Douglas Rushkoff: Crashing Technosolutionism [video]
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Imagine raising kids where they ONLY see you at your road-raging worst, every day, for their entire childhood, and never in any other setting.
This is how we're "raising AI" to put it into his analogy.
It will end outside the US much faster cuz the Ad spends per person are much much lower. And therefore the polluted content too is much less. US advertising is a 350 Billion a Yr business. That's Not even counting political Ads. For comparison China is 150 billion UK is 45B and India is 15B. This is the Cost of Production of Info pollution. Cost of consumption can be seen in the Mental Health of all Americans.
Americans don't realize how much their brains have been fucked up by marketing from birth. Now it's the AI brain getting fucked based on the same sewage.
Other countries desperately want to be the next US. So the sooner they realize what the end state of runaway marketing/advertising funded Content does the more likely we will see drastic change to Information landscape
It is my main issue but it is also the only thing that keeps me awake at night.
I have to say, I find America’s to have a lot of hyper gullible people as compared to other countries though and I do agree with you’re point.
Edit: you can’t insulated them from everything (nor would you want to), but you can support and reinforce their authentic interests that aren’t driven by mass culture - and you can work to maintain boundaries around your values. Maintaining clear boundaries in a responsive and loving way is often really hard, but is probably the most important thing - in my opinion.
Sure some will be, but I doubt most content is. If I write a children's book, is it ad fueled or did I write it because I wanted to write it.
Google, Youtube, Facebook, TikTok are not going to tell content creators that.
They want everyone busy searching for an audience (to hand off to Advertisors). And everyone wants Attention. But there are not enough eyeballs. Yet the mindless marketing mega machine is still running and projecting consumption growth. Content creators are getting paid. How come? It all very similar to the subprime meltdown. There too everyone seemed to be having a good time.
The machine is so over optimized and efficient, it will get ppl to buy your book, and the majority will never have time to read it, or forget about anything in it a few days after consuming it.
Their entire shtick has been we will give you free tools, free distribution (ala free mortgages). You guys generate content. Your job is to find audience and get glory. So everyone is falling over each other producing content. But what they dont tell anyone is they cant generate new eyeballs to consume it all. So content has been exploding. How is consumption supposed to grow? The views come from getting ppl to be more and more scatter focused. Attention to anything is breaking down to the point where ppl are completely lost and overloaded by Info.
For what? To keeping selling Ads. People will keep going into debt and keep buying whatever shit the Ads tell them too.
Another promise they made was their search results and news feed will highlight the best quality content.
But anyone can see what kinds of total shit gets propped up everyday, because the platforms themselves are over run by content and spam. Cost to spam has dropped to 0 cause the tools are all free. Again all this is thanks to the need to show Ads everywhere. Every search query show an ad. Every inch of a stream show an Ad.
The majority doesn't have the eyeballs or the disposable income to keep content factories running. Its Ads. Disney's Bob Iger has said their pipelines can produce marvel level blockbusters everyday, but there are not enough ppl to pay the bill. So what to do? Look at Netflix - start showing ads.
Chat GPT et al might break the curse of ad infested news feeds and search results. And advertisers, marketers, govts and content creators are all equally effected by the breaking down of Attention. The big question is what does a new system look like where Attention isnt being exploited and Info overload is under control.
So? It just points to glut on the supply side. Everyone wants to be a movie star/writer/artist. It doesn't counter my argumentation.
People will write stuff for themselves and others. Sure most stuff will be crap but most stuff is crap anyway.
> Disney's Bob Iger has said their pipelines can produce marvel level blockbusters everyday
And I said I'm the God King of England. Doesn't mean it's true.
Americans still think it’s 2005 huh.
> I thought i was supposed to go out there to do this talk on the digital future & do this talk on the digital future - you know what I usually do -& just try to make people angry, you know- wealthy people upset by telling them people what this technology is for, and all that, and business plans are stupid, and killing the world....
Real talk middle, about the brutal indifferent stasism of AI:
> The dataset on which we are feeding our ai's is us. Is what we are actually doing. We have created a situation where we have a generation of very powerful children learning how to be, based on how we are.
> The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.
