This was, in my opinion, possibly the worst anti-technology article () from a popular news source I have read in a long time. There are some good points (billionaires and their creation and...
Exemplary
This was, in my opinion, possibly the worst anti-technology article (rant?) from a popular news source I have read in a long time. There are some good points (billionaires and their creation and support of alt-reality), but many decisions by the author are strange. On mobile, so won't spend the time to thoroughly explain, but the first most egregious mistake was calling them "Technocrats" and then laying the creation to Musks grandfather in the 1930s.
Why do I have a problem with that? Because I collect, and likely one of the most interested and knowledgeable person on, the history of Technocracy. The movement that was an engineer-created science-focused worker-centric sect of mainstream socialism that started in the early 1910s (technically 1899, if we consider Veblen and his "The Theory of the Leisure Class" as creator, but I digress) and was the fastest growing political movement until it was outlawed by Canada in the early 1940s.
The second was their widely misconstrued idea and definition of transhumanism, and the history of the movement (Bostrom is not the "dean" of transhumanism) and the ideas of Transhumanism go much farther back than the early 2000s, there isn't even any mention of FM-2030, Max More, Aleksander Chislenko, Extropy Institute and magazine, or anything of the sort — which were all vehemently against the corporatization and left/right dichotomy of politics and technology. The way this reads is that they (the author) subscribe to the more "fringe" histories of social movements that more and more of the alt-right tends to blast as fear-mongering on their webpages (seriously, do not set a Google news notification for Transhumanism, bad idea) and that they believe technology, and the people who actually build it are wrong about the world and we must turn the clocks back before they were invented.
I'm....super interested and want to subscribe to your newsletters. Do you feel like the author is just pulling coop sounding words without really understanding what those words have a long history...
I'm....super interested and want to subscribe to your newsletters. Do you feel like the author is just pulling coop sounding words without really understanding what those words have a long history of already meaning?
Why was technocracy outlawed in Canada? Is it just because it's sort of socialism and we hate everything socialist? Can it make a come back? What were criticisms against it?
And yes I'm getting a lot of transhumanism garbage as well and having to wade through so much while being new to it trying to learn is very hard.
Can you recommend the most layperson friendly intro into these topics?
Sadly, I don't really have a newsletter anymore these days. I've been a bit preoccupied with my day job as a roboticist to really spend the time on it - I was (am?) working on a book outlining the...
Exemplary
Sadly, I don't really have a newsletter anymore these days. I've been a bit preoccupied with my day job as a roboticist to really spend the time on it - I was (am?) working on a book outlining the history of the movement, and the future (which is seeing a slight resurgence, just in a very different, less organized, way). A lot of the "insane" ideas of the original Technocracy (1920-1935) are becoming mainstream now, UBI, energy credits (sort of), universal healthcare, limiting the working hours to less than 30 hours a week, public housing projects, etc.
Why was technocracy outlawed in Canada? Is it just because it's sort of socialism and we hate everything socialist?
Socialism is bad, didn't you hear? Particularly when it was gaining ground just as the World War II was starting and so anything to do with it was deemed a hazard, even if the ideas were drastically different from Germanic National "Socialism". It was the fastest growing political movement in North America, and that worried a lot of the main parties and people in power at the time. The growth was primarily due to women joining, and that was certainly even worse.
Can it make a come back?
I believe it has! The ideas were so far ahead (a 100+ years in some cases) that they have started to become more mainstream. I've listed a few of the criticism below that are understandable then, as they are now in some minds.
What were criticisms against it?
Too forward thinking for one thing,
Public housing options wouldn't be a thing for a few more decades really (even though they extended it to everyone being able to live in a well-made engineering standard housing if they so wanted near to where they worked).
Energy credits are still a bit too far (think instead of money as we know it, everything was priced on how much energy was put into its creation from origin to your hands - this idea is still far out there, but there are some great independent ideas in there)
UBI was particularly more of a dream than it is now (but its finally being tried!)
Universal healthcare still has naysayers today even though its wildly possibly and beneficial.
