– Adam Curtis’ documentaries convering similar topics have been mentioned here alread, but not…
– …Fred Turner’s "From Cyberculture to Counterculture", als discussing politics and ideas about the future in tech-culture. If you do not want to read the book (which is excellently written imho), you might enjoy his shorter articles like Don’t be evil [1] and Burning Man at Google [2]
– The article has already been discussed several times here (not surprising) [3]
One of the weirdest developments of the past 25 years since this was written has been the wholesale conversion of a huge set of these people to a weird hybrid of elements of the original current and traditionalist reactionary right wing ideology.
I watched it happen through the mid 20-teens and I am still puzzled about why and how this got such traction.
In any case one result of this was to cause the whole project of the “Californian ideology” to jump the rails. The original ideology was very libertarian about LGBT issues and generally not racist in the classical “race blindness” framing. This made it loosely an ally of the left at least on social issues, with the two agreeing to disagree on economics.
When the power of the technical aptitude of these folks met hard right reactionary ideology, you got high tech highly savvy movements like the whole 4chan-borne Pepe the frog… thing.
That in turn disgusted the left and turned off a bunch of the remaining adherents of the original ideology in its original libertarian form. Many of the latter were driven fully to the left, abandoning libertarian economics and certain less-lefty libertarian social positions.
Meanwhile the left got less liberal. I’m not sure how this happened either. Someone more familiar can tell that story. The time frame was the same though: the 20-teens.
This left us in the end with a techie community split between technocratic leftists who now believe in censorship and benevolent concentrated power and technocratic rightists who now believe in actual monarchy or even fascism or theocracy.
(I think this is a choice of two different awful dystopias.)
Some of us remain though. I feel like a baffled refugee after some kind of apocalypse. I continue to work on decentralized human centric tech designed to deliver both freedom and human dignity and empowerment like we thought we were doing in the 90s. I sometimes feel alone. I feel less alone on Mastodon where it seems some of us now hang.
Edit: or maybe what happened is just that the masks fell off. A lot of tankie reds and technocrats maybe once pretended to be more liberal while a lot of authoritarian rightists pretended to be libertarians. Maybe everyone stopped pretending, leaving those of us who actually believed in the fusion of liberty and humanism bewildered.
Also Californian ideology is a bit misleading. One did not have to be in California, though it did seem to be concentrated there.
I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still pretty libertarian. One thing about social media (Twitter especially, but Mastodon, too, partly because of a concentration of people from Twitter) is the exaggeration of positions and the conflation of markers for actual beliefs. Like someone will agree with a Republican on leftist overreach and be branded a fascist, meanwhile maintaining a consistent opposition to far right political elements or figures. The latter is not ever retweeted by folks you follow, and folks who point this out are often mocked (and acknowledging it is avoided because we now see social media as platforms for meting out mob justice by calling out perceived wrongs via quote-tweets to our followers instead of trying to arrive at the truth), so a distorted view develops, and the same kind of ideological tribal epistemic closure that has existed among many on the right starts infecting the left and center-left because of the algorithmic and social dynamics of social media.
> I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still pretty libertarian.
You don't really see this on HN though. Economic illiteracy is rife here as is, more generally, social-science illiteracy about how politically-driven decision making works in large real-world organizations (Including but not limited to governments). These are the insights that the core of libertarianism is based on. Of course if you mean the rather more self-serving, "I'd rather not pay taxes" Sovereign Citizens' kind of libertarianism you may well be correct.
Economic illiteracy is rife everywhere, because it's been deliberately seeded. In the UK workers who haven't had a significant pay rise for more than a decade are being told they can't have one now because it would be inflationary. Meanwhile the real drivers of inflation are an energy price shock - again - and corporate profiteering.
But that's not the official narrative. So perhaps if you want to think about politically-driven decision making you might want to include the network of funded think-tanks and both covert and overt influencers in the media who invent and push these narratives. And maybe even consider why they're so dominant, and why their definitions of "freedom" and "economics" are so consistently and exclusively pro-oligarch.
