> .. identified the villain with brass-knuckled clarity: the decline of critical, open debate was due to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Truer words have never been spoken. And yet… Updating his 1962 analysis in 2023, Habermas, the patrician-academic, chose to fuss over topics like “algorithmic steering”— a quaint concern akin to adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole.
"Adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole" sums up much of the opposition in the US ATM
However, it's not clear to me how "concentrated power" has lead to "the decline of critical, open debate" ?
Seeing how a lot of the people in SV tech, there is an uncanny resemblance to aristocracies like the English or old money WASP types. They go to certain exclusive schools, they work at certain companies, have certain rituals, have a "type" of social sphere, have a certain political ideology, etc.
The legislator-concept in the header comes from Zygmunt Bauman and has a specific meaning, elaborated on in the article, which also uses both aristocrat and oligarch profusely.
More and more I am coming to hate the term "tech elites"; it playes into the lie that these people have, themselves, any sort of "elite" status in the field, rather than the reality that they are just wealthy owners of big companies; some by luck, some by inheritance.
And people like Musk are increasingly making use of this misconception to justify their opinions with fake authority, as someone who understands tech rather than someone who owns companies that employs people who understand tech.
It's becoming more and more important to remind people that no, these people aren't in any way different from the rest of the wealthy owning class; they aren't smarter, they didn't pull themselves up by the bootstraps, they simply pay qualified people to make them money, and their only value to society is the capital they own.
Some people possess that quality which Machiavelli included in the arsenal of any authentic prince: virtù, a trait defined by a commentator of The Prince as embodied in “an individual endowed with exceptional qualities who seeks to seize reality in order to confront and reshape it, without being overwhelmed by its unpredictable unfolding (by fate).” Virtù, the supreme quality of the Machiavellian prince, is something different from Roman virtus or from virtue in ethical terms; it is an optimal composition of personality suited for a great deed, a strange blend of ingenuity, boldness, effectiveness, and foresight. Virtù is what enables a person of great stature to create their own destiny, rather than being merely a pawn of chance.
Tech leaders are also business leaders and they were also vocal in the past. See Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Alva Edison.
Tech leaders and businesses leaders are publicly speaking to promote their interests and their views. They always have done it.
Going from this to a conspiracy theory where tech and capital are comploting together to subdue the world, shape it to their liking, while using a soviet style apparatus is laughable.
Also, pretending that people on the right are just recycling leftist theories (of Adorno, Rene Girard, Gramsci) is pretty funny.
I don't think uncle Ben or ole Tommy E were collecting information on everyone and using the control they gained from their business to implement advanced psychological techniques which manipulate perception en masse.
It's hilarious seeing HN and similar discussion groups get up in arms about the involvement of the tech industry in governance after spending the last decade endlessly praising the merger of the two. It's not like they weren't warned over and over again that this would eventually come back to bite them. That big tech wouldn't obey them as their master forever. But all too many were convinced big tech had the same values as they have so it was ok to let these companies run amuck and drive all over everyone's rights.
This isn't a case of big tech flipping from Democrats to Republicans (or libertarians). It's that they never were on anyone's side but their own. For a decade they were enabled and allowed to grow their power unchecked. Now they don't need to obey anymore. They haven't flipped to the Republicans. They've flipped to themselves.
Downvotes won't make this truth disappear nor will it absolve you of your role in enabling big tech's power. But if you want HN to keep on its path to becoming Reddit, keep downvoting without engaging in any sort of rebuttal.
The tech industry? No. The "tech" is misleading: it's always been about excess wealth allocations. The railway boom of the 1800s. The oil boom of the early 1900s. People get rich, the greedy take over, they try to subvert institutions in their favour. History is rife with this recurring theme. This is just the latest iteration, and it will inevitably end the same way.
These sorts of people have always existed somewhere, but no one paid any attention to them until now. As a non-American, I'm looking forward to watching the in-fighting that will occur once their attempts to put their competing ideologies into practice start to conflict.
Post dot com boom, yes, but before that I think it was more of the traditional golf/cocaine/strippers/Vegas situation.
The FTX horror show was nothing like as anomalous as the PR of other places would have you believe, which is one reason VCs felt so OK flinging money at them.
