The underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability

February 21, 2024 12:39 AM

Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. from The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet (23 comments total)

Many Americans fret—rightfully—about the rising authoritarianism among MAGA Republicans, but they risk ignoring another ascendant force for illiberalism: the tantrum-prone and immensely powerful kings of tech

Around these parts, the view that both of those groups play for the same team has been uncontroversial for quite some while.
posted by flabdablet at 12:57 AM on February 21 [50 favorites]

The evolution of futurism into fascism wasn’t inevitable

I don't have a lot of time for arguments claiming that things that have actually happened were somehow not inevitable. Inevitability is a property of future possibilities, not past events.

Arguing that parts of the past were not inevitable is tantamount to claiming that a do-over is available, which it can't ever be. Best we can do is try to avoid creating similar circumstances from now on, and hope that similar outcomes can thereby be avoided.

But similar outcomes might not actually be avoidable from where we are right now, given the systematic dismantling of the economic guardrails that's been proceeding apace since Thatcher. Fascism might be not so much a step along a contingent evolutionary path as a kind of evolutionary attractor like the crab body plan, to which mass outbreaks of moral stupidity render humanity periodically susceptible in a kind of Triumph of the Dill.
posted by flabdablet at 1:56 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

“Our enemy,” Andreessen writes, is “the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”

The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites.

Not so much irony as standard-issue DARVO. Fascism is, after all, the politics of the abuser.
posted by flabdablet at 2:06 AM on February 21 [32 favorites]

The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites.

See also mhoye's comment from a day or two ago.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:05 AM on February 21 [8 favorites]

There's only a minority of the big tech guys (and they are all guys) who are open about their MAGA-ish desires. What's interesting to me is how most of the tech leaders who espouse very different values from that still all produce work that is in tandem with the open MAGA people. There are exceptions, but overall there is more unity than division despite what seem like clear political differences.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:33 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

LaFrance summarized technocrats' "eccentric" beliefs to be

1) that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good;

2) that you should always build it, simply because you can;

3) that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality;

4) that privacy is an archaic concept;

5) that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own.


Point #3 is especially salient to me, because it's a version of the core concept in what I'm reading at the moment, Anna Kornbluh's new book, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism.
posted by kozad at 5:43 AM on February 21 [5 favorites]

Arguing that parts of the past were not inevitable is tantamount to claiming that a do-over is available, which it can't ever be. Best we can do is try to avoid creating similar circumstances from now on, and hope that similar outcomes can thereby be avoided.

I take arguments that the past was not inevitable to be the same as arguing that the future isn't - we could have made different choices, and we still can.
posted by joannemerriam at 6:00 AM on February 21 [6 favorites]

Tangentially, how many of you find archive.is links to be worse than useless?

I know that once or twice I have clicked on one and gotten content, but mostly they just open on empty browser windows that eventually display a TCP timeout message. Is there some MeFi boycott of archive.org, which actually works?
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:24 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

> Tangentially, how many of you find archive.is links to be worse than useless?


I believe that may be country based. Overwhelmingly people I know have a great experience with the Internet Archive.
posted by constraint at 6:58 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

@flabdabet:

Arguing that parts of the past were not inevitable is tantamount to claiming that a do-over is available, which it can't ever be. Best we can do is try to avoid creating similar circumstances from now on, and hope that similar outcomes can thereby be avoided.

I beg to differ. Arguing counterfactuals can be a great way to waste an afternoon. It can also be an adjunct in the kind of historical analysis that tries to find parallels between past situations and current ones, and to suggest policies that might avoid the bad outcomes of those previous situations. Which maybe you were groping at while trying to say that counterfactuals are not a useful part of that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:23 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

There's only a minority of the big tech guys (and they are all guys) who are open about their MAGA-ish desires. What's interesting to me is how most of the tech leaders who espouse very different values from that still all produce work that is in tandem with the open MAGA people. There are exceptions, but overall there is more unity than division despite what seem like clear political differences.

A significant reason for this is that a number of the MAGA-adjacent tech folks are also founders or general partners for venture capital firms (Marc Andreesen at a16z, Peter Thiel at YCombinator and Mithir Capital, one of Sequoia Capital's three founders - Doug Leone - supported Trump in the 2020 election and was appointed by Trump to a committee to revive the economy after COVID-19)

So, if you're building a unicorn in the tech industry, you have to raise capital, and if you're going to raise capital, you're going to have to work with firms like this and agree to build to their definition of a successful business (ie. exploit loopholes to penetrate heavily regulated industries and disrupt them to sow profit in the chaos, follow the enshittification cycle, maximize user data collection to build products that exploit human psychology, etc.)

And, sure, you can pick the high road and choose not to take capital, but then you'll fall behind a competitor with less scruples who does take the investment, and then they'll buy your business and exploit your users anyway. Better to take the money, build the toxic product, and then donate a portion of your earnings to medical research and call it effective altruism.
posted by bl1nk at 7:55 AM on February 21 [28 favorites]

The evolution of futurism into fascism wasn’t inevitable

Ironically, that's exactly what happened a century ago.

Edit: Upon reading TFA, I see that's been covered.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:30 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

“Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good”
BS— they want to make money, have influence and control, because they think they are superior to us deplorable plebes.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:37 AM on February 21 [11 favorites]

Is there some MeFi boycott of archive.org, which actually works?

Archive.org doesn't work for everything. The Atlantic and WSJ are two good examples which lead me to another archive to view them. It works for a to of things, though, so I always look there first if I'm going to post an archive link.
posted by hippybear at 10:03 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

"... who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. "

Someone love the smell of their own farts.
posted by symbioid at 10:31 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

Personally I'd like, in the context of creating a global society, to never again hear the opinion of someone who has not had to scrub toilets in order to feed their kids.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:40 AM on February 21 [17 favorites]

Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man

So are you going to help me configure this wildcard SSL cert or what dude
posted by credulous at 11:12 AM on February 21 [11 favorites]

Also for folks who want to read more dunks on the Andreessen manifesto mentioned in the article: previously
posted by bl1nk at 11:59 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Tangentially, how many of you find archive.is links to be worse than useless?

FYI: Some adblocking blacklists kill archive.is. I know this because we have adblocking built into our in-house router and I get bupkis there on my network, but can get those links just fine if I connect to our ISP-provided router.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:02 PM on February 21 [3 favorites]

I mean if you're saying "join me in a glorious struggle against the complacent elites to achieve our eternal destiny" you have a lot of squares on the fascist bingo card
posted by credulous at 12:11 PM on February 21 [2 favorites]

"say what you want about that mussolini fellow, he at least made the trains vast predatory infrastructure of bullshit, hype, and alienation run on time billions of tiny computers that everyone carries because we're all bad at consistently making our own decisions about what actual utility and convenience look like"
posted by busted_crayons at 12:20 PM on February 21 [7 favorites]

.. authoritarianism among MAGA Republicans .. the tantrum-prone and immensely powerful kings of tech
Around these parts, the view that both of those groups play for the same team has been uncontroversial for quite some while.
It's almost as if wealth and power corrupt most people.
Greed is a deadly sin for a reason, and we should tax extreme income, extreme wealth, inheritance.
The United States used to have a progressive tax - the more you made, the higher your tax rate. It didn't stop people from working hard, innovating, creating.
posted by theora55 at 6:06 PM on February 22 [2 favorites]

“Wall Street Traders Are Too Scared to Fight the AI Rally,” Denitsa Tsekova and Carmen Reinicke, Bloomberg, 23 February 2024

“As Nvidia hits $2 trillion, billionaire Marc Rowan’s asset manager Apollo calls AI a ‘bubble’ worse than even the dotcom era,” Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune, 26 February 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 2:25 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]