Why is it a contradiction if startup culture has always been far-right (through the lens of Europe and South America et al)? It's a notch away from enforcing entrenched privilege with an army, unrest providing any such nudge. Didn't the homeless situation in SF ever tip these people off?
Besides, fascism grows by the day everywhere around the world, in rich and intelectualized societies no less (or moreso.) The 60's have called and want their ideals back. The saddest part? People who lived through that are getting beyond old any day now. And when their first-hand reminiscence has gone? It'll fall upon the 80's children and oh! how soon we forget. There are those who'll stand by Stallman, Wozniak and those who'll stand by Jobs, Gates, Bezos or Graham but I'm just being mean-spirited now. Well really, the first three off the latter group look starkly more like your run-of-the-mill fascist if creatively visualized not in the private but in the public sphere, being granted whimsical wishes by an unprincipled society.
It all boils down to MIT vs. GPL for us, doesn't it? Hacker, know thyself.
Well economic vs social axises for one. Start up culture is 'move fast and break things' which is more an economic right of minimal regulation and seeing them as obstacles to be worked around. Silicon valley has been pretty anti-authoritarian historically - starting with the Traitorous Eight and continuing to the job hopping. A more authoritarian ethos would be sticking with the company for life instead of leaving because you are pissed off about starting early and wearing a tie.
Fascism is 'you have to know somebody or be approved or you get the stick for being troublesome to the ruling parties'. While entrenching power in individuals who could pull up the drawbridge and go more controlled with regulatory capture it would be fair to say it is not start up culture at that point, not as a No True Scottsman sense. This is not a dodge of any hypothetical guilt. The policies and ethos may have lead to that outcome but the phases are very distinct - there is a difference between a family passing on their trade and a caste system even if the first may eventually lead to the later.
I think he's referring to the scale of left-right in Europe and South America. Meaning the "center" in Europe and South America has usually been more to the left of the "center" in the United States. So a Bay Area minimal-regulation, minimal-government libertarian would be far-right relative to the average right-wing "liberal" in Europe/SoAmerica, who might be ok with more market regulation and a safety net for the poor.
Nationalism maybe, but then libertarianism and nationalism aren't necessarily any more right-leaning than the other, it isn't clear-cut. Outside the US bubble (including South American politics bending over to the american way of life--a foregone notion) libertarianism is seen as pretty extreme and elitist, if not very naive and hopeful instead. Actual fascism and authoritarianism are totalitarian, dystopic realities, maybe extreme right but even that would more often be conflated with far-right than with totalitarian regimes, which in a way are already beyond "normal" (parliamentary and such) politics and more like, you know, a dictatorship, or the seizing of power with disregard for the constitution.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
Well for starters it's home to the greatest mass surveillance apparatuses in history.
Their big data sets coupled with their algorithms used for sorting and targeting people based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, etc. could be used to enable the most powerful fascist dictator in history.
I don't like to blame the tools, but Facebook was used in this way by Trump and the Russians. So there is a current day example. That said, claiming these are "mass surveillance" apparatuses is quite some rhetoric. While they can be used for this, they also have many other users. The were not created to be state surveillance and routinely fight state control of their data.
Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used.
Im worried that lawmakers cannot/will not truly appreciate the imminent danger of having billions of the most detailed psychological profiles in history stored in a hackable database until a major attack occurs.
When I think of what I read of the Nazis, and my impressions of them, I would say nobody was "safe". The declaration of groups or individuals as enemies is on a whim, at least always reserves the right to be, and it never ends, that is the point.
The more you have to offer to totalitarianism, the more reason to be coerced in all sorts of ways. Loyalty is not enough, even the most loyal must be broken on principle. In the end, one might end up doing stuff so loved ones don't get horribly tortured, while pretending to do it for X and Y reasons, but it won't really be for those reasons (anymore). And that will fester and eat at a person, some way or another.
Even Stalin and Hitler both kinda ended like dogs. None of them were ever as happy and genuinely proud (by genuine I mean not in some alienated, hysterical, infantile way) as, say, Sophie Scholl, even though she was imprisoned and murdered. They did get the shitty end of the deal, in a sense. They could kill people, but that didn't make themselves more alive. And they were damaged long before they damaged anyone else, that goes with the territory. You don't even get to be a "police state cop", not a small time one, and not a leader, with intact humanity.
> Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.
> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think"
It's not that we don't have a good analysis. I would even say what needs to be done, at least on an individual level, kinda fits on a stamp, the trouble is that our courage and honesty do, too.
Besides, fascism grows by the day everywhere around the world, in rich and intelectualized societies no less (or moreso.) The 60's have called and want their ideals back. The saddest part? People who lived through that are getting beyond old any day now. And when their first-hand reminiscence has gone? It'll fall upon the 80's children and oh! how soon we forget. There are those who'll stand by Stallman, Wozniak and those who'll stand by Jobs, Gates, Bezos or Graham but I'm just being mean-spirited now. Well really, the first three off the latter group look starkly more like your run-of-the-mill fascist if creatively visualized not in the private but in the public sphere, being granted whimsical wishes by an unprincipled society.
It all boils down to MIT vs. GPL for us, doesn't it? Hacker, know thyself.