Hacker News Reader

Comment by _xzxj | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? When accounts do that primarily, we end up banning them. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN is an ideological battle whether you like it or not, dang. Especially political threads like this one. Expressing views outside of the techno-libertarian norm around here should be allowed.

It's a matter of degree. Fire may be inevitable; burning to a crisp is not.

> the techno-libertarian norm around here

This is the hostile media effect: ideological users see the platform as dominated by their enemies. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18664482, where HN is "left leaning, socialist Democrats".

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...

You didn't express an ideological view, though, you just took a snarky swipe at HN and called people bourgeoisie conspiracy theorists and capitalist bootlickers.

I've done the same thing, sometimes the urge to react emotionally rather than intellectually and get a good stab in is too hard to resist, but some karmic retribution is only fair. You do the crime, you do the time.

Fair enough, it is very frustrating to see the industry i am a part of be so...sociopathic.

Or... it's the main target of accelerationist activists to radicalize the knowledge workers and subvert the status quo through high-tech powered dissent.

Or just both.

I don't know. One of the positive things about full-on Silicon Valley bubble-dwellers is the obsession with questioning and disrupting everything. One looks at any little detail and digs into it, asking questions about how it might be different, even shockingly different.

It leads to problems and to foolishness like juice-squeezing hydraulic presses for the home, but I feel like that wackiness pays for itself when it has brilliant people asking 'what does life look like when we have solar powered robots and replicators giving us all important things for essentially free?'

Without Silicon Valley disruptive thinking, the answer is simple and time tested: the lord, or whoever's holding authority, takes all the benefit and gives the peasants the absolute minimum he can get away with giving, and it only changes when he gets SUPER greedy.

With Silicon Valley disruptive thinking, there are smart people asking 'hang on, haven't we changed a paradigm here? What else can happen?'

That may produce activists… I don't think you'd call them 'accelerationist' activists. That term is akin to posadism and implies it's activists secretly trying to worsen conditions in hopes of stoking an eventual revolution. SV does have plenty of those, many of 'em leading companies, but in general techno-utopianism wouldn't be characterized as accelerationist.

I believe the person you're replying to may have been referring to themselves (look at their post history). That said I think you're giving SV a lot of credit if you're framing the choice as "Silicon Valley or Feudalism".

I will also challenge you on the idea that silicon valley is still disruptive as opposed to the status quo now. The largest companies in the world (by far) are tech companies now. These large companies are actively stifling competition, and they've been caught stifling wages.

Wealth and income inequality are at terrible levels now and climate change's adverse effects are really only starting to be seen. The Gilets Jaune movement in France is ultimately a proletarian battle against the global oligarchy, of which tech is certainly a part of.

We should not consider ourselves 'disruptors' or outsiders anymore. We are the elite.

Juicero was not hydraulic. It used a series of horridly expensive gears.

Source: I took apart a juicero

Reply on news.ycombinator.com