=Many people didn't believe that you could work less than 40-60 hours a week. Technocracy advocated heavily for a four hours workday and only for four days a week, and still keep the economy chugging along. This was mainly for a manufacturing economy (which we were at the time). The calendar was thought to look something like this.
Equality and freedom of all races, gender, and sexuality were all things that were talked about (in 1919!). They believed allowing people to live their lives would allow for more equality in every way, and lead to the greatest scientific and artistic revolution in human history.
That automation would unlock the power of the masses. They believed mechanized automation would do away with the more dangerous jobs in the world, no more death or amputations from having to work, and that through automation we could remove the most harmful and mindless of jobs. At the time, most didn't believe this was possible.
Environmental protection, there was a lot of more informal dialogue on protecting the environment from construction, mining, and protecting creatures of all kinds outside of farming and more urban environments. They wanted better safety regulations for workers, and better safety regulations for nature in general - protecting against deforestation, mining, oil fields, waterways, things of that, ahem, nature.
Can you recommend the most layperson friendly intro into these topics?
Sure!
For Technocracy: I highly suggest Life in a Technocracy (1919) by Harold Loeb - you could take these words, slap a new copyright date of 2023 on it, make some minor tweaks, and you wouldn't believe that it was talking about the world we live in now. Their problems of inequality, housing being unstable, working conditions being poor, etc are all very apt for today. There was a reprint back in 1996, so you can find copies (and digital formats of the PDF on... websites of a certain kind very easily).
It's by far the best of the bunch. Harold Loeb is considered the "father" of the movement, there was a split in the 1930s by a more industrious group (led by a marketer of all people, trying to cash in on the movement) who didn't agree with everything Loeb wrote, but the core concepts were really put into play there that defined the rest of the movement. The more industrious group lasted longer (Technocracy Inc.), still publishing magazines and updates well into the 1970s. You can find them on Archive.org, great reading material!
I would also suggest going slightly farther back, and reading the aforementioned Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class", he was really the founder, or grandfather, of the core philosophy of the group. I consider him possibly one of the best real-world philosophers of all time. Easy to read, easy to understand, very modern in its interpretations of the world.
Both of those are written in spectacularly modern vernacular, it's astounding.
For Transhumanism: This is a hard one, I read so many!
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Weiner - this one isn't specifically about Transhumanism, but its a good book that forms a lot of the ideas later in the movement.
The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (1993) - this one is great, I've read it twice, highly suggest it.
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (1999) by Margaret Wertheim- this is one of my favorite books, its a fun read!
For non-books, which may be a better method to start, as a lot of the more serious writings were published on the 'net on pages that you can't find anywhere.
Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought - I helped work with a few people to try to find and upload the only available copies of the magazine. This was a fun project. There are a lot of insane and cool ideas in there. A lot of the people who wrote that magazine became very influential people in cryogenics, biotechnologies, robotics, neuroscience, etc. They wrote on genetic engineering, bioengineering, space colonies, robotics, mind uploading (shameless plug: something I wrote a little about here: Uploading vs. Cloning a Mind).
The writings of Aleksander Chislenko, known as ~/sasha. They sadly killed themselves right before the main technological revolution in 2000, but their writings were quite great, sometimes dull and lackluster, not well organized, but very entertaining.
That's all that comes to mind at the moment, there are many, many, more - but I have to get back to work. Once I'm home again I'll try to raid my library for more. I am certainly missing the best.
I use they as a singular term, and as my default for practically everyone, not necessarily for specific gendered reasons. There was no thought to it in that way, but I can understand your thought...
I use they as a singular term, and as my default for practically everyone, not necessarily for specific gendered reasons. There was no thought to it in that way, but I can understand your thought process on that. No worries.
I get your frustration (and would love to read more about the movement), but I've always assumed the modern use of Technocracy is mostly just a combination of "Technology" and "Aristocracy." The...
I get your frustration (and would love to read more about the movement), but I've always assumed the modern use of Technocracy is mostly just a combination of "Technology" and "Aristocracy." The stage of which is fairly well set.
I agree with you, I think there's a failure in nomenclature here. There's at least two definitions of technocracy, the historical and the more current as you point out. As drannex points out,...
