Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

so, we should have a king with absolute power to keep us in check, the office for which is itself a contrivance

In order to maintain their command over these vastly greater resources these sovereign individuals will have to become states themselves, de facto at first and later de jure

States on boats

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/mar/18/floating-cities-proposals-utopian-sci-fi

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

Google may have built the structures on barges to avoid mandatory city building permits and public plans that may disclose their purpose.Ultimately, however, the time and cost of meeting federal maritime safety regulations may have prompted Google to abandon the project.

It is comforting that this is based off of william rees-mogg's prognostications: Private Eye used to run columns clowning him for the unfailing wrongness of his predictions. Think we're gonna be ok

Xp states on a plane

bravo

City officials warned Apple its glass walls were dangerous. Apple Park opened anyway. 911 calls show three people have been injured walking into them. Read more: https://t.co/CpUYRL578t pic.twitter.com/e4mqqBhBCu

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) March 2, 2018

Talk about hostile architecture

https://windowalert.com/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/everything-here-is-fake/2018/03/02/064a3d4a-18c6-11e8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html?utm_term=.63374e187c37

word is they're about to hire a new director overseeing their real estate and building assets - he has some 'disruptive' new ideas!

https://images.eil.com/large_image/BILLY_JOEL_GLASS%2BHOUSES-298776b.jpg

i've never read hobbes btw

― had (crüt)

i think it counts if you've heard that mastodon record

move fast and break your face

also, belated applause for "states on a plane" I would like a painting of that please

anyway the point i was trying to make is that peter thiel's belly is soft and the masses of humanity determined

https://www.healthiq.com/careers

"We do a daily standup where we don't discuss why something is late. Instead we each spend 10 seconds on what we actually shipped today."

harry potter and hagrid

that’s really mind-bending considering the post stand-up “feats of strength” take much longer

this sounds like a hell

Sounds a bit like that Startup Castle.

"We believe winners have always won."

They've invented SROs!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur