Oh, look, rationalists discovered religion. Maybe they’ll take this
opportunity to learn about humility, grace, and self-awareness! Let’s
find out:
“It is better to be interesting and wrong than it is to be right and
boring.”
“This is one of the most culturally significant things that is
happening right now.”
Hmm, ok, well, the grandiosity is still there. But maybe it’s at
least calmed their obessions with converting the world around them into
a self-optimization scheme?
“The best hope is maybe there are [ritual] micronutrients or vitamins
that we can discover, and then figure out how to supply them under
different technological regimes.”
“It turns out that, like, intuition is incredibly powerful … an
incredibly powerful epistemic tool.”
>It turns out that, like, intuition is incredibly powerful … an incredibly powerful epistemic tool
Rationalists, can you stop contradicting the core tenet of your ideology for ONE SECOND
“Rationalists” on their way to say the most unhinged postmodern shit anyone has ever dreamt up while also blaming postmodernism for our collective cultural decline.
> "It is better to be interesting and wrong than it is to be right and boring.”
You can be right and interesting! First some reason these people picked boring AND wrong though
That’s a [hard](https://betterwithout.ai/intelligence-in-science) [no](https://betterwithout.ai/what-intelligent-people-do) – coming from one chief postrat guru himself.
Even [metamodernists](https://metagame.substack.com/i/93170591/cognitive-complexity) (briefly mentioned in the article) can’t shake the compulsion – the people who ostensibly worship the Nordic countries, though maybe it’s the history with _rashygien_?
What if a certain assemblage of runes, placed on intuitively chosen
ley lines, creates an emergent hyper-rune that is more numinously fey
than any rune hitherto cast? I propose an air strike on Stonehenge; it’s
the only way to be sure.
For some people, that sort of story or game creates a “greater threat” that allows them to make a fictional-context case for fascism. It’s okay if the demons you fight are sufficiently bad! There are bad entities on both sides, but ours are _awesomer._
By “some people,” I mean fascists, and by “that sort of story or game,” I mean everything fascists say and do.
Stonehenge is not enough, we also need to nuke the largest ball of twine in the usa. But, we also need to consider if nuking those places is not already part of Wednesday's plan.
Looks like someone already blew up the [Georgia Guidestones](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1113855150/a-georgia-monument-was-destroyed-locals-blame-conspiracy-theories).
> That failed candidate, as well as others who believe conspiracies about the Guidestones, have falsely claimed that God struck the monument down with righteous lightning — despite surveillance video showing a person planting a device and running away.
> Conspiracy theories aren't a new phenomenon, and neither is people acting out on them in real life. But Jared Holt, an extremism researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialog, said the Guidestones are a perfect example of how pervasive conspiracy thinking has become.
> "Whether it's elected officials appealing to online conspiracists or online conspiracists trying to become elected officials, we're really starting to see the effects of that in clear and obvious ways," he said.
> The line between posting things on the internet and doing them in real life is blurring more and more, and the current political climate often rewards extreme rhetoric. And when these events do happen, "they have really disproportionate effects and the damage can last well beyond and certainly extend much past any property destroyed," Holt said.
Speaking of, I maintain that Yudkowsky more or less calling for stochastic terrorism against machine learning datacenters during his media tour is one of the most irresponsible things he's done to date -- which is saying something, considering the guy's 20-odd-year career as a cult leader before it.
Ow yeah my post was totally in fantasy land, I was making a reference to American Gods the novel, not the weird woo eco fash guidestones.
Agree with you on the datacenters thing btw
E: for those not in the know why I call them weird ecofash, the first guideline says: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.", and the second is "Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity."
They found the guy who built them and he was an open racist (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa3sK1iZxc&pp=ygUlbGFzdCB3ZWVrIHRvbmlnaHQgR2VvcmdpYSBndWlkZXN0b25lcw%3D%3D)
“Will no one rid me of these turbulent geeks?”
Prediction: someone will get hurt in a misguided attempt to stop AI, and EY’s response will be that the culprit “attacked the wrong computers.”
I remember my childhood in Brighton
Dear ol’ Dad would bounce me on his knee…
He said, “Son, there ain’t nothing more excitin’
Then exposing beasts to tweet inanity”
Buts it’s like, weird cult of genius borderline narcissistic woo, it’s like Ryan Holiday or that time like a year ago I came across “rumi for entrepreneurs” and almost laughed a lung out
Central to the rationalist worldview was the idea that nothing — not
social niceties, not fear of political incorrectness, certainly not
unwarranted emotion — could, or should, get between human beings and
their ability to apprehend the world as it really is. One longtime
rationalist of my acquaintance described the rationalist credo to me as
“truth for truth’s sake.” No topic, no matter how potentially
politically incendiary, was off-limits. Truth, the rationalists
generally believed, would set humanity free. Sure, that meant tolerating
the odd fascist, Nazi, or neoreactionary in the LessWrongor Slate Star
Codex comments section (New Right leader Curtis Yarvin, then writing as
Mencius Moldbug, was among them). But free and open debate, even with
people whose views you find abhorrent, was so central to the rationalist
ethos that the most obvious alternative — the kinds of harm-focused
safeguarding central to fostering the ostensibly “safe spaces” of the
social justice left — seemed unthinkable.
This is untrue, I have been banned from rationalist spaces for being
a Marxist.
To add a bit more; there's usually a couple of interesting elements to articles like these but authors often (probably unintentionally) just repeat the mythology of the Rationalists and take it at face value.
Also, this article comes from *The New Atlantis*, a conservative website with a very strong Luddite streak towards science and the STEM industries as a whole.
I'll be the first to admit that the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley and hacker culture, especially concerning the internet and social media, has proven to be wildly misplaced and is due for a fierce backlash, not least of all because it can't seem to find a healthy business model that doesn't involve either digital advertising (a business model that's now dying and turning increasingly sour for companies that rely on it) or an endless spigot of VC money. And at times, they do make some [canny observations](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/can-there-be-a-conservative-futurism) about how, if you didn't live through the heady '90s/'00s glory days of techie culture and have known only the cesspool that it is now, you might not understand how anybody could have ever thought the internet might be a liberatory technology.
But in the same article I linked above, they also approvingly cite Mircea Elidae, a Romanian philosopher who was an apologist for the fascist Iron Guard and whose ideas can be loosely described as "the Romanian Julius Evola" (albeit one who was *slightly* less explicit about his politics), and Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a Russian philosopher who basically combined proto-transhumanism with Christianity to claim that humanity's divine purpose was to conquer death. The solutions they propose are also a mess of "trad" buzzwords that don't seem like they would actually do anything, and mostly involve the kinds of heavy-handed, paternalistic, ideologically motivated state interventions that have historically succeeded only in making everyone poorer.
That's what a lot of right-wing intellectual spaces are these days: fundamentally shallow and frivolous people who obsess over aesthetics at the expense of substance, are capable of only the kinds of observations that pretty much everybody else has had and thought about in greater detail, are incapable of offering solutions that don't go off in some really weird and disquieting directions, and think they're the smartest people in the room because they say the right fancy words. No wonder you constantly see rationalists sticking their feet in the mouths with weird right-wing hot takes.
> Also, this article comes from The New Atlantis, a conservative website with a very strong Luddite streak towards science and the STEM industries as a whole.
What we clearly need here is a leftist magazine with a Luddite streak towards the STEM industries as a whole.
> That's what a lot of right-wing intellectual spaces are these days: fundamentally shallow and frivolous people who obsess over aesthetics at the expense of substance, are capable of only the kinds of observations that pretty much everybody else has had and thought about in greater detail, are incapable of offering solutions that don't go off in some really weird and disquieting directions, and think they're the smartest people in the room because they say the right fancy words. No wonder you constantly see rationalists sticking their feet in the mouths with weird right-wing hot takes.
I don't disagree with your characterization of the "intellectual right" as a whole (what you wrote sums up rags like Quillette and Unherd to a T), but I think that *The New Atlantis* is a bit higher-quality then that. I'm probably about as the left-wing as the next /r/SneerClub commenter, but I've found a number of genuinely interesting and thought-provoking articles in TNA. Some articles are certainly better than others (and they have published some real stinkers), but in general, I've always felt like the pieces are genuinely considered, rather than being essentially reactionary propaganda.
Yes it is more conservative than I am, but it's one of the few places where I feel like I can read genuinely well thought-out pieces that challenge my biases and expose me to meaningful ideas outside my political "filter bubble."
I feel like your section on techno-optimism being misplaced takes a bit of a narrow view. Open-source software is the biggest positive outcome of it, and it has, despite everything, thrived and become the core of most of the internet. Plenty of healthy business gets done without either of the bad business models you mentioned. Those negative ones being prominent as examples kind of puts the average case out of focus undeservingly. If anything, I feel like the backlash goes against the reliance on the negative business models, not the optimism or the work being done in tech.
I might not be making sense, but I'm trying to say that there's a lot of misplaced blame there, that exacerbates the mistaken perception of the current internet. At its core, the proper hacker culture is still thriving and just as much of a force for good, and it's on the beholder to look past the stereotype of the internet as filtered through (deserved) cynicism of the big business shenanigans.
Ah yes open source, now all the worlds techstacks depend on a single thing maintained by a single dude who sees no donations from all the big companies who use his/her/their code.
(Don't get me wrong Open source is pretty great, but it is also open to wide ranges of abuse by capital)
E: There is also a piece of open source webserver software which has been discontinued in 2005 or so which is still used in a lot of embedded software everywhere. If you want a moment of 'aaaaaaaaa Butlerian Jihad now!'
Yeah, OpenSSL is basically just one guy who before a massive vulnerability was sorta keeping the internet working for almost no money (and comparatively is still working for almost no money)
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/
> Projects foundational to the health of the internet are often alarmingly undersupported. In her 2016 report on open-source sustainability for the Ford Foundation, Nadia Eghbal documented the plight of the OpenSSL project, on which thousands of companies and applications rely.
