technoutopianism

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The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Carlyle, Thomas, "Signs of the Times," Edinburgh Review 49, June 1829, pp. 439-459, reprinted in abridged version as "The Mechanical Age' in Clayre, A1asdair, ed., Nature and Industrialization: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 229-231. 5. Segal, Howard, "The Technological Utopians," in Com, pp. 119-120; Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 20. 6. Howard, Albert, The Milltillionaire (Boston: 1895), p. 9. 7. Segal, "The Technological Utopians," in Com, p. 124. 8. Schindler, Solomon, Young West: A Sequel to Edward Bellamy's Celebrated Novel "Looking Backward" (Boston: Arena, 1894), p. 45. 9· Howard, p. 17· 10. Clough, Fred M., The Golden Age, Or the Depth of Time (Boston: Roxburgh, 1923), p. 34· 11.

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The pneumatic underground, says one citizen of utopia, is "like a gigantic mill, into the hopper of which goods are being constantly poured by the trainload and shipload, to issue at the other end in packages of pounds and ounces, yards and inches, pints and gallons, corresponding to the infinitely complex personal needs of half a million people."12 All of these inventions, claimed the new technological utopians, would mean freedom from "all of the annoyances" of housekeeping and work. The goal of the new order was to use increasingly sophisticated technologies to provide "everything for comfort, economy, convenience and freedom from care that a corporate intelligence could think Of"13 Most of the technological utopians thought their visions of the future would be realized in the United States and elsewhere within one hundred years. They were convinced that science and technology would replace divine inspiration and intervention, creating a new secular theology more powerful than any conceived by the men of the Church.

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Other titles were cast more in the commercial vein, suggesting a link with America's other great tradition of utilitarianism. They included Albert Howard's The Mill- 46 THE TWO F ACE S 0 F TEe H N 0 LOG Y tillionaire, Paul Devinne's The Day of Prosperity, and Harold Loebs Life in a Technocracy. 5 The technological utopians successfully melded the Christian notion of eternal salvation and the American utilitarian ethos into a new and powerful cultural synthesis. The idea that science and technology-harnessed by a nation of dedicated and faithful laborers steeped in the modern work ethic-would direct us into an earthly kingdom of great wealth and leisure continues to serve as a governing social and economic paradigm to the present day.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

The challenge is to understand how power and influence are distributed within this mongrel space where professional and amateur combine. Consider, for a moment, Clay Shirky, whose back-flap biography boasts corporate consulting gigs with Nokia, News Corp, BP, the U.S. Navy, Lego, and others. Shirky embodies the strange mix of technological utopianism and business opportunism common to many Internet entrepreneurs and commentators, a combination of populist rhetoric and unrepentant commercialism. Many of amateurism’s loudest advocates are also business apologists, claiming to promote cultural democracy while actually advising corporations on how to seize “collaboration and self-organization as powerful new levers to cut costs” in order to “discover the true dividends of collective capability and genius and usher their organizations into the twenty-first century.34 The grassroots rhetoric of networked amateurism has been harnessed to corporate strategy, continuing a nefarious tradition.

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However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture. The fetish for openness can be traced back to the foundational myths of the Internet as a wild, uncontrollable realm. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cattle ranger turned techno-utopian firebrand, released an influential manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” from Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s business elite. (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

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Motivation and resources, time and power—these are assets that are not evenly distributed, even if the Internet has removed many of the old barriers to entry. They are inequalities that we must take into account when we talk about the network’s “level playing field.” The desire to transcend earthly inequality has suffused discussions of the Internet for decades. Early techno-utopians long ago declared that even the atom was “past” and promised the “tyranny of matter” overthrown.1 The terrestrial and corporeal, they confidently predicted, would soon be abandoned for the weightless Web. Unencumbered by our fleshy selves and released from the material conditions that constrain them, everyone would be made equal by binary code, free to participate as peers on an open network.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