Did you not notice the last decade of the tech industry anointing itself as the one arbiter of truth and gatekeeper of human communications? Seems difficult to not noticed with how loudly that role was cheered on by those who thought it would entrench their political ideology into society forever.
> Did you not notice the last decade of the tech industry anointing itself as the one arbiter of truth and gatekeeper of human communications?
No, I've seen individual firms in the various (social and otherwise) online media subindustries, like firms in every earlier media subindustry, each declaring themselves the one arbiter of what will be treated as true and/or worth transmitting on the platforms they operate, but... that's a very different thing than your claim.
> Seems difficult to not noticed with how loudly that role was cheered on by those who thought it would entrench their political ideology into society forever.
Some people may have cheered on individual moderation decisions (but typically the people invested enough to do so had an even longer list they objected too), but no significant group cheered on the fantasy you describe, nor did any significant group embrance the even more fantastic belief you describe as characteristic of the people cheering on that fantasy.
Not always, but the change happened long before Trump. it is also part of a wider change.
Some of the ideas mentioned in the article such as subscription policing and seasteading have been around for decades.
The arrogance of the wealthy goes back to the 80s, and reflects the moral change of "greed is good" replacing "money is the root of all evil" (which started long before, of course).
I suppose making it to the very, very top of worldwide wealth requires some incredibly unusual personality traits. Single-mindedness, ruthlessness, enormous risk tolerance and so on. These aren't necessarily bad, even if selecting for these criteria tends to end up with narcissists. But equally these maybe aren't the best qualities in a political leader.
Maybe what's changed is that SV wasn't running the country 10-20 years ago?
This article seems to have an odd rhetorical stance against people solving problems. Things like:
> Inevitably, Elon Musk, techno-capitalism’s own Zelig, also has strong opinions on the subject: in destroy-infrastructure-first wars of the future, he opined in a recent Westpoint appearance, “any ground based communications like fiber optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed.” If only someone ran an internet satellite company to save us!
I get the impression this is supposed to be dripping sarcasm, but in a fairly literal sense it is describing the expected and productive dynamic. Musk has identified a problem and is proposing a solution. To hurry matters along he is implementing the solution whether everyone agrees there is a problem or not.
How else is it supposed to work? This dynamic turned up a few times and I don't expect the author to have a productive theory for how we're supposed to organise people to effect change - I expect it will involve waiting for Democrats and Republicans to agree on something first (which, traditionally, not a process that leads to the highest of speedy successes). If we're waiting for people with no financial stake or know-how to build and promote satellite networks it could take a while.
I believe the implication is that they're seeding the problems in the discourse for the purpose of selling their solutions. A slightly more overt version of the submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
If you follow that thought a little though it ends up in a world where people can't act on problems that they perceive; they have to identify the problem and whinge about it until someone else handles it.
As a veteran of arguing with people on the internet I speak with some experience on the topic of whinging about problems; that strategy is never going to get good results and is only worth following if you find entertainment from arguing with people. To get results in the real world the process needs to be the person who identifies problem sells the problem and the solution at the same time.
It's the Soros way, which permeates to the things he supports such as this.
He went through a phase of introducing his books by claiming he's a misunderstood sociologist that is doing what he's doing (on the markets) to prove his various theories, which he developed at the LSE under Popper. This particularly applies to the concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory) .
Essentially, the things Soros actually did that people hate him for (such as in the UK the episode with the pound) he claims he did to demonstrate that individuals shouldn't be allowed to do them and that especially markets cannot be trusted to be resistant to problematic individuals. Instead some overarching control mechanism must be inserted of the nature I described.
What do you mean, "solving problems"? Arguably he's rather causing problems by serving the empire his family has emigrated to, filling the skies with surveillance-capitalist crypto-military junk and pressuring other states to do the same.
Fiber cuts are a real problem today even without explicit war. Russian fishing boats have a habit of “accidentally” cutting critical undersea cables that take months to repair.
Places in seasonably inhospitable water end up stranded from the internet when this happens (e.g. Nome, Alaska).
'Pissing my pants to get warm' kind of solution. Not sure why anyone would take it seriously, especially since it is now quite obvious that this space junk is a military tool.
