Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

yeah i dunno, this seems discountable. it's not going to get much traction.

― display name changed. (amateurist), Thursday, May 22, 2014 6:33 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd be more willing to discount it if these weren't people with money, political fever dreams, and the ability to build & destory things

Yeah I'm not exactly alarmed yet but I am a little o_O

these people aren't good at building things that people actually need to survive so I dunno - the rhetoric is horrible and these people are frightening, at the same time they're woefully inept

fantastic article, thank you for sharing

A seafaring community of 10 plutocrats is probably going to do just fine. They can just take a private jet back to the US any time they need fresh virgins to feed on. They don't want the rest of us anyway.

Shouldn't that be Tlön, and holy shit we do not need techno-libertarians referencing Borges

I thought the setting up a new country idea sounded really good, hopefully it would end like jonestown

I am all in favor of techno-libertarian island

me too. preferably one that will be underwater in a few decades.

tru

im less worried about these creeps building their own bioshock dystopias than i am about them using their tremendous money and influence to undermine regulation and other democratic things (tm) at home

yeah that is a more serious danger

I wonder if we can convince them to relocate to Canada

I think their politics might go over well in, like, Edmonton

It should be fun to watch what happens when the VC money starts to dry up.

they all scramble for the surviving corporate monoliths

This Baffler article mentions Nick Land. That's kind of depressing, is he fully in that camp? I've only read some of his stuff but have liked work from his contemporaries.

isn't his own camp bad enough???

maybe! I'm out of the loop

yes, nick land is fully in

this is all a lil weird to me cos reading these dudes has been a minor internet fascination of mine for a long time

if anything, land's story is evidence against the thesis that an encounter with adulthood will chill these guys out: he was a philosophy professor in the 80s (?) and 90s, left for china at some point to be a journalist, was a pro-war neocon type in the early 00s and at some point during/after the 08 crash flipped to austrian economics, "race realism" (if you don't mind me using their euphemisms for a sec) and all the rest.

i feel super weird that even know this shit tbh

the connection with silicon valley utopian-supremacy is only one leg of the thing, there are linkages to a lot of weird old righty type scenes that have been left behind by contemporary conservatism, which have been kept alive in its most public face by association with ron paul. but also the remnants of european throne-and-altar type stuff

this isn't what I think of when I think of 'techno-utopianism' these dudes are just idiots

really the most salient through-line is hostility to democracy.

xp yeah this thread title is a little narrow & off from the corey pein article

feel like the broader 'apps with solve it'/obsessed with meritocracy and measurement/transnational professionalism stuff that permeates the valley and its politics is way more pernicious and worth countering than these dudes who cant help but marginalize themselves by being themselves

I feel like these guys make better bad guys than the republican party, at least their politics are internally consistent

idk i think their predilection for lingo and willingness to set up their own discursive zones is an important idea generator.

there's huge overlap with the PUA/men's rights scene, and *their* language and pop-psych antifeminism is reeeally short work way from being conservative canon

Definitely seems like there is at the root of a lot of it a bitterness stemming from a dissonance between the "meritocracy" these people have been sold on (in which their particular skillset is supposed to make them the fittest dudes) and the reality they grew up in, and the *other* reality they grew up in (having to attend high school and go on the dating scene and such) in which their supposed superior qualities didn't seem to help so much. I know this might sound like just a rehash of the "butthurt nerd" canard, but I think there's something about the combination of ego inflation AND deflation that they experience -- one world telling them they are geniuses and another telling them they are losers at the same time, that makes them want to remake the entire world in the image of the former.

Like you don't get this kind of worldview coming out of getting sand kicked in your face alone, it's more the rage that results from feeling entitled to alpha status and then getting sand kicked in your face.

yup

And to cross reference that with the "men's rights" stuff, it's not unlike "I'm a *nice* and *intelligent* guy and yet hot babes are not throwing themselves at my feet like they are supposed to. Therefore women are defective and dangerous and I must use 'techniques' to disarm and conquer them."

is there an app for that

i'm really skeptical of 'just a thwarted nerd' type explanations. some people just end up believing this kind of shit for reasons that aren't readily explicable. in many cases it doesn't appear to be true.

yeah 'chicks just didn't want him and he's not successful' doesn't explain peter thiel very well

will plain ole megalomania do.

i think it's a more basic failure to grasp that economic and social processes/developments/problems/etc are not governed by clearly delineated causal relationships. and that there is not a predictable utopia that is being stymied by the unpredictable urges of the irrational human heart.

the cliché explanation for this is that hey these dudes are coders and computers do what you tell them and garbage in garbage out etc etc. maybe it is more an incomplete understanding of the human soul? and the truth of the yawning black chasm of despair that is existence? that there is no app that can stave off the darkness forever? idk man

'shitty paypal founder and devout gay catholic wanted everyone to drop out of college' is the obit in my head for peter thiel
(i mean shitty paypal founder to mean paypal is shitty, not necessarily that thiel is shitty any more than being responsible for shitty paypal)

it's mostly ebay's fault

there does seem to be a mentality of thinking of the problems of the world as something you can code for, like I have this one pretty successful silicon valley friend who likes to say stuff like "that depends on what you want to optimize for" wrt policy questions.

inputs go in, outputs go out, you've just got to optimize. tell me your variables.

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.

i'm cool with this

that lady is a complete fucking nut, btw

otm

I do think that the thread title is off a bit(it makes me think more of transhumanists or cyberpunk-fetishists) since the tone of these guys seems to be bits & pieces of wanting totalitarianism or even some sorta anarcho-corporatism. Not fascism quite yet, but certainly shit that can lead to proto-fascism once violence enters the situation.