I dunno, wasn't Saint Augustine "lord make me good, but not yet" pretty much admitting that our heroes have feet of clay, and yet they function as educators and leaders.
If you modulate the training set through externally derived axioms of good and bad, can't you train an AI on objectively naughty data to recognise the anti-set of good behaviour?
If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.
My argument would be this is both likely and inevitable where there AI is used as a judge. OpenAI, for example, has material explaining how they prune and curate their datasets to alter it's biases.
On the extreme end of this is - What one side considered a terrorist, the other considers them a liberating warrior.
That is easy at that scale but the finer grain you go on morals the more fuzzy it gets and the more push back you will get from all directions. This is how you get things like the 1946 Obscenity threshold of "I know it when I see it".
Many saw the 2008 crash as a major issue that destroyed the lives of millions of people, some hard line environmentalists saw it as the single great decrease in consumption we have ever had.
Ok, this is now on my watchlist. Such a good summation.
Here's my definition btw:
> it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.
You could probably get at what people mean by it by starting with "person I dislike in tech" and asking exactly who they dislike and why. It's not because they write code.
But if you want a cheat, TV Tropes has a pretty good explanation of how the tech bro stereotype differs from the average nerd: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TechBro
I’ve unfortunately had some different life experiences of people using the term in other ways, dissimilar to the stereotype on TVTropes… or at least I perceived it as so.
I think fundamentally it's a combination of 1) arrogance in thinking they understand how the world works socially (and are very capable of solving problems that are fundamentally social), and 2) a complete lack of understanding of how the world works socially.
People hate them because at best they're idiots who achieve nothing and at worst their hardworking idiocy makes the world materially worse.
In particular, techbros tend to have a belief that social problems can be solved with technological solutions (e.g. the solution to the housing crisis is to design a construction technique with lower material/labor costs). The problem in this instance is that if they asked themselves "what is the root cause of the problem", instead of jumping straight into the technology (they commonly "disrupt" old technology by ignoring some particular prevailing wisdom, and frame ignoring said wisdom as "not being closed-minded" instead of as "being stupid and ignoring the lessons of the past" - which, to be fair, is occasionally true).
There's also a more explicitly political component, but saying "they have X politics which is stupid" is a great way to start a political flame-war so I think I'll skip that.
So tl;dr: technosolutionism, plus overconfidence on trying to solve social problems that they don't even understand, let alone have the ability to solve.
It isn't necessarily identity politics to talk about groups of people, nor does it necessarily preclude discussing real solutions either — it depends on the relevancy of the group being mentioned. If the group being mentioned is a subculture or philosophical tendency or whatever the defining characteristics of which are relevant to the subject at hand, then it's perfectly fine to refer to such a group. It's only if you are bringing in groups that aren't actually relevant to a discussion, whose defining characteristics aren't provably related to the characteristic you are trying to apply to them, does talking about groups become a problematic thing. Barring that, being able to talk about groups of people that have different approaches or attitudes or beliefs or behaviors regarding a subject, even if it's to speak derogatorily about them, is basically necessary to have a functional discussion about certain topics whatsoever.
In this case, we are having a discussion about attitudes towards technological solutions and technological progress, and one of the major cultures that influence discussions around that stuff and the direction things actually take are 'tech bros.' If we band the ability to speak about such a group that would just give them free reign to do anything they wanted without being criticized.
To define the group, it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.
This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.
> bro - a young male who is part of a group of similar male friends stereotypically characterized as hearty, athletic, self-confident, party-loving, etc.
Are there no women who have the same attitude towards tech that you ascribe to tech bros? Or older, unathletic, unconfident, or introverted men?
I also don't think your definition is universal. As evidence you need look no further than a sibling comment to your own which implies that I am a tech bro even though I don't hold the beliefs/attitude in your definition (I believe that technological solutions do exist - but don't think they are the solution to every problem. I also think that qualitative human factors, like happiness, are very important indeed).
I also disagree that this joke is as conducive to constructive conversation as you seem to think it is:
> I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity.
Is it constructive to take pleasure in "upsetting" people? If he were really out to change peoples' minds rather than simply preach to the choir, I think it would be more effective to adopt a more respectful tone towards people who disagree with him.
> This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.
