Nathan Schneider
I keep thinking about the NYT Douthat interview with Marc Andreesen, especially emphasizing the centrality of "woke" employees (ie, worker power + tech ethics) in pushing him over into Trumpism.
Now, the White House is holding the economy hostage to root out this perceived ideological enemy.
There is a deep contradiction here.
(Thread.)
Nathan Schneider
Andreesen credits the rise of Silicon Valley to capitalist, center-left Democrats like Al Gore. And also he speaks of the Californian Ideology—the mix of capitalism and hippie counterculture diagnosed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. I recently co-edited a special issue on the topic: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2023/08/15/special-issue-afterlives-californian-ideology
The contradiction is in that convergence.
Nathan Schneider
Andreesen is right. The buttoned up Republican MIT technologists of the East Coast didn't become the engine of tech power. It took California. Yes the Californians were often libertarian capitalists, but they were also profoundly irreverent, impatient with hierarchy, and radical in their visions for a disintermediated world.
Nathan Schneider
Now, the Californian ideologists have grown up. They have their companies and their power. And now they want to kill the very thing that created them. They bow around a cult of personality, believing their praises will obtain rewards under his reign.
Nathan Schneider
The Californian Ideology was always a deeply pernicious thing, as Barbrook and Cameron argued. It was always deeply antidemocratic and resentful of the friction of real human life. But it did what it set out to do. It conquered the world with networks.
Nathan Schneider
This seems to me the end of that Californian Ideology. Andreesen said they're in Washington now and they're going to stay. They're going to suppress the counterculture.
So we'll see. Can tech capitalism still thrive without semi-domesticated rebellion? Will the MAGA remedy prove fatal? Or has the "techno-capitalist machine" (as Andreesen puts it) so powerful that it can jettison its countercultural sidecar?
Nathan Schneider
@billseitz @ntnsndr I love that thing
Bill Seitz
@ntnsndr just found this old book they both contributed to
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262621519/crypto-anarchy-cyberstates-and-pirate-utopias/
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.