>The evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. A comprehensive 2023 study tracking political donations of 200,000 employees across 18 industries revealed tech workers as uniquely anti-establishment—and trailing only the bohemians of arts and entertainment in their liberal fervor. The source of this radicalism lies precisely where Gouldner placed his faith: in what he called the “culture of critical discourse” embedded in technical work itself. Thus, the researchers discovered that non-technical employees within the same tech companies showed none of this rebellious disposition, confirming that coding itself, not mere proximity to ping pong tables, contributes to their dissenting mindset.
Thankfully not all tech workers suffer from this disease.
> confirming that coding itself, not mere proximity to ping pong tables, contributes to their dissenting mindset
It might even be that the highly regarded and remunerated job of coding is what gives the people the mindset that they can afford dissent. Those people may thing not only that they're more entitled to have a dissenting opinion but more importantly feel safer expressing it.
> .. identified the villain with brass-knuckled clarity: the decline of critical, open debate was due to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Truer words have never been spoken. And yet… Updating his 1962 analysis in 2023, Habermas, the patrician-academic, chose to fuss over topics like “algorithmic steering”— a quaint concern akin to adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole.
"Adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole" sums up much of the opposition in the US ATM
However, it's not clear to me how "concentrated power" has lead to "the decline of critical, open debate" ?
I think a slightly better perspective is "new aristocrats".
Seeing how a lot of the people in SV tech, there is an uncanny resemblance to aristocracies like the English or old money WASP types. They go to certain exclusive schools, they work at certain companies, have certain rituals, have a "type" of social sphere, have a certain political ideology, etc.
"Oligarchs" is the word you are looking for.
The legislator-concept in the header comes from Zygmunt Bauman and has a specific meaning, elaborated on in the article, which also uses both aristocrat and oligarch profusely.
You are right!
More and more I am coming to hate the term "tech elites"; it playes into the lie that these people have, themselves, any sort of "elite" status in the field, rather than the reality that they are just wealthy owners of big companies; some by luck, some by inheritance.
And people like Musk are increasingly making use of this misconception to justify their opinions with fake authority, as someone who understands tech rather than someone who owns companies that employs people who understand tech.
It's becoming more and more important to remind people that no, these people aren't in any way different from the rest of the wealthy owning class; they aren't smarter, they didn't pull themselves up by the bootstraps, they simply pay qualified people to make them money, and their only value to society is the capital they own.
Some people possess that quality which Machiavelli included in the arsenal of any authentic prince: virtù, a trait defined by a commentator of The Prince as embodied in “an individual endowed with exceptional qualities who seeks to seize reality in order to confront and reshape it, without being overwhelmed by its unpredictable unfolding (by fate).” Virtù, the supreme quality of the Machiavellian prince, is something different from Roman virtus or from virtue in ethical terms; it is an optimal composition of personality suited for a great deed, a strange blend of ingenuity, boldness, effectiveness, and foresight. Virtù is what enables a person of great stature to create their own destiny, rather than being merely a pawn of chance.
“Legislators”, I think it’s more the opposite of that term now.
Now this is a topic where I would have loved to see discussions - the role of technology leaders today, beyond the obvious...
Tech leaders are also business leaders and they were also vocal in the past. See Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Alva Edison.
Tech leaders and businesses leaders are publicly speaking to promote their interests and their views. They always have done it.
Going from this to a conspiracy theory where tech and capital are comploting together to subdue the world, shape it to their liking, while using a soviet style apparatus is laughable.
Also, pretending that people on the right are just recycling leftist theories (of Adorno, Rene Girard, Gramsci) is pretty funny.
I don't think uncle Ben or ole Tommy E were collecting information on everyone and using the control they gained from their business to implement advanced psychological techniques which manipulate perception en masse.
Didn't they find a bunch of skeletons buried under Benjamin Franklin's house?
It sounds like he did what he could with the technology that was available at the time.
You do not need an actual conspiracy. A lot of powerful people with the same interests pushing those interests has the same effect.
Nouveau riche, generally
It's hilarious seeing HN and similar discussion groups get up in arms about the involvement of the tech industry in governance after spending the last decade endlessly praising the merger of the two. It's not like they weren't warned over and over again that this would eventually come back to bite them. That big tech wouldn't obey them as their master forever. But all too many were convinced big tech had the same values as they have so it was ok to let these companies run amuck and drive all over everyone's rights.