Is it though? Can you give me an example of anyone who self-identifies as a tech bro according to your definition, let alone a enough people to call it a "major culture"? Or is it just a harmful stereotype that gets applied to people to discount their opinions instead of engaging with what they actually believe? Because my experience is that most people tend to hold more nuanced beliefs than what you are describing.
I'll also note that is a red herring, as it's not necessary for anybody to identify as an X for X to exist and be a problem. Indeed, some of the most prominent problems today involve people in that space. Exhibit A would be Elon Musk. But most bigots know that openly identifying as a bigot doesn't work out well for them. You might also read Mills or Manne or Bancroft for a look at how and why not identifying as X is part of the game.
I actually tend to disagree with this. Solving problems generally requires consensus. If a term like "tech bro" is too reductive, divisive, and imprecise for people to agree on, we should throw it out and come up with a better way to describe the problem.
For example, a major attribute that people tend to associate with tech bros is being overly optimistic. Most people in tech (even Elon Musk) would readily admit to being overly optimistic at times, and willing to discuss the risks, mitigation, etc. To me this is much more constructive than just labeling someone a "tech bro".
I think the biggest problem with Elon Musk is a lot of credulous people, helped by credulous tech media, treated him as a serious person. But he's obviously not interested in dialog with anybody who doesn't kiss his entire ass. Having a convenient contemptuous label like "tech bro" is absolutely helpful in undermining that unearned and dangerous false respect.
And I'd say the second-biggest problem here is people valuing civility above all else, which allows toxic narcissists like Musk to run rings around everybody that's supposedly pursuing consensus with people in positions in power. Strangely, you never see those people working very hard to get consensus with the less powerful people that they harm. Coincidence, I imagine.
To be clear I am in no way defending everything that Musk has said or done. But I think that people are complicated, no one is either all good or all bad, and Musk has some traits that I admire and others that I detest.
Is "people valuing consensus above all else" really a thing? Can you give a specific example where you feel "people valuing civility above all else... allows Musk to run rings around everybody that's supposedly pursuing consensus with people in positions in power"? I'm sure you have something in mind, but I'm just not sure what you're referencing.
I certainly put a high value on consensus - but if consensus can't be reached then I can be supportive of more strong-armed approaches in order to achieve a desired outcome. Name-calling just doesn't seem that necessary or useful to me though. Hearing someone call Musk a "techbro" doesn't really do anything to convince me that Musk is a bad guy - if anything it makes me think "here's a fairly extreme and quite-likely biased opinion that I should approach with extra skepticism." Rather, the thing that has sullied Musk's reputation for me in recent years is simply reading the things that he himself has said and done... the facts, clearly stated, are more than sufficient in Musk's case.
Unfortunately I can't deny that name-calling does seem to influence people more than I would like. Democrats and Republicans seemingly engage in ever more name-calling and stereotyping for one-another, and yeah I suppose it gets people engaged and out to the polls to vote (or out to the capitol building for an attempted coup). But it's such a shallow form of debate, and over time the rhetoric tends to drift pretty far from reality as echo chambers form. There are probably a number of important things that people could agree on (like the bi-partisan infrastucture bill) if they weren't so caught up in name-calling and squabbling about (often) irreconcileable differences. This is the feeling that I got when originally watching the video and subsequently reading your comment that I initially responded to.
Speaking of shallow debate, I have read a number of your comments now about how Musk and techbros are ruining the world - and I honestly don't understand where you are coming from. Our frames of reference are different enough that when you say "techbro" it apparently conjures a different image in your head than it does in mine - and the word itself is not enough to convey your intended meaning, only your sentiment gets through. You haven't referenced a specific real-world problem or event that I can say "yeah I agree with that" or not - just a description from "tv tropes" that I maintain is only a stereotype and doesn't accurately reflect reality. (Is there some truth in it? Sure, but in reality people are not that one-dimensional).
I'm open to at least considering how people in the tech industry or even I myself am doing something harmful that I'm not aware of. I may even already be in agreement with you. And yet here we are somehow stuck debating whether stereotypes, name-calling, and consensus-building are good or bad.
