The new tech worldview
Omg. Representing a recently emerged plutocratic class as &quot;new tech worldview&quot; is a <i>gross</i> mis-service to this world &amp; especially tech.<p>It&#x27;s a hard dilemna. Tech is indeed a new vanguard force for fatcat imperalism like these filthy-rich virtually-monocole-wearer navel-gazers who &quot;measure their status not so much in mansions and yachts as in engagement with their blog posts and essays&quot;. But I don&#x27;t think that at all represents the actual belief of 99.999% of technologists &amp; techies.<p>Apologies to Stephen O&#x27;Grady in advance for again hammering on this, but &quot;The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World&quot; is- even in the title- about how hopeful &amp; idealistic believers made other people rich beyond belief, is about the can-do builder who made these rich kings. But what has been done with tech does not represent the tech view, what we hope for, what tech wants: it&#x27;s about the views of these often-libertarian old-world-style lieges who have the money and leverage to dictate &amp; control the techies, that have the extreme privilege to define what new world systems emerge, which they do not do for progressive gain, but for individual libertarian benefit.<p>&gt; <i>You might think these men have little in common. But they are both part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists,</i><p>This is a hard problem: tech has a hopeful optimistic worldview that we can do better, but we are, like most of human history, subordinate to the nouveau (or sometimes old) riche who happen to have the McDuck vaults-full-of-gold to swim through. These upstarts happen to be leveraging tech, yes. But to most techies, their world view is undifferentiated &amp; unclear from the other old-world views. Even if it uses new means to achieve dominance, uncontestability. There&#x27;s not a lot of strong political statements to draw from any of these folk, so apologies here but... how many techies would agree with Lonsdale saying, <i>&quot;Any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser. In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future – that’s the correct masculine response.&quot;</i> ? This feels so the mode for these folk. Is that the new techie worldview? Personally that feels like a <i>very</i> old worldview to me. And not idealistic in the least.<p>These people don&#x27;t represent, to me, the potential, the buildingness. Not in any open fashion. They represent control &amp; take-over-ness. They represent the kings, those that the kingmakers have made, those that build for themselves, &amp; to elevate themselves. They have a limited narrow window of idealism, but one that forever perches them &amp; their limited cadre atop &amp; in control of all systems, all data, &amp; leaves the world about floundering for itself.<p>&gt; <i>They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.</i><p>All of these folks seem like constrainers of growth. None of them have shown any real commitment or belief in open source &amp; mutual expansion of human destiny, as far as I can tell. They control vast intellectual property empires that funnel information in-ward with great abandon, &amp; almost all contribution out is extremely limited, &amp; typically quite pricey.<p>The vision of what tech has done &amp; is capable of seems limited to the dullest of conceptions. Quoting Altman:<p>&gt; <i>Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said &#x27;OK, now what?&#x27;</i><p>How about we make tech serve people better? Rather than wall up the gardens &amp; enforce harsher terms of service, rather than leave all data in the hands of vast indifferent money-making powers, maybe we should try to put actual humans in control of systems &amp; data? Is that on your radar, any of you?<p>&gt; <i>Some think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these iconoclasts once remarked, &quot;We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.&quot;</i><p>Instead we got vast inhuman systems of top-down surveillance, like Palantir (deeply funded by Thiel &amp; Lonsdale, along with other military info-control startups). Instead we got monitoring &amp; exploitation &amp; attention economies, funded by vast VC&#x27;s like these folk&#x27;s (eg: Facebook, where Thiel made most of his money (but personally I think Facebook hatred is somewhat overrated, a scapegoat masking more systematic problems)). I don&#x27;t see these &quot;new tech&quot; folk as having even the most meager stakes against what they decry: they all seem to want to spit-fire against the scape-goat most-visible names, but are obviously a part of the same system, same game, same villainy, often at more escalated more expansive levels than the semi-controlled affrontery that we&#x27;ve had to endure &amp; have come to be fearful of.<p>&gt; <i>A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset,</i><p>Utterly unclear to me what form of progress these folk seek, other than more get rich, yet more control, and with little government oversight or concern to worry about.<p>I wish I could say clearly &amp; without reserve this article isn&#x27;t about tech. Alas these folk do have amazing control over the world. There is a certain &quot;new tech&quot; that is embodied by these new plutocratic dominators. They have enormous control over tech, enormous influence. But to me, this is just the new noveau riche world view. This is the view of those who have exploited &amp; trampled humanity, by &amp; large. These people don&#x27;t have a worldview. They have a &quot;me&quot;-view. They have a hunger for wealth &amp; power &amp; riches that doesn&#x27;t include most people. If they had a view that encompassed the world, they&#x27;d give more away. They&#x27;d support &amp; benefit open source. They&#x27;d have data-portability broadly everywhere they went. They&#x27;d have users owning more data. I don&#x27;t see that vision, and I don&#x27;t think their vision of the world includes many of us.