This isn't a case of big tech flipping from Democrats to Republicans (or libertarians). It's that they never were on anyone's side but their own. For a decade they were enabled and allowed to grow their power unchecked. Now they don't need to obey anymore. They haven't flipped to the Republicans. They've flipped to themselves.
Downvotes won't make this truth disappear nor will it absolve you of your role in enabling big tech's power. But if you want HN to keep on its path to becoming Reddit, keep downvoting without engaging in any sort of rebuttal.
> their libertarian fantasies bobbing like luxury yachts in international waters.
I wouldn’t say libertarian, more oligarchical.
they forgot Mars colony - libertariano-oligarchical with that Musk's salute from heart to the Sun.
Has the tech industry always been this depraved? Or something fundamentally change within these people with the advent of Trumpism?
The tech industry? No. The "tech" is misleading: it's always been about excess wealth allocations. The railway boom of the 1800s. The oil boom of the early 1900s. People get rich, the greedy take over, they try to subvert institutions in their favour. History is rife with this recurring theme. This is just the latest iteration, and it will inevitably end the same way.
Learning actual history can be enlightening.
These sorts of people have always existed somewhere, but no one paid any attention to them until now. As a non-American, I'm looking forward to watching the in-fighting that will occur once their attempts to put their competing ideologies into practice start to conflict.
One faction will win and then you will have Russia but with more power.
Post dot com boom, yes, but before that I think it was more of the traditional golf/cocaine/strippers/Vegas situation.
The FTX horror show was nothing like as anomalous as the PR of other places would have you believe, which is one reason VCs felt so OK flinging money at them.
Did you not notice the last decade of the tech industry anointing itself as the one arbiter of truth and gatekeeper of human communications? Seems difficult to not noticed with how loudly that role was cheered on by those who thought it would entrench their political ideology into society forever.
> Did you not notice the last decade of the tech industry anointing itself as the one arbiter of truth and gatekeeper of human communications?
No, I've seen individual firms in the various (social and otherwise) online media subindustries, like firms in every earlier media subindustry, each declaring themselves the one arbiter of what will be treated as true and/or worth transmitting on the platforms they operate, but... that's a very different thing than your claim.
> Seems difficult to not noticed with how loudly that role was cheered on by those who thought it would entrench their political ideology into society forever.
Some people may have cheered on individual moderation decisions (but typically the people invested enough to do so had an even longer list they objected too), but no significant group cheered on the fantasy you describe, nor did any significant group embrance the even more fantastic belief you describe as characteristic of the people cheering on that fantasy.
Not always, but the change happened long before Trump. it is also part of a wider change.
Some of the ideas mentioned in the article such as subscription policing and seasteading have been around for decades.
The arrogance of the wealthy goes back to the 80s, and reflects the moral change of "greed is good" replacing "money is the root of all evil" (which started long before, of course).
I suppose making it to the very, very top of worldwide wealth requires some incredibly unusual personality traits. Single-mindedness, ruthlessness, enormous risk tolerance and so on. These aren't necessarily bad, even if selecting for these criteria tends to end up with narcissists. But equally these maybe aren't the best qualities in a political leader.
Maybe what's changed is that SV wasn't running the country 10-20 years ago?
[dead]
This article seems to have an odd rhetorical stance against people solving problems. Things like:
> Inevitably, Elon Musk, techno-capitalism’s own Zelig, also has strong opinions on the subject: in destroy-infrastructure-first wars of the future, he opined in a recent Westpoint appearance, “any ground based communications like fiber optic cables and cell phone towers will be destroyed.” If only someone ran an internet satellite company to save us!
I get the impression this is supposed to be dripping sarcasm, but in a fairly literal sense it is describing the expected and productive dynamic. Musk has identified a problem and is proposing a solution. To hurry matters along he is implementing the solution whether everyone agrees there is a problem or not.
How else is it supposed to work? This dynamic turned up a few times and I don't expect the author to have a productive theory for how we're supposed to organise people to effect change - I expect it will involve waiting for Democrats and Republicans to agree on something first (which, traditionally, not a process that leads to the highest of speedy successes). If we're waiting for people with no financial stake or know-how to build and promote satellite networks it could take a while.
