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That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were
by duped 2y ago
That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics.
They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.
- kazinator 2y agoIt's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoHistory is written by the victors, though. And no one is omniscient. It's a bit hard to say "just the progression of discoveries" as if every voice is equal. And this isn't just about governmental politics. the dispute over the inventor of the light bulb is a big example.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoThe “victor” here is the technology which allowed you to survive into adulthood and fed you inexpensively and clothed you and supports the infrastructure for this forum which lets us have this discussion in the first place. The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy, the conditions which unleashed it held back by their own stubborn insistence.
- johnnyanmac 2y agothat's a pretty bizarre angle. we're overlooking centuries of abuse because "it made my life easier"? My grandfather couldn't de facto vote. These politics are not that far removed from any country. >The politics of technology has only itself as its enemy and the biases of the winners, yes.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoYou are both the winner and the loser here. The right to vote is immaterial if the underlying conditions don't change, or change regardless of how you want them to. The silicon valley tech companies bought this most recent election, they donated the most money to both parties, and would fill up the cabinets of the president with their allies regardless who won, you were just voting on the flavor. But this is not a "bad" thing, insofar as it accelerates the pace of technological development, which creates both great wealth and great alienation and leads to increasing turmoil and civil unrest. But that is on account of "politics" itself, which legitimates the regime of industrial leaders and not industry itself, the tech founders and not the technology.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoThe conditions of possibility of that extraodinary technical development are political. cf Marx, Capital vol 1
- kazinator 2y agoThe conditions may be, but the development itself isn't, and the prior work which that development references and depends on likewise isn't (and had political conditions of its own quite possibly unrelated to the present ones).
- DiscourseFan 2y agoIt is still shrouded by the spectre of the political
- kazinator 2y agoEven if so, that's a different claim from the content being political.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoits not not-political
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 2y agoSure, like Earl Gray tea is tinged by what you're listening to. It tastes a bit different if you have Beethoven on versus Miles Davis. Therefore, although tea obviously isn't musical, it's not non-musical, either.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoBoth the music and the tea are produced by and through market capitalism which depends on a particular configuration of the state to operate efficiently, ie politically. Its just the case that the most efficient configuration is also the one beyond politics.
- wat10000 2y agoI guess you could write a pure technological history that just says what was invented and how it works, but that would be awfully dry and rather uninformative. As soon as you start discussing who did it and why, you’re in the realm of politics, even if not the presidents-and-kings sort of politics. This site is a perfect example. It presents itself as a technical forum where politics is occasionally tolerated but never the focus. And yet you could probably write an entire book about the politics behind the name of the site itself, never mind its history, rules, culture, and means of support.
- kazinator 2y agoYou're in the realm of politics, but politics is still not the front-and-centre focus of your story. You're not telling a political history; but you need to reference politics in order to explain the timeline, or situations of when one of several equally good solutions "won" and such. It is still a history of the technology and not political history.