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The failed promises of tech liberation
- freedsoftware 4y agoThis is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later became the dominant ethos of the tech industry. Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.
- freedsoftware 4y agoHere's a link to "The Californian Ideology" if you haven't read it: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...
- glitchc 4y agoThanks for sharing this. Paints a clear picture of how deluded the technocrat class is.
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- dopylitty 4y agoI don’t know if it’s amazing or depressing that this was written almost thirty years ago but could have been written last week.
- whitemary 4y agoDepressing. I first read it ~11 year's ago after Occupy Wall St failed as I started trying to understand what might actually work, has worked, etc. I was reading about neoliberalism and ultimately Marxism. The essay is excellent but not necessarily better than so much other prophetic work in the Marxist canon.
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- jerryu 4y agoDecentralization is over hyped. People think they want decentralized but they really don't.
- GenericDev 4y agoYou do not speak for me. I want decentralization, self hosting, and the right to repair. The modern technology ecosystem has failed me in every one of these areas.
- dymk 4y agoGP may not speak for you, but they do speak for 99.9% of users. How’d the whole Mastodon migration go? Seems to have fizzled.
- aliqot 4y agoI don't use twitter or mastodon, so I consider it a significant sign that I keep seeing so many of my peers and people whose content I read showing up on Mastodon. I consider myself impartial. That's just n=1 from my perspective, but it's a datapoint nonetheless considering I'm the least likely to be exposed to this.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoMastodon doesn’t speak for decentralization
- nobody9999 4y ago>Mastodon doesn’t speak for decentralization That's kind of the point, IMHO. Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization, it is decentralized. And that's not really splitting hairs here, it's an important distinction. I could set up a Mastodon instance (although Writefreely[1] and Pixelfed[2] are more my speed) that advocated for centralized everything. I could even ban folks who argue for decentralization and delete any comments they make in favor of same. It's a tool that allows folks to speak for themselves, without a central corporate authority dictating what's acceptable and what isn't. If you don't like a particular Fediverse[0] instance, move to another one or set one up for yourself. [0] https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ [1] https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ [2] https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/ https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/
- zozbot234 4y agoThe global village is basically here, courtesy of social media like TikTok (which did not come from California). What we didn't expect was that the village idiots would also come along.
- donatj 4y agoAnd that the loudest village idiots get the most attention.
- quickthrower2 4y agoAnd there are training courses on being a village idiot so you can be heard too!
- stjohnswarts 4y agoSurely you aren't referring to all the "how to become an influencer" courses?
- danrocks 4y agoYes, and don’t call me Shirley
- intelVISA 4y agoAgile methodology(tm)
- seydor 4y agoTiktok is a specific kind of entertainment, nothing more, and hardly a medium to debate ideas. Maybe twitter is a more engaged kind of crowd but there too, the people making the loudest voice get preferential treatment. But certainly the global village does exist and this podcast is even a good example of it.
- gsatic 4y agoWhat type of villagers have contempt for the village idiots?
- Guthur 4y agoI'm sure the same promises were made to the Greeks and Romans as their institutions of governance were slowly bought out before their very eyes. Aristotle wrote about this inevitable path of democracy. It's happened before and we've wilfully ignored those lessons.
- freedsoftware 4y agoGot a link with a discussion of his theories? I would find that interesting to see.
- Guthur 4y agoHe mentioned it briefly in his book/notes on rhetoric. It was from a free audio book. I've only started my exploration of Aristotle.
- Koshkin 4y agoThe recent and ongoing events clearly show that politicians do not learn anything from history, as the lust for power, money, notoriety, and what not, is too strong.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoThe amount of people who cannot keep track of their money with a simple Excel sheet is astonishing. Heck, scratch that, people don't even keep track of their money with a calculator or even pen and paper. And yet, keeping an eye on your money and seeing where it flows is an incredible tool to adjust your spending and maybe save up where it matters and afford to step up your game. Technology without education is borderline useless, the liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
- Shared404 4y ago> Technology without education is borderline useless, the liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge. Tech without education is worse than useless - it provides access to a non-stop dopamine drip which stops people from seeking education.