But I think that's a very shallow understanding of "identity politics". Typically that's used to mean a deep or immutable characteristic. It's not like techbros come from Techbronistan or County Techbro, with deep cultural roots. Tech bros are dudes who chose to go into tech and choose a hypermasculine performance. And that performance, like the "frat bro" stereotype isn't just about their personal choices. It's about its impact on others, and their indifference to that impact.
Which is also, not coincidentally, a major critique of the tech industry as a whole. If you really care about "serious solutions", maybe you could grapple with that, rather than performing offense right off the bat.
For “bro”, I’ll use the definition from merriam webster that I used elsewhere: “a young male who is part of a group of similar male friends stereotypically characterized as hearty, athletic, self-confident, party-loving, etc.”
So they are “male”, and “young” - that’s two immutable characteristics.
If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession? And the problem of course is that it’s very easy to see a person with the above three traits and assume they think or behave a certain way - i.e stereotyping.
And since we’re talking about gender, age, and socioeconomic status - I think the term identity politics is applicable.
Words spread when lots of people start using it and lots of other people successfully infer the same meaning from context as what it was intended to mean - what people intuitively interpret is incredibly culturally-specific and subjective, and thus is utterly impossible to nail down in some sort of rigorous formal logic.
I bring this up because assuming "techbro" means "tech" plus "bro" (instead of referring to a specific attitude common among FAANG employees - and if you ask why people say "Xes" instead of "people who think X", the answer is brevity) is a very naive and inaccurate approach to language.
>If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession? And the problem of course is that it’s very easy to see a person with the above three traits and assume they think or behave a certain way - i.e stereotyping.
What you're saying is that "techbro" is a politically incorrect term, and that anyone who uses the term is therefore stereotyping. The problem here is that people can use the term (because it's useful) without necessarily supporting the choice of words the term is made up of - as I mentioned above, when people use a word they do so because they believe other people will reliably connect it with the right concept.
I agree that stereotypes have their uses in popular culture. And often there is some basis for stereotypes in reality. But people should at least be aware when they are using stereotypes, of their inherent imprecision, and why people find them offensive/hurtful. Do you agree that “techbro” is a stereotype?
And I think we should be careful not to build our world views on top of stereotypes. I.e. a world view that the tech industry is run by a bunch of techbros who don’t understand or care about humanity is a gross oversimplification.
This is such a good example of why technical degrees need stronger humanities requirements. Why indeed?
Most of it can only be consumed and rewriting the rules is hard or almost impossible.
This is spot on. And the lie kept being repeatedly sold by tech bros and streaming service who need to lower their cost as much as possible and are, in 2023, still unable to stream lossless music to their audience without losing too much money.
And the tech bros, for the love of tech, keep explaining you how "you cannot tell the difference so you may as well listen to the lossy song instead of the lossless one". But why? Fuck no. Just no. Why the heck would I listen to a 320 kbps mp3 when I can have something simpler and unarguably more correct?
Do I want to go to the Le Louvre museum and see a color print of Mona Lisa, made from a .jpg at 97% quality "because from 1 meter nobody can tell the difference"? For the love of tricking human's eye just as mp3 can trick human's ears? Just screw that mindset of disrespecting humans.
Now a case could be made that "CD audio" ain't "human" either but the CD audio format was created in 1979 (?), then commercialized in the early 80s. This was way before the real tech abuse started. It's an incredibly well conceived format and it's all I need.
"the original kind of tech bros science nerd need to separate from humanity and nature"
They are tricksters. They want to trick my eyes and my ears for the love of Rube-Goldberg algorithms and the complexity deity. They want to trick me behaviorally. They need to sell me ads. They need to track me.
I'm off ranting, I'll now go buy a few audio CDs. Early 80s tech, the best one.
If you are looking for the complete opposite you should consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6GIrCJY7s (german only)
Taken metaphorically is this the new incarnation of the "ruining society" meme/rhetorical device after it got utterly discredited because society was already ruined by jazz music, women voting, women wearing pants, LGBT people existing in secrecy, rock music, metal, rap, LGBT people existing openly, and many more? If so it is just as insipid as its ancestors.
I find the self-flagellation complex of claiming tech to be the well from which all sorrows are drawn, ruiner of the perfect Eden which existed before not only utterly stupid but downright tedious and tiresome.