> It was earning no more than $2,000 in donations each year before its Heartbleed security vulnerability surfaced in 2014, with most of the other funding coming from consulting and contract work. It also had just one full-time developer.
Open source getting abused by capital is a problem that isn't as harm-causing as a lot of the other practices mentioned in the previous reply. The reliance on advertising and the consequent obsession with DAU's to the exclusion of all else seems like far more necessary a thing to address, and at least that is definitely not related to hacker culture or techno-optimism.
Getting that piece of software replaced is a severe issue of institutional inertia. I'm not surprised that it still gets used in embedded software, it seems normal for that type of highly-constrained work to not be too opposed to some narrow version of "if it ain't broke".
> Open-source software is the biggest positive outcome of it, and it has, despite everything, thrived and become the core of most of the internet
The lesson to be learned from the past decade or so is rather that neither the products of open source development nor the development practices themselves are protected from being subsumed by capital's interests. In fact, the backlash against things like copyleft licenses in general (and GPL in particular) is so strong that now entire communities and ecosystems have written them off altogether (e.g. Rust). Meanwhile, companies continue to abuse the commons by monetizing open source software. Amazon has built an entire (massively profitable) business around running open source software while contributing disproportionately little to the open source community. Rather than the decentralized, user-controlled tech landscape open source pioneers envisioned, the internet has only become *more* consolidated and centralized over the past 15-20 years.
> Plenty of healthy business gets done without either of the bad business models you mentioned
In fact, *very few* businesses are run sustainably without massive exploitation of either the commons, their customers, their users, or their employees. Tech companies are no exception. There are very few profitable open source ventures that don't rely on otherwise coercive or shady business tactics. "Plenty" is doing a lot of healthy lifting here
> not the optimism or the work being done in tech.
The vast majority of the "work being done in tech" has been to exploit an era of unprecedented consistently low interest rates to shuffle money from unprofitable startup to unprofitable startup. The gross impact of modern tech to society has been massive attacks on labor rights and consumer protections, hitherto unknown levels of privacy violations, and the broadcasting and dissemination of mis- and disinformation. It turns out "move fast and break things" was actually referring to society.
> the proper hacker culture is still thriving and just as much of a force for good
*huge* doubt on this one
* What do you consider "hacker culture"?
* In what senses is it "still thriving"?
* How much impact does "hacker culture" have on society in comparison to the broader tech culture that dominates
The average person can easily identify the ways mainstream tech's culture and products impact their daily lives. They can point to the deleterious effect of social media on the psychological health, they've seen the massive amounts of disinformation spread through unaccountable web platforms, they notice that every mass shooter comes from an increasingly large population of atomized, isolated, and alienated individuals that are radicalized on right wing internet forums. How many people can identify what "hacker culture" even is and what impact it has on their lives?
> it's on the beholder to look past the stereotype of the internet as filtered through (deserved) cynicism of the big business shenanigans
Likewise, it's on the *beholder* to look past the streotypes about the fossil fuel industry to see the *optimism* about climate change. Surely, if you ignore all the "business shenanigans", you'll see that the vast majority of people working in big oil adhere to "rigger culture", and that it is a *force for good* in our fight for a livable earth. Why accept reality as it is when you can simply *imagine* that the things that are bad about it are actually good things
That's not a bad comparison. The thing is, they're actually more effective than you'd expect. It's was clever to use the copyright system to undermine itself. There's really not much like it, especially none that have been as influential (see: Creative Commons). But it operates within a very narrow scope; it addresses only how the *products* of labor can be used by the public and can never directly address the economics of that production. The problem is people don't recognize these limitations of "open-source" as a movement, so they either make claims about it that they cannot justify, like the person I'm responding to, or they [double down on an ineffective strategy](https://anticapitalist.software/). It's great to acknowledge the groundbreaking parts of Free Software but there's no need to pretend that it's some panacea to the software industry magnifying and accelerating the worst parts of capitalism
I detest these assholes abuse of open source, because when it comes crashing down, it's gonna be very damaging to that scene.
Granted, the CC license desperately needs a rewrite to prevent chicanery anyway.
>The lesson to be learned from the past decade or so is rather that neither the products of open source development nor the development practices themselves are protected from being subsumed by capital's interests.
This is literally not a problem so long as open source software remains available to the public. Tell me about open source software not being worked on as much anymore, and I'd feel afraid of capitalists "taking advantage". The whole point is that you can't take advantage of it, since unlike a real-life commons, there is no scarcity in software.
> There are very few profitable open source ventures that don't rely on otherwise coercive or shady business tactics.
Open source != open source ventures. Expecting those to be healthy relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of open source, namely that it should itself be the subject of a business, rather than non-profit work at the most.
> What do you consider "hacker culture"?
