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I'd love to see the look on my younger self's face as I agree with this sentiment, but I think you're on to something. Still, I think this is bad politics. The last 8 years has clearly shown there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke. The woke are more than happy to use Big Tech's capabilities to track and censor dissent from it's ideology, and Big Tech is more than happy to provide it. I agree that utilitarian techbroism needs to be countered, but that can only be done by sponsoring groups that are actually opposed to utilitarianism and tech-accelerationism, not just another outgrowth of modernism.
Internet is enormously beneficial to people solving technical problems.
Asked someone I know who worked as a software developer before and after internet. She thinks it's at least an order of magnitude difference in efficiency/ output.
Look, I'm a Luddite, it's not that I don't see the increases in efficiency, it's that I question whether they're good for us in the long term.
Having lived through the same period and worked in the same field, I agree the Internet was a game changer in many ways. There's a world of difference between looking up info in a book, like a barbarian, and just checking Stack Overflow. But I also see the effect it had on me - for example I notice I'm way more frustrated when I have to read a longer explanation, and don't just get served the goddamn code snippet. I also wonder what effect the rise of video tutorials / documentation is going to have on people. I find it frustrating, but just from how common it is, I guess a lot of people have to like it, and I wonder if it doesn't mess with people's heads in a similar way that Stack Overflow messed with mine.
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Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.
Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.
All I'm saying is that your plan to counter Big Tech may just end up giving the Woke (even more) control over it.
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