Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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.

can't wait for a movement populated by people allergic to brands.
i guess the naomi klein thing happened but i mean literally allergic to brands.

are brands a gluten?

thread of brand shaming

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

it's an authoritarian state run by engineers hell bent on getting rich as quickly as possible, what's not to love

true, there are multiple stripes of badness here

yeah they're big on how little they agree on things (while the prof left is a huge monolith of conformity etc etc)

*prog left

yeah, unified front on the left, for sure

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

right, I think Singapore, Hong Kong are the promising models for some of them - and from what I've seen the "racial realism" end of the dark enlightenment/mencius moldbug crowd throw around NAM as an acronym for the ppl they want out of their dictatorships – "non-asian minorites"

they are other-ing the hell out of people, aren't they?

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

― purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:11 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This seems completely otm to me – techno-libertarianism maybe has the money, connections, technical accomplishment, power to fuck up a lot of the decent bits of the state & society in the future. Probably just enough of those things to implement a really miserable, corrupt and half-arsed version of its Utopia in a muddled alliance with the old right.

To be clear: techno-libertarian utopia = shit, robot cars, people starving on the streets; half-arsed version = probably even shitter, robot car companies sueing the starving people they run over on the streets.

techno-montessori schools?

kids making their own beats at their own pace, discovering new filters

808fasciststate

ok, i take it back, it's all ok if Thiel is like

http://www.me.gr/m/photos/get_image/file/c4a5ed918dd0eb0c058b5cfa95afc85d.jpg

forwarded this link with subject: "smug silicon valley shits want to create a randian/fascist utopia" which is pretty much all i can really think to say about this

what is that gatefold from??

prodigy - music for the jilted generation

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

Interestingly enough the thesis of Amy Chua's follow-up book was that this combo was at the root of Jewish-Chinese greatness

on second thought that's not actually that interesting

i, for one, welcome our asshole-technofascist overlords.

http://recode.net/2014/03/15/marc-andreessens-latest-tweetathon-naughty-fun-leads-to-ruined-lives-in-anonymous-apps/

this ding-dong has this sweet new bulleted point twitter rant style that seems pretty indicative of the dystopian trend

http://supost.com/post/index/129734920

This may not be the right place if you:

already seen this list republished about twenty times on twitter

is that a suggestion to add to their list?

hah, sure!

Could you live in Startup Castle?

but this is a good place for it as well

oh sorrry yeah

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIxGwLRWcAAnWLt.jpg

haha omg

let's not get trolled by the SeekingArrangement dude, come on

it needs to be taught what "eleemosynary" means

"He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece ... I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people"

this is like a quote from a Trump rally used to prove that, contrary to all the reports, he's recently regained a lot of his lost coherence

that does sound like him