The real driver of inflation and low workers' wages is lack of attention to long-term growth potential. This is not a partisan issue, least of all in the UK; both sides have done things that hurt long-term growth. By way of example, we're still waiting for those billions that the Brexit folks once promised as increased NHS funding.
Everyone is ideologically google- or twitter-deep today.
Back in the day, people actually read Road to Serfdom or A People’s History and picked an ideology. College libertarians were middle or upper-class economic conservatives who were athiests, trekkies, gay or wanted to smoke weed. Now that that’s all fashionable and they’re not at risk of getting beat up or jailed they don’t have anything to get riled about except Corporate 1st Amendment reimaginings, digital privacy or why one of “those” people kept them from their slot at Stanford.
> Everyone is ideologically google- or twitter-deep today.
Yes, this handily explains how populist figures like Trump, AOC or MTG have managed to become so popular as of late. Twitter is a place where the most outrage-inducing and simplistic soundbites get all the attention. Subtlety and nuance are dead in that medium.
> > I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still pretty libertarian.
> You don't really see this on HN though.
Spot on!
I have a weird interest in the old-times, when geek were actually libertarian? (well, based on my readings and what people told me, they seemed to be different from now)
And it's not just the people: instead of "safe" languages like rust, people liked "unsafe" perl that let you do about everything!
I really wish there was some time travel, to get the chance to live and work in the 1990s-early 2000s where there seemed to be both optimism AND libertarianism in the tech world, instead of the current pro-big-government/social conformity trend.
But since tech is now mostly fueled by advertising $$, it is difficult to get techies to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Well, that's a big question; hope you don't mind if I reflect a bit before attempting to answer! (any specific qs, go ahead and I'll do my best)
I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s (among which, both in Silicon Valley and in "flyover" country, with non-domicile tours in Boston, Seattle, and the DC Beltway)
It's a pretty good capture of our Zeitgeist. In fact, I distinctly remember one day when I was at my desk, and two of my colleagues were enjoying the afternoon sun on the balcony of my office. We had started to discuss Microserfs, through the open window next to my desk, and one of them remarked: "it's pretty accurate ... except they're all dating within the company". One year or so later, the company had grown by a factor of two or three, and it turns out Coupland had indeed called it in advance: all three of us were then in intra-company relationships. (which was again, a topic of balcony discussion)
(sorry, no idea about Dinosaurs: we were working extreme hours [some days the company was comping us ~$2'000/day (in 2023 USD), which was considered very good money back then for "kids" not many years out of uni], and except for attending watch parties for Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, and Spike & Mike's when it came through town, I was not getting much pop culture exposure during these years)
Another anecdote: our landlord once complained that the janitor had found porno mags in the restrooms, and as the other tenants were law firms, maybe they might have been from us, possibly one of our contractors? My boss, indignant, called them up and she asked them if they knew we were an internet company? With a T1 connection? How could they possibly think any of us would still be paying for porn on dead trees?
> Well, that's a big question; hope you don't mind if I reflect a bit before attempting to answer!
Not at all, please take your time! And if you have more insights, feel free to post them later! I'll check again the comments for the next few days, because all this is so intriguing to me!
> I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s
This begs many questions: where you born here? Where do you live now? (and ...why?)
I was born in the Southern US (long story: when a cat has its kittens in the oven...) but emigrated to Europe this century (reasons for which are an even longer story).
> what are the other differences between now and then that stand out to you?
(thanks for making me think about it long enough to come up with a hypothesis; I think I do address both the things about current startup culture which I find off-putting, and —if you read between the lines a bit— why we might've preferred power to safety in our tools.)
90s geeks were as often as not listening to Pacifica radio in the office. We did have a conference room with Star Trek TNG videos playing at lunch. So we did have optimism for the future (a big government controlled optimistic future at that). If you are looking across the river and seeing the green grass and wishing 'if only you play there' remember, when you get up close, that grass in the park is filled with dog shit.
