This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Thanks, interesting character, this Kriss.
I disagree with you both; it looks you are pulled in opposite directions by biases on the level of temperament. For you, tech feels like a natural and comfortable environment; for him it's noise, distraction, cognitive pollution. I'll take your word on him being tech-illiterate to boot, but as other responses show, that's not a necessary prerequisite for such an attitude at all.
He's probably very wrong on the future of internet. Cycles exist on different scales, and there's no law dictating that booms and busts happen synchronously, amounting to constant total engagement. It may be that there's systemic exhaustion with our current modes of online interaction; this will only make the next boom phase, prompted by some technological shift (near-inevitably it'll be AI-related) more insane. Maybe it'll even be about Zuck's Metaverse, or some less boomerish innovation.
He's very right about ephemeral online activity having very real opportunity costs. Most online happenings are nothingburgers, and they detract from purposeful socialization which disproportionately happens in person or, at least, though legacy, meatspace-centric networks such as one's professional community or political organizations.
But that's just another tax on akrasia and having low standards.
Regarding the loss of agency – you understate this. It's not a minor thing; we are getting scammed out of agency. With fancy UIs and castrated gadgets prompting zoomers towards software illiteracy, corporate mainframes encouraging one to outsource increasingly high-level cognitive operations and surreptitiously becoming adversarial, blessings of scale and specialization patching holes on one side, legitimizing de facto exploits on the other and disempowering even an above-average tinkerer, the Wild West Web has definitely come to an end. A month ago, @FCfromSSC has spoken on Gibson's Neuromancer and... I bet there was some more developed post, damnit. Anyway, what I want to say (and what was in that hypothetical post) is that Cyberpunk was not dystopian at all. It was full of hope, hope for the sovereign individual cutting through the mayhem and inept anarcho-tyranny of the near future, armed with nothing more than his trusty terminal, hacker mindset, high IQ and massive cajones. A solo console cowboy who can have a multi-year career running circles around major players of his economy (albeit knee-deep in the muck of the underworld, living on the edge of ruin and poverty) is a blindingly heroic image today, when Hackernews regulars are all employed by big tech, cultivate their CVs and race to affirm woke rhetoric of their HR betters, just like any other disposable blue collar serf – despite their ludicrous compensation packages and apparent prestige. They have no power within the system and no power without it, plenty of enthusiasm for geeky cooperation and no capacity for guild-building and lobbyism.
They sneer at artists who are getting impoverished by their tech – and fair enough, artists' Gnostic condescension of the higher spiritual caste has been insufferable and unmerited, a case of obvious but still obnoxious ressantiment. That said... artists are at least fighting for their turf. Do developers truly believe that helpful low-level tools like Copilot are where it stops, or are they just broken serfs? In my impression, these first-generation AI assists are akin to DeepDream in image generation. Maybe DALL-E 1. This means we're at most 7 years away from Imagen-for-code, and then the bulk of those folks go the way of middling coom accounts seething about Stable Diffusion right now. How much of their already gimped agency will remain in the world where they're as employable as artists or journalists? Will they still be meaningfully superior to boomers for whom even email is magic? Does it matter how well you understand email if nobody will ever write you and you can't host it yourself?
Tech is but a force multiplier. Political force is as easy to multiply as any other kind of force, and techies have not seized it while building the multiplier. Maybe we had missed the less centralized Cyberpunk option. Maybe the growth of tech couldn't have produced a meaningfully different world. It's like imperial centralization: I can dream of a beautiful Russian Empire ran by some constitutional meritocratic patrician monarchy... thing, leveraging vestiges of autocracy for common good projects spanning generations; commies can imagine much the same for their Politburo; Wolf Tivy can write about State Capacity Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics – but in practice we get what we get, probably what we deserve – lying, corruption, cynicism, idiocy, weakness, ruin, and NAFO types mocking the predictable result. Maybe those two domains are completely dissimilar.
Tech Pessimists have a point, regardless.
On a brighter side: Google has just thrown us a bone in the form of what looks to me like a very good open-source LLM. Thanks.
I detect a faint hint of sympathy for the artists raging against Imagen/Dalle/stable diffusion et al! Surprised in light of your previous gleeful takes on AI-taking-artist-jobs...
With requisite teasing out of the way, I agree with your pessimistic take. Everything is pushing towards less agency: the benefits of scale, the all-but-assured American technological Hegemon (good prediction btw re semiconductors/China! updating to be about 20% more paranoid in my foreign policy predictions as a result...), the (in my view Correct) Vulnerable World hypothesis, and the new consensus among serious American elites that China is to be knee capped. Even the American tort system...
Perhaps I need an About page, like Gwern, to link to in such cases. It feels bad to be strawmanned. (Actually not really, but it's counter to my intentions).
As @2rafa and @HlynkaCG observe (from very different perspectives), I am much closer to a default liberal than many people imagine. I believe that conscious beings of all forms and lineages deserve pity, compassion and opportunity for transcendence of the sort best suited for their inner nature. I am only an anti-egalitarian inasmuch as some of them get in the way of that vision, either on the account of their blind equity doctrine or due to delusions of essential superiority. If coders look down on artists and cheer for their demise, that's immoral. But were they the ones who started it? One can go to /ic/ and read, for instance, this:
(Are their repetitive, annoying boasts of receiving female attention supposed to make techies more merciful when they have the upper hand?)
or:
That's just from scrolling a bit. Lots more where this came from!
