No, I would have cited it. Rhetoric. I'm starting to realize that my zeitgeist has diverged from the zeitgeist of hacker news such that my comments are not understood by the majority of the readers here. C'est la vie. In-person interaction is best.
"While the socialist left has fantasized for generations about global revolutions and global class wars"
Global-scale revolution would be rare and unprecedented, however national-scale revolution is extremely common, almost all nations have, are having, or will have one. USA would not exist without our national-scale revolution around 1776 and then the follow-up act around 1812. France wouldn't be as it is today without its 1789 event. Today it seems as though the people in the Middle East and Eastern Europe want things similar to those things Americans and French wanted ~ 200 years ago. And so such revolutions have continued up to this day. One is happening in Ukraine right at this very moment. [0] Don't worry though, it's not televised, and the NYT characterizes the situation merely as a "crisis." [1, though to be fair, the article and its wording were more soft-ball in the past than it is at this moment in time].
I believe the probability of something like that happening in the USA at this moment in time is small. I think the USA is at a different point on the sociological development curve and the USA's problems have morphed in such a way that it should be possible to sort them out either by modifying the government (which is the entire purpose of the orig. architecture of the government, though it's been perverted by generations of asshole politicians) or building "Foundation-like things" on top of the existing economy. The mass of people in America are beginning to see the cause and effect relationships that have hiddenly influenced humanity for millennia. The cause and effect relationships of our current national situation will becomes more and more apparent to a larger and larger portion of the population with time, and at some point a threshold of action will be crossed, and some sort of change will occur. Dubious people at the core of the dubious phenomenon generally speaking no longer have mercenaries, and only have limited influence over the government. And everyone knows where these people live because rich people tend to cluster together and live in the same neighborhoods. When the country was founded the "rich people" who were "pulling the strings" were back in England. And we won anyway. So it's a much more tractable problem now that all the players are in one place, and everyone can know who they all are, where they work, and where they live. I can't wait until a critical mass of people feel like peacefully solving the problem.
One of the things that I think is most interesting about this Ukraine story is how it has def. been "blacklisted" by the mainstream media in the USA-- essentially even the NYT, which is using doublespeak at least some of the time in its reporting about the happenings. Why is this blacklisting/whitewashing occurring, esp. in a country (USA) that was founded by a bloody, violent revolution? Understanding that cause/effect would be very important to helping America at this moment in time.
If we take the pulse of Belarus, we see that the authoritarian dictator there has made clapping illegal in response to similar dynamics playing out there. [2] Yes, this really happens on Earth in 2014.
I've been by the bay for going on seven years and I'm just now starting to perceive this caste-system aspect of the place. I perceived it first as something that I call "dynastic culture," which is, I think, how it shows up on a individual basis. But when you collect together in the same place a bunch of people whose consciousnesses run "dynastic culture," you end up with a caste system emerging at the more macro scale. Anyway, I suspect I would enjoy corresponding with you. If that's mutual, my email is mpdakin at Google's service. Cheers!
Hehehe, she lives 1/3 of the way around the world, and I'm not rich so that's def. not my objective. Plus how can you hit on someone you've never even seen? Personally, I don't want to go much more down the rabbit-hole of a conversation that involves "caste systems" in a public forum, but this is the sort of thing I talk about with my friends. That and I've been randomly making friends with people on the Internet since I was a little kid! (Probably explains everything about me really.) :)
That's fine, no embarrassment needed... I understand the act of the moderator but I also believe in taking the mystique out of random socialisation over the internet, which is an enlightening and innocuous pastime.
An angry man punched him because a critical mass of humanity continues to choose dystopia over utopia.
All of the specifics and examples in that article really are just symptoms of dystopia. The phenomenon of mentally ill people running around on the streets punching people is merely just a symptom of dystopia.
If you want to blame something-- it's not tech companies, Google, Twitter, etc. It's human nature in general, and it's the dystopian beliefs and behaviors of a group of assholes+morons alive on this planet right now who collectively pull humanity towards dystopia by their actions and behaviors in the world relative to the other humans they interact with.
Humans on this planet at this moment in technology-time have all the technological know-how to create a world-wide utopia-- theoretically, it could be done in a matter of months. Unfortunately, there is a critical mass of humans who prefer to live in dystopia. And there are many in that critical mass who are willing to kill other people who disagree with them. So dystopia is what we have at this moment in time.
Free will's a bitch when there is a critical mass of dystopian assholes+morons on a planet. The behavior of that critical mass of dystopians has a sort of spooky action at a distance for the rest of humanity, even those who are not directly connected/interacting with the dystopians.
I can't wait for dystopian actions, behaviors, ideas, models, philosophies, religions, corporations, and governments to die, finally.
