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Serious question: How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today? And what if everyone in Silicon Valley started practicing shamanism? An

Serious question: How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today? And what if everyone in Silicon Valley started practicing shamanism? And/or anarchism? What things would companies measure instead of or in addition to money & attention? What if tech leaders & workers joined together in saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice." (Or something more effectively worded than that)

nkoren 8y ago
Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways. We've been doing that pretty much since the Cambrian explosion, and we're not going to stop any time soon. Asking what would happen if we did is useless -- like asking what would happen if gravity reversed, or if black was white and white was black. If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am -- then it's best to pursue avenues of enquiry and develop theses which aren't fundamentally impossible from the fifth syllable onwards.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  Good advice, although the original post could be the basis for a sweet fictional novel.
  - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
    Reality is a sweet fictional novel we're writing together. It's why I ask fanciful questions.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  > Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways. Serious advice #1: thought experiments can have value even if the thought experiment does not directly model plausible human behavior. The same is true of statistical, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical inquiry. Many foundation proofs begin with "assume this unlikely thing is true." Heck, laissez-faire capitalism as a concept started as a thought experiment based around the fiction of a prior redistribution of wealth (too bad everyone seems to forget that first part). This is a discussion forum, and the question "what if the majority of folks start doing ______" isn't so absurd a question to ask in all but the most degenerate cases. > like asking what would happen if gravity reversed Ironically written given the front page has a detailed writeup on an experiment looking for signs of anti-gravity in the cosmos. Serious Advice 2: "If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am" is defining activism of any sort with you as its focal point. Any such activism is doomed, because one need only render you unlikable to derail even unrelated work (as we have seen in the UK's politics these last few years). It's even worse to admonish other people to operate this way. Reconsider it, please.
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  You're assuming parent wasn't going for the top comment. In addition to the open-ended hypothetical, popular tactics include prefacing with "This is an unpopular opinion" and "My theory is". Depending on the goal, they might be using their brain correctly. Stacking open-ended hypotheticals is a savvy move.
  - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
    I wasn't, but now I'm going to experiment with it as a means of building a following for my design-your-own-religion religion!
    - anothergoogler 8y ago
      I think you're onto something. Perhaps it's best to focus on the design of the design though. A further derivative of subjectivity ought to fit the bill! :)
      - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
        I started by working on a theory of design. The religion is an artistic packaging of a programming framework for the human self. It's all centered around hacking my perceptions. Does that seem to address what you're talking about? Cause now I'm intrigued by whatever other thoughts you might have.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  I see I wasn't clear because I used absolute terms. Please insert your own desired population percentages for the questions where I've implied 100%. In the meantime, I'll still consider the ideas because I find it useful. There are no bad questions, just people who find it useful to judge others and their questions. I've found it transformationally useful to minimize my judgment, so I don't count myself among that crowd anymore and I don't judge others who do. If it's the absolute terms I used, like "everyone," that's put you off, cool. Let's instead imagine what would happen if a majority chose to. Or 25%. Or 3.5%. Just as you chose to answer a question I didn't ask, you could've easily modified my questions to fit your standards. Serious advice: Responding with judgment isn't typically conducive to learning unless the recipient has learned to let go of other people's judgments. Here's a paper on the subject I find useful. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754
  - nkoren 8y ago
    This is a good reply, and I apologise for the judgemental reaction. We probably actually share much of the same ethos. Personally I think it would be absolutely if everybody dropped mushrooms and spent a week in the wilderness coming to terms with the unity of consciousness of all beings and the absurdity of building a society based on false economies of wage labour and conspicuous consumption, etc. Worked wonders for me, and no doubt it would be groovy if everybody else did that too. The severity my reaction is due to the fact that I've seen too many people hit this wavelength and then get lost in the daydream of what would happen if literally everybody else got on this wavelength too. And then spend -- and please believe that I mean this very very literally -- the entire rest of their lives lost in that daydream. I find this to be tragic, because I think that such people have something to contribute to the world, and pursuing this question explicitly degrades their ability to do so. And thus I actually do think it's a bad question. If you're interested in changing the world, then becoming attached to any kind of theory whose initial predicate is fundamentally impossible means that you are not going to change the world. A far better starting point is: "how can I change the world without anybody noticing at all"? Followed closely by: "how can I change the world if I get one in a million people to see things my way?" Work your way up from there. Starting from the other direction is a mind-killer.
KirinDave 8y ago
> How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today? What's interesting is that I don't think the day-to-day of it would look very different. Extremely hierarchical corporate structures don't work very well in small scale unless you have phenomenally charismatic (or even rarer, actual top-of-field domain expert) leaders. As an incentive to bring folks into the space, varying degrees of group ownership and power are offered to the founding set (and founding investors, which are often an integral part of the early business). In a very real sense but perhaps to a lesser total degree, this is (as the syndicalists love to put it) "the workers owning the mill they operate." What's also interesting is that as the company scales, this approach is considered increasingly untenable (mostly from a profit-generation standpoint) and a more absolutely hierarchical system emerges. But nearly everyone has the opinion that these corporate structures are awful, inefficient beasts that create incentives for parasitic management, outsized rewards for C-sets who may or may not provide actual value, and a constant conflict within the workforce to avoid being trivialized by the desire to increase efficiency over product quality or market share. There was a pair of papers recently that I really enjoyed investigating what "fractal" community (and by obvious extension, corporate) structures could look like by De Florio & then Pajaziti: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sres.2242 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sres.2242 https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05112 https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05112 These delve into how one can build service organizations around non-traditional (e.g., not-straight-line-to-the-top-always-centralized) structures and how these can actually have deceptively better efficiency even if their outcomes are only statistically predictable. It's worth noting that these sorts of organization styles are not untested in the valley. The biggest success for such an organization I can think of off the top of my head is Google's technical support and loaner laptop system, which is semi-fractal and horizontal and despite looking like it'd be a huge money pit (from the traditional "control outcomes and limit loss" school of IT management), is actually dramatically cheaper than traditional IT departments at its scale. Data driven organizations often naturally push towards open and relatively flat org structures, with the understanding that the overhead of abuse of such system's leniency is much less expensive than the total expense of minimizing said abuse. This isn't isn't exactly new, we see echos of the "actually the chaotic version of this over resources that are infinite in principle but constrained in a time domain is not much worse than the perfectly scheduled system" principle in lots of fields. Market economics likes this outcome (although not when you start making them own "externalities" like environmental damage). Network engineers have long ago made their peace with this truth, as well. A randomly scheduled network is only about 1/3 worse than an optimally scheduled network!
13of40 8y ago
If you think about it, Silicon Valley is what you get when you mix two parts new age culture with three parts IBM and let it ripen for a few decades.
drb91 8y ago
If you're asking seriously.... I think there's serious potential for co-ops. There's no reason services like Yelp need to be designed around a hockey stick revenue curve.
egypturnash 8y ago
A Silicon Valley that counted its value in the amount of happiness it created for people using its products (and perhaps even for people who don't use their products) instead of the amount of financial value it extracted from them would be a very different place indeed. The older I get the more I feel like capitalism is a system for turning human misery into profits for a lucky few.