The community of people that worry about and discuss software development (currently, of course it's broader within other contexts e.g. DEFCON's breadth of interests) outside of a business setting, aka pretty much anyone who contributes to open-source stuff and isn't bananas. Anyone from that catgirl hacker, to the guy still writing curl, to the many many people busting their asses to make the Godot engine.
> In what senses is it "still thriving"?
It's still growing in absolute population, no danger seems to be presenting itself in terms of contributions drying up, even things as inconsequential as console emulators have loads of dedicated, talented people doing highly-skilled work for no reward and often at some personal risk. Various communities exist with disparate goals and they don't cannibalize each other, which is the usual symptom of not thriving. More languages, more tools get created, lessons get learned, and
> How much impact does "hacker culture" have on society in comparison to the broader tech culture that dominates
It has a lot more impact in that it provides the circumstances for the broader tech culture to exist at all, it's just less worrying than that culture, and thus people don't see it as worth discussing externally.
> How many people can identify what "hacker culture" even is and what impact it has on their lives?
Isn't that my original point? That the lack of awareness is creating an overblown sense of doom over what is essentially a layer entirely separate from the real work being done. Namely techbros, venture capital seekers, and all that crap. They are the focus of conversations, but that does not mean they are more important.
It's really important to see that misinformation, lack of accountability, psychological damage from social media, are all the products of a much smaller section of people, and that most of the people making the decisions to bring such shit about are not developers, and that the blaming of "techno-optimism" is detrimental. It's blaming the positive ideas for the products of the negative ones, and pretty much saying that the problem lies not with scummy business models that result in shitty practices, but with the impetus to fix problems using knowledge, which is just how problems are solved at all, within the domain of computing.
> fossil fuel industry equivalency
This is really bad faith. It's not analogous at all, since what I spoke about was regarding a lack of awareness, not willful ignorance. I'm not imagining that the bad shit isn't bad, I'm saying that it is terrible but does not erase the good parts, and that the good parts are mostly unrelated to the bad shit.
I feel like you took my reply to the other user as something that it wasn't. I want the issues to go away just as much as they do, I just don't believe the thing they mentioned as "proven to be wildly misplaced and is due for a fierce backlash" is either of those things at all.
> It has a lot more impact in that it provides the circumstances for the broader tech culture to exist at all, it's just less worrying than that culture, and thus people don't see it as worth discussing externally.
I think it says a lot that your sole concrete example of why "hacker culture" even matters is that it creates the circumstances for techbros to exist.
I don't think it does. Something being structural makes it the foundation for lots of things, and I referenced the techbro stuff because it was relevant to what the previous reply said. Current hacker culture is, to give another example, helping with a new wave of improvements in Linux through using Rust as a new tool for several use cases, which is pretty much the ultimate standard in terms of mattering to the world while being open-source. And going more specific than that, Proxmox, TrueNAS, pfSense, all of those have (though invisibly to the general public) made huge impacts in terms of democratizing previously enterprise-only capabilities to individuals, while also being worked on by businesses that do not resort to the shitty business models that were mentioned by the original reply I answered to. They're helping to bring life to homelab and mass archival communities that are essentially doing what some people are complaining is missing from the current internet, thus showing that the issue is still getting fixed, and that more would be gained by pushing further widespread involvement in that culture and in the pursuit of solutions through the lens of techno-optimism.
I want people to want to crack down on the shitty business practices, but my concern is always going to be to avoid putting techno-optimism itself in the crosshairs.
> Current hacker culture is, to give another example, helping with a new wave of improvements in Linux through using Rust as a new tool for several use cases, which is pretty much the ultimate standard in terms of mattering to the world while being open-source. And going more specific than that, Proxmox, TrueNAS, pfSense, all of those have (though invisibly to the general public) made huge impacts in terms of democratizing previously enterprise-only capabilities to individuals, while also being worked on by businesses that do not resort to the shitty business models that were mentioned by the original reply I answered to.
Why should I care about these things to any significant degree? I'm aware certain tech nerds like them, but I fail to see why I should care more about that than I do about techno-optimism justifying delaying action on global warming and other forms of environmental destruction, or promoting reckless development of the surveillance state's technologies.
Yes, it absolutely does. To focus on just delaying action on global warming, the promise of carbon drawdown technologies has helped justify delaying action on reducing emissions now. It's a strategy that can only make sense if you're *optimistic* about *technology* rising to meet the challenge.
That's people being wrong about whether or not to take the best actions available until better actions become available. It's got nothing to do with optimism at all, it's a form of stupidity and greed.
Well no, it does. Because if you really did believe that practical, scalable carbon capture technology would materialize in a couple decades, it would make sense to avoid politically difficult cuts to emissions in favor of a more political palatable route. After all, it's not a dire issue; if you go over the carbon budget you can just have negative emissions later.
The problem is that practical, scalable negative emission technology quite possibly won't exist. So things like the Paris Agreement [lock in global industrial civilization to a possible death path](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aah4567), using techno-optimism to justify it. If no one was assuming that negative emission technology would exist, it couldn't be used as an excuse to delay action.
