Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

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

Everything is fine https://t.co/VB6uoq0Csu pic.twitter.com/21Ae4hMtUs

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) March 13, 2018

this is without a doubt the greatest silicon valley quote of all time https://t.co/6trw1Lx8a4

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) March 13, 2018

the kind of guys that will sign up for this will be exactly the kinda guys who should sign up for this

living in the future fucking sucks tbh

100% fatal is a very high bar to set

see you in 500 years bitch

lmao

Twitter. You’ve invented Twitter. pic.twitter.com/h8qaAHjXqf

— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) March 13, 2018

lol

vg

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes charged with "massive fraud" by SEC https://t.co/RmzyJ5ycH6 pic.twitter.com/w7BcdNsxwQ

— maya kosoff (@mekosoff) March 14, 2018

lol pic.twitter.com/OBHS9y2V5B

— maya kosoff (@mekosoff) March 14, 2018

holmes def guilty of the most heinous crime of all: making the rich and the powerful look dumb af

see also fyre festival

Dave Morin on Theranos…. pic.twitter.com/iv3sfXBw8V

— Will Alden (@williamalden) October 26, 2015

https://twitter.com/daveMorin

apart from everything else dumb and clueless about that: it must be amazing to have nothing you dislike more than thinking about passing out during your annual physical

lmao D@ve M0r1n "Entrepreneur. Investor. Photographer." "sponsor of Britt+Co. creator of super-disruptive world-changing Path. courageous giver of blood. better to be lucky than good."

tbf that's from 2015 but still lmao

when youre a real human being pic.twitter.com/iCL9aY5gQA

— shane (@shanevader) September 8, 2016