I believe the implication is that they're seeding the problems in the discourse for the purpose of selling their solutions. A slightly more overt version of the submarine: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
If you follow that thought a little though it ends up in a world where people can't act on problems that they perceive; they have to identify the problem and whinge about it until someone else handles it.
As a veteran of arguing with people on the internet I speak with some experience on the topic of whinging about problems; that strategy is never going to get good results and is only worth following if you find entertainment from arguing with people. To get results in the real world the process needs to be the person who identifies problem sells the problem and the solution at the same time.
> How else is it supposed to work?
Through an ethics committee gated, peer-reviewed, consensus driven academic technocracy.
They are criticizing one extreme while being oblivious that they represent the other.
I've never seen him advocate for something like that, would you mind giving a source to your claim?
It's the Soros way, which permeates to the things he supports such as this.
He went through a phase of introducing his books by claiming he's a misunderstood sociologist that is doing what he's doing (on the markets) to prove his various theories, which he developed at the LSE under Popper. This particularly applies to the concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory) .
Essentially, the things Soros actually did that people hate him for (such as in the UK the episode with the pound) he claims he did to demonstrate that individuals shouldn't be allowed to do them and that especially markets cannot be trusted to be resistant to problematic individuals. Instead some overarching control mechanism must be inserted of the nature I described.
We can get to that later. Do you have a source for your claim?
You can buy many books George Soros wrote on Amazon. Please use my affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/Soros-Lectures-Central-European-Unive...
This is about Evgeny Morozov.
Former fellow of the "Open Society Institute" i.e. a promulgator of Soros' ideologies.
He has also been a Yahoo! fellow.
If you don't have any evidence, just say so or stay quiet.
What did you think of that book?
Why would orbital infrastructure be spared in such hypothetical future wars?
What do you mean, "solving problems"? Arguably he's rather causing problems by serving the empire his family has emigrated to, filling the skies with surveillance-capitalist crypto-military junk and pressuring other states to do the same.
Fiber cuts are a real problem today even without explicit war. Russian fishing boats have a habit of “accidentally” cutting critical undersea cables that take months to repair.
Places in seasonably inhospitable water end up stranded from the internet when this happens (e.g. Nome, Alaska).
'Pissing my pants to get warm' kind of solution. Not sure why anyone would take it seriously, especially since it is now quite obvious that this space junk is a military tool.
The problem is, musk and co. dont know the actual problem to solve: Sustainability.
My guess is, their vision of a better world is just psychological self defense and way too many people buy into that delusion.
>The evidence isn’t merely anecdotal. A comprehensive 2023 study tracking political donations of 200,000 employees across 18 industries revealed tech workers as uniquely anti-establishment—and trailing only the bohemians of arts and entertainment in their liberal fervor. The source of this radicalism lies precisely where Gouldner placed his faith: in what he called the “culture of critical discourse” embedded in technical work itself. Thus, the researchers discovered that non-technical employees within the same tech companies showed none of this rebellious disposition, confirming that coding itself, not mere proximity to ping pong tables, contributes to their dissenting mindset.
Thankfully not all tech workers suffer from this disease.
Sounds to me like you're a technical person who's uncomfortable discussing their work in a “culture of critical discourse”.
I am comfortable discussing my work in any context, provided my peers can understand it, at least roughly.
I am more favourable to OP. Taking a starting point that "everything I don't understand, and haven't been able to verify, is suspect" is pathological.
Please point us where you have seen such a starting point, or why else are you bringing it up?
> confirming that coding itself, not mere proximity to ping pong tables, contributes to their dissenting mindset
It might even be that the highly regarded and remunerated job of coding is what gives the people the mindset that they can afford dissent. Those people may thing not only that they're more entitled to have a dissenting opinion but more importantly feel safer expressing it.
The disease of wanting to change the society?
Not all changes are good.
But some change is needed as other things change.
This type of answer is called "strawman argument" - when one refutes an argument which was not presented at all. Let's try again.
How is that a straw man? What's the statement argument you see implied in the statement "not all change is good"?