Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

looking for the fleshlight for my heart

double-fuck him for also apparently inventing the hashtag

lol at that claim

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-algorithms-that-tell-bosses-how-employees-feel/502064/

techno-dystopianism

on trendwatch: the phrase "nerdesse oblige" to refer to neoliberal "code for good" stuff

e.g. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/780875752967380994

lol holy fuck at their summary of agriculture

can't wait 2 disrupt plants&animals

all the actual work on vat-grown meat is happening in academia of course

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny

it is once again time to mock the silicon valley hero who got scurvy

At Graham’s table, he and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump, then decided to reach out to an affiliated expert: Chris Lehane, a former White House lawyer now at the YC company Airbnb. Altman declared, “The best idea seems to be just to support Hillary.”

someone hand that guy a billion dollars

you know that attitude some people get around precocious youth? not to just be a good mentor or resource, but they treat them like some houseplant to be watered and put in the sun. and then not expect them to develop personally, just to keep coming up with more of the same precocious youth stuff.

"hmm yes, look at my youth. truly a great example"

"dude he's 30 now and just got scurvy for the third time because he's a large child"

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13180666/theranos-close-labs-fire-employees

Anybody catch the sniper theories regarding musk's last rocket bust?

Sorry I said sniper I meant UFO

either way, lol

I feel like my "hey, sup" messages to Liz Holmes in the hopes she will buy me sushi and chat are increasingly futile now

Liz, get back at me, not too late

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuGvQEkWcAA9bcG.jpg:large

note: no longer a billionaire by any reasonable meaning of that word

^ I let these kinds of people run after the kind of success they seek, without their attracting either my interest or involvement.

I might not be interested in Theranos, but I'm interested in a FDA and healthcare industry that's capable of vetting things and adopting new technology. Their shell game only made it so far because of a lack of public interest in vetting their claims!

https://twitter.com/shanevader/status/773720109529509888

this replicant is saying many things that are true but is incapable of delivering any of it, and in pushing her company, drew resources and attention away from other companies that might be more successful in pursuing those goals.

like if I find out some day that a company that was on the verge of delivering a way to check for a disease I end up with, and I would have been diagnosed a decade earlier had theranos not driven them out of business, I'm going to be pissed

Sam Kriss on the SV/Muskian obsession with simulation theory:

"Tech billionaires want to destroy the universe"

...Just a little tweak to the formula: All that appears to exist must be destroyed. There’s something admirable in this blasphemous ambition, but it’s based on some very shaky ideas. It helps to look at an influence on simulation theory that’s a little better known that the Nag Hammadi codices: 1999’s The Matrix, in which a gang of heroic freedom-fighters try to wake humanity from a false computer-generated universe and return them to the real world. The film has plenty of knowing references to those older traditions, and to some newer ones: In one scene, Neo is shown hiding his cash in a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (appropriately, a black hardback edition that doesn’t seem to have ever actually been printed.) The philosopher himself wasn’t particularly pleased, insisting in an interview that the film fundamentally misunderstood his work, that ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.’ In The Matrix, there’s a real world behind the simulation. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth. In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’ Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’

namaste

lol, I wrote a piece for my college weekly making almost the exact same point back when Matrix came out.

TS: https://twitter.com/benedictevans vs https://twitter.com/JoshConstine

btw lol https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/18/in-its-vrar-push-twitter-trolls-itself/

A nice column on Obama's talk with a room of wannabe disruptors:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obama-silicon-valley-20161017-snap-story.html

The business model of drug companies such as Turing and Mylan exploits shortcomings in the regulatory system, but their sky’s-the-limit pricing strategies victimize patients who can’t afford their life-saving drugs. Obama made the case that “blowing up the system” because it doesn’t serve entrepreneurs perfectly is the wrong answer. No, he said, government “is not inherently wrecked; it's just [that] government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.”

Of course he’s correct. Private companies work well when they need to concern themselves with their own balance sheets. But that’s not how government works. Caring for veterans, or the poor or aged appear on the surface and in the short term to be liabilities on the public ledger. But in the long run, they’re assets, because they testify to the cohesiveness of society, which is priceless. What’s sad about this is that President Obama’s statement of the principle needs to be repeated over and over again, time without end.

it needs to be repeated inside the government as well.

more than once, i endured an all-hands meeting featuring a new upper management figure - presidentially appointed - straight from the private sector, declaring their intention to "run government like a business"

despite the fact that the public sector's purpose is to maximize the public good, whereas a business' purpose is to maximize profit. being forced to follow marching orders of a madman who equates the two was demoralizing.

I feel you

holy shit that liz holmes vid on that twitter link

"run it like a business" predates SV of course.

as well as the KPIs being different, the basic mechanics of the economic system in which you're operating are different too. i like this krugman piece on that from 1996 https://hbr.org/1996/01/a-country-is-not-a-company

full self-driving tesla

https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-tesla-cars

Pretty sweet.

the hardware is the easy part!

hard to tell with edited video, but that looks somewhat ahead of Uber based on what I read of the tests

Elon Musk said "The hardware is ready, but the feasibility of mass self-driving car use is still decades away. It's a good step forward, though."

when and where did he say that?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/elon-musk-says-fully-self-driving-tesla-cars-already-being-built

He said it in an alternate universe where he actually had a shred of respect for other people's intelligence.

Self-driving cars are a terrible idea anyway, imo, it adds nothing good while adding more bad, based on a false premise that cars, and the environments where they're needed, aren't deeply unsustainable. If Musk were really worthy of respect for me he'd be a champion of mass transportation and better-designed cities and towns. Can't make a gazillion dollars off that, though.

Nothing good? Come on.

And, Tesla is working on trucks (for transporting stuff) and buses.

Maybe someday he'll deserve your respect.

lol maybe

There's definitely some potential for safety and traffic improvement. Obviously I prefer public transit but there are many existing urban areas that have neither good public transit nor adequate density nor the political will for public transit from scratch, and in places like that, self-driving electric cars that pool users MIGHT be preferable to the current system.

like it or not, cars and the massive infrastructure already built up to support them are here for the foreseeable future. of all the possible visions of how that might play out, energy-wise, the mass adoption of self-driving cars is one of the most optimistic scenarios. electric self-driving cars could drive themselves to recharge at the local solar station while you're at work or sleeping, for example.

oh yeah, and also ~30,000 fewer people would die every year in the u.s. alone, but that's nothing good.

i'm all for shifting resources toward public transport as well, of course, and urban planning that prioritizes low-energy commutes for residents (and tele-working, for that matter). but it's not a zero-sum game. rich dudes like elon musk can focus on their plan to create a giant electric car pooling system at the same time that city planners try to re-orient neighborhoods in a more sustainable direction. i don't understand why you'd root against one of those options when both can be pursued at the same time.