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Feels like tech backlash 2.0 is starting up, a qualitatively different line of attack/critique that features a different kind of critic launching a different variety of hostile attack 🤔 This isn't the Morozov/Roose type attacks.
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Can't put my finger on it, but it isn't the old "arrogant aspie techbros trying to make an app for everything, who need to study humanities and learn to kiss my ass."
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One legible strain is bad faith deployment of climate concerns as an anti-billionaire-ressentiment weapon. Another is regulation attempts now growing up. But the thing I'm sensing is more like illegible background gaslighting beyond those things.
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the charismatic megafauna big 5 game species of africa: lion, leopard, cape buffalo, rhino, elephant big 5 charismatic mega-emitters: nuclear power,* bitcoin, billionaire space flights, plastic waste, cheap things made in china * this is called a "joke"
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Thing I'm sensing has more of a retreat/boycott/cozyweb feel, and pointedly trying to find re-enchantment in things that seem secure from being app-ified and shoved under the API. A kind of going-boneless passive resistance. Almost Gandhian. Politically weaponized waldenponding
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The new thing is not just against SV culture and VCs and entrepreneurs and new money. It feels somewhat anti-tech (small t)
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One of the things little known outside India is that Gandhi was a proper luddite, kinda Jeffersonian-agrarian. He almost blocked India from industrializing. Luckily Nehru and others realized you can't run a nation in the 20th century using medieval spinning wheels
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I mean, it’s possible too that people just feel exploited and extracted and drained. We are the natural resource; tech wouldn’t exist without our curiosity & appetite for novelty. It’s not like tech is solving anything relevant that we need — this is more apparent now than ever.
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huh... the entire economy is running on Zoom and slack, social media is backstopping institutional failures in covid response.... you're seriously disillusioned if you genuinely believe that "It’s not like tech is solving anything relevant that we need"
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