See World Economic Forum Debugging, 31 Design masculine, in OLPC, 71 nostalgic, 15–18, 51–55, 58–60, 62, 71, 131–132, 233n15 of XO laptop, flaws in, 89–90, 99, 244nn55–56 Development disruption and, 183 performativity in, 173, 178–183, 250n12 Silicon Valley model of, 178–179 technological utopianism in, problems of, 195, 254n37 United Nations program for, 3 Digital native, 228n47 Disruption of classroom, OLPC expectations of, 83, 92, 106–107 performing development and, 183 Silicon Valley culture of, 189 by XO laptop, 85, 106–107 Doom, 57, 122, 129, 143 DOTA 2, 151 Dourish, Paul, 6 Drake, Daniel, 239n17, 240n23 Educational reform charisma and, 187, 196–198 techno-utopian, 187–189 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 127 English, 169 Futuro teaching, 153, 156 over Guaraní, privileging of, 158, 160 learning, focus on, 156–160 Paraguay Educa arranging lessons in, 145, 151–152, 156 Ensmenger, Nathan, 39 Ethiopia, 176, 185–186 Ethnography, 16, 107 methods of, 214, 224n60 performance and, 174–175 thick description in, 217 Etoys, 148–152 Etoysera, 148 Europe and the People without History (Wolf, E.), 161 Exceptionalism, 10, 69–70 Factory model, of education, 36–37, 60, 229n69, 230n73 Fail Festival, 178–179 Ferguson, James, 161–162, 250n12 Fetishism, 223n42, 234n31 Fieldwork Guaraní in, 214 with Paraguay Educa, 16, 210–214, 216–218 quantitative data supplementing, 16, 214–216 thick description in, 217 Fisher, Allan, 69–70 Formadores, 95–97 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 221n35 Foucault, Michel, 222n37 Fouché, Rayvon, 132–133 Freedom Levy on, 62 in OLPC core principles, 50, 61 Papert on, 65–66 self-taught learner and, 64–66, 236n67 in XO laptop, 61–67, 71–72, 236n59 Free Software Foundation, 62, 64 Freire, Paulo, 76, 229n67, 239n15 Futuro, 153, 156 García, Alan, 245n73 Geertz, Clifford, 194, 217 Gender boy as default, 43, 232n97 hacker ethic and, 38–40 internet and, 43 laptop breakage and, 117 masculine design, 71 motivation and, 70 OLPC and, 39–40, 43–44, 46, 71 Papert and, 43–44 in Paraguay Educa, 117–118, 144–147, 151–152, 155, 159, 163 rebellion and, 38–40 Scratch and, 145–147 technically precocious boy, 15–16, 29, 33, 41–45, 111, 145–146, 152, 155, 187–188, 231n90, 231n92 toys and, 41–43 in video games, 42–44, 57 Gettys, Jim, 51–53 Gibson, William, 39, 53 Globalization, 221n35 Global South, 219n1 imperialism and, 195–196 Logo projects in, 25–27, 225n15 OLPC for, 1–3, 5, 49, 219n9, 220n12 OLPC imaginary and, 7 teachers in, 60 The Gods Must Be Crazy, 107, 246n80 Goffman, Erving, 173 Great Britain, 187 Green machine, laptop as, 2–3, 55 Guaraní English privileged over, 158, 160 in fieldwork, 214 in Paraguay, 77, 81, 157–158, 160, 214, 224n60 rurality and, 157 Gutiérrez, Raúl, 73–74, 77–78, 238n5, 239n18 Hackathons, 250n12 Hacker ethic, 226n31 masculinity and, 39–40 open-source software promoted by, 62 rebellion in, 37–41, 46 Hackers constructionism and, 28–31, 38, 46 infrastructure and identity of, 163 at MIT, culture of, 14–15, 23, 28–31, 38, 54, 58, 226n31 OLPC architects as, 15, 23 Papert and MIT culture of, 29–31, 54 Papert and social imaginary of, 38, 44–45 in Paraguay Educa, culture of, 77, 144, 163 self-taught, social imaginary of, 44–46 as yearners, 44–45 Hackers (Levy), 38–39 freedom in, 62 MIT in, 30, 60, 226n31 as symbol, hacker in, 226n31 Hall, Stuart, 7–8, 45 Haraway, Donna, 14, 199 Harvey, David, 223n42 Heterogeneous networks, 19 Hill, Benjamin Mako, 40, 64–67 Himanen, Pekka, 226n31 Historical Determinism, 191–192 Hodzic, Saida, 250n12 Hole in the Wall, 194 Holmes, Christina, 195 Hour of Code, 187–188 Hoyles, Celia, 27 Humala, Ollanta, 245n73 Hundred-dollar laptop.

