Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially…
Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally.
Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of personal status. /1 https://t.co/tPPbICoHPw
A culture so obsessively focused on removing anything collective, so that status is only ever individually achieved. Why wouldn’t anybody in that context look for a short-cut out of destitution and low status?
The Founding Fathers were determined to avoid tyranny. /2
Refugees from a Europe that didn’t want them, scarred by their clashes with royals and popes. Sadly what they implemented was a fundamentalist fanaticism of individual-driven societies.
A governance oxymoron. Individuals and collectives are not two things. They’re one thing. /3
You have the freedom to be an individual if much of the work of the society you live in has been delegated widely to others, to do for you. To feed you, keep you safe etc.
The more collective we are, the more individually free we are. Division of labour. Economies of scale. /4
Government itself, the vile enemy of freedumb culture, was invented as an economy of scale, of social transactions. A way to make individual life even freer and more easy.
People invented government. Aliens didn’t impose it on them. /5
The US has been at war with itself since its inception, in a bootstrapping tug of war. Iconoclastically smashing all of the collective mechanisms that actually give people freedom, to protect individual freedom. /6
On the basis of the hilarious idea that the default raw material of human life is some isolated free individual.
It’s worth noticing that nobody who believes this stuff is living in the jungles of violent countries. /7
It’s a belief system that only flourishes in places of collective well-being. An armchair/keyboard fantasy.
You can see it in other ways. When individuals become obviously impotent in the face of existential threat? What then? /8
You create super-individuals. ‘Super heroes’ are largely creatures of the American imagination. You can feel the desperation, of individuals facing clear collective clusterfucks, responding emotionally in the only logical way then open to them.
Super (individual) powers. /9 https://t.co/XVDM5bcrw2
Fast forward to SIlicon Valley, and you have people there determined to own and run the world. Their products are doing that.
The tools are all about disruption, about hijacking of existing social processes, to lift the tool owners above the unwashed fray. /10
This bizarre social tug of war generated by a simple mistake, of believing individual and collective to be in opposition, is exported to every country that uses the tools.
Once they arrive there, the tools unload those underlying assumptions onto other cultures too. /11
People now have ‘freedom’ using the tools, to subvert centuries of evolved, incredibly complex social systems.
Social media is the apotheosis of this hijacking. Entire societies have been swallowed by SM platforms. /12
Personal, social, professional and political lives are now transacted almost in their entirety, on these platforms.
They’re the ultimate Trojan Horses for that horrible mistaken constitutional tug of war between individuals and society.
/end