Oh god it's real? I saw pictures and there was a lot of "it's AI" claims which I kind of hoped were true.
There's definitely something to this narrowing of opportunities idea. To frame it in a real bare bones way, it's people that frame the world in simplistic terms and then assume that their framing is the complete picture (because they're super clever of course). Then if they try to address the problem with a "solution", they simply address their abstraction of it and if successful in the market, actually make the abstraction the dominant form of it. However all the things they disregarded are either lost, or still there and undermining their solution.
It's like taking a 3D problem, only seeing in 2D, implementing a 2D solution and then being surprised that it doesn't seem to do what it should, or being confused by all these unexpected effects that are coming from the 3rd dimension.
Your comment about giving more grace also reminds me of work out there from legal scholars who argued that algorithmically implemented law doesn't work because the law itself is designed to have a degree of interpretation and slack to it that rarely translates well to an "if x then y" model.
Oh no, the dangers of having people read your work!
It is coming, potentially in the next week. I was on leave for a couple of weeks and since back I've been finishing up a paper with my colleague on Neoreaction and ideological alignment between disparate groups. We should be submitting to the journal very soon so then I can get back to finishing off this series.
.... Nope. In fact one of my in-laws said that they'd buy us an air frier for Christmas once the sales came. Everyone forgot about it shortly after and I don't care one bit.
I feel like generative AI is an indicator of a broader pattern of innovation in stagnation (shower thoughts here, I'm not bringing sources to this game).
I was just a little while ago wondering if there is an argument to be made that the innovations of the post-war period were far more radically and beneficially transformative to most people. Stuff like accessible dishwashers, home tools, better home refrigeration etc. I feel like now tech is just here to make things worse. I can't think of any upcoming or recent home tech product that I'm remotely excited about.
I'm banking on the primary use case being "getting Elon sued into oblivion by Disney" .
Fascinating to see that the politics of the old crypto hype train have carried over to the new hype train.
Ah OK, so it's sending the email draft in process not sending off the content of incoming messages or your final sent messages. Now I understand. Also, that's still bad....
I don't really understand how it's possible to both not store data in plaintext, but also be able to siphon off some of it in plaintext. Like is this technically possible in the way they suggest it? We shoot off the plaintext before it gets to our storage servers?
Like at some point that means the communication is not encrypted right? But if you're using https and all good normal security standards that should never be the case from the moment it departs your terminal?
I have a small amount of knowledge about this but it's the dangerously small type so any illumination would be appreciated.
Dear CHATGPT how do we get our company more money?
"That's a great question. To get more money simply bring up the console and enter 'rosebud!;! ;! ;! ;!'"
A left-wing podcast for better technology and a better world.
The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one.
Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.
If this includes their journals then I guess my stuff is off to the big LLM melting pot to be regurgitated wrongly without context or attribution.
I think it's definitely worth distinguishing between different classes of workers in Silicon Valley. It's hard to talk about tech ideology in a fully encompassing way because there are for sure dissenting voices. I think to some degree you can say it is the intersection of tech and wealth ideologies but there's definitely people that aren't wealthy that also espouse similar thinking so... tricky!
I adopt the handy framing of Silicon valley as a mindset rather than a place to help with this. There's a great photography book called Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan that is all photos and stories of the precarious workers that don't necessarily work in tech. I keep it out in my office to remind me that silicon Valley is not just the rich assholes.
Absolutely. In fact in one major survey of the values of the counterculture conducted back in the 1960s Ayn Rand was listed as one of people's major influences. There were different strands to the counterculture, one communitarian but the other about self actualisation and the individual. Both positioned themselves in opposition to the state, but differed significantly in what kind of future they wanted.
John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf's book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.
You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive
The tech industry is falling over itself to embrace Trump and J.D. Vance. It’s a mask-off moment.
Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the "Tech Right" as they're being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there's more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I have a tendency to over explain things (so much cut text already) partly because I'm never too sure of how far down the rabbit hole I've gotten and if a general audience would be lost without it. Glad I was able to pull it together with a flourish though!
A newsletter in which I think too much about tech culture elites, the ideologies they cling to and their gleeful aspirations to create the most tediously horrific dystopias. Click to read Unserious Academic, by James Allen-Robertson, a Substack publication. Launched 15 days ago.
Hello all,
TLDR: I've written some stuff about tech ideology via the TV show Devs. It's all free, no paid subs etc. Would love it if anyone interested wanted to take a look - link is to my blog.
Longer blurb: Firstly if this is severely poor form please tell me to do one, throw tomatoes etc.
I'm a Sociologist that focuses on tech culture. Particularly elite tech culture and the far right. I started off writing about the piracy cultures of the 2000s and their role in the switch to digital distribution back in 2013. Just by virtue of paying attention to tech ideology I've now ended up also researching far right extremism and radicalisation and do a lot of data analysis with antifacist orgs. I also used to flirt around in the Sneerclub post-rat spaces on reddit and twitter a few years back too.
Anyway, I've been researching NRx and the wider fashy nature of tech since 2016 but because of "issues" I've not yet got much out into the world. I'm working on a book that more closely examines the way that the history and ideologies in tech culture play well to far right extremism and what it might say about the process of radicalisation more generally.
However, because I'm tired of glacial academic publishing timelines I've also started a research blog called Unserious Academic and for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs to illustrate and explore some of the things I know about tech culture. I've put out three parts so far with a fourth one ready for Monday. I'm not looking for paid subs or anything, all free I just figured some people might be interested.
I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I'd like to hang around longer term too. Thanks for your time!