9 ms·

The Silicon Oligarchy

76 points by wheresvic3 6y ago

zxcb1 6y ago
VECTORALISTS
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Would you care to elaborate? How am I doing so far? > According to McKenzie Wark when information becomes a commodity it means we will only be able to see the information produced by the vectoral class. This is because they are the ones whose profits depend on the scarcity of information. So when information becomes intellectual property we are bound to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees. She states that the “hack” which monetizes information introduces the “vectoralist” class. > It is the hacker class that produces new information, free from the restrictions of a property form. This however is then used by the vectoral class, who own and control the means of production of information on an industrial scale and mediates connections and access to information (Paolo Pedercini, the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria cites companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb as typical representatives of the vectoral class). The hacker and the vectoral class aren’t always at odds with each other. They can compromise on the free flow of information and the extraction of wealth from this information to fund its development. Think of the open source movement, Reddit and Wikipedia. McKenzie Wark believes that the hacker class should ally themselves with the other producing classes so that they together don’t have to answer to the vectoral class anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  If medieval military structure influenced feudalism, I can see strategic bombing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572030 as influencing vectoralism. But I'm not super convinced vectoralist/hacker is that useful a distinction. I think Orwell called it correctly in predicting Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Where he went too far[1], perhaps because he grew up in a parliamentary system, is in not predicting that the Oceanic outer party would be dualised in two distinct thought-monitoring parties: the pitchfork party and the torch party. https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg [1] I haven't read anything but the Goldstein chapters, so all my knowledge of the rest is from pop culture. Is there anything there, or is it "fast-forward?" (Also, it seems pop culture overplays universal oppression: at least 87% of the population appears to be unaffected. Doesn't the severe dystopia only hit those readers who identify with outer party members?)
ohazi 6y ago
s/Silicon/Tech/ I thought this was going to be about Intel/TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries. There's barely any Silicon in the valley anymore.
zpeti 6y ago
I love this new narrative that allowing the president of the USA to communicate on the largest platform in the world is siding with him or being in alliance with him. At least be honest and say that you want Zuckerberg to censor and police trump. That’s the truth. But don’t pretend that somehow it’s immoral to allow the US President to post on your platform. He’s the president, whether you like it or not.
- zwirbl 6y ago
  Do rules not apply to US presidents?
  - leereeves 6y ago
    In much the same way that even laws do not apply to anything said in Congress, because the power to control political debate is the power to control government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause
    - EdwardDiego 6y ago
      Except wasn't that clause to stop the Executive Branch (and anyone else) from using the machinery of the state to interfere with Congress? Not really about freedom of speech, rather keeping Congress independent from outside control. A lot of former British colonies have the same principle, dating from 1688/1689: https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-works/parliamentary-privilege-in-new-zealand/ https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-...
      - leereeves 6y ago
        > keeping Congress independent from outside control. Exactly what's at stake here. Keeping the government independent from outside control by those who happen to control the means of communication.
        6y ago
swiley 6y ago
This is why it’s so important to avoid closed software and especially avoid software that depends on network services run by individual companies.
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  I agree, but how? Everyone I know uses WhatsApp. If I close my Facebook account I lose my only method of contacting a great deal of people who I used to know and don't want to lose touch with. How do I get off these platforms when no-one else will?
proc0 6y ago
tl;dr: I'm from Turkey and "orange man bad" So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  It's an opinion piece. It's not required to show both sides.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  The great advantage of Trump for those of us in the rest of the world is that his emphasis has been on doing unto his own rather than doing unto others.
  - proc0 6y ago
    Correct, America first.
- pjc50 6y ago
  It turns out that the orange man is bad, in many of the same ways that Erdogan is bad.
  - proc0 6y ago
    Nah. It's more true everybody is brainwashed because people are scared to think for themselves.
Havoc 6y ago
>a Chinese president gets first dibs on naming Zuckerberg’s kids. That's pretty bizarre even by Zuck's standards
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Think of it as a diplomatic move against straight up invasion.
abellerose 6y ago