Having lived in 1990s-early 2000s, there was definitive system of codes you had to conform to in order to be "in" or socially accepted. And "expected" sets of both behaviors and opinions you was expected to have.
I mean following very genuinely: if everyone has to claim he is libertarian, then what you have is group thing.
Progressives do not equal hippies yet somehow they took over as the representatives for that group. Hippies were very libertarian. When I was a kid our commune had everyone from atheist communist hedonists to super religious Muslim political refugees from Egypt, everyone was welcome. Progressives only welcome fellow Progressives, and heaven forbid you mention the L word (libertarian) around them. They go into 'attack the evil witch' mode and lose all reason.
Somewhere along the line Progressives were able to take up the lead as if they were the continuation/inheritors of the hippie ideal, but they in no way were/are, they are the opposite. They take the 'hippies were trying to make the world better' then add 'and WE KNOW what rules will make it better, so we are therefor an extension of the hippie ideals'.
Progressives go into fight-or-flight reponses around libertarians because the 60s-style 'live and let live' libertarian has been displaced by the 'destroy all government services' libertarian in popular culture.
Live and let live sounds great if you're the child of petty bourgeoisie parents. Meanwhile the millions in poverty don't have access to the "live" part.
The only answer to the neoliberalism of the last 40 years is a course correction to socialism and big state government.
The root of all this has been a disillusionment with Liberalism. Which may have put itself on a pedestal after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then knocked off during the first decade of the 21st century through overreach:
* The response to the 9/11 that lead to multiple western military quagmires
* A financial crisis followed by a recession, with lots of rhetoric that placed blame on regular Americans
* Privatization of public services that did not bear meaningful fruit
Basically we ran head-first into some real limitations of Liberalism.
Edit: For what it’s worth I think 2022 showed the opposite with Russia’s own military quagmire, the unrest in Iran, and Xi’s China we are now seeing the limitations of authoritarian regimes.
I think in general there's an effect something like this: Let's say I'm some person curious about a political party that I think makes some good points in an area I care about. I'm a bit uneasy about some of their points that seem a bit extreme, but overall they don't seem unreasonable. When I, the hypothetical voter, talk to other people, they say these people are literally the worse than the devil, and I am to be tarred and feathered and dragged through the streets for even considering voting for them. This doesn't feel justified to me, and I, the hypothetical voter am not convinced to change my mind, but I'm rather pushed toward this somewhat extreme party, that in my eyes seems less extreme than the people threatening to lynch me for being curious and open-minded.
I think overall this is a recurring and common mechanism of polarization that has the only people daring to speak chewing the scenery like something outta Warhammer 40k[1], and everyone in the middle just hunkering down to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
Maybe I am not trapped in the Star Trek Mirror Universe; I am trapped in a W40k timeline? We went from TFA's
> Emboldened by supposed advances in Artificial Intelligence and medical science, the Extropian cult fantasises of abandoning the ‘wetware’ of the human state altogether to become living machines.
[Edit: NB, there are countries with viable and functioning political centres. They're just not the countries which constitute the cultural centre of the 'net.]
> [Edit: NB, there are countries with viable and functioning political centres. They're just not the countries which constitute the cultural centre of the 'net.]
Which are they? Every country I've got insight into has had a marked decline in the political dialogue post 2010-somewhere with a significant uptick in polarization and shit-flinging (I think coinciding with most of the political dialogue moving onto Twitter; where given the medium is the message; generalizations and zingers rule).
This will take a while; I think I'll limit it to top 10 by population. Using lower chamber where bicameral, regional parties and unaffiliated have not been counted (but so far have not been numerous). I take "english-country-name parliament" and the first wikipedia page that comes up in a google search, and attempt to characterise (where not available from WP) as left, centre-left, centre, centre-right, right, regional or unaffiliated depending upon keywords when clicking through to each party's english-language wikipedia page.
left centre right
DE 39 613 79
FR 74 387 88
IT* 64 134 184
ES** 35 217 52
PL 3 212 240
RO - 279 32
NL*** 16 100 28
BE 12 94 25
CZ - 180 20
EL 21 265 10
Note how many governments are centrist coalitions, containing both centre-left and centre-right parties, and having both wings in opposition.