In short, techno-optimism exists in service to stupidity and greed. And you know what? It always has. The belief in eternally progressing technology that we can use to solve our problems promises salvation in the future and makes dealing with them now seem less important.
EDIT: Also, I think it says a lot that when I asked, a few replies up, why I should care about Rust, TrueNAS, pfSense, et cetera, you had no answer. If these are clearly beneficial, transformative projects, you should be able to give a good answer, shouldn't you?
> The whole point is that you can't take advantage of it, since unlike a real-life commons, there is no scarcity in software
The cost to *reproduce* software is negligible (most of the time), but the cost to develop it, to maintain it, to deploy it, to configure it to interoperate with other systems, is not. There's a multitude of ways in which big tech exploits Free Software. They control the ecosystem, they define the standards, they dominate the priorities of any big open source software used on the internet, including the development tools and environments themselves. The vast majority of Linux development revolves around the needs and concerns of mega-corp cloud environments, not individual "hacker" machines. I haven't even mentioned the countless hours of labor open source maintainers have dedicated to their work to have it deployed behind an API and sold as SAAS. It's almost as if you haven't heard of [Embrace, extend, and extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)
> fundamental misunderstanding of open source, namely that it should itself be the subject of a business, rather than non-profit work at the most
I'm not misunderstanding anything. The reality is we live in a capitalist society. The viability of open-source *anything* depends *entirely* on how it interacts with the greater tech ecosystem.
> That the lack of awareness is creating an overblown sense of doom over what is essentially a layer entirely separate from the real work being done
An theory completely devoid of any material analysis. As if people's attitudes about technology are formed entirely from reading reports about it. As if people can't observe the obvious impacts it has on nearly every facet of their lives. If they are unaware of the positive effects of "hacker culture", the first-order analysis is simply that "hacker culture" provides an insignificant and immaterial bulwark against the encroachment of big tech.
To be a "force for good" hackers would have to first provide a *force*. And the state of the tech industry shows that either they are not actually interested in or insufficiently influential to achieve their purported goals.
> It's blaming the positive ideas for the products of the negative ones, and pretty much saying that the problem lies not with scummy business models that result in shitty practices
I don't know where you pulled this from. People aren't blaming "open source software" or "hacker culture" (as ill-defined as that is) for their problems. They're observing that the developments in big tech have more often than note had a deleterious effect on their psychological, social, and often physical wellbeing. And the entities with the power to influence that, namely your government and your big businesses (not individual "hackers") are seemingly uninterested in doing so.
What people *do* dismiss are the people that are *cheering* for the disintegration of labor laws, of privacy protections, of coercive designs and systems. It may seem like *you're* getting caught up in that and that's because that by refusing to acknowledge the *overwhelmingly negative* effects tech "culture" has had, you're simply acting as an apologist.
> since what I spoke about was regarding a lack of awareness, not willful ignorance. I'm not imagining that the bad shit isn't bad, I'm saying that it is terrible but does not erase the good parts, and that the good parts are mostly unrelated to the bad shit
Things do not *exist* independently. Everything interacts and exists within a system. The simple fact is that the positive effects of open source culture have not done enough to curb the worst instincts of the tech industry. The greatest *positive* impacts of open-source development happened 15,20,30 years ago. And while "open-source" is more popular today than ever, it is because that, currently, serves the interests of capital. The FSF is less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
While people are criticizing the influence of big tech on their lives and societies, you are *demanding* that people focus on your particular hobbyist concerns. And not because you've shown that those particular things have a big impact, but because *you don't like negativity*. That's why the analogy is apt. I don't tell people "hey, stop spreading doom and gloom about the climate, don't you know that there are individuals in the energy industry that are very personally environmentally conscious? Lots of my friends working in oil drive EVs in their off-time!".
You are really just another aspect of the tech-bro, but with a different facade. You demand that people recognize your stated "goals", refuse to demonstrate how you will actually achieve those things, and then criticize people for not ignoring the harms caused by the industry in favor of celebrating "hacker culture" for... what exactly? Did hacker culture stop the gig economy from massively exploiting marginalized workers? Did hacker culture prevent [companies from selling their users' data to ICE](https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/10/23065080/ice-surveillance-dragnet-data-brokers-georgetown-law)? Did hacker culture prevent [Facebook from super-charing the Rohingya genocide](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/).
Coming as someone who spends all their professional time working in software and most of their personal time working with and maintaining open source software, you haven't actually demonstrated why the average person should feel positively about the tech industry just because I exist.
> The cost to reproduce software is negligible (most of the time), but the cost to develop it, to maintain it, to deploy it, to configure it to interoperate with other systems, is not.
So a person who contributes to open-source of their own accord, at most, is donating their work in the first section, and no other. Every other part is handled by people other than the ones putting in the development work, since they are user tasks (user here also meaning downstream developers depending on stuff, as I'm sure you understand).
