Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Excellent

ted chiang i luv u

it's a good essay until the conclusion which is "why can't capitalism just be a bit nicer?"

^
Exactly

enh i dunno if it’s ted chiang’s job to come up with a cure for the illness he’s diagnosed

one of chiang's first short stories is a duel between flowers for algernon dudes who keep upping their smart drugs until one of them becomes a messiah, so basically his cure is elon musk and jeff bezos should be popping nootropics until one of them saves the planet.

can we have them popping opiates until both of them leave the planet instead pls

given their private little space race they've got going, they're certainly trying!

enh i dunno if it’s ted chiang’s job to come up with a cure for the illness he’s diagnosed

I think the problem is that he kind of does. Either way, it's a good essay.

hey everyone’s fav juice entrepreneur is back!

The most prominent proponent of raw water is Doug Evans, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. After his juicing company, Juicero, collapsed in September, he went on a 10-day cleanse, drinking nothing but Live Water. “I haven’t tasted tap water in a long time,” he said.

Before he could order raw water on demand, Mr. Evans went “spring hunting” with friends. This has become more challenging lately: The closest spring around San Francisco has recently been cut off by landslides, so reaching it means crossing private property, which he does under cover of night.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html

lol @ "raw water".

I hike, so get to drink from natural springs in the mountains and it is always great water, but lake water is just as "raw" as spring water and it is nowhere near as good. hell, if this guy wants really RAW stuff he should gather water from small streams that run through pastures where cattle graze. I guarantee that would be very lively water!

raw water is a real clarion call to roll out the guillotines

or what SZ said: "Little known fact: Roman shopkeepers were using the terms mouth feel and flavor profile to describe aqua right before the empire collapsed."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmxwEpWkAAsp9l.jpg

abysmal real names

that’s a risk i’m willing to take xp

As a mixed martial arts fighter, Mr. Buttram said he would fight for a couple hundred bucks, sometimes a few thousand, and worked security at a start-up, but his main hobbies were reading 4chan and buying vintage pornography, passions that exposed him to cryptocurrency.

those north korean ballistic missiles can’t come fast enough tbh

From last week:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2018/01/08/latest-trend-fashionable-nonsense-raw-water/

welcome to the future, where the rich live on mars and no-one on earth has a job but, thanks to elon musk, everyone has a flamethrower

https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/boring_company_flamethrower_2048x2048.png?w=738

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/27/elon-musks-boring-co-flamethrower-is-real-500-and-up-for-pre-order/

Musk’s Boring Company is literally a company focused on tunnel boring, but it seems like it’ll be a while before it has revenue or significant results (even if it’s already digging test tunnels). To fund the project until then, selling weird stuff with the company’s logo to Muskheads everywhere seems like a decent plan.

imagine being so invested in cult-of-personality vaporware that you're willing to drop 500 bucks on a flamethrower that doesn't even throw flames well enough to let you pretend to be the doof warrior from fury road

I don’t have much use for a flamethrower.

his bore's like vapor, so buy this flame

...and take your money

the boring company has sold all of its 20,000 flamethrowers in less than 24 hours fyi

if this means just one silicon valley asshole dies by immolation it'll all have been worth it

You could use it to melt the ice on your front walkway, but it would just refreeze again later. Other than that I am stumped for a practical use for that flaming contraption.

melt ice, you say

pic.twitter.com/NyjqDrj431

— "ascetic house" (@AsceticHouse) January 28, 2018

Oh boy, Uber but for doula

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/doula-drama

there's one born every minute

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/peter-thiels-unfortunate-world-on-the-know-it-alls-by-noam-cohen/#!

I’ll read that when I’m feeling stronger

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/technology/his-2020-campaign-message-the-robots-are-coming.html

“All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society,” Mr. Yang, 43, said over lunch at a Thai restaurant in Manhattan last month, in his first interview about his campaign. In just a few years, he said, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.”

“That one innovation,” he continued, “will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”

pretty scary they are going to start automating call center workers

lol

tom i'm kinda eh about that stuff. 90% of the workforce used to be in farming. driving trucks is dull. working in fast food is dull. there is no career path in any of that stuff and never has been. old jobs will close but there are new jobs that need desperately need doing i.e. nursing

Paul has only received one community strike against his channel, for the video he uploaded on Dec. 31. The other videos, as tasteless as they may be, aren’t enough to violate the company’s code of conduct. Instead, YouTube has removed monetization privileges from his channel and placed an age gate (a tool that prevents users under the age of 18 from watching a video) on the vlog that contained footage of Paul tasing dead rats.

“What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would think is tasteless,” Wojcicki said.

There’s no denying that Paul is still a top creator on the platform. With more than 16 million subscribers and growing, Paul may also a financial asset to the company — or he will be, once advertising is restored on his video. YouTube still collects 40 percent of all advertising revenue made from videos, and with millions of eyes on Paul’s every vlog, the company appears to be investing in a sure moneymaker. The company denied earlier reports that YouTube restored ads on Paul’s channel 72 hours after the suspension was instituted, pointing to a glitch that was causing some users to see ads displayed.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/13/17006890/logan-paul-ban-suicide-forest-youtube-susan-wojcicki

unfortunately nobody asked her if she finds filming suicide victims or tasering dead rats tasteful

could just as easily post this to the rolling apocalypse thread but there's a good longread in the grauniad today about peter thiel and other silicon valley assholes' obsession with using new zealand as their supervillain lair/doomsday bunker, possibly inspired by a batshit libertarian screed published at the turn of the millennium

The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:

1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.

2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.

3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.

4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.

The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. Davidson and Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. “The new Sovereign Individual,” they write, “will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.” It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.

full thing here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand

i'm aware i've said this before a few times on ilx but jesus christ the obsession of these billionaire assholes in securing their own wellbeing in the face of a threatened societal collapse which they are ideally-placed to help mitigate is just breathtakingly evil

more proof, if any were needed, that in order to become a billionaire asshole, one must already be breathtakingly evil before attaining that eminence

tru

(isn't new zealand earthquake-prone?)

( yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_New_Zealand#2010%E2%80%93present )

ugh ugh ugh https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/world/australia/school-tech-lumineer-academy-susan-wu.html

1/ VERY interesting tidbit from an ex CEO of major tech co.

Tech giants are opening offices in new cities as much to RETAIN valley talent as RECRUIT new. New office opens and the ratio of valley employees asking to move to actual job openings is 11:1

— Josh Wolfe (@wolfejosh) March 2, 2018

they're leaving

I used to get sent to the principal's office for disrupting education.

yeah basically none of the google people I know work in MV anymore (well, ok, a lot of them never did - but certainly not because they're DC based govt relations staffers)

that reminds me that someone brought this to my attention recently - an amazon intranet page apparently drove a shitload of traffic to a local indie in NoVa: https://www.arlnow.com/2018/02/20/amazon-employees-are-very-interested-in-a-particular-article-about-arlington/

google is pretty much taking over chelsea in nyc

a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends

have these ppl never read hobbes

i'm going to wager that a great many of them have not

i've never read hobbes btw

it helps to read with calvin otherwise its just the tiger talking to himself

hobbes is fun to read

the ultimate basis for the equality that leads people to seek the security of sovereign rule is human vulnerability to being killed by other human beings, regardless of one's power or station in life

so