* 5 star has been counted as left? they claim unaligned, but seem to be populists who are —at least currently?— in opposition to a centre-right/right-wing government.
** many small (and some not-so-small!) regional parties
*** The worker's party is only centre-left here, but not to worry, there's a "party for the animals" on the far left :-P
I won't disagree about a decline in dialogue, just think voting records (in places fortunate enough to have (a) not succumbed to first-past-the-post mentality, and have (b) voting districts that may hundreds to thousands of years old, preventing the more egregious cases of gerrymandering) show that even though winger parties have indeed gained adherents in this century, in absolute numbers they are still behind centrists (meaning especially that they are still far from the near-majorities that they, due to paucity of parties, are in my Old Country).
In particular, there was a brief period several years ago when the far right in my country ran political posters with candidates liberally draped in the national flag. They don't do that anymore.
Will conduct a survey of EEA parliaments tomorrow, if not later today.
Libertarianism has become deeply unfashionable. Many on the right talk about libertarianism as a gateway drug to the hard right. As some who is broadly libertarian this is quite distressing. We have no representation in government or the mainstream parties and no media machine like the hard right / alt right or even the far left!
I heard this once: “A libertarian politician is like a teetotaler in the brewery business.” So maybe that’s the deal. Maybe people who get into politics do so because they want to control people or beat up on some other group because of grievances. People who have neither control issues nor bigotries maybe spend their time in other ways.
>Many on the right talk about libertarianism as a gateway drug to the hard right
Lolwut?
Both the left and the right complain that libertarianism is a gateway drug to the other party. "We'd have won if it weren't for that obnoxious 2% that won't vote for anybody who's platform is all about controlling people" and all that jazz.
I think people on the right talk about it pushing people "hard right" they're specifically talking about the rise of the Mises caucus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Caucus
I think there's a separate complaint about the Libertarian candidates peeling voters away from conservative Republicans in close contests, resulting in a Democratic victory. The problem with this argument is that many of these Libertarian voters have zero interest in major-party politics, and may not be closely aligned with either party. So if you removed the Libertarian candidate from the ballot, many Libertarian voters would rather stay home than decide on the "lesser evil", and those that did choose a major party wouldn't support one party over another enough to matter.
I never capitalize Libertarian for that reason. The present day Libertarian party is a bunch of absolute fruitcakes. It's neither libertarian nor a competent political party.
Back in 1993, one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents, Valeria Novodvorskaya, had this to say on the subject of human rights:
"I always knew that only the decent people should have rights, and the indecent ones should not. ... Personally, I've had enough. Some time ago we [dissidents] and the USA have used this concept as a ram against the USSR and communists. This concept has served its purpose, and we should stop lying about human rights and promoting their defenders, lest we undermine ourselves."
Now, this is a different case in a sense that internal anti-Soviet opposition was generally somewhere to the right of the state ideology (although it still included socialists etc) - Novodvorskaya was never "left" in any meaningful sense. But, more broadly, this shows how people can be seemingly genuine about their political liberalism when they are fighting against long odds, and then when they win, you find out that they always saw it all as a tool to gain power to advance their agenda; a tool that's too dangerous to leave for the opposition to your rule. I wouldn't be surprised if similar attitudes existed on the American left back when it broadly supported freedom of speech etc.
You might find some of Adam Curtis's films help you feel less baffled. Not that they have 'answers' but good contextual analysis that will give better understanding. Century of the Self, and Can't Get You Out of My Head are the most relevant here. Power of Nightmares, Bitter Lake and Hypernormalization are great too.
Regarding the left becoming “less liberal”, I think it really became “more international.”