I assume the US has always been an oligarchy and never truly a democracy at the federal level. The American people just get to vote from either the two parties that desire whoever to be elected and where hundreds of millions are spent with a lot of nonsense that's off-topic. Understandably tech is arguably in infancy but nothing like the decades before today. So the tech monopolies of today weren't a thing before but people had so much opportunity in the earliest years; that resulted in money being easy to be made with little concern of whatever outcome. Nowadays platforms control most of the market and people are now starting to notice an oligarchy in tech. Resulting in concern propagating in recent years. It's well known a lot of people in society don't have a voice and when they're wronged by the system(s) of society; whether it be authoritarian or not. I'm unsure if we can really prove current day is worse or better than previously in history regarding to having a voice/impact when being wronged. My question is how do we justly blame a worse outcome on a tech oligarchy and when we cannot know the foregoing being worse or better than the past?
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  The pre-internet saying was "freedom of the press is for those who own one." (journalists like to think of themselves as professionals, but publishers are not journalists. These days I guess we have to mention that random people with a truck and vlog are "journalists" in the same sense that random people with headphones and an open incognito tab are "scientists") For your amusement, WASP self-parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 "haters like to ???? ?? our ivy league education / but they're just jealous 'cause our families run the nation" (as far as I can tell, this commerical was only aired in New England. That's OK, the P-word is their word, they can use it. "Sloane Ranger" for our brit friends, I suppose. It's "Goldküstenmilieu" here. What is the term in your countries?)
hoseja 6y ago
I had hoped it would be about how there are so very few top-tier fabs.
tumetab1 6y ago
Please remove what looks like a tracking token from the URL. Untracked URL https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy
foobar_ 6y ago
Bully's once they grow up have to adopt a veneer facade of goodness to hide that plain fact that they are still the same. In such cases it's usually the actions that speak the truth because the words are always meant to hide greed and sadism.
bsanr2 6y ago
>One of my new grand theories is that America lags 5-7 years behind emerging markets when it comes to the impact of American companies on society. And now, whatever heaven and hell tech companies have wrought upon the emerging markets is now on our doorstep. This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country. Widespread housing insecurity? Check. Drug epidemic? Check. Voting rights crisis? See you in November.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  It's been 30 years since Yugoslavia so you all have fortunately avoided that particular misfortune arising from polarisation and breakdown in civil discourse.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country One of my wilder observations is that, while the conspiracy theorists are wrong, they're "exactly wrong": the unevidenced thing looks a bit like something that actually happened but with completely different details. The thing they're worried about is the US doing to white people what it's already done to nonwhite people. Illegal medical experiments? Tuskeegee. "FEMA camps"? The post-Katrina mess. COINTELPRO? Already deployed against civil rights leaders in the 60s and 70s.
  - lostmyoldone 6y ago
    It kind of makes sense, actually. We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be considered the perpetrator. Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know. That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it is going on if it will harm the social interaction. Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.
cinquemb 6y ago
Tools of the national security™ apparatus and its profiteers repurposed for domestic use[0]: 2014 CFR discussion[1]: "… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested." - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company [0][1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278
cryptica 6y ago
I'm not convinced at all that Mark Zuckerberg likes Trump. He just did it to play "good cop bad cop". I've seen this kind of "good cop bad cop" charade a lot recently. Not just in the news but also in real life at my last company. You have one person acting like the bad guy using extreme arguments and another person acting like the good guy using less extreme arguments (though also undesirable) - this encourages people to side with the less extreme position instead of recognizing that they are both undesirable options. IMO the 'employee walkout' by FB was just a charade in this good cop bad cop game. In a highly divided society, this is the most effective way to persuade people to do what you want. It creates a slow but predictable decline. Within a decade, people will think of the once extreme position as being totally reasonable. Then they will keep playing the game; it's going to get a point that the good cop will be offering people to take huge salary cuts while the bad cop will be offering to abolish salaries altogether and provide food vouchers instead. There will be some overhanging narrative that we have limited resources and each one of us should do our bit to conserve those resources.
trabant00 6y ago
> As the Black Lives Matter demonstrations gained momentum and the police response became increasingly violent, I found myself reliving what Turkey has gone through, but in English. In some cases in these US protests/revolts the authorities stepped completely back allowing looters and vandals complete reign over some areas. That's the complete opposite of what happened in Turkey.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  And in many, many places, there's no looting etc. Its a protest, and the public responds positively. But not news-worthy I guess.

