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"In sum: This is not a culture that respects either its workers or its neighbors, and they should not be surprised when workers and neighbors don’t respect it i

"In sum: This is not a culture that respects either its workers or its neighbors, and they should not be surprised when workers and neighbors don’t respect it in turn." It is a culture that loathes human dignity in general. to them, people are biological robots, stochastic parrots, attention algorithms to be gamed for profit, and resources to be exploited until they are used up and replaced with something superior. They moved fast. They broke their bank. And now, since it hurts them instead of everyone else, they're sad. Well to them I say stop being ungrateful brats and delight in the chaos and carnage like you always do. :)

mindslight 4y ago
The problem isn't libertarianism per se, but rather that by the time it's been chopped up by surveillance companies and sold to the public, it's ultimately just marketing used to carry weight for digital authoritarianism - essentially freedom for me but not for thee. The exact same dynamic occurs in the two mainstream political parties, where the grassroots start from decent places which then get transmuted into supporting corporate authoritarianism. Society is more used to the pathologies of mainstream parties, and I suspect the hypocrisy is more jarring when claiming an attitude of fierce individualism while actually creating something that "loathes human dignity". Libertarianism is ultimately rooted in individualism, which I think is a great basis for political understanding. The ability to "exit" and go one's own way is a powerful dynamic, even though it is impractical for most people to do so and impractical for anyone to do so for most things. Personally I can't understand how one can even determine what's right and wrong in this world without the starting point of individualism (eg human rights). But from that starting point, it's critically necessary to go in a positive direction - viewing things from others' perspective and extending them the same freedoms you expect, rather than the domination and hierarchy of short-sighted self interest. But yes, back to the larger Surveillance Valley culture? My thoughts are summarized right there in that name. Web 2.0 is just today's version of proprietary software, with the "innovations" of telemetry and centralized control. So is every corporate operating system / platform / etc, not wanting to be left out of owning a piece of the dystopia. So is most every product that gets thoroughly marketed to consumers, if not right out of the gate then definitely down the road after some pivots and acquisitions. Digital technology can provide a lot of freedom, but Surveillance Valley has done fuck all to actually get that unrestricted freedom into end users' hands, as there's no profit in doing so. Ultimately the only thing "libertarian" about Surveillance Valley is that same hypocritical dynamic of freedom for me but not for thee. It remains to be seen if anything worthwhile for non-techies comes out of web 3.0. Cryptocurrency is itself a bust, having been thoroughly colonized by finance douchebags even quicker than web 2.0. Perhaps fungible currencies have long term futures or perhaps not (non-fungible Bitcoin et al certainly do not). Or perhaps there are enough newly minted millionaires that some will actually continue to build solid human-empowered technology and reject the VC playbook of business disruption masquerading as "tech" in name only. Only time will tell.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  I'm working through both The Loop and Your Computer Is On Fire which discuss the authoritarian tendencies of computing as it exists today. Everyone's been saying for years that democracy's at a breaking point, capitalism's at a breaking point, now technology is at a breaking point. Unless we stop flirting with fractures and actually hit that breaking point and survive, this paradigm will only continue to squeeze. Precious little time to find a future that isn't annihilation or incredibly bleak. I would wish best of luck to the techbros that anointed themselves our enlightened leaders and refer to everyone outside of tech as "normies" and "lemmings", but I've also read Survival of the Richest.

mindslight 4y ago

The problem isn't libertarianism per se, but rather that by the time it's been chopped up by surveillance companies and sold to the public, it's ultimately just marketing used to carry weight for digital authoritarianism - essentially freedom for me but not for thee. The exact same dynamic occurs in the two mainstream political parties, where the grassroots start from decent places which then get transmuted into supporting corporate authoritarianism. Society is more used to the pathologies of mainstream parties, and I suspect the hypocrisy is more jarring when claiming an attitude of fierce individualism while actually creating something that "loathes human dignity". Libertarianism is ultimately rooted in individualism, which I think is a great basis for political understanding. The ability to "exit" and go one's own way is a powerful dynamic, even though it is impractical for most people to do so and impractical for anyone to do so for most things. Personally I can't understand how one can even determine what's right and wrong in this world without the starting point of individualism (eg human rights). But from that starting point, it's critically necessary to go in a positive direction - viewing things from others' perspective and extending them the same freedoms you expect, rather than the domination and hierarchy of short-sighted self interest. But yes, back to the larger Surveillance Valley culture? My thoughts are summarized right there in that name. Web 2.0 is just today's version of proprietary software, with the "innovations" of telemetry and centralized control. So is every corporate operating system / platform / etc, not wanting to be left out of owning a piece of the dystopia. So is most every product that gets thoroughly marketed to consumers, if not right out of the gate then definitely down the road after some pivots and acquisitions. Digital technology can provide a lot of freedom, but Surveillance Valley has done fuck all to actually get that unrestricted freedom into end users' hands, as there's no profit in doing so. Ultimately the only thing "libertarian" about Surveillance Valley is that same hypocritical dynamic of freedom for me but not for thee. It remains to be seen if anything worthwhile for non-techies comes out of web 3.0. Cryptocurrency is itself a bust, having been thoroughly colonized by finance douchebags even quicker than web 2.0. Perhaps fungible currencies have long term futures or perhaps not (non-fungible Bitcoin et al certainly do not). Or perhaps there are enough newly minted millionaires that some will actually continue to build solid human-empowered technology and reject the VC playbook of business disruption masquerading as "tech" in name only. Only time will tell.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
I'm working through both The Loop and Your Computer Is On Fire which discuss the authoritarian tendencies of computing as it exists today. Everyone's been saying for years that democracy's at a breaking point, capitalism's at a breaking point, now technology is at a breaking point. Unless we stop flirting with fractures and actually hit that breaking point and survive, this paradigm will only continue to squeeze. Precious little time to find a future that isn't annihilation or incredibly bleak. I would wish best of luck to the techbros that anointed themselves our enlightened leaders and refer to everyone outside of tech as "normies" and "lemmings", but I've also read Survival of the Richest.