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The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

simonandschuster.com

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Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#231

Post by Arainach »

pigpop wrote: post #218
sgnelson wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: banality of evil

it's almost like the people you call evil are just regular people anyone can be evil, anyone can be good, anyone can be both even on the same day or be seen as one contemporarily and the other historically so perhaps painting specific groups of people as the incarnation of pure evil is not a good idea unless you're trying to sell a book or get ad revenue

You've misunderstood the point of historical absentee analysis and rhe banality of evil.

It is comforting to think that there is a group of "evil people" who are innately different, but most evil is done by people similar to people you know.

Just because your neighbor Joe or your aunt Bertha is a "great person" who coaches the local sports team doesn't mean they aren't evil if they also spend their days working to target minorities and get them thrown in jail or worse - or building the tools used for authoritarians and voting for them.

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#232

Post by lo_zamoyski »

tekla wrote: post #205
JuniperMesos wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nerd/jock dichotomy is at best loosely pointing at some genuine clusters of interests and predilections that exist among people in the world, and is more often taking a set of tropes from 80s Hollywood movies about high school and using them to try to explain how real people in the world are today, which is stupid. (Who wrote all those 80s movies? Bookworms ! Who acted in them? Theater kids !)

The jocks at my school (Championship Winners) were also simultaneously the smartest kids at it. Most went to Ivy Leagues on academic scholarships. I know a few of them were the first engineers on several well known unicorns.

The nerd/jock dichotomy is rooted in envy.

There is an unspoken presumption many people live believing that the various qualities people can have must be evenly divided among people, because somehow it would otherwise be “unfair”. Got brawn? Can’t have brains. Got X? Can’t have Y. Etc. It’s a coping strategy for weak people with big egos.

The fact is that in primary school, a “nerd” wasn’t necessarily all that “intelligent” even in some narrow sense. If you are inept at something or insecure about it, you might gravitate toward things that avoid it. So you invest time in that activity.

Of course, if the brain is the seat of intelligence, and the brain is just a part of the body, and an intelligent brain is a healthy brain, then it follows that a healthy body overall is more likely to have a healthy brain and thus an intelligent brain. Conpare this with the ancient expression “Mens sana in corpore sano”.

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#233

Post by Arainach »

konart wrote: post #98
mc32 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue the same for the capital that goes in. It’s used for what it’s used. By itself it’s neutral.

Yes, but I think that questions like 1. How come people are able to accumulate so much capital? 2. How come people are able to use the capital to influence life of other people in all ways possible to their liking? are more interesting and worth asking. Yes code and capital are both "tools". But you can't just write some code and install cameras at every corner. You need some political influence to do so. And capital…

>How come people are able to use the capital to influence life of other people in all ways possible to their liking?

This sentence applies to "code" as well as to "capital"

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#234

Post by Arainach »

konart wrote: post #106
croes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how did they get those capital, for instance the CEO of Meta? And isn’t social media that prefers rage over information a danger to democracy?

>And how did they get those capital, for instance the CEO of Meta? This is the right question. I'll quote myself here: 1. How come people are able to accumulate so much capital? 2. How come people are able to use the capital to influence life of other people in all ways possible to their liking? Yes code and capital are both "tools". But you can't just right some code and install cameras at every corner. You need som…

>Yes code and capital are both "tools". But you can't just right some code and install cameras at every corner. You need some political influence to do so. And capital buys you this influence.

You absolutely can. Tiny tweaks to social media feeds - what content gets promoted, what gets hidden - have massive impacts on opinions, votes, and society.

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#236

Post by nkmnz »

amiga386 wrote: post #152
WickyNilliams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's lost on people outside of the UK - perhaps even to many inside the UK - just how strongly there is a class divide and a ruling elite. The old money is very old indeed

Indeed. You are literally likely to be in a better social class today if your ancestors were Normans conquerors rather than the Anglo-Saxon conquered. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...

Actually, that 0.7 intergenerational correlation only tracks surnames—i.e., the male line. It completely ignores the fact that ~50% of the population changes status by marriage, which is invisible in surname analysis. Think about it: when a blacksmith’s daughter marries a baron, her social mobility doesn’t show up anywhere in the data. She just becomes part of the baron’s lineage going forward. So Clark has discovered that patrilineal dynasties persist with 0.7 correlation, and then presented this as if it were a measure of social mobility. It’s not. It’s a measure of surname mobility. If assortative mating across 500 years averaged something like 0.5 (plausible—people married outside their exact status all the time), the actual population-wide status persistence might be closer to 0.4 than 0.7. That’s… a completely different story about how stratified society actually was. But sure, “elites persist for centuries” makes for better book sales than “we measured half the mobility and ignored the other half.”

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#237

Post by whattheheckheck »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #226
pigpop wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's almost like the people you call evil are just regular people anyone can be evil, anyone can be good, anyone can be both even on the same day or be seen as one contemporarily and the other historically so perhaps painting specific groups of people as the incarnation of pure evil is not a good idea unless you're trying to sell a book or get ad revenue

The line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Which means we need to blatantly and explicitly call out the ones who are choosing to use their evil side for outsized material gains at the expense of a huge majority?

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#238

Post by BirAdam »

konart wrote: post #8

>democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation Not sure "code" belongs here. Even less sure about "illusion". Take those away and what is left is "dismantled... by capital". Nothing new, really.

If we’re being honest, democracy, such as it is, is being dismantled by people. Code, capital, and illusion have no volition.

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#239

Post by nmfisher »

alecco wrote: post #82
jamil7 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cute but are there any actual nerds left in big tech leadership? Of the magnificent seven we basically only have Jensen Huang left as a technical leader and maybe you can count Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg? The genius coder according to the movie. Programming in PHP .

There are numerous criticisms you can level at Zuckerberg, but writing the first version of Facebook in PHP is not one of them.

Re: The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy

#240

Post by sershe »

In less than a page, they call it feudalism, fascism, and capital(ism) / corporate rule. Mussolini in his manifesto explicitly defined the 2nd in opposition to the 3rd among other things, and even Marx considered the 1st and the 3rd to be very distinct. Of course the 1st and the 2nd are also quite different.

So which one is it? Oh wait, it's a modern progressive, "calling everything I don't like every bad name I remember from high school history"! Are they also nativist globalists and authoritarian libertarians? I bet they are!

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