The left realized that most liberal democracies have laws against hate speech, technocratic power centers, extensive regulation, etc.
If Germany can outlaw hate speech, fringe political movements, and private ownership of firearms, why can’t we?
Notice how the Democrats focus on healthcare, even when it hurts them (they were killed at the polls over Obamacare in 2010). If every other country has state guaranteed affordable healthcare, why can’t we?
The "market good government bad" really is one of the most poorly considered and hard to defend positions.
In the US the government is wholly captured by the oligarchy. There's a reason why health care is extortionate and the defence budget is a huge pork factory, and it's not because voters are content with that balance.
That's one of the points of the original article. The US pats itself on the back for being a market driven economy of freedom and opportunity, when in reality for most of the population it's a labour camp. It's true there are various levels of comfort, but they all demand time and labour and non-compliance is punished severely.
Genuine freedom requires at least an eight figure net worth. Without that the system treats you like a disposable NPC.
Independent opportunity is possible, but most people quite literally cannot afford the risks.
> In the US the government is wholly captured by the oligarchy.
All large-enough organizations are captured by an oligarchy of some kind. It's an iron law of social organization. The term for a genuinely decentralized counterpart of organization that's immune to such capture is, well, a "market". (And yes, non-monetary markets can exist. HN itself is, in no small part, a market for upvotes.)
> ... when in reality for most of the population it's a labour camp. It's true there are various levels of comfort, but they all demand time and labour
People who have lived in a less-developed country will be well aware that this description is far more applicable to such places than the U.S. The U.S. is far from perfect, there's plenty of room for improvement. But the direction of improvement is for more involvement of a genuine free market, not less of it.
The free market is good for a lot of things, but it cannot solve large, society-wide problems, problems that require collective, coordinated action from people, or problems that take more than a quarter to finish.
> In cyberspace… market after market is being transformed by technological progress from a “natural monopoly” to one in which competition is the rule.
Of all the bad predictions in this essay, this is most dead-wrong, deader than a doornail wrong.
The internet favors natural monopolies, despite its decentralized design. Or to be more accurate, people using the internet favor natural monopolies.
He's a little goofy, but I think Slavoj Zizek is right when he says information technology is communistic. Because it benefits from unified standards and data centralization and suffers from heterogeneity and data silos, it seems to be that information technology will progress from competitive markets, to monopolies, to utilities, to state control in some cases.
I'm sure there's some information theory which can express this better than I am, but it's weird that market forces, which are traditionally explained as the least bad way to handle low-info, distributed decision making, don't perform as well when it comes to the distribution and regulation of information itself.
The internet favors specific kinds of monopolies that are different from the physical world. Small towns only need one laundromat, car wash, gas station etc until they reach sufficient size. The logistics of traveling in the real world ends up creating lots of monopolies from tiny coffee shops to massive cable companies. The online equivalent is up middlemen of various stripes where people just aren’t willing to comparison shop vs just buying from Amazon.
Content creators on the other hand end up with a really long tail. They obviously benefit from a vastly wider reach and the ability to thrive with tiny niche followings. But the then need to compete with everyone else in the world.
These are not quite "true" monopolies however because the market for laundromats or car washes is still open to entry, i.e. contestable by others. The apparent monopoly is in fact checked by the "virtual" competition that might be expected to appear if it becomes too inefficient. True monopolies are generally a product of real barriers to entry, which are indeed possible on the Internet. Reasonable users will be aware of this though, and prefer more open platforms where even prospective competitors are free to interoperate with the incumbent, and there's no undue lock-in.
The remaining obstacles amount to things like IP regulation, that can prevent entry even by a more open competitor.
The barriers to entry into a market with an existing laundromat, ignoring the setup costs, is the insufficient number of customers to support both until one of you fails.
That’s what makes it a natural monopoly, you can’t have two business in stable compensation one of them will fail.