76 points by wheresvic3 6y ago

zxcb1 6y ago

VECTORALISTS

aspenmayer 6y ago
Would you care to elaborate? How am I doing so far? > According to McKenzie Wark when information becomes a commodity it means we will only be able to see the information produced by the vectoral class. This is because they are the ones whose profits depend on the scarcity of information. So when information becomes intellectual property we are bound to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees. She states that the “hack” which monetizes information introduces the “vectoralist” class. > It is the hacker class that produces new information, free from the restrictions of a property form. This however is then used by the vectoral class, who own and control the means of production of information on an industrial scale and mediates connections and access to information (Paolo Pedercini, the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria cites companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb as typical representatives of the vectoral class). The hacker and the vectoral class aren’t always at odds with each other. They can compromise on the free flow of information and the extraction of wealth from this information to fund its development. Think of the open source movement, Reddit and Wikipedia. McKenzie Wark believes that the hacker class should ally themselves with the other producing classes so that they together don’t have to answer to the vectoral class anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto
082349872349872 6y ago
If medieval military structure influenced feudalism, I can see strategic bombing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572030 as influencing vectoralism. But I'm not super convinced vectoralist/hacker is that useful a distinction. I think Orwell called it correctly in predicting Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Where he went too far[1], perhaps because he grew up in a parliamentary system, is in not predicting that the Oceanic outer party would be dualised in two distinct thought-monitoring parties: the pitchfork party and the torch party. https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg [1] I haven't read anything but the Goldstein chapters, so all my knowledge of the rest is from pop culture. Is there anything there, or is it "fast-forward?" (Also, it seems pop culture overplays universal oppression: at least 87% of the population appears to be unaffected. Doesn't the severe dystopia only hit those readers who identify with outer party members?)

ohazi 6y ago

s/Silicon/Tech/ I thought this was going to be about Intel/TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries. There's barely any Silicon in the valley anymore.

zpeti 6y ago

I love this new narrative that allowing the president of the USA to communicate on the largest platform in the world is siding with him or being in alliance with him. At least be honest and say that you want Zuckerberg to censor and police trump. That’s the truth. But don’t pretend that somehow it’s immoral to allow the US President to post on your platform. He’s the president, whether you like it or not.

zwirbl 6y ago
Do rules not apply to US presidents?
- leereeves 6y ago
  In much the same way that even laws do not apply to anything said in Congress, because the power to control political debate is the power to control government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Except wasn't that clause to stop the Executive Branch (and anyone else) from using the machinery of the state to interfere with Congress? Not really about freedom of speech, rather keeping Congress independent from outside control. A lot of former British colonies have the same principle, dating from 1688/1689: https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-works/parliamentary-privilege-in-new-zealand/ https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-...
    - leereeves 6y ago
      > keeping Congress independent from outside control. Exactly what's at stake here. Keeping the government independent from outside control by those who happen to control the means of communication.
      - 6y ago

swiley 6y ago

This is why it’s so important to avoid closed software and especially avoid software that depends on network services run by individual companies.

hackissimo123 6y ago
I agree, but how? Everyone I know uses WhatsApp. If I close my Facebook account I lose my only method of contacting a great deal of people who I used to know and don't want to lose touch with. How do I get off these platforms when no-one else will?

proc0 6y ago

tl;dr: I'm from Turkey and "orange man bad" So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.

EdwardDiego 6y ago
It's an opinion piece. It's not required to show both sides.
082349872349872 6y ago
The great advantage of Trump for those of us in the rest of the world is that his emphasis has been on doing unto his own rather than doing unto others.
- proc0 6y ago
  Correct, America first.
pjc50 6y ago
It turns out that the orange man is bad, in many of the same ways that Erdogan is bad.
- proc0 6y ago
  Nah. It's more true everybody is brainwashed because people are scared to think for themselves.