I think the inflation/deflation aspect is a key bit to it. Like, the real world is complicated and fucked up and you're kinda sorta sold a bill of goods by authority figures a about what adulthood actually will be v. what you wind up in 15 years after adolescence.

I get the sense that a lot of these guys are pretty much victims, with a high intelligence stat but a correspondingly low wisdom stat. Being really smart but not getting how that doesn't solve everything and can be a hindrance. Its that gap that breeds the intense anger and alienation.

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

there's also a strong overlap, I would wager, between this group and those that think wearing google glass everywhere is a great idea

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

― a strange man (mh), Thursday, May 22, 2014 8:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but cyberpunk ~fetishists~ are people who can't wait to jack into their decks so they can have outsized power and information

not so far from these nerds imo

I mean, the baffler piece makes the point that they don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. blade runner sure as hell wasn't a utopia... from my standpoint. this despotic, oligarchic vision seems to be "utopia and all the freedom and information for me, shitty gutter with my leftover circuit boards for you"

fuckin' ayn rand fetishists, thinking that the disadvantaged or "less meritous" deserve what they get, good and hard

hi tech lowlife

your faulty code is not my problem, if you've got enough money we got some patches you can try.

glanced at that url and thought it said amanda palmer

same

A client accidentally double paid a $15K invoice recently.

I called to let them know and said I would shred the check. They asked me to please mail the check back to them.

I had to use ChatGPT to learn where to buy a stamp.

I went to Walgreens, and they made me buy 20.

I…

— Brandon Avedikian (@bavedikian) August 9, 2024

dude is truly arrogantly dumb but also engagement farming. disregard

someone should tell him that stamps don't have a use-by date on them and he can keep them in case someone else needs something sending via non-email at a future date

the thing that really makes the post is the claim that not knowing how to mail things is a competitive advantage, but he does know how to do it now so is that a problem, i guess hes talking about from a mindset (barf) pov hes so relentlessly future facing that it gives him an edge, he uses email instead lol, obvs just some bs to rile people up but its still kind of interesting

https://i.imgur.com/xFJIXJx.png

lol

I strongly prefer email and want to push the world forward.

— Brandon Avedikian (@bavedikian) August 9, 2024

that is some truly brainbreaking trolling there

you can only tip your cap

then why is accepting checks as payment? that's so 1954 bro

About a year ago my wife’s debit card was eaten by an ATM so she tried to pay for groceries by check at a major supermarket. The clerk and a manager had no idea what to do with it.

I deal with checks at my job all the time... they're still out there and don't seem to be going away anytime soon, despite the multitude of payment options out there

I feel like I always end up writing about 1 check a year, in recent years mostly to contractors for various home repairs. It's still a pretty easy way to move large-ish amounts of money around.

I always just go get a money order from Amscot if I have to send a check to someone.

theyre still used a lot in business, not so much retail

I still write checks for rent.. the management co. set up a payment portal which was free for awhile but then began charging a $2.50 'convenience fee' so I went back to mailing a paper check to inconvenience them

only use checks to pay rent and parking space rental, to two companies at the same address.

Finally stopped writing checks earlier this year -- I'd only been doing them for rent for a few years now and I was able to persuade my landlord to go with Zelle (whatever works, I figure).

I took a class in law school on negotiable instruments (which includes checks). We learned things like the laws and history around how checks clear, endorsing checks, liability for fraud, etc. A truly byzantine area of the law that developed over decades and felt held together by glue and wishful thinking. I hated and have mostly forgotten it.

The only check I write now is rent, but that gets handled by Bilt (credit card that earns points for rent).

every year or so I get a check for like $12 for a class action suit I have no knowledge of.

My rent is paid in cash directly to my landlord at the motel he also owns.

Used to go to the bank in our building and write a check for cash every week for spending money. That branch closed otherwise I would still be doing it.

Used to go to the bank in our building and write a check for cash every week for spending money. That branch closed otherwise I would still be doing it.

Our mortgage is serviced through one bank, and we both use another bank, so every month I write a check and electronically deposit it in the mortgage bank account because there is a fee to transfer funds between the two banks. This is a stupid situation, but I have talked to both banks about it, and they say it's the only way to do it without a fee. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Imagine being woken up at 4 a.m. by cars honking at each other. That's what some San Francisco residents have been dealing with for weeks, as the Waymos can be heard in this video honking and blinking headlights in a parking lot outside of their condo. https://t.co/2cVmDfUk4i pic.twitter.com/pkxNTT5vXd

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) August 13, 2024

very perfect for a tech guy to pick gray for his authoritarian color, dont want to get people too riled up over your movement with an actual color

― lag∞n, Saturday, April 27, 2024 3:50 PM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/nazis.jpg

https://lithub.com/bigoted-bookselling-when-the-nazis-opened-a-propaganda-bookstore-in-los-angeles/

Note "Silver Shirt Literature" in the store's sign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html

to save you time, here is the best line in the article:

Keller Easterling, the urbanist and architectural theorist, considers Próspera a city in name only, akin to “say, Mattress City.”

Próspera has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.

https://t.co/zphvgcRGDy pic.twitter.com/dEiV99UEFk

— BuccoCapital Bloke (@buccocapital) September 3, 2024

gone now

I was going to post "The Limits to Growth was a huge deal" but my supervisor is writing a book about the history of models, so I may have a pretty skewed perspective on this

― rob, Wednesday, May 5, 2021 8:33 AM

Did that book ever come out?

Theoretically the limit to growth is the point at which the death rate matches the birth rate and population settles into equilibrium. In real populations explosive growth such as humans have achieved in the past century predictably leads to rapid population collapse, not equilibrium.

that is a completely literal observation and not especially here nor there, but yes

https://i.imgur.com/Ma2buFf.jpeg

Engagements require a witness?! Maybe when it's someone you met in a jacuzzi I guess.