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Tech futures meta thread. 3 prompts I posted in the last week got some good responses on stuff I’ve been thinking about. 1. Prompt on rewilding tech.
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The phrase "rewilding tech" (as in making tech "wild" again, not as in tech for rewilding other things like people/culture/animals) has been stuck in my head for 24h, which probably means it means something What does it evoke for you? Visceral imagery/examples, not other ideas
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2. What people think is good tech
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What are your top 3 gestalt adjectives (or short adjective phrases) for good and interesting technology? Adjectives that pick out both your tastes/values and some essential quality. Examples: antifragile, organic, hackable, robust, human-centric, minimalist.
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3. Specifics of tech people want
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What new directions would you like to see in technology evolution in the next decade? (at actual tech level like “larger laptops” or “blimp airlines”... not econo-political level like “weaken FAANG” or “more open source”) Extra points for non-SV, non-software speculations.
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Don’t yet know where exactly I’m going with this. Intuition I’m chasing is that after ~20 years of software eating the world, the “future of tech” is no longer synonymous with the fate of Silicon Valley. Even the future of computing and software are no longer synonymous with SV.
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We can’t seem to separate their feelings about SV (positive or negative) from their feelings about technology generally. Tech futures turn into either “un-Silicon Valley” or “next Silicon Valley” or “how history will punish Zuckerberg” or “Bitcoin solves this”
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In that essay I reached 3 conclusions: 1. “Tech is not technological activity per se, it is a rate regime of technological evolution, defined as “fast enough”, and a necessary and sufficient condition to be a technologist in Tech, or a Techie, is simply being able to keep up.“
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2. “Tech is a single, connected, hydra, within which technologists make almost all the decisions that matter. Because they’re by definition the only ones keeping up sufficiently with the nature of the potential coming online, and thinking about what to do with it”
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3. “... VC sector is a sign that an area of technology is part of Tech. When technologists are in the driver’s seat, patterns of return on capital acquire a certain generic predictability (in terms of time horizons and rates) that allows for an efficient kind of investing.”
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tldr “Tech is a growing agency pie, and a Techie could be defined as someone who is participating in a way that they’re gaining agency faster than secondary actors can take it away. So Tech is simply the collection of all such Techies in a densely connected social graph”
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Re the “can Tech die” question I concluded that while it can’t die, it can slow down to the point of going dormant if other kinds of minority decision-makers, esp financiers and politicians, who slow tech to their speed rather than try to keep up, take over from technologists.
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I made this 3-phase diagram 1. When a few humans keep up with tech, you get Coherent Tech (eg 1978-2000) 2. When everybody gets caught up you get Incoherent Tech based on expanding access (eg 2001-15) 3. When politicians and financiers take over you get Stagnant Tech (2016 -)
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This is neither good or bad. It’s an inevitable refractory phase. As in a period after a peak/burst of activity becomes unresponsive for a while. It’s not adoption exhaustion. There’s always fresh young people to feed Tech and be fed by it. It’s governance exhaustion.
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Anyhow, that’s setting the stage on where my head was pre-Covid. I too was caught up in SV-framed views of Tech future. For the past year, my primary frame has shifted to rewilding Tech (or the human side, rewilding engineers and engineering).
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If you want the stagnation to last only 10 years instead of 1000 (we’re 5 years in IMO), rewilding Tech and techies is the key. Dark ages are Tech refractory periods where the cycle stalls instead of restarting. We’re dangerously on the cusp of stall.
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I don’t care *what* you want from Tech, whether it is more of SV style growth, or a climate focus, or decentralized Bitcoin futures, but it’s only Tech if it hits the rate regime where only a minority can keep up (and become known as “techies” regardless of credentials).
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It’s not about what you want, but What Tech(nology) Wants to use Kevin Kelly’s phrase. And above all, Tech “wants” to evolve at a certain unbridled rate where only a fraction of us can keep up, creating a kind of societal leadership selection pressure.
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It’s a mistake to think that the rate-based selection pressure is predictable. Or that tech leaders and capital squatters of yesterday will remain in their positions when the source of the pressure/acceleration changes. It can be very random and activate politically new actors.
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I mean that’s what disruption is: the “Force” shifting to unexpected new players on the margins. Except here we are talking global society. Disruption at any scale is a manifestation of the Force shifting.
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I used to think the Force is synonymous with Moore’s Law, so the question of how to unstagnate became “how do we reboot Moore’s law or replace it with an equally powerful Force” but maybe the relationship is not so tight? Maybe the Force that animates Tech can be non-tech?