Anyway, any market created monopoly will weaken once it loses it’s competitive edge. The run down movie theater may get driven out by a new cinema just as De Beers fell to from 80+% to sub 30% market share, but the barriers to entry are real.
> That’s what makes it a natural monopoly, you can’t have two business in stable compensation one of them will fail.
Yes it's a monopoly in that there's only one firm, but it won't behave much like one. Because the firm will be incented towards being a strong competitor towards any new entrants in the market, lest it be supplanted by them - even before those new entrants exist.
Sure it’s always a question of the barriers to entry. However, the most effective barrier here is having a large bankroll to operate at a loss and drive competition out of the market. Which means charging monopoly prices just like every other monopoly.
Operating at a loss can let you subsidize your market share, which might be a rational strategy if you're in a field with big network effects. Otherwise it won't help much, your competitors will simply not play that game.
And the network effect case is one where you're actually creating value for your customer base - at least until an even more open competitor comes along. See how Compuserve, formerly a market-dominant walled garden benefiting from network effects, had to open themselves up to the Internet.
A single laundromat in a small town isn't a monopoly because the business isn't "laundromats" it is washing clothes. They are in competition with washing machines, and, if need be, sinks.
By that argument the electric company isn’t a monopoly it’s in competition to people buying generators. In the end monopolies aren’t defined so abstractly because no business has absolutely exclusive control.
Instead monopolies are defined by having monopoly power in the marketplace.
Capitalism in general favors monopolies for the simple reason that more capital makes more profits, all else being equal, and more profits give ability to acquire more capital. That's why any society that wants a capitalist economy to remain competitive needs some kind of anti-trust enforcement.
Internet just happened to be the fertile ground (for all kinds of business) on which the present flock of monopolies grew after anti-trust has been severely curtailed under Reagan.
> information technology will progress from competitive markets, to monopolies, to utilities, to state control in some cases.
The whole point of the Internet was to be a decentralized network with no single point of failure. Something that might look like a unified platform to users, but be implemented behind the scenes via self-interested coöperation among a huge number of involved actors. This is how markets work, and what communist central planning has never been able to replicate.
Anyone care to mark this piece to market? Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.
Looking at the "More from Medium" sidebar, we see suggestions for cyberspace activities that are neither rare nor (presumably) are well-done...
- 20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible
- 5 Unique Passive Income Ideas — How I Make $4,580/Month
- Don’t Just Set Goals. Build Systems
...which (in combination with bleak near-future HN prediction[2]) reminds me of nothing so much as Lem's 1971 Futurological Congress[3].
====
[0] considering it hails from the country that brought us both Molière and Minitel Rose, https://www.journalduhacker.net is a bit disappointing. The revolution may not be televised, but it will probably —at least on this side of the GFW— be discussed online in (maternal or non-maternal) english.
[1] although I am here on Th' Continent now, despite having in 1995 been in California, so in the meantime I've apparently chosen my meatspace with my feet.
> He sees that people do not drive cars or ride in elevators, but they run in the streets and climb the walls of empty elevator shafts, which explains why everyone in this new world is so out of breath. Robots whip people in the street and protect order. Through successive doses of more and more powerful types of up'n'at'm, Tichy sees increasingly horrible visions of the world, climaxing in a frozen horrorscape where people sleep blissfully in the snow, and the police robots are revealed to be people who are convinced that they are robots. The frozen state of the world explains why he has always found the new world to be so cold.
>Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.
Otlet & La Fontaine came close when they tried to get Le Corbusier (quite the artist-engineer) to build a version of the Mundaneum. They intended it to be public and electric, even somewhat decentralized. The surviving bits of it is fully wheelchair accessible.
As lazywebbing failed to work, my marks to market:
> ...and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists...
In some cases (eg The Space Merchants, Pandora's Planet, and arguably The Ayes of Texas) these rugged individualists were parodies.
Is the "Virtual Class" of this essay (symbolic analysts, according to Robert Reich) impacted by ChatGPT?
> Electronic Agora or Electronic Marketplace?