I agree with you, I think there's a failure in nomenclature here. There's at least two definitions of technocracy, the historical and the more current as you point out. As drannex points out, transhuman has even more meanings and has been picked up by the alt-right as a word (thanks Alex Jones!) with nearly no meaning other than whatever meaning is needed to fear monger.
I would be interested in drannex's thoughts, should they have any, as to why technocracy and transhumanism have been picked up by the fringe so hard, especially when they champion people like Musk and Thiel so frequently.
From the excerpts, I found the author leaning towards a moral compass of some sort that I believe makes the writing sound like a rant. In my opinion "morality" is absent in this world. I don't...
Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” ....I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies.
Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks.
Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control. To quote historian Timothy Snyder, Donald Trump has shown that he “was lying not so much to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality.”
But of all the myths the Technocrats peddle, none is more far-fetched than transhumanism, a concept dear to the heart of Peter Thiel.
In his 2021 book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn makes the frightening claim that as the planet warms, the same tropical pests that have plagued the Southern hemisphere will establish themselves in much of the southern United States, for example. They will carry with them “some complex mix of the dengue virus and the yellow fever virus, but also the viruses that cause chikungunya, Zika fever and Mayaro.” In the decades to come, people living in, say, Mississippi may experience earlier death because tropical diseases will be moving north—even as people like Thiel propose having us live to 200 or so.
The gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, for instance, has already been used in China to alter nonviable human embryos, ostensibly to see if it can be done. Applications to regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States have been made to experiment with the tool to edit out mutant genes that could cause some severe, mostly very rare, diseases.
So the day is coming when the embryo you and your spouse have created in vitro will be tested for many characteristics, and you might be presented with a menu like this:
Higher-than-average risk of type 2 diabetes and colon cancer.
Lower-than-average risk of asthma and autism.
Dark eyes, light brown hair, male pattern baldness.
40 percent chance of coming in above the 50th percentile in SAT tests (if SAT tests haven’t been compl
It would be up to you to decide if you wanted, for a very high price, to edit the genes of your embryo before it was implanted.
From the excerpts, I found the author leaning towards a moral compass of some sort that I believe makes the writing sound like a rant. In my opinion "morality" is absent in this world. I don't mean morality in a religious or atheistic or aesthetic or secular or any other sense. I mean moral or morality as a concept, we just don't have it. It used to exist in some form or the other but not now. Morality assumes an "ideal" way of doing things which expects possible course correction if a given situation is deemed to be veering from this accepted "ideal" way. No such concept exists now. We live in its absence.
I believe we could easily find people to adopt or adapt to any type of reality as stated in excerpts or in any of its references. From among those if we consider just the gene editing, I expect that there would many couples (across the gender spectrum) who would gladly accept RPG type character creation for newborns basing on certain assumptions which they hold to be right. The powerful tech barons (or simply money barons employing tech) will just tap into this readily available reserve of humanity.
Communism, fascism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and all other -isms are remains of the old world left in our languages with no weight in meaning. Just empty shells (concept of Democracy included). Old world is long gone. We are just holding onto words that make us nostalgic about a world that doesn't exist anymore. We believe that we can course correct basing on some fledgling moral sense. Its just a ghost. Like the old world, this sense too doesn't exist anymore. There is no compass of any kind. Moral or otherwise.
I reject this premise. While moral absolutism is (rightfully) dead to anyone paying attention, morals certainly exist, and it's very much a spectrum. Very few people would disagree that murder is...
Morality assumes an "ideal" way of doing things which expects possible course correction if a given situation is deemed to be veering from this accepted "ideal" way. No such concept exists now. We live in its absence.
I reject this premise. While moral absolutism is (rightfully) dead to anyone paying attention, morals certainly exist, and it's very much a spectrum.
Very few people would disagree that murder is wrong, in the broad abstract. But almost nobody would also say that murder is always unjustified. It's almost always possible to find at least one mitigating circumstance that transcends murder's moral wrongness. Its just that list of circumstances is different for everyone. And part of coming up with a just society is accomodating the widest possible swath of moral freedoms. Sometimes there are losers, like fascists, because their moral desires are completely incompatible with so many others. Sometimes peace treaties like Roe V Wade need erected to compromise between warring moral ideals. And sometimes those peace treaties fail.
