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Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was dark

by api 5y ago

Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface but the view of the future was optimistic. Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate. Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.

e40 5y ago
> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center. Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
  - morelisp 5y ago
    Keep in mind that Barlow was heavily involved in the GOP. Libertarian yes, but also always on the right to a significant degree. As a radical liberatory movement this was all doomed from the start.
- api 5y ago
  You can find counterexamples, but the big difference is how people reacted. Almost everyone thought Waco was unjust and excessive. Today many people (especially on the left) would say they had it coming. Meanwhile the right now openly talks about the need to regulate business more and Trump’s whole message was more about cracking down on others than freedom for his base. Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea anyway. If you’d released an expose back then of Facebook and its shadow profiles, people would have almost universally freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares. Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft’s original “trusted computing” initiative and contrast it with today’s acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares. Back then we built personal computers with the goal of serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to get people into cloud silos to… uhh… serve the user in a different sense… more like that old “to serve man” Twilight Zone episode. The biggest difference I see today is general public acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and authoritarianism.
  - e40 5y ago
    You make really good points, thanks. I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet minority (30+%), who have very different values than what we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people previously had little to no voice, but because of Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to band together and elect a criminal and start to take control of local and state elections, to remake the progressive world that we all thought we lived in. Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    > Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political program has. (Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was, let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much about it at all.)
Barrin92 5y ago
totalitarianism and authoritarianism should not be used interchangeably, they're opposites. Totalitarianism is mass mobilization and uninhibited violence, think Cultural Revolution, authoritarianism is, to quote Gibson given that we're in a thread about him, Singapore's 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Radical depolitization. People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots' hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.
VictorPath 5y ago
> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley. > authoritarian technocracy on the left Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals. [1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  complicit with the "surveillance capitalism" model of profiling and tracking every adult with disposable income, and then some. That is in itself, enough to convict the American political class, to my mind. As said more than forty years ago in America and more true than ever, the "two party" system is not really.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    You’re describing neoliberalism, not the liberals or the left. Surveillance capitalism in the tech sector arose with the rise of FAANG, which depends on monetizing personal data for its models. The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left. While entirely fictional, Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" is an interesting overview of the surveillance zeitgeist and philosophy from a centrist POV. I wouldn’t really recommend the film as it’s terrible, but the book illustrates how every good tech idea is a slippery slope or double-edged sword. Every idea that has the potential to make us more free, also has the risk of enslaving us. The reason the tech sector requires regulation in this arena is because they aren’t willing to do it themselves as it impacts their profits. There’s nobody in DC looking out for the consumer or interested in protecting personal data, and that’s the most troubling part of the problem. Our representatives aren’t there to protect us, they are there to protect the donor class.
    - 5y ago
cheese_van 5y ago
>The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism) jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by api 5y ago

e40 5y ago

> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center. Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
- morelisp 5y ago
  Keep in mind that Barlow was heavily involved in the GOP. Libertarian yes, but also always on the right to a significant degree. As a radical liberatory movement this was all doomed from the start.
api 5y ago
You can find counterexamples, but the big difference is how people reacted. Almost everyone thought Waco was unjust and excessive. Today many people (especially on the left) would say they had it coming. Meanwhile the right now openly talks about the need to regulate business more and Trump’s whole message was more about cracking down on others than freedom for his base. Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Today nobody cares. The right would never have tolerated January 6th. Now half of them think maybe democracy is a bad idea anyway. If you’d released an expose back then of Facebook and its shadow profiles, people would have almost universally freaked out and boycotted Facebook. Today nobody cares. Nobody would have gone for locked down devices and app stores then. Look up the reaction to Microsoft’s original “trusted computing” initiative and contrast it with today’s acceptance of walled gardens. Nobody cares. Back then we built personal computers with the goal of serving the user. Now the shift is toward thin clients to get people into cloud silos to… uhh… serve the user in a different sense… more like that old “to serve man” Twilight Zone episode. The biggest difference I see today is general public acceptance of technocracy, surveillance, and authoritarianism.
- e40 5y ago
  You make really good points, thanks. I think the apathy is because we've been bombarded with evil for so many years, and the rise of the quiet minority (30+%), who have very different values than what we saw every day on TV and in newspapers. Those people previously had little to no voice, but because of Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc, etc, they were able to band together and elect a criminal and start to take control of local and state elections, to remake the progressive world that we all thought we lived in. Btw, even back 20 years I was ringing the alarm bells of authoritarianism and surveillance, to my friends (most of whom are way smarter than I am) and not a single one of them gave any shits. I really don't understand it.
- morelisp 5y ago
  > Back then the left would have drawn the line at arbitrary freezing of the accounts of the trucker protestors. Back then, truckers wouldn't have been suspicious of a basic public health program. Reagan & Clinton (and similar conservative-to-third-way politics in other countries) did a fine job putting a wedge between liberals and labor. That the allegiances have changed doesn't necessarily mean any part of the political program has. (Waco is also not as clear-cut as you make it; it was, let's say, bipartisanly popular at the time, then equally unpopular 5 years later which seems to be what you remember, and today I don't think anyone is thinking much about it at all.)

Barrin92 5y ago

totalitarianism and authoritarianism should not be used interchangeably, they're opposites. Totalitarianism is mass mobilization and uninhibited violence, think Cultural Revolution, authoritarianism is, to quote Gibson given that we're in a thread about him, Singapore's 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Radical depolitization. People are more apathetic than hateful (today's 'riots' hardly deserve the label by historical standards) and there is more of an indifference than a pessimism. You're not told what to think (or compelled to action), but rather told what not to say (or how not to act), and otherwise left alone.

VictorPath 5y ago

> The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley. > authoritarian technocracy on the left Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals. [1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.

mistrial9 5y ago
complicit with the "surveillance capitalism" model of profiling and tracking every adult with disposable income, and then some. That is in itself, enough to convict the American political class, to my mind. As said more than forty years ago in America and more true than ever, the "two party" system is not really.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  You’re describing neoliberalism, not the liberals or the left. Surveillance capitalism in the tech sector arose with the rise of FAANG, which depends on monetizing personal data for its models. The American political class is guilty of not regulating this industry, which came about as a result of the influence of the libertarian right, not the left. While entirely fictional, Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" is an interesting overview of the surveillance zeitgeist and philosophy from a centrist POV. I wouldn’t really recommend the film as it’s terrible, but the book illustrates how every good tech idea is a slippery slope or double-edged sword. Every idea that has the potential to make us more free, also has the risk of enslaving us. The reason the tech sector requires regulation in this arena is because they aren’t willing to do it themselves as it impacts their profits. There’s nobody in DC looking out for the consumer or interested in protecting personal data, and that’s the most troubling part of the problem. Our representatives aren’t there to protect us, they are there to protect the donor class.
  - 5y ago

cheese_van 5y ago

>The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Looking back on it, it's hard to decipher. I explained to my son that once, a movie usher asked me to put out my cigarette at a midnight movie. This while the rest of the patrons were smoking pot, which was so commonplace at midnight movies that the authorities just ignored it. Those decades were a strange battleground between intellectual freedom (and hedonism) jousting with the establishment. This decade, I don't feel that promise of wholly unbridled intellectual freedom, and the excitement it caused. I suppose the establishment won.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]