Silicon Valley Roused By Secession Call

I can't believe this isn't satire. To me it exemplifies the exponentially growing hubris emanating from Silicon Valley -- namely, that the products being built are more significant than the people who use them. Saying that what's been built so far could replace the rest of society without a problem is this logic taken to its absurd extreme.

Take, for example, passages like "Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington" -- which I guess is intended to imply that the state is personified best by its role in regulating taxis and hotels? As if Silicon Valley has a workable alternative to infrastructure, energy, the justice system, police, hospitals, primary education, and the rest of the $4 tr federal budget.

I laughed the most at "The Quantified Self movement helps people self-measure and opt out of the health care system." Yes, because measuring your heart rate while waiting in line at Peet's does wonders for people with chronic illnesses.

And, of course, Srinivasan's suggestion that people who sneer at his "frontier" must also "hate technology". No, I just hate when people assume it will inevitably solve all problems. If society at large begins to "backlash" to Silicon Valley, it's for that very reason.

What would the constitution look like?

The Vietnam war was managed by technocrats - look how well that turned out.

Libertarian ideals are a step removed from anarchy, and all fine in theory - but extremely naive because as one gets older, you (hopefully) begin to understand the flawed nature of humanity better. I can see how getting older makes people more conservative, or at least susceptible to conservative thinking - I on the other hand am becoming more of a anarchic Marxist. Not because such ideologies are achievable in the real world, but because the utility of their theory sheds light on the bad side of capitalism and Western society that gets swept under the carpet (cue Noam Chomsky soundbite...) I just wish "conservatives" would live up to their lofty ever so repeated ideals, instead of being the utter hypocrites they are (along with the liberal hypocrites)

To create a anarcho-socialist Marxist paradise, or even a libertarian one, the members of the community would have to be spiritually advanced enough such that non-parts of the community (i.e. government and regulations, etc) wouldn't be needed to step in to maintain balance - the system (community of people) would be self-regulating. Libertarians like to think they'd be self-regulating, but how many of them slavishly bow to the God (invisible hand) of the market? The market won't regulate human emotions, like greed and fear - the market is very easily manipulated by the sociopathic as the last few years have shown. Libertarianism could not have done jack to correct what they have wrought lately. Perhaps society is too big now - a small libertarian community might be achievable, but humanity is too interconnected now.

I recently read some stuff on behavioral economics - it looks like economists are wising up and realizing most non-economists are not sociopaths, unlike them. So a proper understanding of economics requires an understanding of human psychology and how it, and especially psychopathology, are primary factors in economic systems. I just spent the last 4 years of my life being manipulated by a bona fide sociopath, who manipulated me into building him a company, then forced me out just as money actually started rolling in... so take that into account when evaluating my current stance.

It is said engineers don't really begin to understand that non-engineers don't think like engineers until their 30s - I can certainly attest to that. Or maybe I'm just more autistic or whatnot. But after I dropped acid for the first time I started to grok how working as a US DoD defense contractor was a waste of time. If all the engineers working for the industrial-military complex said "fuck you", what would happen? You think politicians have any useful skills? The problem with engineers is that we are so enamored of thinking up and building stuff, that asking ourselves "why are the larger, more nebulous consequences of this? How are the people in charge going to profit from this?" gets lost sometimes - IT is addictive in some sense, or at least that mode of thinking.

So to wrap up this essay, which didn't start out as one (I am just winging it), speeches like the one mentioned in the article are fine as exhortations to try and improve society, but to opt out entirely is not going to work unless that new society that is created figures out how to deal with the dark side of humanity - the greed, the sociopaths, and the garden variety drama that goes on between people (even engineers). To do that is going to require an understanding of empathy, and a better understanding of humankind (in a spiritual sense) that I wouldn't expect the average 20 something person in IT to grasp. Right now regulation of society is supposed to be the purpose of government, but it is now obvious the hypocrisy, inefficiency, and stupidity is too much to ignore anymore. But you can't get rid of government until you solve the problems it is supposed to regulate. Perhaps governments, or other such things like feudalism, are instead an emergent property of a system? An emergent property based on factors like the psychological relationship between individuals, which is defined by social customs and other anthropological like things?

To ask one's self "who is John Galt?" is a good thing, but you also have to remember Galt was creating a community and that relationships between people shouldn't be based on economics. It always seems to get lost in the noise that one aspect of John Galt's society was that it would be populated by people with integrity, not the rent seeking parasites living off of income from capital gains. You can't live with integrity if you are primarily concerned with maximizing your economic status, because that, in theory, requires you to act like a sociopath.

The first step I would propose instead would be to figure out how to ensure manipulative authoritarians are not elected to high office and how to weed out the sociopathic from high finance (hell, all of society entirely). Once that is accomplished, we'll be farther along towards the ideals the "Average" person (or guilt ridden Western white middle class liberal, if you prefer) likes to espouse.