Sure, big companies have a lot of pull for many open-source projects. Why would I argue that, given capitalism? It does not invalidate the outcome, of even corp-influenced work ending up on the open-source side, which is a better outcome than the closed alternative.
SAAS doesn't matter. It is equivalent to a company just using that open source software internally, just with a rental agreement in between. It would have been the same issue for the OSS developer regardless. EEE is an obvious concern, but sheer awareness of it has made people wary, and it still, at the end of the day, represents an incentive for big corp to dump money into OSS to get more of a pipeline to their larger offerings. There is no incentive to "extinguish" anymore, as can be seen by the level of open-source contributions going out even from MS.
> I'm not misunderstanding anything
I didn't say *you* were. I was speaking about the wider perception of the issue. You're clearly not part of the wider perception, and all the better for it.
> the first-order analysis is simply that "hacker culture" provides an insignificant and immaterial bulwark against the encroachment of big tech.
Someone being unaware of something, implies that that that something must not matter. Cool logic /s
>To be a "force for good" hackers would have to first provide a force. And the state of the tech industry shows that either they are not actually interested in or insufficiently influential to achieve their purported goals.
The survival, expansion, and rise of corporate investment into OSS is all the evidence anyone needs for the good of the hacker culture. The goals are being reached. It's just that, much like medicine, progress is gradual and mostly unrelated to the capitalistic harms brought down around it. But OSS is bigger than it's ever been, and showing no signs of losing to any particular non-OSS in the long run. What the internet *is* losing on is the capitalist shit, the business practices. And those, no matter how good it would be, cannot be fixed unless the proper emphasis is given, in the public eye, to where that shit is coming from. And it's not anyone who types code for a living.
> I don't know where you pulled this from. People aren't blaming "open source software" or "hacker culture" (as ill-defined as that is) for their problems.
Yes, they are. The common person does not differentiate Silicon Valley from the wider concept of software development.
> What people do dismiss are the people that are cheering for the disintegration of labor laws, of privacy protections, of coercive designs and systems.
I'm literally agreeing with you on this, and saying that letting the idea of techno-optimism take any crossfire at all is basically causing a waste in energy that could be used to target the cheerers more effectively, and that could result in a worse outlook for OSS as an aspiration.
> The simple fact is that the positive effects of open source culture have not done enough to curb the worst instincts of the tech industry.
Those instincts have precisely zero to do with tech or software at all, though, so why is thinking that software and tech might not be valid targets for that criticism a problem?
> The greatest positive impacts of open-source development happened 15,20,30 years ago.
The greatest contributions to medicine all happened more than half a century ago, yet it's not doctors we get mad at, it's administrators and insurance companies. Why would it be different for software? Also, the idea of greatest impact is always going to appear to lie within the distant past for any field, just because of the cascading nature of knowledge and progress, but it's not really a sensible way to analyze the current importance of a thing.
> And while "open-source" is more popular today than ever, it is because that, currently, serves the interests of capital.
It serving those interests does help its popularity, but it does not cause that popularity to be a harmful thing. We want the interests of capital to align with things that help workers too, that's just sensible. The whole issue with the economy is misalignment with progress and the benefit of individuals, but this is literally a win-win in terms of getting more OSS work done.
> The FSF is less influential today than it was 20 years ago.
And? Was it ever, despite its apparent influence, resulting in a curbing of the instincts within the financial spheres that control tech? I'd say no, it was at best getting tiny scraps of copyright law improved, in ways that did not affect how those instincts worked on the internet.
> While people are criticizing the influence of big tech on their lives and societies, you are demanding that people focus on your particular hobbyist concerns.
I'd say hobbyist concerns are pretty dang important when it's the drifting of the internet towards big corpo that's getting mourned. It's what people want to go back to, it's what all the nostalgia is about, and it's who needs to gain power to the detriment of the corpos. Like, it feels like you're actively minimizing the core component that is desired.
I didn't tell anyone to stop spreading "doom and gloom", we need plenty of it. Just that *techno-optimism is not the cause, symptom, or in any other way related to the issues we all acknowledge are happening*.
> criticize people for not ignoring the harms caused by the industry in favor of celebrating "hacker culture" for... what exactly?
I didn't. Literally putting words in my mouth. I never said it had to be celebrated or that the harms should be downplayed. If anything, they should be played up to whatever degree gets the most effective outcome. But that outcome has to strike upon the right ideas and people, not techno-optimism. Not to the problem-solving instinct.
Hacker culture could not prevent the atrocities you mentioned because they were not related to them. They were the result of heartless capitalists utilizing resources against the interests of the workers, and to blame the workers for making those resources available, especially within the OSS context, is a massive misattribution of guilt.
> you haven't actually demonstrated why the average person should feel positively about the tech industry just because I exist.
I wasn't trying to, so of course I haven't. I was just, strictly, trying to get techno-optimism, the simple idea of solving problems that can be fixed with tech, out of the crossfire of the issue of heartless capitalist instincts. For all I care, average people can just consider it the same as plumbing. Because plumbing is critical, and when shit gets screwed up it's not plumbers or their desire to fix liquid transportation issues using pipes we get mad at, it's the assholes that use plumbers' work to make users miserable.