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Later, he said that the laptop project “is probably the only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really had to look at how to eliminate poverty, create peace, and work on the environment, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”19 ... One Laptop per Child serves as a case study in the complicated consequences of technological utopianism. The puzzle of this book is to untangle what made this project and its laptop so captivating and even the most outrageous claims about it so compelling. Despite OLPC’s high profile, hailing from the MIT Media Lab and becoming known around the world, very little is known about how the project’s laptops have been used day to day and what impact they have had—a gap this book will fill.

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Although the projects featured at these Fail Faires promised unrealistically grandiose results and then inevitably failed to achieve them, the narrative was that their failures would help inform future moon shots, not that projects should be more realistic in scope.22 More recent Fail Festivals take a more measured tone in not discussing moon shots directly, instead encouraging projects to, as they put it, “fail early and often,” paraphrasing a mantra that has become common in business schools and technology-management literature.23 Still, a reliance on modeling development projects on the technology world risks taking on the reckless technological utopianism that is rife in that world as well—especially in venture capital. And the influence is one they are proud of. “Look at Silicon Valley, arguably the most successful business incubation environment in the world today,” Fail Festival’s website states. “Venture capitalists invest millions in new, untested ideas and are excited to get a 10% success rate.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

There were some groups that operated multiple vehicles, but most drivers were independent and some would only take fares at certain times of the day or to make a bit of extra money on their regular commutes. Seen through the modern libertarian lens that drives thinking among adherents to free market economics and strands of technological utopianism, jitneys may seem like an innovative business undertaken by entrepreneurial individuals to fill a gap in the transportation system of the early twentieth century, but that requires one to ignore many of the effects of these services. Jitneys were not an equitable transport service. They relied on workers who were struggling as a result of the recession, and were “often yesterday’s unemployed locomotive engineer, policeman, bartender, printer, barber, or clerk.”1 Due to the cost of the vehicle, depreciation, and various other costs such as fuel and maintenance, it was unlikely that many jitney drivers were actually making a profit, and as a result there was a high turnover.

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The World’s Fair helped renew New Yorkers’ faith in the future when many people had lost hope that things could get better, and the tech industry has sought to do the same. As the neoliberal political system gave up on bold policies in favor of managing a worsening status quo, they left the door open to techno-utopians to fill the void. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Silicon Valley was embraced as the driver of economic growth, and that included valorizing its key figures and buying into its big plans to remake the world—regardless of how poorly they were thought through. Transportation was perceived to be ripe for disruption.

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And so I then move on to outline the evolution of Silicon Valley and how it fused its faith in technology to neoliberal economics to hide its deep links to the US government and military. Its adherents’ belief in the power of technology alone to transform any industry or system for the better, without considering the political and social implications, is the product of that techno-utopian ideology. In the central chapters of the book I apply those histories to critically dissect some of the most prominent of tech’s proposals for the future of transportation and cities. I cover electric vehicles, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars; the Boring Company’s tunnel system and Uber’s vision for flying cars; along with the implications of micromobility services and the delivery robots increasingly staking a claim to the sidewalks.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

I had thought the web was where the children of the baby boomers got to have their own space, to play with their own ideas, away from the complex political legacy of gender equality and identity politics, of the cult of the individual and the advance of corporate “freedom”. But it turned out all we were doing was gardening in someone else’s Utopia. I ask Stewart if he would describe himself these days as a techno-Utopian. “The very concept of techno-Utopian”, he replies, “would be part of what we trend against. Because techno-Utopia says Brave New World. We, the technoids, know the future and are spelling it out for you. That’s what Utopia is. It’s there in Plato and it’s there in Thomas More. “Utopias in practice are invariably Dystopias.

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“We might have petered out anyway but that was a real kind of angry activist split in my life where I felt like these people, who had said to us: ‘Our mission is to turn you into our successors and we recognise that young people have the capacity to do anything in the world,’ had then said: ‘Actually, that was just bullshit. Young people can’t really do anything, you know. Young people are just kids. You guys are just kids.’” * * * Bound up in the lifted copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, Cory took his techno-Utopianism with him when he left Grindstone. But it didn’t always go down well in eighties Canada. “Being a technology fan among lefties of that era means that you were kind of a pariah,” he explains, “Techno-Utopianism was not widely understood and technology was seen as, well… I was out there protesting cruise missile guidance systems, but the internet came from [the US military research agency] DARPA.”

