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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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At this point, I've spent a decade each in the east coast civ-core world of public institutions (including darpa/nasa/afosr funded research) and west-coast frontier world of private tech companies (including time in musk and bezos worlds in the latter). I know which I prefer :D
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I've sort of redpilled myself re: the surface theaters of both worlds, and come to appreciate where/how each has substance. IME both sides are blind to the substance of the other. They think it's some sort of accident that the other side has *any* power at all.
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I think the problem is that each side is operating by a map of *legitimacy* of power, and gets confused because the reality of power distribution does not match the aspirational power distribution by a particular legitimation scheme. It's a large-scale is-ought confusion.
Replying to and
Cf this thought. I have spent no time as an adult exploring weapons of the weak, so that's one reason I'm setting out to explore that for my 2020s.
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Three kinds of political weapons: 1. Weapons of the powerful 2. Weapons of the weak 3. Weapons of the frontier The biggest weapon in the third category is obscurity. The first two categories are only dimly aware that the third exists at all.
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