Do both of these possibilities seem a little quaint, in a world which also contains 防火长城, شورای عالی فضای مجازی, and Роскомнадзор?
> the question facing the emerging hypermedia industry isn’t whether or not it will be organised as a mixed economy, but what sort of mixed economy it will be.
Now, this holds up, even in hindsight.
> Freedom is Slavery
I once asked someone of that generation why the hippies thought they could change the world. "After the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, anything seemed possible" was the reply. From the standpoint of 2023, I'd say Reconstruction continues to have yet to be fully in the past, for the Old Country is still dealing with the aftermath of 1868 and the 14A.
> Forward Into the Past
Ah, yes, the twenty-first century, when I can see "flyover deplorables" in the Old Country forming their own separate but equal social networks, sharing memes in which the fine christian Donetsk and Lugansk forces are flying a starred St. Andrew's flag (as opposed to the what, non-christian? Ukrainian forces?) Now, these memes are nowhere to be found on RuNet, but my maximal entropy source attribution is that it's highly likely that's where they'd ideologically originated.
> Cyborg Masters and Robot Slaves
Recall: the Virginians were only carrying on in the traditions of the Athenians.
> There are Alternatives
The specific alternatives mentioned don't seem to have panned out; or at least they are not being publicised at the moment. I am, however, optimistic that other alernatives will eventually be adopted.
Americans will always do the right thing ... after they have tried everything else. — WC
> The Rebirth of the Modern
The EU is trying to assert itself here (and full props to balsam for the Mundaneum! chapeau !); I would just suggest to my former landspeople in the Old Country that it might be nice if the net were indeed a place "with Liberty, and Justice, for all"
christ this whole article reads like a hot wet handjob for the west coast. am i somehow supposed to golf clap the libertarian gig economy that leaves office workers living out of cars in san jose and uber drivers pissing in soda bottles for slave wages under the 405 while simultaneously crucifying the mental health of a generation of youth and silencing all but the most brand loyal speech online?
the thing this article never mentions is californias hippies sold out, bought up all the real estate, became landed gentry and left their kids with the bill. apple replaces your itunes with drm tunes and the rights are to be a consumer, not to repair.
the hackers left a looooong time ago, and now most of them hack tractors lately. in fact the minute gig fiber showed up was when the virtual class ceased to be anything but an exodus for california. this is nostalgiabate.
> However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other — much less positive — features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation.
> And who would have suspected that as technology and freedom were worshipped more and more, it would become less and less possible to say anything sensible about the society in which they were applied?
> One of the weirdest things about the rightwards drift of the Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a creation of the mixed economy. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities and other infrastructural projects which makes the good life possible in California. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast hi tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades.
Bruce Sterling is not a fool or a shill.
I'm really not convinced you read this entire article.
bruce has clearly never driven down californias potholed highways, admired its last-in-the-nation literacy rate from public education, or pontificated on its unaffordable gilded ponzi schemes posing as higher education. the unchecked farm irrigation has reduced the state to a perpetually drought plagued desert...it single handedly created the toxic salton sea and reduced borrego springs to a sand scorched purgatory. high speed rail is a boondoggled turd no politician can seem to keep from screwing up despite their californian ideological proclivities
tech worship isnt preventing free speech, its the tech companies this article ostensibly sings praise to.
reproduction of neoslavery isnt the biggest issue thats just late stage capitalism. its the persistent failure at any level of the californian ideology to do anything to correct it for the past forty years thats a damning indictment of its proposition
You and the author are not in disagreement in the critique of the ideology.
> However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other — much less positive — features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation.[5] Ironically, in the not too distant past, the intellectuals and artists of the Bay Area were passionately concerned about these issues.
Huh? Did we read the same article? This was explicitly a critique of the techno-libertarian ex-hippies, along the lines of everything you just said. Read it through the end and read each paragraph.
I read and loved this and propagated it around my friends when it came out in the mid 90s. It was a poignant criticism of the bullshit fake utopia being sold by Silicon Valley and the .com boom at the time.
