Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

‘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.

These purported benefits are based on a technology that doesn't even exist yet, let alone hasn't even been implemented successfully in the conditions/environment/situations where these beneficial scenarios are apparently going to exist. It's nothing based on nothing based on ideal scenarios immune to change or fluctuations, yet ... it's real?

All I'm saying is, it's self-interested hype coming from people who have poor track records of credibility and having the public interest at heart.

To take the other side of this, I have concerns about the fact that we are creating massive moneyed interests that might have incentive to lobby against further public transit development. I mean, maybe no more so than the current fossil fuel and auto industries (and much smaller by comparison), but still, we've already seen Uber meddle in municipal politics a lot.

Poor record of credibility?! Musk and Tesla pretty much single-handedly resurrected the electric car (and gave away much of the technology). His whole raison d'etre seems to be trying to keep the human race from going extinct.

Also, he builds self-landing rocketships. Seems credible to me.

His whole raison d'etre seems to be trying to keep the human race from going extinct.

C'mon. Do you actually believe this? Even if this were his goal, like he's got a Jesus complex or something, the way he's pursuing it is so fucking stupid that he should be relieved of his duties.

So cynical. Yeah, I believe him. So far, he seems to be working toward that goal.

Musk: "Lower consumption levels to help stem climate change? Nah, that'd cut into my businesses. How about we GO TO MARS!!! YEAH!"

Smart person: "Wouldn't that actually just add to the conditions causing climate change?"

Musk: "Get 'em, boys!" ('em here are Elon Musk's entourage of cultists)

Like wtf is that? How could you possibly believe a) this guy is really this great humanitarian; b) if he is, that he isn't totally incompetent and downright bizarre about it?

you're drawing some weird connections here - how is going to Mars increasing emissions

You're right, we use spice melange now to transport spacecraft

do you even know what rocket fuel is made of

why am I bothering

xpost wait a second. do you think that al gore is a hypocrite when he flies to conferences?

fwiw, exhaust from space ship engines does contribute a few kilotons of GHGs to the atmosphere every year - a small fraction of the hundreds of kilotons that commercial airplanes emit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_by_rocket_launches

did you read the entire wikipedia article

also the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change are completely different things

On a global scale today, rockets have a negligible impact on destruction of the ozone layer.

fwiw the majority of rocket launches are to put satellites in orbit

To me, Musk seems like he's doing as much as he can do within the current system (we don't live in some command economy utopia where we can just force everyone to ride the bus to work) to try and help. Yes, he's using technology, but that's his area of expertise! I'd love to hear what you think Musk should be doing.

I don't feel comfortable defending some rich dude, honestly, but your arguments seem like straight-up hating to me.

I'm just saying here, he doesn't seem to be all that great at preventing the human race's extinction when 1) he isn't tackling the actual problems we're facing here on earth, because they cut into his business operations; and 2) his supposedly great ideas are pretty fucking stupid, and not only that, are actually doing more harm than good (the good here being "0" unless you count entertainment and distraction a positive value). Even if his rockets were perfectly clean, including the building and maintenance of the, going to Mars is a dumb shit idea.

Can't believe you guys are so taken in by Musk. It's not hating, I'm just not a big fan of cult of personalities, especially ones that co-opt genuine issues that need to be solved, monopolize the time spent discussing them, and then provide crap solutions for them. Dude's doing more harm than good, and the cult surrounding him gives this stupidity more power and sway than it should have.

I'm all into forcing everyone to ride the bus btw

Xp

Electric cars powered by solar cells with big batteries to support the power grid when the sun isn't out - those are dumb ideas?

Well the best idea is to immediately make cars illegal

I dont like Musk at all but you are making nonsensical arguments

Xp

The home energy cell stuff is pretty good (normal caveats for rare earth metal mining apply, though) and it's making investors hate him, but I think bringing that business into Tesla makes sense.

I don't think his goal is some weird lofty thing like preventing human extinction (?!?) but putting investment into technologies that he believes are genuine goods. Hyperloop seems like a solution that doesn't quite fit with any existing problem but it's something that could be useful long-term. Electric vehicles, technology that harnesses renewable energy and developing better battery storage, making space launch technology that's reusable... all seem pretty good uses of resources.

Sending humans to mars is of questionable utility to me, but it's a goalpost that drives a lot of useful technology that will need to be created in the interim.

That doesn't really do much good for the world, except take power from one industry and locate it in another; who's sitting on the throne of that particular industry you may ask? Well, if it isn't Elon Musk! Wonder why this is such a big issue for him. Solar power, electric cars, they will not do anything to solve climate change or our shitting up the earth. It's a gamble to become the head of a new empire, which seems more suited to Musk's actual personality than Earth Savior.

It's interesting from a business perspective, but the cult around him just grosses me out.

xxp

I have a friend who works at SolarCity but I haven't talked to him for a while and have barely discussed his work, other than that he likes his workplace.

He wrote out his plan, if anyone is interested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux