On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 9:21 PM Prem Chandavarkar wrote:
> The problem, as Edward O. Wilson said, is that we have a combination of
> “Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.”
>
For the perfect expression of where the Californian Ideology landed, check
out the film "Don't Look Up" with its Silicon Valley figure Peter
Isherwell. A really weird combination of Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Elon
Musk, he's effete, self-assured, domineering, and dead wrong on a planetary
scale when he puts his god-like technology into action. As for the medieval
institutions and Palaeolithic emotions, he outsources that to the US
president and her followers
Maybe 2022 is the year when we finally put the nail in the coffin of
neoliberal populism? Go ahead and hold your breath!
>
>
> On 07-Jan-2022, at 1:02 AM, Jon Lebkowsky wrote:
>
> I did a lot of web consulting and project management for years, and that
> definitely became boring work. But I suppose when things become truly
> useful they also become boring - Bruce once gave a talk where he said that
> we'd know solar tech had arrived when it became really boring to consider.
>
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 12:30 PM carl guderian
> wrote:
>
>> And speaking of flashbacks, doesn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, a catalog of
>> online activities imagined long ago by others but now to be mediated by
>> not-Facebook, sound awfully like Bill Gates’ vision of the Internet as a
>> collection of 1970s- and 1980s-era electronic services channeled through
>> Microsoft, in “The Road Ahead”?
>>
>> But I can live with boring. I’ve had a 25-year run (probably wrapping up)
>> in “the cyber” working as the equivalant of an industrial plumber. The pay
>> was very good, the hours agreeable, and the hype minimal. In good times and
>> bad, toilets gotta flush.
>>
>> Carl
>>
>>
>> On 6 jan. 2022, at 18:46, Jon Lebkowsky wrote:
>>
>> What does it say about me that I find that boring?
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 10:45 AM Bruce Sterling wrote:
>>
>>> *It's a recent screed from the current editor of WIRED magazine.
>>>
>>> *If you're enough of a greybeard nettime OG to remember nettime's vague
>>> feud with WIRED and its techno-libertarian principles, this is likely to be
>>> one of the funniest things you've read in quite a while.
>>>
>>> *If you've never heard of the "California Ideology," that prescient work
>>> of distant 1995, well, I happened to archive it, because, as the guy who
>>> was on the cover of the first issue of WIRED, why wouldn't I.
>>>
>>>
>>> https://bruces.medium.com/the-californian-ideology-by-richard-barbrook-and-andy-cameron-1995-c50014fcdbce
>>>
>>> Bruce S
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In the next few decades, virtually every financial, social, and
>>> governmental institution in the world is going to be radically upended by
>>> one small but enormously powerful invention: the blockchain.
>>>
>>> Do you believe that? Or are you one of those people who think the
>>> blockchain and crypto boom is just a massive, decade-long fraud—the bastard
>>> child of the Dutch tulip bubble, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and the
>>> wackier reaches of the libertarian internet? More likely, you—like me—are
>>> at neither of these extremes. Rather, you’re longing for someone to just
>>> show you how to think about the issue intelligently and with nuance instead
>>> of always falling into the binary trap.
>>>
>>> Binaries have been on my mind a lot since I took over the editor’s chair
>>> at WIRED last March. That’s because we’re at what feels like an inflection
>>> point in the recent history of technology, when various binaries that have
>>> long been taken for granted are being called into question.
>>>
>>> When WIRED was founded in 1993, it was the bible of techno-utopianism.
>>> We chronicled and championed inventions that we thought would remake the
>>> world; all they needed was to be unleashed. Our covers featured the
>>> brilliant, renegade, visionary—and mostly wealthy, white, and male—geeks
>>> who were shaping the future, reshaping human nature, and making everyone’s
>>> life more efficient and fun. They were more daring, more creative, richer
>>> and cooler than you; in fact, they already lived in the future. By reading
>>> WIRED, we hinted, you could join them there!
>>>
>>> If that optimism was binary 0, since then the mood has switched to
>>> binary 1. Today, a great deal of media coverage focuses on the damage
>>> wrought by a tech industry run amok. It’s given us Tahrir Square, but also
>>> Xinjiang; the blogosphere, but also the manosphere; the boundless
>>> opportunities of the Long Tail, but also the unremitting precariousness of
>>> the gig economy; mRNA vaccines, but also Crispr babies. WIRED hasn’t shied
>>> away from covering these problems. But they’ve forced us—and me in
>>> particular, as an incoming editor—to ponder the question: What does it mean
>>> to be WIRED, a publication born to celebrate technology, in an age when
>>> tech is often demo