Exodus because at the end of the day they are all greedy motherfuckers who hate paying taxes and love the deregulation of Texas. Where you can still pollute and exploit and call it entrepreneurship.
California is actually trying to enact laws against the gig economy.
I was never for a minute fooled that the hackers were good people.
Most of the worst aspects of the San Francisco Bay Area long predate the tech industry boom. The NIMBYs that made housing a largely unaffordable luxury, and its inevitable consequence of large-scale homelessness, are precisely the Boomer hippies who turned coat with Reagan and adopted the greed-is-good naked self-interest with a vengeance. They've got theirs, and they couldn't care less if you drop dead.
Those NIMBYs largely call themselves Progressives now: https://reason.com/2022/08/11/are-san-franciscos-nimbys-fina... There are some articles that call out the political affiliations more directly, but all of the elected officials they're talking about are Progressives.
I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.
Progressivism is a big tent. In the early 20th century it was associated with urban politics of a rather authoritarian streak which promoted things like eugenics and a rigidly segregated labor market, fearing the "unfair" competition of non-white workers.
There's the rhetoric and lip service, and then there is the actual pursuit of a nakedly self-serving agenda. Both can be done simultaneously, e.g. the trust-fund baby Dean Preston's successful efforts to block anything from being built in his district.
> I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.
The common conservative critique of progressives is progressives say "affirmative action, affordable housing, wealth redistribution are all great, unless it affects me."
Have you ever experienced the standard of living in a Scandinavian country?
High taxes, but it's much easier to start and run a business, there are numerous unicorns, housing is affordable, locales of all kinds tend to be more pleasant, especially in cities.
Scandinavian countries are ranked among the most economically free (i.e. "capitalist"), despite the high taxes. This was not always the case either, it's just how the 1980s "neoliberal revolution" (which was hugely influential throughout the West and arguably the world at large, well beyond the most commonly mentioned UK and US) played out there.
Weird then how no one ever dies of starvation because bread is up 1000%. What market would you think of as freer to entry by new upstarts, the one for bread or for insulin?
It's either bad bad regulations or... capitalism's evil drive for profit over life. So it costs more here where we don't have nationalized healthcare than anywhere else, and we don't live as long. Hmm...
1. Population growth. I would say this is the largest factor to making housing unaffordable. Unless your claim is that all growth if from local boomers kids (hint: it isn't).
2. Geography. San Francisco is surrounded by quite a bit of water if you haven't noticed. The Bay Area is fenced in with hills. I would argue that geography creates as much of the problem as zoning laws (because if there was easy room to expand people wouldn't be pushing to cancel long term planning and zoning laws and just force through high density housing).
But nice try trying to blame someone on the fact that you want something (to live in a certain area) and think it's fair to trample peoples property rights to get it, make them out to be villians and 'others' worthy of scorn, while ignoring the largest factors (population growth and geography).
I'm pretty sure Carlyle's "whiff of grapeshot" was punning on the "whiff of grape", which is generally available in either red or white (vineyard products being inferior in spectrum to all the factions in the Russian Civil War), and well known in the context of sex & drugs & national anthems:
And long may the Sons of ANACREON intwine
The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS'S Vine.
(with Jordan apparently having been one of those people who were very particular about —at least in unprotected cases— which vines ought to be entwined in which myrtles!
Remember: a social darwinist is someone who is deathly afraid that the "unfit" are somehow outbreeding the "fit")
– Adam Curtis’ documentaries convering similar topics have been mentioned here alread, but not…
– …Fred Turner’s "From Cyberculture to Counterculture", als discussing politics and ideas about the future in tech-culture. If you do not want to read the book (which is excellently written imho), you might enjoy his shorter articles like Don’t be evil [1] and Burning Man at Google [2]
– The article has already been discussed several times here (not surprising) [3]
[1] https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
[2] https://fredturner2022.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiy...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...