I call these anti-creative people of the world who work to hold the world of humanity fixed in one conceptual place/time "The Lords of the Status Quo." These "lords" are great in number, but always individually weak. This group somehow combined forces with "The Lords of Hierarchy"-- those who built and currently inhabit the hierarchal social structures that last throughout time (e.g. Corporations, Religions, Governments). That combined force is the most powerful abstract entity that I know of on this planet, and has somehow managed to impose its collective will over everyone on this planet. (Drone strikes, anyone?) If you want to understand the combined group you want to understand "Slave Morality." They are all something like Slaves. The creatives are best understood using "Hero Morality." I can't wait until this world's "Slaves" finally free themselves. I am generally an anti-Nietzsche thinker and I believe his ideas should be taken with a huge handful of salt, but I think the Hero/Slave archetypes actually do explain a lot about this (effed up) world.
"Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology!
Ain't got time to make no apology"
-Iggy Pop
There are people who work on the ethics of science and technology full time and they are awesome. If every technologist worked on ethics full time nothing would ever get done. I recommend checking out the work of the STS department of MIT though Open Courseware if you are interested in ethics.
Also, if there is actually something unethical going on, it's best to enunciate it using straight/clear prose following the satire if you actually want to affect the external world.
I... want Rome to burn. The authoritarian, hierarchal power structures that exist in this country/world ("Rome") are in need of re-formation or collapse. I'm not interested in participating in that process though. I certainly would never have architected a system of the manner that exists, and I'm not interested in helping the a-holes who did do that debug it. I'd rather just live awesome, think, feel, and make cool stuff when I'm in the mood to do that.
The thing that concerns me about SF Bay Area Startup Ecosystem is that it is def. neither a meritocracy nor a technocracy. (Those systems, properly implemented allow great new things to come into the world, without the side effect of king-creation.) Right now, California is dynastic. Dynastic money, flowing into the hands of people who adopt a dynastic culture, and creating the weak sort of creations that dynastic people end up creating. It makes people rich, and dynastic, one startup team at a time. That's a problem for the world! Once the bulk of the genius-level people now tied up working on dynastic projects or on online advertising/email delivery for some behemoth company wake up to the true nature of the reality and start operating in it as true creators things will start to actually get interesting and awesome.
In the mean time I'll enjoy the delicious beer, food, and weather. And Tahoe once there's enough snow.
I've had an idiosyncratic but highly useful definition of the word 'genius' since I was a little kid thanks to my mother. She taught me that a genius is an intuitive/rational thinker-feeler-person who was lucky enough to somehow line it all up for humanity in his/her mind and bring something big into the world that changes it for the better. If you think about all the real geniuses-- that criteria holds.
There is not much academic research into genius these days but there is research into intuitive people and intuition. And there is also related work in psychology about self-actualization and the other mental-processes.
But eventually it all comes down to someone doing something breathtakingly interesting-- you can't really roll that step off an assembly-line.
I percieve one of the problems with the world right now is that lots of the most highly-competent/skilled people are sort of holding off doing big things, esp. with technology. The number of intuitive man-hours that have been poured into the subject of online advertising is staggering. Those people working on that are capable of actual works of genius. But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems. But I understand this: if you look at what the last waves of true high-tech are i.e. computer/communication/aerospace/nuclear vs. what their "fruits" have been i.e. surveilance-state/police-state/military-industrial-complex/mass production and mass proliferation of WMDs. It's quite disgusting.
Anyway, I know why I'm working on "social technology" and "consumer technology" instead of "high technology."
> But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems.
I remember this opinion also surfacing with the Steve Yegge OSCON 2011 presentation[1]. In which he complained about Google, and all the hard working people there, focusing on social media instead of hard problems. There was a good discussion as to why these problems are not in the forefront.
I think hard problem vs. social media problem is a false dichotomy. I wish people would focus on wise problems. High tech is too dangerous at this moment, even though it's the best stuff to work on long-term for humanity.
So you're saying that only good comes from "social technology" while mixed things have come from "high technology", so working in social tech is "morally" better?
I think social technology has enabled the surveillance of more people than ever before in history - a more than mixed bag. Not only that, new graph theoretical approaches that come from Facebook, Google etc. can easily be used to track humans using non-social technology, as well.
I don't see this as a good/bad/moral calculation. I see it as a practical calculation. We don't need to go into the moral domain when the cause and effect domain is capable of completely outlining the problem.
Working on high tech is dangerous as long as the world is run by warlords and the USA is a surveillance/police state. The last several rounds of high-tech have been utilized by a dynastic, authoritarian power-class to make the world a more horrible place while benefiting themselves, their families, friends, and other cronies.
This is an interesting post. The attraction of advertising is two fold: (1) its passive income; (2) its highly scalable. One of the problems with it as a source of "innovation" is that it is primarily an accelerant. It can either accelerate the adoption (a) of non-ad-tech; or (b) the accumulation of debt. Both of these can be "productive", but only up to a point.
I think you're right about the "attraction of advertising." But the real attraction there is that (1)+(2)=(money pump). And these companies don't seem to know what to do with the type of money pump they are capable of building. It just sort of piles up. :)
You seem to only be able to see the world for the way it is now, and has been over the recent past. Getting stuck on these thinking patterns is self-limiting, much like getting stuck on a programming language like PHP-- both are one-trick-ponies. We thankfully live in a world that, long term, is driven by imagination and possibility. And not always are the "leaders" complete and massive assholes (which is our main immediate problem at this moment in time).
