[AndrewKemendo]

> Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be?

Couldn’t have said it better myself

Desperation is just a manifestation of manic ignorance unfortunately

The only solution to ignorance is education and I’ll go back to my original point which is this precise thing was discussed over and over and in detail over the last half century of computing in multiple places

Most notably one of the most popular well distributed books that discusses this explicitly is Rodney Brooks’ mythical man month

So my original critique is that engineers do not even utilize the core literature for which there is global consensus on these problems

[perching_aix]

How would desperation be "manic ignorance", when desperation is specifically when you think/know something is unlikely to impossible, yet feel cornered enough to go for it anyways? The only interpretation I can imagine that fits, you clearly did not mean.

This really just reads like finding their efforts unreasonable, then presenting that opinion as a foregone logical conclusion they were merely too stupid / ignorant to realize, and doing so from a position of hindsight with zero evidence no less. It's purely just tropes and ideas. And even if we keep to just reasoning about ideas, if technology was not able to shape society, politics, or the way people interact, we ourselves wouldn't be talking, so I beg to differ on it being such a foregone conclusion in general.

If I really had to consider a critique along these lines, the only salient difference I see specifically to ventures like this is that they concern themselves very little with what there's a cultural moment and narrative space for, due to being convinced whatever they're doing needs to happen. Ventures need these though, hard work and a sound idea is not sufficient (or sometimes even required), just like with anything else. It needs to find and retain an audience, and have that scale. Same for purely political ventures, really. Opportunity, luck, commitment, and capability is what takes the win. This project, and ones similar, do provide at least the last one for those coming later.

It's Fred Brooks by the way, and the book is about project management deadlines vs staffing strategies according to the synopses I found. I continue to fail to find the connection between that and this. Conversely, the proverbial law usually mentioned in relation with the book is Brooks' law, not Conway's. Not sure if that was a mistake or intentional.