The Children of Silicon Valley

After reading a little I thought "yep, this is gonna be another conservative screed." Kept reading and yes, it's another conservative screed. I realize the author(s) might think they are liberals, but they're not. They're reactionaries.

I can't be a conservative. I have eyes. I can't be a reactionary either because I've studied history, and I don't buy the sugar coated version of it. There is nothing worth going back to, and there is little worth conserving except insofar as it serves as a platform and scaffolding to build something else.

I just can't for the life of me understand how someone could be truly satisfied with this existence enough to want to conserve it... to protect it from change. Sure, some people are randomly selected by the genetic lottery to be handsome, intelligent, or born to wealthy parents or in a wealthy nation. I guess if you were one of those people and never bothered to contemplate beyond these immediate realities, nor to ponder the fundamental and utter brutality of that lottery itself, you might be satisfied.

Meanwhile the rest of us are trying to find some way -- be it through spirituality, technology, art, science, or religion -- to build a ladder tall enough to climb out of the hell that is the Darwinian process that gave birth to us.

I'm not saying I hate my life. I actually lead a pretty good one. I have people I really love, a good job, a great looking future. I guess I got a decent lotto ticket. But when I open my eyes and step outside myself and look objectively at the whole reality of my circumstance and those of the people around me, I can't help but remember that I'm in hell.

So yes I sympathize with "disrupt everything," even though it's reckless and sometimes amounts to little in the end. At least it's trying to do something. I even find myself sympathizing on some level with religious fanatics. I don't share their metaphysics but I understand what could lead a person to that place. The thing that could make a person fast until near death, blow themselves up to achieve martyrdom, or drive nails into their own hands in imitation of Christ... that's the same fundamental dissatisfaction with our position in the universe that makes us spend years trying to solve hard technical problems and build rockets to the moon. If we were satisfied we would do none of these things. We would eat, drink, be merry, and die.