(and as a sidenote, for all that you may have at least some passing distaste or worse for my current thread of comments, I appreciate whatever work you have chosen to do in OSS and consider you laudable in that context)
This stuff has always been in their DNA going back to the California
Ideology. Good for people more widely to be able to see it now, but this
has always been their wheelhouse (we’ll have immortal robot bodies or
live as a consciousness on a machine that can travel at light speed,
etc.)
Reason was just an aesthetic of correctness and impartiality that appealed to them in comparison to the people they don't like, who they see as unreasonable, histrionic and wrong.
The fun evolution of that is now the people they don't like are not only unreasonable, histrionic and wrong, they're so bad and wrong that they're going to literally end humanity, and the only hope we have is if they're tortured for eternity by an electric Golem made of pure reason, logic and 20,000 word blog posts.
I attended a rationalist-affiliated “Secular Solstice” in New York —
a non-theistic version of Hannukah in which a series of
(battery-operated) candles were lit and subsequently extinguished to
represent the snuffing out of superstitions.
Battery-operated?? These people can’t ever do anything right!
“There’s a sense where modernity is kind of great, because sacredness
leads to irrationality, problems, wars etc. That maybe trading off a bit
of guaranteed meaning for more choice, warm homes and less violence … is
actually a pretty good deal. At the same time, [postrationalists] are
basically all mourning the loss of enchantment.”
This comment is another great example of how shallow and superficial
rationalist thought is. Consider all the times the US fucked up a weaker
country for nigh purely material reasons, or the World Bank’s
contribution to famine in Malawi. The Soviet Union wasn’t religious
either by any means!
She describes their general mindset as: “I think religion is very
powerful and it’s interesting that religious people have greater life
satisfaction. So should I try doing religion like it’s recreational
drugs to see where that takes me?”
It will never cease to fascinate me that these people seem so
incapable of experiencing any real enjoyment, and not because they’re
clinically depressed, but because they’re too earnest and stuck in their
heads and reflexively over-analyze the shit out of everything.
Well, shit. I’ve been saying for a while now that the rationalists
were just this generation’s version of the New Age movement with the
appeals to mysticism swapped out for appeals to science. Even
discounting how the New Agers themselves also often appealed to science
to back up their beliefs (one of the largest and most successful New Age
cults is literally called the Church of Scientology), it seems that the
rationalists proved a lot less invulnerable to mystical woo than they
claimed they were, so now you can add one more similarity.
In all honesty, I peg Jordan Peterson as the guy who started it.
Beyond his right-wing culture war politics, a good chunk of his appeal
is derived from his ideas about the relationship between religion,
science, and society. He came around at the perfect time in the mid-late
2010s, which saw the emergence of a countercultural backlash against the
secularism that dominated most of the online discourse surrounding
religion before then, be it the secular humanism of the left or the New
Atheist movement that was by that point rapidly migrating to the right.
As this article notes, this was a time when even a lot of atheists and
rationalists were starting to wonder if the “noble lie” of religion
didn’t have some broader societal value in keeping people sane. It was
also a time when a lot of “crunchy granola” New Age liberals were
growing increasingly disillusioned with left-wing politics as the
Democrats became the party of professional workers and secularism, with
Donald Trump and COVID together realigning that crowd sharply to the
right. Peterson appealed to those who, like “Vogel” in this article,
were disillusioned with both mainstream Christianity and secularism and
channeled their spiritual longing into philosophy and esotericism.
I believe that, at some point within our lifetimes and quite possibly
before we grow old, we’re going to see a Fifth Great Awakening, similar
to the ones we experienced in the past. (Broadly speaking, the First was
in the 1730s, the Second was in the early 1800s, the Third was in the
late 1800s, and the Fourth was in the post-WWII era.) However, it will
be the first time in American history when a broad religious revival is
not a Christian revival specifically. There may be some new
Christian churches that arise during this movement, and some older ones
may replenish their pews, but a lot of the energy of this Fifth Great
Awakening is going to be focused into non-Christian faiths and areas
that mainstream Christians regard with suspicion, particularly
esotericism, Gnosticism, and the occult. Even a lot of the new Christian
churches that arise during this time will be offering some radically
new, almost unrecognizable takes on the faith, not unlike how people in
the 1840s during the Second Great Awakening saw the Seventh-Day
Adventists and the Mormons (and how many of them still see the latter).
And lest we forget, the New Age movement itself also arose during the
Fourth, hand-in-hand with the evangelicals.
Great comment that deserves an actual response instead of what I’m giving you but
> I peg Jordan Peterson
JP becoming a radical ploy leftist would be a great conclusion to his arc
very good comment! i enjoyed reading it. semester ended a few weeks ago so i’ve been sorely missing my history/philosophy courses, and this had the rigor and thoroughness to scratch that itch.