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I believed in them enough to abandon my career as a journalist and run an organisation called the Open Rights Group (ORG) which, as well as fighting to protect basic civil liberties online, campaigns against any kind of regulation that could prejudice the liberating aspects of the ’net. I don’t run ORG anymore, which is probably a good thing given how sceptical I became that its mission could succeed. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the techno-Utopians were onto something. I simply feared that the institutions of the old world they thought they could topple – be they corporations, media or politicians – had a lot of fight left in them. But if Barefoot into Cyberspace was intended to be a eulogy, I hadn’t figured on WikiLeaks. Almost from the moment I started collecting material for this book, their story began to trespass on mine.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

It’s also a response to cyber-libertarianism, the reigning industry philosophy, which holds that large corporations, freed from the shackles of government regulation, claim to know what’s best for us and that digital life is inherently emancipatory. (Mostly, we’re only surrendering ourselves, in the form of data and personal autonomy, to oligarchic platform owners, who sell us to advertisers, data brokers, and intelligence agencies.) Popular tech writing tends to fluctuate between the two poles of Luddite rejection and unvarnished techno-utopianism. The former is generally considered far less respectable and easily stigmatized. As Richard Byrne wrote in The Baffler, “In the straitened and highly ritualized discourse of tech boosterism, ‘Luddite’ has become a catchall dirty word for anything that stands in its way.” Byrne’s smart essay about the history of Luddism offered a necessary revisionist take, showing how it really began as a labor movement concerned with workers’ rights and how automation would deprive skilled workers of their livelihoods.

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Byrne’s smart essay about the history of Luddism offered a necessary revisionist take, showing how it really began as a labor movement concerned with workers’ rights and how automation would deprive skilled workers of their livelihoods. In other words, it’s a surprisingly contemporary, flexible belief system, not the rigid extremism of the Unabomber. But even if this book is fated to be categorized as the work of a digital skeptic or neo-Luddite, I would argue in return that such perspectives are needed. Techno-utopians have plenty of allies—in business, in government, in media, in every celebrity with a million hard-earned followers or the fanboys who wait in line to buy a new Apple product on the day it drops. If there is actually some recurrent dialectic between technological skepticism and utopianism that we are locked into as a culture, then all the better that the people belonging to the former should be able to launch volleys such as this one.

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As the scholar Trebor Scholz notes, “The essence of technology is not solely technological.” Technology cannot be looked at outside of its relationship to politics, sociology, economics, or culture. Nor is technology something neutral, just a tool that can be put toward good or bad uses, as so many techno-utopians are fond of claiming. Digital technologies have certain capacities built into them, though some of them, as the U.S. military might say, are dual use. The GPS chip in a smartphone can help you find a local restaurant; it can also be used to track all of your movements. Other digital technologies are more obviously beneficent or pernicious.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

A few weeks later, eventually the Five Star Movement and Lega formed a coalition government which was dubbed by the press ‘yellow-green’, or carioca, because of the colours of the two parties (yellow for Five Star and green for Lega). How was it possible for an ‘internet party’ that had long been ridiculed by the mainstream media in Italy for its naïve techno-utopianism and dilettantism to enter government less than 10 years after its foundation? What led it to enjoy such a widespread popularity in the Italian electorate? What kind of political organisation and model of democracy does this formation put forward? And is the case of the Five Star Movement an Italian exception or also an indication of what is happening in other countries?

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These include the Partido de la Red (Party of the Net) in Argentina, the Wikipartido (Wikiparty) in Mexico, and Partido X (X Party, also known as the Party of the Future) in Spain, which, as their names attest, make overt claim to being parties of the internet. Like the Pirates, these formations propose a technoutopian discourse which sees digital technology as leading us towards a better future. However, they have not been very successful in translating this vision into electoral results. So far, the most impressive manifestations of the rise of the digital party have come from parties that, although drawing some inspiration from the Pirates and similar formations, and sometimes espousing a similar rhetoric of the ‘digital revolution’, are far more ambitious in scope and less single-issue oriented.