Sure, the only person you are morally accountable to is yourself. But others will certainly judge you based upon their own moral constructs, and as such, over time an average concensus will be reached.
All of those 'isms' you speak of have plenty of meaning and weight. They might be used incorrectly quite frequently, but that does not mean they have any less meaning when used correctly.
Edit: And to me personally, I consider the idea of "designer children" to be an abhorrent idea. Many people already treat their children like props in their feeds. Any rise in popularity of this tech, especially for cosmetic traits, is going to come with all the problems we see with the current state of dog breeding.
This was, in my opinion, possibly the worst anti-technology article (
rant?) from a popular news source I have read in a long time. There are some good points (billionaires and their creation and support of alt-reality), but many decisions by the author are strange. On mobile, so won't spend the time to thoroughly explain, but the first most egregious mistake was calling them "Technocrats" and then laying the creation to Musks grandfather in the 1930s.Why do I have a problem with that? Because I collect, and likely one of the most interested and knowledgeable person on, the history of Technocracy. The movement that was an engineer-created science-focused worker-centric sect of mainstream socialism that started in the early 1910s (technically 1899, if we consider Veblen and his "The Theory of the Leisure Class" as creator, but I digress) and was the fastest growing political movement until it was outlawed by Canada in the early 1940s.
The second was their widely misconstrued idea and definition of transhumanism, and the history of the movement (Bostrom is not the "dean" of transhumanism) and the ideas of Transhumanism go much farther back than the early 2000s, there isn't even any mention of FM-2030, Max More, Aleksander Chislenko, Extropy Institute and magazine, or anything of the sort — which were all vehemently against the corporatization and left/right dichotomy of politics and technology. The way this reads is that they (the author) subscribe to the more "fringe" histories of social movements that more and more of the alt-right tends to blast as fear-mongering on their webpages (seriously, do not set a Google news notification for Transhumanism, bad idea) and that they believe technology, and the people who actually build it are wrong about the world and we must turn the clocks back before they were invented.
I'm....super interested and want to subscribe to your newsletters. Do you feel like the author is just pulling coop sounding words without really understanding what those words have a long history of already meaning?
Why was technocracy outlawed in Canada? Is it just because it's sort of socialism and we hate everything socialist? Can it make a come back? What were criticisms against it?
And yes I'm getting a lot of transhumanism garbage as well and having to wade through so much while being new to it trying to learn is very hard.
Can you recommend the most layperson friendly intro into these topics?
Sadly, I don't really have a newsletter anymore these days. I've been a bit preoccupied with my day job as a roboticist to really spend the time on it - I was (am?) working on a book outlining the history of the movement, and the future (which is seeing a slight resurgence, just in a very different, less organized, way). A lot of the "insane" ideas of the original Technocracy (1920-1935) are becoming mainstream now, UBI, energy credits (sort of), universal healthcare, limiting the working hours to less than 30 hours a week, public housing projects, etc.
Socialism is bad, didn't you hear? Particularly when it was gaining ground just as the World War II was starting and so anything to do with it was deemed a hazard, even if the ideas were drastically different from Germanic National "Socialism". It was the fastest growing political movement in North America, and that worried a lot of the main parties and people in power at the time. The growth was primarily due to women joining, and that was certainly even worse.
I believe it has! The ideas were so far ahead (a 100+ years in some cases) that they have started to become more mainstream. I've listed a few of the criticism below that are understandable then, as they are now in some minds.
Too forward thinking for one thing,
Sure!
For Technocracy: I highly suggest Life in a Technocracy (1919) by Harold Loeb - you could take these words, slap a new copyright date of 2023 on it, make some minor tweaks, and you wouldn't believe that it was talking about the world we live in now. Their problems of inequality, housing being unstable, working conditions being poor, etc are all very apt for today. There was a reprint back in 1996, so you can find copies (and digital formats of the PDF on... websites of a certain kind very easily).
