I think you're mistaking the echo for the real thing. What you're referring to as frontier ideology is an echo -- cultural-political ephemera. It's the difference between Freeman Dyson's nuclear rocket plans and spec-fic in Astounding Stories.
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There is *always* a live frontier ideology and an active world of ideas and actions at it. I think you're kinda looking for it in the wrong place, and are reluctant to acknowledge the right place because it's full of assholes. Which is a cost of doing frontier business.
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Frontiers are as full of assholes as civ cores are full of hypocrites. The moral failing turns into the adverse selection that turns into the "wrong people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" in the 2 zones.
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In civ cores, you have preening, posturing people engaged in greasy pole climbing in DC beltway or Davos, obsessed with appearances and shallow theater and refining hypocrisy into a high institutional art... it's the reality of "civilization" as opposed to high ideologies of it
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In frontiers, you have assholes doing power-driven fait accompli things simply because they can and riding roughshod over attempts to draw them into social consensus problems and subject what they're doing to collective scrutiny...
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And like it or not, silicon valley winners, at every level, no matter how much you may disdain them, have in fact constituted a true frontier ecology for 20 years. One that has genuinely gone far beyond what the DARPA era created as foundation.
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A key "tell" of people who refuse to acknowledge frontier driven by SV is to dismiss everything between the DARPA funded era and now as superficial cosmetic bs and privatization of public goods/exproporiation.
No, this is an uncharitable and basically wrong reading.
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The foundations until ~1970 or so laid by DARPA were important, but imo, the private sector phase from 1970-2015 was more important. And though it's not the same as the space frontier, the same sensibility is shifting to the space frontier due to these billionaire space programs
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People who think the billionaire space race is just a coat of paint on foundations laid by the NASA-Cronyist era of space... they basically don't understand space tech. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin... genuine advances there both in tech and frontier culture.
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I think the advances are only visible if you're somewhere inside the space of tech, which differs substantially from the old superpower driven space race
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Yeah. I've been inside it for over a decade now, and think 70% of the effective people within it are assholes I don't want to associate with socially more than I must to make a living, but I have no doubts about their frontier true-grit stuff being real as opposed to myth-making
Looking back at frontier stuff of the past it was almost all myth making as we know it now; the myths now are old worn ones however