Man we really did just breeze straight through the part where
fascists are okay but feminists aren’t, didn’t we? Like, not everything
needs to be political but if you’re more open to arguments about
reclaiming the mythologized past than you are arguments about how
certain practices and norms impact other people that’s going to show in
the broader intellectual environment of your group.
Oh, look, rationalists discovered religion. Maybe they’ll take this opportunity to learn about humility, grace, and self-awareness! Let’s find out:
Hmm, ok, well, the grandiosity is still there. But maybe it’s at least calmed their obessions with converting the world around them into a self-optimization scheme?
Uh, ok, so that’s a hard no.
Well….maybe they’ve stopped the skull-measuring?
What if a certain assemblage of runes, placed on intuitively chosen ley lines, creates an emergent hyper-rune that is more numinously fey than any rune hitherto cast? I propose an air strike on Stonehenge; it’s the only way to be sure.
Their “reason” had woo baked into all of it from jump. They were into cheeseburgers now they’re into Sloppy Joe’s, a lot of same ground beef.
This is untrue, I have been banned from rationalist spaces for being a Marxist.
[deleted]
This stuff has always been in their DNA going back to the California Ideology. Good for people more widely to be able to see it now, but this has always been their wheelhouse (we’ll have immortal robot bodies or live as a consciousness on a machine that can travel at light speed, etc.)
they were never really obsessed with reason as such. It was more like reason happened to be the woo flavor-of-the-year
are they gonna freak out enmasse again
edit: EVANGELICALS!1!
Battery-operated?? These people can’t ever do anything right!
This comment is another great example of how shallow and superficial rationalist thought is. Consider all the times the US fucked up a weaker country for nigh purely material reasons, or the World Bank’s contribution to famine in Malawi. The Soviet Union wasn’t religious either by any means!
It will never cease to fascinate me that these people seem so incapable of experiencing any real enjoyment, and not because they’re clinically depressed, but because they’re too earnest and stuck in their heads and reflexively over-analyze the shit out of everything.
Well, shit. I’ve been saying for a while now that the rationalists were just this generation’s version of the New Age movement with the appeals to mysticism swapped out for appeals to science. Even discounting how the New Agers themselves also often appealed to science to back up their beliefs (one of the largest and most successful New Age cults is literally called the Church of Scientology), it seems that the rationalists proved a lot less invulnerable to mystical woo than they claimed they were, so now you can add one more similarity.
In all honesty, I peg Jordan Peterson as the guy who started it. Beyond his right-wing culture war politics, a good chunk of his appeal is derived from his ideas about the relationship between religion, science, and society. He came around at the perfect time in the mid-late 2010s, which saw the emergence of a countercultural backlash against the secularism that dominated most of the online discourse surrounding religion before then, be it the secular humanism of the left or the New Atheist movement that was by that point rapidly migrating to the right. As this article notes, this was a time when even a lot of atheists and rationalists were starting to wonder if the “noble lie” of religion didn’t have some broader societal value in keeping people sane. It was also a time when a lot of “crunchy granola” New Age liberals were growing increasingly disillusioned with left-wing politics as the Democrats became the party of professional workers and secularism, with Donald Trump and COVID together realigning that crowd sharply to the right. Peterson appealed to those who, like “Vogel” in this article, were disillusioned with both mainstream Christianity and secularism and channeled their spiritual longing into philosophy and esotericism.
I believe that, at some point within our lifetimes and quite possibly before we grow old, we’re going to see a Fifth Great Awakening, similar to the ones we experienced in the past. (Broadly speaking, the First was in the 1730s, the Second was in the early 1800s, the Third was in the late 1800s, and the Fourth was in the post-WWII era.) However, it will be the first time in American history when a broad religious revival is not a Christian revival specifically. There may be some new Christian churches that arise during this movement, and some older ones may replenish their pews, but a lot of the energy of this Fifth Great Awakening is going to be focused into non-Christian faiths and areas that mainstream Christians regard with suspicion, particularly esotericism, Gnosticism, and the occult. Even a lot of the new Christian churches that arise during this time will be offering some radically new, almost unrecognizable takes on the faith, not unlike how people in the 1840s during the Second Great Awakening saw the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Mormons (and how many of them still see the latter). And lest we forget, the New Age movement itself also arose during the Fourth, hand-in-hand with the evangelicals.
Man we really did just breeze straight through the part where fascists are okay but feminists aren’t, didn’t we? Like, not everything needs to be political but if you’re more open to arguments about reclaiming the mythologized past than you are arguments about how certain practices and norms impact other people that’s going to show in the broader intellectual environment of your group.
https://twitter.com/meaning_enjoyer/status/1658304113451618305?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
‘Stawwwp talking to journos u guise!!’
Dohoho. This is gonna end well.
Journalist digs through layers of compacted shit only to find shit-covered sandwich at its center.
Um, you can’t be a Nietzsche fan and a Hegel fan at once. It’s literally against the rules.
Just going back to their roots. Anyone ever heard of Jack Parsons?