

Silicon Valley Roused By Secession Call - cdvonstinkpot
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/us/silicon-valley-roused-by-secession-call.html

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jpwright
I can't believe this isn't satire. To me it exemplifies the exponentially
growing hubris emanating from Silicon Valley -- namely, that the products
being built are more significant than the people who use them. Saying that
what's been built so far could replace the rest of society without a problem
is this logic taken to its absurd extreme.

Take, for example, passages like "Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory
state personified by Washington" \-- which I guess is intended to imply that
the state is personified best by its role in regulating taxis and hotels? As
if Silicon Valley has a workable alternative to infrastructure, energy, the
justice system, police, hospitals, primary education, and the rest of the $4
tr federal budget.

I laughed the most at "The Quantified Self movement helps people self-measure
and opt out of the health care system." Yes, because measuring your heart rate
while waiting in line at Peet's does wonders for people with chronic
illnesses.

And, of course, Srinivasan's suggestion that people who sneer at his
"frontier" must also "hate technology". No, I just hate when people assume it
will inevitably solve all problems. If society at large begins to "backlash"
to Silicon Valley, it's for that very reason.

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gshakir
What would the constitution look like?

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dfraser992
The Vietnam war was managed by technocrats - look how well that turned out.

Libertarian ideals are a step removed from anarchy, and all fine in theory -
but extremely naive because as one gets older, you (hopefully) begin to
understand the flawed nature of humanity better. I can see how getting older
makes people more conservative, or at least susceptible to conservative
thinking - I on the other hand am becoming more of a anarchic Marxist. Not
because such ideologies are achievable in the real world, but because the
utility of their theory sheds light on the bad side of capitalism and Western
society that gets swept under the carpet (cue Noam Chomsky soundbite...) I
just wish "conservatives" would live up to their lofty ever so repeated
ideals, instead of being the utter hypocrites they are (along with the liberal
hypocrites)

To create a anarcho-socialist Marxist paradise, or even a libertarian one, the
members of the community would have to be spiritually advanced enough such
that non-parts of the community (i.e. government and regulations, etc)
wouldn't be needed to step in to maintain balance - the system (community of
people) would be self-regulating. Libertarians like to think they'd be self-
regulating, but how many of them slavishly bow to the God (invisible hand) of
the market? The market won't regulate human emotions, like greed and fear -
the market is very easily manipulated by the sociopathic as the last few years
have shown. Libertarianism could not have done jack to correct what they have
wrought lately. Perhaps society is too big now - a small libertarian community
might be achievable, but humanity is too interconnected now.

I recently read some stuff on behavioral economics - it looks like economists
are wising up and realizing most non-economists are not sociopaths, unlike
them. So a proper understanding of economics requires an understanding of
human psychology and how it, and especially psychopathology, are primary
factors in economic systems. I just spent the last 4 years of my life being
manipulated by a bona fide sociopath, who manipulated me into building him a
company, then forced me out just as money actually started rolling in... so
take that into account when evaluating my current stance.

It is said engineers don't really begin to understand that non-engineers don't
think like engineers until their 30s - I can certainly attest to that. Or
maybe I'm just more autistic or whatnot. But after I dropped acid for the
first time I started to grok how working as a US DoD defense contractor was a
waste of time. If all the engineers working for the industrial-military
complex said "fuck you", what would happen? You think politicians have any
useful skills? The problem with engineers is that we are so enamored of
thinking up and building stuff, that asking ourselves "why are the larger,
more nebulous consequences of this? How are the people in charge going to
profit from this?" gets lost sometimes - IT is addictive in some sense, or at
least that mode of thinking.

So to wrap up this essay, which didn't start out as one (I am just winging
it), speeches like the one mentioned in the article are fine as exhortations
to try and improve society, but to opt out entirely is not going to work
unless that new society that is created figures out how to deal with the dark
side of humanity - the greed, the sociopaths, and the garden variety drama
that goes on between people (even engineers). To do that is going to require
an understanding of empathy, and a better understanding of humankind (in a
spiritual sense) that I wouldn't expect the average 20 something person in IT
to grasp. Right now regulation of society is supposed to be the purpose of
government, but it is now obvious the hypocrisy, inefficiency, and stupidity
is too much to ignore anymore. But you can't get rid of government until you
solve the problems it is supposed to regulate. Perhaps governments, or other
such things like feudalism, are instead an emergent property of a system? An
emergent property based on factors like the psychological relationship between
individuals, which is defined by social customs and other anthropological like
things?

To ask one's self "who is John Galt?" is a good thing, but you also have to
remember Galt was creating a community and that relationships between people
shouldn't be based on economics. It always seems to get lost in the noise that
one aspect of John Galt's society was that it would be populated by people
with integrity, not the rent seeking parasites living off of income from
capital gains. You can't live with integrity if you are primarily concerned
with maximizing your economic status, because that, in theory, requires you to
act like a sociopath.

The first step I would propose instead would be to figure out how to ensure
manipulative authoritarians are not elected to high office and how to weed out
the sociopathic from high finance (hell, all of society entirely). Once that
is accomplished, we'll be farther along towards the ideals the "Average"
person (or guilt ridden Western white middle class liberal, if you prefer)
likes to espouse.

