my worry is with the idea that you can own the world. There's poetry in the techno-optimists, but in a sentence like that one you get the sense that everything—no matter how elevated is just a tool for humans to usurp and utilize.
That's just power and power and power which ends up being amazingly dreary
I think this is really pretty close to the money. Trump 2.0 seems to lack vitality or vigour beyond merely 'doing more'. Doing more for more's sake is ultimately a futile pointless quest. It is precisely the problem which liberalism has encased itself in- liberal values for liberalism's sake i.e., tautology and nothing else.
I guess that's why entertainment is so key to Trump 2.0 with Musk especially the case doing outrageous stupid things so people don't look under the bonnet and find little of substance. Rarely have I been convinced by the tech bros and as someone who is friends with tech friendly people besides utility there is little of value they generally point to. It's an adding machine but as most of us know people aren't built to be calculated in such a way.
I respectfully disagree with much of what you've said.
First of all, who says banal is bad? I'll take it any day power the likes of Stalin or Mao. Or Hilary.
We are in the industrial revolution. No, not post industrial, IN the industrial revolution. I made my living in the skilled trades, in spite of my teaching certification. Before my time, nearly everything was done by hand labor. Transportation was by mule and ox. Then the steam engine was invented, and it changed everything. The steam engine begat the steel industry, and now transportation could be by railroad and steamship.
I'm stating the obvious, but so many people have forgotten the obvious. The essentials of what you need to live can not be packed into bits and bytes and sent thru fiber optic cables. Many indulge themselves, thinking they are far more essential than they really are. If your work can be accomplished at a keyboard, you aren't essential.
Before my time, materials were processed and manipulated by hand. During my career, the work was done by powered machines, the worker supplying none of his own energy. The work went much faster. Today, those machines are often controlled by software, not workers. Yes, workers have lost jobs. But that also can be said of the nineteenth century workers, who lost jobs to steam engines and the like. This is nothing new, but maybe a bit different. Interestingly, the real jobs killer was mechanization, not software. And that continues to be true.
As a person who has been on both sides of the fence, I trust Musk and Trump far more than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Waren to accurately sort out what the future holds for those 'uneducated' workers who haven't had the benefit of having their brains filled with mush at our 'elite institutions'. You know, the institutions that graduate useless leeches such as Elizabeth Waren, AOC, Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Consider: If they had never existed, it would make no difference. We need our plumbers, electricians and carpenters far more than we need them.
Samuel, I agree on the turn of the admin and right-wing techno-progressives doesn't clearly offer a "way out of that stifling banality", but what do you suggest will offer a way out?
I think that is the question on which attention needs to be focused.
“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
I dunno, this seems rather poetic, inspiring, and even "divine" to me. I'm not really sure what the complaint here is, or what specifically Kimbriel's alternative vision looks like.
Perhaps a vision of harmony and balance rather than a perpetual struggle between humans and the gods. The ultimate sin in ancient Greece was hubris - a mortal acting above his/her pay grade imagining themselves as immortals beyond the bounds of humanity.
In contrast to Western mythology and philosophy, Asian a-thesist philosophy values collective harmony and compassion rather than fruitless struggles against the forces of Nature (Gaia). There are no gods to emulate but the responsibility of introspection and alignment with the Flow of the moment.
The mythical Greek giants are no more. Bred simply to fight and disrupt, they turned upon themselves in self-destruction. That is the lesson the tech bros and military industrialists might want to meditate upon.
What I know of Greek and other mythologies is that gods would frequently treat humans capriciously and even cruelly - Shakespeare wouldn't have come up with, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport" if that weren't the case - so I can't help but interpret the line of thinking you describe as the idea that humanity must always and forever be submissive to callous and inscrutable powers, and any fighting back against this state of affairs will only lead to being "punished" in the way a rapacious totalitarian dictator "punishes" anyone who dares go against him. There's something that feels capital-W Wrong to me about this, like how child molestation feels Wrong.
"Effective accelerationism" may very well lead to self-destruction, but the logical conclusion of a "vision of harmony and balance" is degrowth-ism, which is its own kind of self-destruction and one I believe is far worse. Some amount of overconfidence is necessary if one wants to accomplish anything, especially anything having to do with making people's lives better like, say, reducing poverty or infectious diseases. I will definitely grant, though, that folks like Musk and Thiel have overconfidence in spades, to say the least - they could certainly stand to be knocked down a peg or two.
