Abolish Silicon Valley – Wendy Liu

The article recycles a lot of the familiar excesses and removed-from-reality tropes of Silicon Valley, as I'm sure the book does at points, but doesn't focus nearly enough on the author's prescriptions. It's really a missed opportunity to understand what makes the book unique, what better world the author wants to build.

> “open protocols and decentralised services”, and wants secretive competition between developers to be replaced by “democratic oversight and open collaboration”

Sounds not too far removed from the activism of groups such as the EFF, and even the FOSS movement in general. How they fit on the political graph is complicated. They are civil liberties oriented, but often in a more right-libertarian (or perhaps center/apathetic-libertarian) than a left-libertarian way, much less libertarian socialist. Pirate politics, as the Europeans call it. Not libertarian in the Californian ideology utopian neoliberal sort of way, but in a more anti-authority radical form of libertarianism.

And some of these proponents still end up working for some of the large corporations like Google. Which really complicates things further when free flow of information as ideology blends into freeing information for the sake of furthering the bottom line.

> Liu’s blueprint for a “socialist media system” may still sound impractical, but her emphasis on public space and the public good have an eerie resonance at present: who knows what changes might come when we creep out of our enforced solitude and reconstitute a functioning society?

Intriguing idea, great question, totally nonsense in this context as this review does not bother to explain the former, nor expand upon the latter. SF tech workers stepping over the homeless is not "enforced solitude", it is both lack of empathy and the sign of a failed political and economic system. What solitude separates these juxtaposed segments of society?

> In Einstein’s day, the pioneers of the new physics thought they were engaged in “world-building”; Liu similarly remarks that designing a website opens a hole in the universe through which we can study its inner mechanics. Her experiments in coding would, she believed, confer on her “a kind of immortality”.

Sidebar: I've long-wondered if software developers have a propensity to fall prey to the "engineer's disease" more than other STEM disciplines because so much of our form of engineering exists only in the abstract. (Mechanical engineers and civil engineers, for instance, know that they are at least bound by basic laws of physics- and stay humble.) But through hardware and integrated physical systems, we're able to control and influence the real world, potentially in world-changing ways. So when choked on a suffusion of our own abstraction, we imagine we know everything, deriving everything from first principles.