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Finally, the typical voter of Bernie Sanders was said to be below 45 years of age. The sympathy of young people, especially those living in urban areas, towards digital parties is unsurprising for a number of reasons. First, young people enjoy higher than average levels of internet access, which means they are more likely to buy into the techno-utopian idea of the digital revolution as a positive change. Second, they have been disproportionately affected by the effects of the economic crisis, stagnating wages, unemployment and labour casualisation. Therefore, they tend to be more receptive to the message of social change offered by digital parties and their promise to redistribute wealth.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

The cohort who solicited my doomsday advice readily admitted they were “low-level billionaires” who could at best hitch a ride with Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos—who are themselves still at least a few generations away from colonizing anything. Offering a slightly more reasonable techno-utopian escape fantasy, the “seasteading” movement—publicized in a flurry of maga zine stories a few years ago—promises a sustainable solution to a world of climate catastrophe, social chaos, and economic collapse. In the Minecraft-meets-Waterworld future envisioned by “aquapreneurs ,” wealthy people are to live in independent, free-floating city-states—giant clusters of high-tech rafts using clean, renewable ocean thermal energy to power themselves and escape from a civilization of oil-drilling land dwellers.

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One of them could orchestrate the processing of effluent through mango groves to produce potable water, and another could maintain proper hydration of giant contained tubes of agricultural topsoil used to grow vegetables with a minimum of watering. Then they all use sensor data to measure their effectiveness, and feed back the results for everyone’s benefit and improvement. Assuming all the pieces work—and that’s a big assumption in itself—it’s a beautiful picture for an organic, techno-utopian paradise. Like the Epcot Center at Disney World, but with no need for deliveries from the outside world. Almost like a space colony. Ehrlich readily admits, “We are really looking at the full stack of life support systems—sort of Mars-style, but here on Earth.” Rather than helping an existing village or neighborhood utilize more regenerative principles, the ReGen project itself must be spawned on virgin territory, from the ground up, ex nihilo .

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Unvaccinated populations generate more variants, which then travel back to infect people in wealthier countries, anyway. You can monopolize, but you can’t escape. 11 The Mindset in the Mirror RESISTANCE IS FUTILE T he greatest danger to the holders of The Mindset would be for us to really listen to what they’re telling us and react accordingly. In the techno-utopian fantasies they share from TED stages, Davos podiums, and Silicon Valley pitch decks, we human beings are regarded as little more than iron filings flying back and forth between the magnetic poles set up by the rich and powerful, mostly in an effort to keep us from impinging on their lifestyles.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

That was the neoliberal promise. Both Democrats and Republicans had tied their fortunes to delivering on it. Gore, himself, had long been at the center of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal campaign, Clinton’s trusted techno-utopian lieutenant. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, globalization and neoliberalism could no longer be promoted as policies that lifted all boats. Techno-utopianism could no longer hide the truth that serious structural imbalances in the global economy threatened not just to collapse economies but to rend the social fabric of nations. The economic hardship and distress caused by the crash would linger for years.

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The information technology revolution, another key feature of the neoliberal order, made possible this phenomenon of perpetual counting and measuring. In the utopian 1990s, the self-knowledge resulting from this revolution was held up as liberating, as delivering on the neoliberal promise of personal freedom and emancipation. Now that the technological utopianism of the 1990s and 2000s is gone, the measurement imperative that remains has become as much a mechanism for tyrannizing the self—with the relentless injunction to do or be better—as for realizing the full possibilities of one’s personhood. No political movement to release individuals from this tyranny of self-scrutiny has yet gained traction; but perhaps a visionary with a Stewart Brand-like imagination will arise to call for freeing human consciousness from tech-imposed fetters.

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The iPhone gave IT innovators and their venture capital supporters everywhere a big boost. Google, meanwhile, was rapidly universalizing internet access and use.36 Thomas Friedman, the prominent New York Times columnist, caught the hopeful IT spirit of the Bush years in his bestselling book The World Is Flat, published in 2005 in the midst of the Iraqi occupation. The book’s techno-utopianism echoed that of Clinton-era cyberspace enthusiasts Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and Alvin Toffler. But if the latter group was mostly focused on the cybernetic revolution as an American event, Friedman was struck by its global reverberations. Friedman was drawn to Bangalore, a city in southern India that had become a high-tech corridor rivaling Silicon Valley in its sophistication and in its embrace of American values and techniques.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

The company had a real business model—selling private and self-hosted versions of the platform to corporations that wanted to apply the collaborative, open-source approach to proprietary software—and the public, free website struck me as radical. It offered unfettered access to the tools, knowledge, and online communities of the elite: a defensible allocation of venture capital. The startup glittered with idealism and old-school techno-utopianism. It was a corner of the industry that I found optimistic, experimental, and, most important, redemptive of the whole enterprise. I could see how it might actually make the world a better place. There was, of course, a red flag. That spring, the startup had been implicated in a highly publicized gender discrimination scandal.

