Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

being white, middle class, and graduating college in 2003 with a computer science degree worked very well for me, feel free to borrow my template

― mh

unlike elon musk, i'm having a difficult time leveraging my obvious mental instability for profit

i am unsure why trump allows musk in the same room, elon's hair transplant puts whatever bizarre experiment is on donald's head to shame

im convinced elon musk has a publicist working reddit. there's so many shitty 'TIL Elon Musk did something mildly interesting' articles and their ilk at the top of /all

he inhabits that perfect slice of interest between people who like the environment and modern tech business and people who are five years old and love cars and spaceships

and people who love nikola tesla

Uber now lets you set a person, not a place, as your destination

innovation in the stalking space

there shd be a theranos thread, I love how crazy liz holmes is

yeah, i feel bad for all the people who had to work for her and anyone harmed because they believed in the medical technology

but she is batshit crazy and lol

On Saudi Arabia and Twitter's inability to handle doxxing there, amongst other things:

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/your-app-isnt-helping-the-people-of-saudi-arabia-1790198445

Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself

so this guy is . . . actually a moron?

yes

ahahahahahahaha that picture

“Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan. There were hedge fund people I spoke to about a week after the election. They hadn’t supported Trump. But all of a sudden, they sort of changed their minds. The stock market went up, and they were like, ‘Yes, actually, I don’t understand why I was against him all year long.’”

funny

The reaction from the gay community has been harsh, with one writer in The Advocate going so far as to suggest that Mr. Thiel was not even a gay man, because he did not “embrace the struggle.”

“I think Trump is very good on gay rights,” Mr. Thiel says. “I don’t think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”

I ask if he’s comfortable with the idea that Vice President-elect Mike Pence, regarded in the gay community as an unreconstructed homophobe, is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

“You know, maybe I should be worried but I’m not that worried about it,” he replies. “I don’t know. People know too many gay people. There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people.

weird

When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, noting: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

When I ask if he is concerned about conflicts of interest, either for himself or the Trump children, who sat in on the tech meeting, he flips that one, too: “I don’t want to dismiss ethical concerns here, but I worry that ‘conflict of interest’ gets overly weaponized in our politics. I think in many cases, when there’s a conflict of interest, it’s an indication that someone understands something way better than if there’s no conflict of interest. If there’s no conflict of interest, it’s often because you’re just not interested.”

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tim-and-eric-mind-blown.gif

loooool

David St. Hubbins: Well, I don't really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It's like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.

people know too many gay people according to Thiel, huh

on the other hand, a friend and her husband recently had a niece stay with them for a week, and the description of the whole thing sounded like some sort of caricature of "rural girl graduating high school, trying to plan out her life" when I asked how it went. the niece said she'd never met a gay person

o_O

Dowd isn't the interviewer who's going to tease anything revelatory from Thiel but I appreciated that left-field question about whether he'd thought about marriage and kids

I dug this episode:

-
Listening to On Being with Krista Tippett (Anil Dash — Tech’s Moral Reckoning)

A wildly popular blogger, tech entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley influencer, Anil Dash has been an early activist for moral imagination in the digital sphere — an aspiration which has now become an urgent task. We explore the unprecedented power, the learning curves ahead, and how we can all contribute to the humane potential of technology in this moment.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/anil-dash-tech-s-moral-reckoning/9132
-

Here's some Silicon Valley Techno Dystopianism:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

And because these dickbags are all libertarians, they just dumb their savings into shit like abandoned Y2K shelters in abandoned missile silos, rather than say using billions to avert any coming catastrophe

https://www.facebook.com/leanincommunity/ not a single mention of the inauguration of the protest

Wow, there is a _lot_ of hopeful-yet-clueless assumptions going on in this article. How many years do you think it'll take tech culture as a whole to finally realize tech ain't neutral? Also that "progress as a society" and "technical sophistication" are far from the same thing?

https://backchannel.com/we-need-techies-to-work-for-trump-b66367b7f621#.idhvua61n

deeply deeply unsurprised that this dude in sam altman's mentions is a ruby on rails person. what is wrong with those people? they're like lambdaconf people if lambdaconf people had an iq of 85 instead of 160.

http://i.imgur.com/LFRcnNI.png

http://i.imgur.com/Ffrx6ed.png

isn't ruby on rails the perfect emblem of thoughtless low-entry-bar-tech-provides-disruptive-social-solutions boosterism?

ah yes, the analysis where doing really offensively racist and xenophobic scapegoating and aggressively knee-jerk reactions are good

the ruby on rails community is extremely shitty.

it's probably the preferred platform at this point for small businesses that create web presences and small apps for local business. it's a huge slice of the web work that actually gets done and you get this perfect storm of small business skepticism and technology utopianism

'so if we pay you for this we'll be able to grow our business exponentially at virtually no cost???'

'o yes'

That reminds me of one of my favorite tweets from Erowid Recruiter, an account that generates mash-ups from drug trip reports and tech recruiter emails. It read simply "don't do Rails".

erowid recruiter is good

The bigger you are, the weaker your sauce

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/28/14426550/silicon-valley-trump-immigration-response

http://avc.com/2017/01/make-america-hate-again/

note this in the comments

http://i.imgur.com/5G29mS4.png

omg yessss pull beetbort's comments

respect to sergey brin for going to an airport protest!

has this been posted? http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/01/26/elon-musk-is-ready-to-bore-under-l-a-as-the-tunnel-market-takes-off/#79eed3924a40

Speaking of Musk, ain't no industry has a Union didn't deserve one:

https://theoutline.com/post/1069/tesla-worker-jose-moran-elon-musk

as zuck edges toward running for office, remember this is how he thinks

https://twitter.com/nathanjurgenson/status/616084493041070080

"what will enable us to live forever" is such a dumb question on every level

i'm looking forward to voting for zuck one day

facebook is a blight on humanity so no I won't be doing that

wow those are really dumb questions

but how does the brain work

it's like he's an 8yo

zuck is awful

Fuckin' magnets, man

bunch of brain surgeons itt

"what will enable us to live forever" is such a dumb question on every level

It wouldn't be my first pick of scientific question, but I don't think it's entirely dumb. A cure for aging isn't far-fetched, and we welcome all kinds of limited life-extending breakthroughs. Not that I would look to tech billionaires for wisdom on the ethics of life extension.

zuck's first paragraph is fine, he's not the first to ask them and they're definitely q's other scientists already explore

second paragraph is creepy

maybe zuck's the same as me, we see things they'll never see

the most problematic words there are "us" and "forever".

As far as I know a cure for aging actually is pretty far-fetched, as recent studies indicate our DNA has built-in limits that restrict indefinite cell replication (there was some article in Discover about this recently, not sure if its online). And "forever" is obviously substantively different from "limited life-extending". If he'd said "how can we make people live longer" that's slightly more reasonable.

The "us" part involves, as noted, the ethics of life extension, which are v v thorny and imo come out v strongly against even considering this.

xp