The point is to remain fluid - Flowing in a continuum between the polarities of assertion and acceptance. The wider one’s range on the continuum, the fuller and more fulfilling their life becomes.
my worry is with the idea that you can own the world. There's poetry in the techno-optimists, but in a sentence like that one you get the sense that everything—no matter how elevated is just a tool for humans to usurp and utilize.
That's just power and power and power which ends up being amazingly dreary
I think this is really pretty close to the money. Trump 2.0 seems to lack vitality or vigour beyond merely 'doing more'. Doing more for more's sake is ultimately a futile pointless quest. It is precisely the problem which liberalism has encased itself in- liberal values for liberalism's sake i.e., tautology and nothing else.
I guess that's why entertainment is so key to Trump 2.0 with Musk especially the case doing outrageous stupid things so people don't look under the bonnet and find little of substance. Rarely have I been convinced by the tech bros and as someone who is friends with tech friendly people besides utility there is little of value they generally point to. It's an adding machine but as most of us know people aren't built to be calculated in such a way.
I respectfully disagree with much of what you've said.
First of all, who says banal is bad? I'll take it any day power the likes of Stalin or Mao. Or Hilary.
We are in the industrial revolution. No, not post industrial, IN the industrial revolution. I made my living in the skilled trades, in spite of my teaching certification. Before my time, nearly everything was done by hand labor. Transportation was by mule and ox. Then the steam engine was invented, and it changed everything. The steam engine begat the steel industry, and now transportation could be by railroad and steamship.
I'm stating the obvious, but so many people have forgotten the obvious. The essentials of what you need to live can not be packed into bits and bytes and sent thru fiber optic cables. Many indulge themselves, thinking they are far more essential than they really are. If your work can be accomplished at a keyboard, you aren't essential.
Before my time, materials were processed and manipulated by hand. During my career, the work was done by powered machines, the worker supplying none of his own energy. The work went much faster. Today, those machines are often controlled by software, not workers. Yes, workers have lost jobs. But that also can be said of the nineteenth century workers, who lost jobs to steam engines and the like. This is nothing new, but maybe a bit different. Interestingly, the real jobs killer was mechanization, not software. And that continues to be true.
As a person who has been on both sides of the fence, I trust Musk and Trump far more than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Waren to accurately sort out what the future holds for those 'uneducated' workers who haven't had the benefit of having their brains filled with mush at our 'elite institutions'. You know, the institutions that graduate useless leeches such as Elizabeth Waren, AOC, Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc. Consider: If they had never existed, it would make no difference. We need our plumbers, electricians and carpenters far more than we need them.
Samuel, I agree on the turn of the admin and right-wing techno-progressives doesn't clearly offer a "way out of that stifling banality", but what do you suggest will offer a way out?
I think that is the question on which attention needs to be focused.
“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
I dunno, this seems rather poetic, inspiring, and even "divine" to me. I'm not really sure what the complaint here is, or what specifically Kimbriel's alternative vision looks like.
Perhaps a vision of harmony and balance rather than a perpetual struggle between humans and the gods. The ultimate sin in ancient Greece was hubris - a mortal acting above his/her pay grade imagining themselves as immortals beyond the bounds of humanity.
In contrast to Western mythology and philosophy, Asian a-thesist philosophy values collective harmony and compassion rather than fruitless struggles against the forces of Nature (Gaia). There are no gods to emulate but the responsibility of introspection and alignment with the Flow of the moment.
The mythical Greek giants are no more. Bred simply to fight and disrupt, they turned upon themselves in self-destruction. That is the lesson the tech bros and military industrialists might want to meditate upon.
What I know of Greek and other mythologies is that gods would frequently treat humans capriciously and even cruelly - Shakespeare wouldn't have come up with, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport" if that weren't the case - so I can't help but interpret the line of thinking you describe as the idea that humanity must always and forever be submissive to callous and inscrutable powers, and any fighting back against this state of affairs will only lead to being "punished" in the way a rapacious totalitarian dictator "punishes" anyone who dares go against him. There's something that feels capital-W Wrong to me about this, like how child molestation feels Wrong.
"Effective accelerationism" may very well lead to self-destruction, but the logical conclusion of a "vision of harmony and balance" is degrowth-ism, which is its own kind of self-destruction and one I believe is far worse. Some amount of overconfidence is necessary if one wants to accomplish anything, especially anything having to do with making people's lives better like, say, reducing poverty or infectious diseases. I will definitely grant, though, that folks like Musk and Thiel have overconfidence in spades, to say the least - they could certainly stand to be knocked down a peg or two.
The point is to remain fluid - Flowing in a continuum between the polarities of assertion and acceptance. The wider one’s range on the continuum, the fuller and more fulfilling their life becomes.