It isn't the technology I fear, it is how people build grand expectations on the technology and then start throwing people under the bus of the "great god of progress".
Those that are first to implement new technology are usually the most reckless, uncaring to the possible blow back provided it benefits them. Those that hold back to analyse the risks many never make it to the market because they are crushed by the move fast people.
This is why we have such rampant con's a disinformation nowadays, those that push their ideas and concepts out fastest can generally get a good head start on those that are trying to be more moral or ethical.
I find it fascinating you focused on just the really negative aspects. I mean sure we did pollute the environment, but that's par for course for living things. Keep in mind Oxygen is a waste product for most methane based lifeforms. All living things are entropy maximizers, expecting stuff to not get shitty over time is almost a fools errand.
It's like AC. It's great for you but everything else is now more heated.
there are a variety of actors you are talking about and there are many, many good things technologists have created in my lifetime. saying the industry "fucks up everything it touches" is a sign you are the kind of cynic I'm referring to. my condolences.
And it's not just because I work in tech (I often fantasize about quitting my job and buying a farm and living a low-tech lifestyle). I would find such remarks equally offputting if they were made about any group of people really... a political group (on either the left or right), a religious group, ethnic gorup, etc. I'm fine with attacking ideas, but not groups of people.
There are plenty of rational, thoughtful critics of technology, and the ones who are most listened to are the ones who have built things and shown themselves willing to error correct in a way that balances tradeoffs.
It's actually quite distinguishable.
Stereotyping is when you assign characteristics to a group that are unrelated to the group's actual defining characteristics, and so there's no reason to think the group actually has this characteristics. For instance, saying all black people like hot sauce or something to use a silly example.
Meanwhile, if you are talking about a group that you've defined in terms of characteristics relevant to whatever you are discussing, and are only assigning characteristics that are relevant to how you've defined the group, then that's just a necessary part of reasoning about the social dynamics of whatever subject you're talking about.
Furthermore, it's only bigotry when you are speaking negatively or hatefully about a group with morally irrelevant characteristics and members that can't choose whether or not to be part of that group (so membership in it is also morally inert). None of this is true for 'tech bros' as a group.
Tech bros are a specific tendency/subculture of people who work in tech, with attitudes toward technical progress characterized by a brash and hubristic belief that purely technological solutions can solve everything, and that qualitative considerations of human experience and existence are irrelevant to decision-making and should be ignored as "irrational."
Thus, talking about "tech bros" in this context perfectly meets all my criteria for being valid. The group is defined in terms of characteristics relevant to this discussion, isn't assigned any characteristics that don't follow from that, only garners a negative connotation for reasons based on the actual definition of the group, and it is a group that's just a philosophical category and so of course people can volitionally join or leave based on their actual beliefs.
> It absolutely is tribalistic stereotyping
They're talking about an actually real philosophical and ideological tendency among some people in Tech. It's not a tribalistic stereotype. By that definition talking about any group of people that hears to a general ideology would be tribalistic stereotyping and that's extremely stupid. Being able to talk about the people that have a certain ideological tendency is a necessary part of talking about the social dynamics of issues.
> to be disparaging and generalizing about people
If you are talking about a general group of people and it's a group that is defined by their adherence to a squishy set of bad ideas, I don't see the issue with that.
It seems like you and the other people objecting to the use of the term "tech bro" just feel offended and want to wiggle out of that any way you can. So you try to reduce discussions down to purely only ever being able to talk about specific individuals, essentially ripping out an important conceptual aspect of the discussion by removing the ability to abstract, which is a crucial part of reasoning. Referring to the group of people that adheres to a certain attitude or ideology is not tribalistic nor stereotyping. Assigning arbitrary unrelated attributes to a group is stereotyping.
Technology has been described as vicious circle previously as the problems it "solves" it (the technology) created in the first place, so it's not really going anywhere... and only grows (for its own sake?).
Distinguished authors like Ted Kaczynski wrote on this.
It is similar to Ted K in that, yes, here is a whole lot of problems that the technological society have brought on. Cool, now what? I ain't going to do what Ted did and even then - the happiness question pops up - will it make us any happier to follow that path. I don't know but I have a feeling that it wouldn't help or hurt, we just have a default and go with that.