
Abolish Silicon Valley – Wendy Liu - jsty
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/07/abolish-silicon-valley-by-wendy-liu-review-rebooting-our-reality
======
Apocryphon
The article recycles a lot of the familiar excesses and removed-from-reality
tropes of Silicon Valley, as I'm sure the book does at points, but doesn't
focus nearly enough on the author's prescriptions. It's really a missed
opportunity to understand what makes the book unique, what better world the
author wants to build.

> “open protocols and decentralised services”, and wants secretive competition
> between developers to be replaced by “democratic oversight and open
> collaboration”

Sounds not too far removed from the activism of groups such as the EFF, and
even the FOSS movement in general. How they fit on the political graph is
complicated. They are civil liberties oriented, but often in a more right-
libertarian (or perhaps center/apathetic-libertarian) than a left-libertarian
way, much less libertarian socialist. Pirate politics, as the Europeans call
it. Not libertarian in the Californian ideology utopian neoliberal sort of
way, but in a more anti-authority radical form of libertarianism.

And some of these proponents still end up working for some of the large
corporations like Google. Which _really_ complicates things further when free
flow of information as ideology blends into freeing information for the sake
of furthering the bottom line.

> Liu’s blueprint for a “socialist media system” may still sound impractical,
> but her emphasis on public space and the public good have an eerie resonance
> at present: who knows what changes might come when we creep out of our
> enforced solitude and reconstitute a functioning society?

Intriguing idea, great question, totally nonsense in this context as this
review does not bother to explain the former, nor expand upon the latter. SF
tech workers stepping over the homeless is not "enforced solitude", it is both
lack of empathy and the sign of a failed political and economic system. What
solitude separates these juxtaposed segments of society?

> In Einstein’s day, the pioneers of the new physics thought they were engaged
> in “world-building”; Liu similarly remarks that designing a website opens a
> hole in the universe through which we can study its inner mechanics. Her
> experiments in coding would, she believed, confer on her “a kind of
> immortality”.

Sidebar: I've long-wondered if software developers have a propensity to fall
prey to the "engineer's disease" more than other STEM disciplines because so
much of our form of engineering exists only in the abstract. (Mechanical
engineers and civil engineers, for instance, know that they are at least bound
by basic laws of physics- and stay humble.) But through hardware and
integrated physical systems, we're able to control and influence the real
world, potentially in world-changing ways. So when choked on a suffusion of
our own abstraction, we imagine we know everything, deriving everything from
first principles.