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Like take the Ivan Illich “convivial tech” idea. That’s a vaguely socialist-anarchist mode of tech that prima facie seems incapable of driving the rates of evolution that turn tech into Tech. But what if you lose the socialist, “human-centric” baggage while keeping conviviality?
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Perhaps. Perhaps rate-limiter is not the lack of a driving force of technological surplus like Moore’s law but societal organization that creates an inefficient divide between “producers” and “consumers” and a professionalized “engineer” class. Ie excessive structural regulation.
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What if the minority that can keep up with the organic evolution rate of Tech to sustain it (let’s say 10% of us need to be able to keep up) isn’t a professional class that churns every 15-20 years as technology pedagogy shifts at its glacial institutional pace?
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This is in a narrow sense what “hackers” are today, but what if everybody were enough of a producer-consumer that the “right” 10%, the chosen ones with “the right stuff” to set the pace for the next year or two could easily be discovered by the “Invisible Soul” of Tech?
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“Invisible soul” as an analogy to “invisible hand” for markets and Chandler’s “visible hand” for managerialism (which describes large corps and bureaucracies as coordination mechanisms) Invisible soul = what I called the “baroque unconscious” a decade ago
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The idea is that the absence of human-centric coordination (through markets or orgs, aka financialization and politicization in the baroque forms) does NOT imply devolution to chaos. There’s a third source of coordination: the intrinsic logic of tech evolution itself.
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There is no such thing as “unregulated tech” It’s an incoherent strawman on the order of “blank slate” It’s a bad faith casus belli manufactured by politics and finance to extend the phases when they’re in charge via artificial regulation (invisible/visible hand)
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A clever rhetorical maneuver is to pretend that “free markets” are a way to have unbridled Tech rather than just a weaker kind of regulation. In terms of freedom for Tech to be/become what it wants: Invisible soul > invisible hand > visible hand > traditional religion.
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Market fundamentalists are as scared of “unregulated” Tech as politicians and socialists, because it can potentially evolve in ways that shred their ability to secure rents. In fact Tech “escapes” regulation by markets every 80y or. That’s the point of the Carlota Perez model.
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So I think the tech futures challenge, which I think of as the rewilding/de-stagnation challenge, is to find a rate-preserving mode that taps into the invisible soul as well as Silicon Valley did for 2 decades. Without regard to sunk costs.
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Yes, a Haraway Chtulhucene angle has been on my mind as one possible way this could turn out. But again, without the baggage of quasi-socialist human-centricity same as Illich. That’s kinda a poison pill that kills the What Tech Wants dynamic.
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Replying to @vgr
Thoughts: 1) Despite the recognition that Tech is a human endeavor, there's a haunting here of Tech as a phenomenon of its own, waxing and waning in relation to human activity, almost as an independent force. Tech determinism? Maybe. Perhaps a strong dose of Donna Haraway helps.
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“Tech” is really the current projected shadow of human attachment to current ways of being and fear of change. “Tech” is merely the current mode of how we’re coming to terms with change in what it means to be human.
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This is why I find fetishistic human-centricity and Waldenponding to be the essence of non-Tech. It’s people in denial about, or in active resistance against, how the definition of “human” is changing. Left or right, it’s all an aestheticized trad turn.
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As for the ever-popular question of the fate of Silicon Valley, it’s as simple as — if the trad turn infects tech, SV becomes part of the problem. If it doesn’t, SV remains part of the solution. Both left and right versions of trad are currently infecting SV.
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It kinda doesn’t matter whether you take your kids off iPads to teach them Real Masculinity™ and Real Femininity™ or if you do so to raise them in Fully Automated Post-Gender Luxury Space Communism. So long as you retreat from What Tech Wants you’re human-centric.
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This is a subtler failure of the imagination than simple Luddism. Many human-centrics think of themselves as highly Tech-positive (Bitcoin maximalists on the right, UBI leisure society through automation on the left). But they want humans to call the shots.
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One reason Iain M. Banks Culture novels are so Tech-positive is that despite the openly socialist nature of the vision, it’s a What Tech Wants vision, not human-centric. The Minds just happen to want what Banks wanted too. Contrast with say Le Guin novels with humans in charge.
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I think Bank tried to construct the Culture universe under the premise “what if ‘reality has a well-known liberal bias’ were true?” To his credit, he didn’t just assume it. He entertained the hypothesis rigorously and worked out both happy and potentially unhappy consequences.
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