- nine_k 4y agoTechnology without education is magic. Now take a look at the multitude of fantasy books describing the problems of mere mortals which can't handle a magic artifact, and what happens when it falls into wrong hands.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoTitle reminds me of how Zhou Enlai replied to someone "Too early to say" when asked his opinion on the French Revolution
- Sniffnoy 4y agoNote that he didn't actually say that -- or rather, he did say that, but not in reference to the French Revolution: https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/ https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-...
- dang 4y agoRecent and related: The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287603 - Jan 2023 (92 comments) Also: The Californian Ideology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29444538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29444538 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088216 - Jan 2020 (1 comment) The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 - Dec 2017 (95 comments)
- ryandrake 4y agoHigher quality discussion/comments in that first link, too. Thanks for the related links, as always, dang!
- ed-209 4y agoEveryone agrees socials are the scourge of the net, amplifying the most hyperbolic trash available, but they (seem to) increasingly just accept this to have been inevitable (or more erroneously, they blame human nature itself lol). This is actually worse than wrong because it creates apathy and hopelessness that re-enforce the problem. It's not difficult to find out who funded these virtual gulags or to imagine what motivated them to seek re-centralization.
- t43562 4y agoI would have thought that computer scientists would not really fall into debates about "centralisation" or "decentralisation" when we're so busy changing from one strategy to the next in CPU and software designs. At the broadest level first it was mainframes, then client server, now it's all in a kind of giant mainframe again which we just call a cloud service provider and yet it's not exactly monolithic. Why would politics ever be free of debate about what is best with centralised or decentralised human organisation? Lets just say that those who think they know best about everything will be for centralisation at the extreme if they think they can succeed in dominating others or decentralisation in the extreme if they think they cannot.
- lapinot 4y agoAhh. Refreshing to see some people talking about class politics on hn.
- zozbot234 4y agoWhere's the class politics among "tech liberation" proponents? It seems like a fairly anti-elitist idea, as far as these things go. And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West?
- nine_k 4y agoOwning a computer in a country of the Soviet-dominated bloc was definitely a sign of privilege. But it would be a game machine. Tinkering with machines was a lower-class thing; a son of a party official won't usually do that. A professor's son very likely would; still higher class than the working class. Getting access to a computer in some kind of a club, or at a good school, was not an upper-class thing though, but more of how well-off the city / district was.
- lapinot 4y ago> Where's the class politics among "tech liberation" proponents? Nowhere, it's in the critic. (doesn't make much sense to me, either i'm misreading you or you are) To make it clear "tech liberation" here is the editorialized version of the so-called "californian ideology", which has been coined and attacked by OP, by saying among other things, that it is completely blind of any class-based vision of politics. > And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West? Ooh now i'm understanding your misunderstanding! You seem to have understood "class politics" as defamatory and that's why you thought i applied it to the thing being criticized. It's the opposite: any politic which is not based on class (ie by definition, the only (and all) materialistic criterion relevant socially) is imho based on bogus concepts. Now as is obvious from all my vocabulary the class i'm defending politically isn't the class of owners, but that's another thread. I would be happy already if people doing owner-class politics would publicly acknowledge doing so. edit: If your not doing class-based politics what are you doing then? Religion-based? Racist? I'm not completely dismissing identity politics insofar that there is sense in fighting for specific rights in some circumstances, but my point is that identity is nowhere near being a working tool for general politics.
- lexarflash8g 4y agoWhere is the discussion on incentives in this argument? Globalization has benefited humanity in many ways but also caused massive climate change, increasing inequality, and a winner-take-all economy.
- jasmer 4y agoTech is power, but how that power is distributed is not a given. We should not assume the power that tech creates just magically diffuses among the plebes. It's a interesting paradox that consumer surpluses are quite enormous: we live with enormous material wealth: electricity, telephone/mobile device, TV, internet, IoT. (A poor person lives better than any Absolute Monarch from 100 years ago) ... and yet the same time power imbalances are still problematic and captial concentration is once again a problem. Russia and China have vastly improved quality of life vis-a-vis 15 years ago and yet they have more limited power and freedoms.