Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
1 day ago
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Maximilien Robespierre was an intellectual.
The US was founded originally with a much narrower electorate in mind. John Adams essentially argued that people who didn't own property were too dependent on other people to be trusted with important decisions that affected the future of the country.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
"Populist" is whatever the other side wants. "Nuanced and complex" is my side. My point is, "muh boomers" is a pretty populist reddit-brained take.
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
You need to spend a lot of time publishing, studying etc to become an academic it's not a highly social pursuit. In fact techies in order to achieve anything mostly have to operate in a team and it's not the zero sum ruthless game of academic careerism (only so many tenured spots available).
Also the output of tech companies is ideally something tangible not just the careerist publish or perish mindset of academics. Academics are not exactly principled either they will go to exactly where the funding/grants are.
> love things more than people
Society hated techies until we started getting ridiculous amounts of money and women figured out that they could marry a techie and instantly go up the social hierarchy. Now that this isn't happening anymore, society is back to hating techies. Tech always attracted people who were in some ways social outcasts - I've spent my formative years being bullied and now I'm supposed to love the society? I pay taxes to maintain public infrastructure while normies vandalize and misuse it when bored and I'm supposed to love that? Truly baffling.
> low empathy
Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
> "bootstraps" mentality
The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
You couldn't have explained it better!
> Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
Programmers do that because distribution is free, production has a fixed cost that's relatively limited compared to actual industrial equipment and the output directly benefits THEM.
If they would really be as altruistic as you say, software made by companies started by devs would be AGPL or even freer.
> The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
Q.e.d.
This assumes that a teacher that's paid 1/5th of a dev is "vibing".
I'd probably be fine with the average opinion of silicon valley workers. Even accounting for the overabundance of priveliged white men that leads to a libertarian/fascist undercurrent. It's the sociopaths that rise to the top by fucking everyone else over that are a problem.