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The company had been profitable practically from the get-go, and was a paragon of product-market fit: catnip for venture capitalists. The founders decided to do things differently. There was no one to tell them no. The company was modeled on the free software community, with its subversive, countercultural, and deeply techno-utopian ethos. For years, in emulation of the tenets of open-source—transparency, collaboration, decentralization—the startup was flat. There was no hierarchy. There was no org chart. Employees had named their own compensation, determined their own priorities, and come to decisions by consensus. The founders did not believe in management, but in meritocracy: the best would naturally rise to the top.

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My teammates were thoughtful and clever, opinionated but fair. Speaking for a platform, however, was nearly impossible, and none of us were particularly well qualified to do it. We wanted to tread lightly: core participants in the open-source software community were sensitive to corporate oversight, and we didn’t want to undercut anyone’s techno-utopianism by becoming an overreaching arm of the company-state. We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights?

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

In a Facebook post, he called for “a more politically correct” neoreactionary movement, with room for women and nonwhites, in what appeared to be an effort to cover toxic ideas with the veneer of tolerance and the language of campus liberalism. This “sanewashing” campaign, to borrow a phrase from Dale Carrico—an academic rhetorician in San Francisco who was both a skeptic and a close observer of the techno-utopian futurists, whom he calls Robot Cultists—was successful. Neoreactionary ideas were buffed and polished for polite company, then spread via social media to mass audiences by the apologists for a new global order that places tech executives at the top. Some of those apologists do concede that Silicon Valley rule would mark a reversion to feudalism, but then, they say, there is no alternative.

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His name became more familiar in the American mainstream after then Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon (who would go on to become Trump’s campaign strategist and White House adviser) mentioned the heretofore obscure writer’s name in a BuzzFeed interview. As one scholar of right-wing traditionalism later told the New York Times, “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant.” It was more than significant—it was alarming. Some who had been paying close attention to the techno-utopian scene were less than astonished to see Anissimov, long praised as a rising star, go the Nazi way. After reading one of Anissimov’s neoreactionary rants in 2014, the academic blogger Dale Carrico published the following told-you-so: Now, for years and years before what you call Anissimov’s “jolt to the right” I have accused him of advocating a reactionary politics of plutocratic corporatism, fetishistic militarism, and anti-democratic eugenic and technocratic elitism … Of course, he whined and denied this as name calling but never responded to the substance of what I was saying.

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His fake-it-till-you-make-it approach seems in good fun, except when he uses it to bluff through life-or-death problems. What’s worse, powerful people take him seriously, because he is forever telling them what they’d like to hear and zealously defending the excesses of consumer capitalism. Like techno-utopians such as Peter Thiel, Kurzweil has long argued that corporate interests should be calling the shots in the “new paradigms” of the future. Such views are unsurprising coming from a longtime corporate executive and salesman. Fossil fuels wrecking the planet? No worries, Kurzweil declares. We’ll crack the problem of cold fusion soon, and nanobots—always with the nanobots!

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Rumors of such cases were rife in the 1800s—such as folktales from New England of how poor families struggling to feed the household through the harsh winter months would give the grandparents large quantities of homemade liquor, lay them in a coffin and bury them in a snowbank. When spring finally came they would be hauled out, defrosted and (allegedly) revived—perhaps with the help of a little more moonshine. Whether modern techno-utopians believe these legends or not, they are convinced there is something in the idea of freezing bodies in order to ward off decay. At temperatures below –276°F, they argue, biological structures could be preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years without decomposing. Cryopreservation (that is, preserving things at extremely low temperatures) is already used for storing small samples of human tissue such as eggs and sperm.