It's by far the best of the bunch. Harold Loeb is considered the "father" of the movement, there was a split in the 1930s by a more industrious group (led by a marketer of all people, trying to cash in on the movement) who didn't agree with everything Loeb wrote, but the core concepts were really put into play there that defined the rest of the movement. The more industrious group lasted longer (Technocracy Inc.), still publishing magazines and updates well into the 1970s. You can find them on Archive.org, great reading material!
I would also suggest going slightly farther back, and reading the aforementioned Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class", he was really the founder, or grandfather, of the core philosophy of the group. I consider him possibly one of the best real-world philosophers of all time. Easy to read, easy to understand, very modern in its interpretations of the world.
Both of those are written in spectacularly modern vernacular, it's astounding.
For Transhumanism: This is a hard one, I read so many!
For non-books, which may be a better method to start, as a lot of the more serious writings were published on the 'net on pages that you can't find anywhere.
That's all that comes to mind at the moment, there are many, many, more - but I have to get back to work. Once I'm home again I'll try to raid my library for more. I am certainly missing the best.
I use they as a singular term, and as my default for practically everyone, not necessarily for specific gendered reasons. There was no thought to it in that way, but I can understand your thought process on that. No worries.
I get your frustration (and would love to read more about the movement), but I've always assumed the modern use of Technocracy is mostly just a combination of "Technology" and "Aristocracy." The stage of which is fairly well set.
I agree with you, I think there's a failure in nomenclature here. There's at least two definitions of technocracy, the historical and the more current as you point out. As drannex points out, transhuman has even more meanings and has been picked up by the alt-right as a word (thanks Alex Jones!) with nearly no meaning other than whatever meaning is needed to fear monger.
I would be interested in drannex's thoughts, should they have any, as to why technocracy and transhumanism have been picked up by the fringe so hard, especially when they champion people like Musk and Thiel so frequently.
From the excerpts, I found the author leaning towards a moral compass of some sort that I believe makes the writing sound like a rant. In my opinion "morality" is absent in this world. I don't mean morality in a religious or atheistic or aesthetic or secular or any other sense. I mean moral or morality as a concept, we just don't have it. It used to exist in some form or the other but not now. Morality assumes an "ideal" way of doing things which expects possible course correction if a given situation is deemed to be veering from this accepted "ideal" way. No such concept exists now. We live in its absence.
I believe we could easily find people to adopt or adapt to any type of reality as stated in excerpts or in any of its references. From among those if we consider just the gene editing, I expect that there would many couples (across the gender spectrum) who would gladly accept RPG type character creation for newborns basing on certain assumptions which they hold to be right. The powerful tech barons (or simply money barons employing tech) will just tap into this readily available reserve of humanity.
Communism, fascism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and all other -isms are remains of the old world left in our languages with no weight in meaning. Just empty shells (concept of Democracy included). Old world is long gone. We are just holding onto words that make us nostalgic about a world that doesn't exist anymore. We believe that we can course correct basing on some fledgling moral sense. Its just a ghost. Like the old world, this sense too doesn't exist anymore. There is no compass of any kind. Moral or otherwise.
I reject this premise. While moral absolutism is (rightfully) dead to anyone paying attention, morals certainly exist, and it's very much a spectrum.
Very few people would disagree that murder is wrong, in the broad abstract. But almost nobody would also say that murder is always unjustified. It's almost always possible to find at least one mitigating circumstance that transcends murder's moral wrongness. Its just that list of circumstances is different for everyone. And part of coming up with a just society is accomodating the widest possible swath of moral freedoms. Sometimes there are losers, like fascists, because their moral desires are completely incompatible with so many others. Sometimes peace treaties like Roe V Wade need erected to compromise between warring moral ideals. And sometimes those peace treaties fail.
Sure, the only person you are morally accountable to is yourself. But others will certainly judge you based upon their own moral constructs, and as such, over time an average concensus will be reached.
All of those 'isms' you speak of have plenty of meaning and weight. They might be used incorrectly quite frequently, but that does not mean they have any less meaning when used correctly.
Edit: And to me personally, I consider the idea of "designer children" to be an abhorrent idea. Many people already treat their children like props in their feeds. Any rise in popularity of this tech, especially for cosmetic traits, is going to come with all the problems we see with the current state of dog breeding.