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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It is exciting from an insider view that lifts to orbit are cheaper, that there will be a space plane that a non astronaut can get into and fool around with, but coming from outside the "whitey's on the moon" critique is what I see first and foremost
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What I find striking (and probably what is saying) is that the defenses of space tend to be semi spiritual and dated sounding.
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certainly... and lazy, very lazy. That's because the people doing this stuff are literally more interested in doing the stuff than having debates about the narrative of it. If/when they succeed, it will be time for that conversation, when the particular frontier chapter is over.
But if you want to participate in the live frontier, the key is to ignore the peripheral concerns about the premature myth-making and dive in. It makes sense from the inside even if it doesn't make sense from the outside.
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