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Notes -
The new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy has been making the rounds. In lieu of reading it, here's an NPR interview.
At the core of this is a middle-school-cafeteria psychodrama that remains unresolved. The lived-experience of "computer nerds" is that of being instrumentally valuable to many, terminally valuable to none. As a result, anti-capitalist rhetoric that disparages money as a source of moral value is received by them as a personal attack. The computer nerd feels deep down that his earning-potential is the only thing he brings to the table in the status game; as far as he's concerned, his value on all other axes might as well be rounded off to zero.
Therefore, the computer nerds wants nothing more than to get away from all those teeming masses with their grabby hands who want to take all his stuff and leave him with nothing. If it takes moving to one of Balaji Srinivasan's seasteads, or to Elon Musk's space colony, then so be it.
Huh? Is it a zone, or the whole world? There's a big difference - but hold on. That comic is the story of nerds simpliciter, not just computer nerds. And the people most outspoken against "The Nerd Reich" are also nerds - "theater nerds" to be precise. To continue the cafeteria picture, the theater nerds are (if anything) even more autistic, more put-upon, and more bullyable than the computer nerds, while the bullies themselves (the "jocks" and "popular kids") don't even figure in to the dialectic at all. So what's going on?
I guess it comes down to the different coping mechanisms each group employs. The theater nerds find solidarity with each other at least, whereas the computer nerds have no need for each other because they have their toys to play with, which can incidentally eke them out a living independent of anyone else. But the theater nerds have no such refuge, and so, being poor in both financial and social capital, have been forced over generations to build up an elaborate alternative system of social capital which is a lot more off-putting to outsiders but seems to form much deeper personal relationships within itself than any within the computer club. This, at least, levels the playing field between the two nerd factions somewhat.
But then, if some computer nerds start getting uppity and decide to form alternative solidarity groups of their own, now this upsets the balance. I suppose the theater nerds believe there's only so much space for nerds in this world, and so any ascendancy of computer nerds will leave less for them.
Honestly, I'm really just spinning a yarn at this point. There are a lot of holes in this story that I don't know how to patch up. In particular:
But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do. But what are those true reasons?
Tech has been eating journalists and will continue to do so. Who wants to advertise in a newspaper distributed to a few million people in one place vs google, facebook (or perhaps an AI) which is queried by everyone everywhere and can track users in exacting detail?
Journalists are aware of this, this is why they don't make much money! Their prestige and wealth is going to some SWE instead.
If ever there was a class war in history, it's this. The tech industry does many bad things but there's such an insane chorus of negativity. Go to https://futurism.com/
There is scarcely a single piece of good or even neutral-valence news about technology anywhere on the entire website, certainly none about AI. Journalists hate technology and especially AI because it is destroying the business model of their companies, it directly threatens their livelihoods. The natural countermove is to whip up anti-tech sentiment, create terms like 'tech-bro' to wield social and political power against the technology sector and try to siphon some of that money back. Not unreasonable as a survival strategy but deceptive.
Given how little analysis they do, how weak their articles are compared to rare moments of real journalism or even AI queries that can directly investigate primary sources, they're right to be worried. The average journalist is pretty stupid per the incessant complaints of my friends who talk to the media. They're constantly misunderstanding and mangling quotes. Abstract points and semi-rare diction escapes them.
Anyway, journalists hate people like Elon Musk in large part because he refuses to pay for PR/advertising. If Tesla paid for ads, there would be a night and day difference in how he's treated by the media.
If journalism were actually trying to save the world from AI takeover, that'd be heroic. But they've been doing this for years and years before AI, they're trying to make some money, to restore the cozy NGO/govt/advertising landscape they think they deserve.
Aren't futurists supposed to be optimistic? Like, isn't that pretty much a requirement for the job?
Well you won't find any futurists on futurism.com...
Or alternately, they're the opposite kind of futurist, the one who bemoans all developments. There's a media tendency for fear and negativity, fear sells after all.
Plus a social trend against technology since the 1960s: just read the title of a book like 'Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster' (1954) and you can tell it was a whole other world. Today Tom Swift would be the villain. Maybe like how in Fahrenheit 451 firemen of the future are just in charge of starting fires, futurists of today bemoan technology. Now it directly affects them after all.
There are huge cadres of sci-fi authors who bemoan LLMs and I suspect this is because it's finally their lunch that's being eaten, writers of novels can sense they're on the chopping block soon. They're still a few tiers above the journalists of course.
1968-69 seems to have been the breaking point, with the endless Vietnam war and the rise of the counterculture, "The Population Bomb" and the environmentalist movement. New speculative fiction (the "New Wave") suddenly became a lot more pessimistic and a lot less fun to read. Air and water pollution was supposed to be on the verge of killing all the plants and wild animals. In contrast, I see deer in my backyard every day now (when they were an extraordinarily rare sight until the turn of the millennium), and even foxes occasionally. In the lower-density areas nearby, there have even been black bears. And the vegetation grows quickly enough that it's become a real nuisance, blocking even the view of the sky from indoors!
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