nkoren 8y ago

Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways. We've been doing that pretty much since the Cambrian explosion, and we're not going to stop any time soon. Asking what would happen if we did is useless -- like asking what would happen if gravity reversed, or if black was white and white was black. If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am -- then it's best to pursue avenues of enquiry and develop theses which aren't fundamentally impossible from the fifth syllable onwards.

joejerryronnie 8y ago
Good advice, although the original post could be the basis for a sweet fictional novel.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  Reality is a sweet fictional novel we're writing together. It's why I ask fanciful questions.
KirinDave 8y ago
> Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways. Serious advice #1: thought experiments can have value even if the thought experiment does not directly model plausible human behavior. The same is true of statistical, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical inquiry. Many foundation proofs begin with "assume this unlikely thing is true." Heck, laissez-faire capitalism as a concept started as a thought experiment based around the fiction of a prior redistribution of wealth (too bad everyone seems to forget that first part). This is a discussion forum, and the question "what if the majority of folks start doing ______" isn't so absurd a question to ask in all but the most degenerate cases. > like asking what would happen if gravity reversed Ironically written given the front page has a detailed writeup on an experiment looking for signs of anti-gravity in the cosmos. Serious Advice 2: "If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am" is defining activism of any sort with you as its focal point. Any such activism is doomed, because one need only render you unlikable to derail even unrelated work (as we have seen in the UK's politics these last few years). It's even worse to admonish other people to operate this way. Reconsider it, please.
anothergoogler 8y ago
You're assuming parent wasn't going for the top comment. In addition to the open-ended hypothetical, popular tactics include prefacing with "This is an unpopular opinion" and "My theory is". Depending on the goal, they might be using their brain correctly. Stacking open-ended hypotheticals is a savvy move.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  I wasn't, but now I'm going to experiment with it as a means of building a following for my design-your-own-religion religion!
  - anothergoogler 8y ago
    I think you're onto something. Perhaps it's best to focus on the design of the design though. A further derivative of subjectivity ought to fit the bill! :)
    - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
      I started by working on a theory of design. The religion is an artistic packaging of a programming framework for the human self. It's all centered around hacking my perceptions. Does that seem to address what you're talking about? Cause now I'm intrigued by whatever other thoughts you might have.
crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
I see I wasn't clear because I used absolute terms. Please insert your own desired population percentages for the questions where I've implied 100%. In the meantime, I'll still consider the ideas because I find it useful. There are no bad questions, just people who find it useful to judge others and their questions. I've found it transformationally useful to minimize my judgment, so I don't count myself among that crowd anymore and I don't judge others who do. If it's the absolute terms I used, like "everyone," that's put you off, cool. Let's instead imagine what would happen if a majority chose to. Or 25%. Or 3.5%. Just as you chose to answer a question I didn't ask, you could've easily modified my questions to fit your standards. Serious advice: Responding with judgment isn't typically conducive to learning unless the recipient has learned to let go of other people's judgments. Here's a paper on the subject I find useful. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754
- nkoren 8y ago
  This is a good reply, and I apologise for the judgemental reaction. We probably actually share much of the same ethos. Personally I think it would be absolutely if everybody dropped mushrooms and spent a week in the wilderness coming to terms with the unity of consciousness of all beings and the absurdity of building a society based on false economies of wage labour and conspicuous consumption, etc. Worked wonders for me, and no doubt it would be groovy if everybody else did that too. The severity my reaction is due to the fact that I've seen too many people hit this wavelength and then get lost in the daydream of what would happen if literally everybody else got on this wavelength too. And then spend -- and please believe that I mean this very very literally -- the entire rest of their lives lost in that daydream. I find this to be tragic, because I think that such people have something to contribute to the world, and pursuing this question explicitly degrades their ability to do so. And thus I actually do think it's a bad question. If you're interested in changing the world, then becoming attached to any kind of theory whose initial predicate is fundamentally impossible means that you are not going to change the world. A far better starting point is: "how can I change the world without anybody noticing at all"? Followed closely by: "how can I change the world if I get one in a million people to see things my way?" Work your way up from there. Starting from the other direction is a mind-killer.

