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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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Note that the novels are about the AI Minds and biological Culture citizens interfering in more primitive societies and pondering the morality (in a socialist utilitarian calculus) but don’t rig an answer. They let you draw your own conclusions about whether the Culture Did Good
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So, while of course I am onboard with 'human flourishing' (who wouldn't?), I make a distinction between those who *solve* for it in Well-Regulated Tech™ , and those who *assume* it as a property of unregulated /intrinsically regulated tech
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I'll put it to @vgr that the relevance of Illich's "conviviality" is in the claim that vgr's "invisible soul" of tech has an intrinsic telos: human flourishing. There's no advancement of productive forces if "advancement" doesn't cause flourishing. twitter.com/vgr/status/138
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Telos is the right way to think of it, but be aware how weak of a metaphysics it entails It is roughly on par with the old Calvinist protestant ethic sense of "grace" or "reality has a liberal bias" or "arc of moral universe bends towards X" type claims. It's all historicism.
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I've had the "flourishing" conversation with people across the spectrum from "We Must Ensure it With Manifestos" to "relax and enjoy the ride, it happens anyway if you keep the commies out." I'm kinda agnostic about it.
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I'm not historicist, but not anti-historicist in a Popperian sense either. I am highly sympathetic to end-of-history Fukuyama historicism, even though he himself has disavowed it. But I don't think the end of history has a particular bias. It has a lot of variance though :D
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We should have a common name for all those ideological assumptions that unregulated reality evolves with a certain character. I think they're all basically religions, so they are all doctrines of grace. Forgot Singularitarianism as another grace doctrine.
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I am agnostic about grace doctrines, which I suppose makes me a bit of a nihilist. A priori I don't think "What Tech Wants" necessarily leads to flourishing or not-flourishing or anything else, including ascendancy of AIs or destruction of humans.
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I used to think grace doctrines are eschatological doctrines, but they aren't really. Some *also* have eschatological commitments, but mostly they are immanetize-the-eschaton type tendencies.
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The end of history is a condition defined in part by the loss of the generalized capacity for false consciousness around grace doctrines. Nothing *has* to happen, though wishful thinking (dark or hopeful) is fun. The future is not determined.
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Post-history is a sort of random process without story or meaning. Call it atemporality or whatever. You can't easily narrativize it, but you talk in terms of the bias-variance tradeoff in beliefs about it.
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Grace doctrines = "there is a bias (and it is good/bad)" Variance doctrines = "bias is unknowable a priori, but more variance is probably good" (= pluralism, generativity, keep shaking things up)
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I *am* rooting for What Tech Wants because it's really the only ride out of town available. It's the only known vehicle to surrendering to the inevitability of change in the human condition while maintaining agency.
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Replying to @vgr
Total alignment on grace doctrines, but then why when I read your thread do I end up thinking you are rooting for "What Tech Wants"?
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"Wanting" in "what Tech wants" translates to "this is the only thing that can happen if enough people can keep up: play or don't play." When enough people decide not to play, you get stagnation, decay, and corruption. Not an "alternative" way.
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Replying to @vgr
So “wanting” translates to mean “being within the range of what’s possible given the resources we invest”? Or is there more to it that actually governs where we are capable of investing resources?
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