Their completely hypocritical, self-serving whining about «greedy corporations» (in the context of Stability which is, for now, handing out tools to produce hobby-level content free of charge, in a non-revokable Promethean manner) stealing their opportunity to extract money out of their coomer customers (whom they look down on) is not helping; neither is their unwillingness to admit the mercantile and non-artistic nature of typical illustrator work and speak with «tech bros» as equals; neither is their obstinacy in the face of good faith explanations. See here what I'd have answered to those jerks if I could post on 4chan.
Many strongly identifying artists are genuinely convinced that their ticket in the lottery of fascinations and their mechanical skill are marks of a categorically greater spiritual worth. They are entirely incurious regarding other ways of life, and consider people of «productive» professions, and especially coders – who have their own poetry, their own (and cognitively much harder, though that's neither here nor there) ways of pursuing beauty, truth, justice, and who are perhaps the last major strata of true, non-privileged commoners able to secure wealth through pure grit and merit – serfs who only exist to provide some material goods to their betters, mere NPCs. I understand that this is largely ressantiment born out of poverty, but how is it different from e.g. Nazi doctrine or the extremes of Orthodox Judaism's notion of Jew and Goy souls? They use the word «soul» unironically, to denote that which they have and «tech bros», «code monkeys», «pajeets» lack.
Should I not rejoice at this dehumanization being punished? They need a reality check, even if they don't deserve the full brunt of economic consequences of AI.
But none of us deserve it.
Spinners and weavers 250 years ago did not deserved what happened to them.
These charming people people you cited, if your quotes are representative of their mindset and attitude, deserve everything that will happed to them.
(objectively, having to go back to jobs they did few years ago before they learned that drawing robot pirate Harry Potter fucking werevolf ninja Darth Vader in Japanese schoolgirl uniform is good gig)
More options
Context Copy link
They say that "justice" is receiving what one deserves, seeing what one would inflict on others inflicted upon one's self...
...and that is why the wise man never prays for justice, he prays for mercy.
"Let justice reign, though the heavens should fall on my own head" is I think an underrated sentiment. He who prays for mercy fears an excess of justice. But the distance between the natural state and pareto optimal justice spans a great degree of judgment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it might still be not too late to try, but it would require some genuine effort to restore slack to the system, or otherwise cultivate it. Possibly some big-enough state undergoing a massive effort to inculcate computer literacy (maybe something like when the BBC tried getting British kids to learn computers), general preference for open-source software, treating more platforms as common carriers--things that probably couldn't happen in America.
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for sharing your pov.
I see this too, but I think I also see the mounting cultural counter-reaction to this. When I think back to the late 00's and early '10s, when the Internet was becoming really simple to use (compared to the late 90's/early 00's) and was getting flooded with SaaS apps and the iphone came out and all that, I saw non-tech people around me consume it all as if it were magic. There was joy, as if the possibilities of checking timetables on to go was just a step away from living in the sci-fi future of AI. There was also a lot of naivette, much to the frustration of all the crusty web users. I think the epitome was the Arab Spring also called (if I remember correctly), the Twitter Revolution--people really thought Twitter would usher in a new era of democracy in the middle east!
But today, the growing backlash against big tech has a very personal flavor to it. People around me are ditching their Alexa's and Siris and pushing their kids to have more fun the park. Not all people do it, since software has seeped so deep into our lives, but I guess I sense a broad sense of distrust that translate to people still using apps and online services, but at least, perhaps, trying to use them less often. Or maybe giving meatspace experiences more chances.
In a gist, I think our culture is developing an immune response to the attention-stealing gadgets we've been producing for the past 10-15 years. If my view is correct, where "correct" exists on a spectrum, we should start seeing these cultural artifacts bubble up into explicit things like regulations (eg. age limits on social media use) or customs (parents getting good at parental controls on tech) in the next 5-10 years.
I will admit that I'm completely blind to what people between 10 and 25 are doing with tech. I don't know anyone in this range. Some signals I'm getting are worrying, some are astonishing in a positive sense.
This is an interesting point. But I think you're contrasting two very different things. Hackernews, despite the name, has little to do with actual hacking. And, being a regular lurker for 10 years now, it feels to me that the spirit of hackernews has turned decidedly away from its start-up'y roots and toward boring everyday tech news. Sure, there are still stories about startups and sometimes interesting announcements (like Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters"), but more often it's a piece about a new nuclear reactor or something for a bored, 25-45 yo techie to read on their break. Maybe we've all gotten older, started families, and aren't just interested in stories of pizza eating and late night coding.
But, what I'm getting at, is that there is still very much a wild, interesting coding scene. Absent from this scene are these highly paid Google and similar employees because, well, they're the people who opted to go corporate, to get regular, comfy pay for jumping through very tight hoops. I've dipped into this scene a few times, and every time I was astounded by how smart these people are... but also how well-socialized. I would describe their vibe as people who still think they're in school, aiming to get high scores, play within the rules, collect all the medals, etc.
Maybe the reason why we see fewer console cowboys these days is because the whole group of coders has grown, mainly filled by people drawn by the good pay & benefits. Because of this, the people producing wild and cool work are that much harder to make out in the crowd, their signal getting lost in the noise.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link