KirinDave 8y ago

> How would a Post-Capitalist Silicon Valley be different from today? What's interesting is that I don't think the day-to-day of it would look very different. Extremely hierarchical corporate structures don't work very well in small scale unless you have phenomenally charismatic (or even rarer, actual top-of-field domain expert) leaders. As an incentive to bring folks into the space, varying degrees of group ownership and power are offered to the founding set (and founding investors, which are often an integral part of the early business). In a very real sense but perhaps to a lesser total degree, this is (as the syndicalists love to put it) "the workers owning the mill they operate." What's also interesting is that as the company scales, this approach is considered increasingly untenable (mostly from a profit-generation standpoint) and a more absolutely hierarchical system emerges. But nearly everyone has the opinion that these corporate structures are awful, inefficient beasts that create incentives for parasitic management, outsized rewards for C-sets who may or may not provide actual value, and a constant conflict within the workforce to avoid being trivialized by the desire to increase efficiency over product quality or market share. There was a pair of papers recently that I really enjoyed investigating what "fractal" community (and by obvious extension, corporate) structures could look like by De Florio & then Pajaziti: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sres.2242 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sres.2242 https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05112 https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05112 These delve into how one can build service organizations around non-traditional (e.g., not-straight-line-to-the-top-always-centralized) structures and how these can actually have deceptively better efficiency even if their outcomes are only statistically predictable. It's worth noting that these sorts of organization styles are not untested in the valley. The biggest success for such an organization I can think of off the top of my head is Google's technical support and loaner laptop system, which is semi-fractal and horizontal and despite looking like it'd be a huge money pit (from the traditional "control outcomes and limit loss" school of IT management), is actually dramatically cheaper than traditional IT departments at its scale. Data driven organizations often naturally push towards open and relatively flat org structures, with the understanding that the overhead of abuse of such system's leniency is much less expensive than the total expense of minimizing said abuse. This isn't isn't exactly new, we see echos of the "actually the chaotic version of this over resources that are infinite in principle but constrained in a time domain is not much worse than the perfectly scheduled system" principle in lots of fields. Market economics likes this outcome (although not when you start making them own "externalities" like environmental damage). Network engineers have long ago made their peace with this truth, as well. A randomly scheduled network is only about 1/3 worse than an optimally scheduled network!

13of40 8y ago

If you think about it, Silicon Valley is what you get when you mix two parts new age culture with three parts IBM and let it ripen for a few decades.

drb91 8y ago

If you're asking seriously.... I think there's serious potential for co-ops. There's no reason services like Yelp need to be designed around a hockey stick revenue curve.

egypturnash 8y ago

A Silicon Valley that counted its value in the amount of happiness it created for people using its products (and perhaps even for people who don't use their products) instead of the amount of financial value it extracted from them would be a very different place indeed. The older I get the more I feel like capitalism is a system for turning human misery into profits for a lucky few.