Havoc 6y ago

>a Chinese president gets first dibs on naming Zuckerberg’s kids. That's pretty bizarre even by Zuck's standards

lostmsu 6y ago
Think of it as a diplomatic move against straight up invasion.

abellerose 6y ago

I assume the US has always been an oligarchy and never truly a democracy at the federal level. The American people just get to vote from either the two parties that desire whoever to be elected and where hundreds of millions are spent with a lot of nonsense that's off-topic. Understandably tech is arguably in infancy but nothing like the decades before today. So the tech monopolies of today weren't a thing before but people had so much opportunity in the earliest years; that resulted in money being easy to be made with little concern of whatever outcome. Nowadays platforms control most of the market and people are now starting to notice an oligarchy in tech. Resulting in concern propagating in recent years. It's well known a lot of people in society don't have a voice and when they're wronged by the system(s) of society; whether it be authoritarian or not. I'm unsure if we can really prove current day is worse or better than previously in history regarding to having a voice/impact when being wronged. My question is how do we justly blame a worse outcome on a tech oligarchy and when we cannot know the foregoing being worse or better than the past?

082349872349872 6y ago
The pre-internet saying was "freedom of the press is for those who own one." (journalists like to think of themselves as professionals, but publishers are not journalists. These days I guess we have to mention that random people with a truck and vlog are "journalists" in the same sense that random people with headphones and an open incognito tab are "scientists") For your amusement, WASP self-parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 "haters like to ???? ?? our ivy league education / but they're just jealous 'cause our families run the nation" (as far as I can tell, this commerical was only aired in New England. That's OK, the P-word is their word, they can use it. "Sloane Ranger" for our brit friends, I suppose. It's "Goldküstenmilieu" here. What is the term in your countries?)

hoseja 6y ago

I had hoped it would be about how there are so very few top-tier fabs.

tumetab1 6y ago

Please remove what looks like a tracking token from the URL. Untracked URL https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy

foobar_ 6y ago

Bully's once they grow up have to adopt a veneer facade of goodness to hide that plain fact that they are still the same. In such cases it's usually the actions that speak the truth because the words are always meant to hide greed and sadism.

bsanr2 6y ago

>One of my new grand theories is that America lags 5-7 years behind emerging markets when it comes to the impact of American companies on society. And now, whatever heaven and hell tech companies have wrought upon the emerging markets is now on our doorstep. This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country. Widespread housing insecurity? Check. Drug epidemic? Check. Voting rights crisis? See you in November.

082349872349872 6y ago
It's been 30 years since Yugoslavia so you all have fortunately avoided that particular misfortune arising from polarisation and breakdown in civil discourse.
pjc50 6y ago
> quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country One of my wilder observations is that, while the conspiracy theorists are wrong, they're "exactly wrong": the unevidenced thing looks a bit like something that actually happened but with completely different details. The thing they're worried about is the US doing to white people what it's already done to nonwhite people. Illegal medical experiments? Tuskeegee. "FEMA camps"? The post-Katrina mess. COINTELPRO? Already deployed against civil rights leaders in the 60s and 70s.
- lostmyoldone 6y ago
  It kind of makes sense, actually. We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be considered the perpetrator. Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know. That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it is going on if it will harm the social interaction. Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.

cinquemb 6y ago

Tools of the national security™ apparatus and its profiteers repurposed for domestic use[0]: 2014 CFR discussion[1]: "… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested." - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company [0][1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278

cryptica 6y ago

I'm not convinced at all that Mark Zuckerberg likes Trump. He just did it to play "good cop bad cop". I've seen this kind of "good cop bad cop" charade a lot recently. Not just in the news but also in real life at my last company. You have one person acting like the bad guy using extreme arguments and another person acting like the good guy using less extreme arguments (though also undesirable) - this encourages people to side with the less extreme position instead of recognizing that they are both undesirable options. IMO the 'employee walkout' by FB was just a charade in this good cop bad cop game. In a highly divided society, this is the most effective way to persuade people to do what you want. It creates a slow but predictable decline. Within a decade, people will think of the once extreme position as being totally reasonable. Then they will keep playing the game; it's going to get a point that the good cop will be offering people to take huge salary cuts while the bad cop will be offering to abolish salaries altogether and provide food vouchers instead. There will be some overhanging narrative that we have limited resources and each one of us should do our bit to conserve those resources.

trabant00 6y ago

> As the Black Lives Matter demonstrations gained momentum and the police response became increasingly violent, I found myself reliving what Turkey has gone through, but in English. In some cases in these US protests/revolts the authorities stepped completely back allowing looters and vandals complete reign over some areas. That's the complete opposite of what happened in Turkey.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
And in many, many places, there's no looting etc. Its a protest, and the public responds positively. But not news-worthy I guess.