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Philosophers call this “computational resurrection,” the rerunning of the software that is your mind on a new piece of hardware so that you might live again. The resulting being—whether avatar, robot or human—would be psychologically identical to you: it would remember your first day at school, support your favorite football team and think it was married to your spouse. According to the techno-utopians, it would therefore be you; after years lying dead in a freezing thermos, you would live again in a new and improved form. Mind-uploading has some important advantages over merely finding a modern elixir of life, which, as we saw earlier, would still leave you vulnerable to catastrophic accidents—your airplane crashing, for example, or being at the center of a nuclear explosion.

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Being all-knowing, DigiGod would also have the information required to create beings with psychologies identical to those of all the humans who have ever lived, and being all-powerful, he would also have the capacity to do so. DigiGod, according to these optimists, would therefore resurrect all of us—and create a fine paradise in which we can all live happily ever after. This is the most extreme version of techno-utopianism, and its debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition is obvious. It is a wonderful demonstration of human ingenuity in weaving an immortality narrative from scraps of science, myth and speculation. This vision has reached its clearest expression in the work of the theoretical physicist Frank Tipler, who has gone as far as arguing that something like DigiGod is inevitable according to the laws of physics, and that he will be able to take advantage of certain specific features of the final stages of the universe to create the perception of living for eternity for the universe’s inhabitants (Tipler calls this “the Omega Point”).

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Together, Wired seemed to suggest, these two communities had set about to free America and the world from the rigid, oppressive corporate and government bureaucracies of the twentieth century. In 1998 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron named Wired’s particular blend of libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions the “Californian Ideology.” As they pointed out, by the end of the decade, its tenets had become the day-to-day orthodoxy of technologists in Silicon Valley and beyond. But this ubiquitous set of beliefs did not in fact grow out of the legacy of the New Left, as Barbrook and Cameron suggested.

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CHAPTER 8 The Triumph of the Network Mode Looking back on the dot-com bubble’s spectacular collapse, we can be tempted to dismiss the millenarian claims that surrounded the Internet in the 1990s as little more than the cunning hype of those who stood to profit from the building of broadband pipelines, the sale of computers, and the distribution of soon-to-be-worthless stock. But that would be a mistake. Although Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, and Wired magazine certainly helped fuel the raging optimism of the period, their technoutopian social vision in fact reflected the slow entwining of two far deeper transformations in American society. The first of these was technological. Over the previous forty years, the massive, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold war had become desktop computers, linked to one another in a vast network of communication that reached into almost every corner of the civilian world.

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They also produced new social networks and, in Brand’s case, new information systems, such as catalogs, meetings, and online gatherings. These systems in turn hosted and helped to create new social and professional networks and at the same time modeled the networks’ governing ideals. By the 1990s, each of these elements had come to play an important role in building the rhetorical and social infrastructure on which the technoutopianism of the decade depended. But they also represented a new, networked mode of organizing the production of goods, information, and social structure itself. Fifty years earlier, across the military, industry, and academe, the dominant mode of organizing work was bureaucratic. Universities, armies, corporations— outside their research laboratories and designated think tanks—all featured vertical chains of command, long-term employment prospects, clear distinctions between individuals and their professional positions, firm boundaries between the organization and the outside world, and reward systems based on some combination of merit and seniority.1 By the end of the twentieth century, however, these bureaucratic organizations had begun to lose their shape.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Esfandiary to reflect his conviction that the problem of human mortality would be solved by the year 2030—though I could not say precisely which dewar contained them, because for security reasons members of the public were not to be informed of the specific resting places of individual cryonauts. Max had mentioned to me that his wife, Natasha, had been involved with FM-2030 when they first met, and so I became briefly preoccupied, there in the care bay, with the gothic richness, as an idea, of this man charged with the maintenance of the corpse of his wife’s former lover, a techno-utopian who believed in his own exemption from death. But to reiterate: for Max, as for anyone who signs up to cryonics and its taxonomy, these are by no means corpses. “Cryonics,” as he put it, “is really just an extension of emergency medicine.” It would be easy, in the light of this seemingly bald denial of clinical orthodoxy, to portray cryonics as some kind of cult, or to view this place as a satirical diorama on the theme of modern scientism and its tragicomic excesses.

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And so these cryopreserved corpses were not by conventional standards deceased—were not, that is to say, corpses at all—but rather human beings preserved between conditions of life and death, abiding in some state outside of time itself. And standing in the cool of the care bay, surrounded by the unseen bodies and severed heads of techno-utopians, I thought of the Catholic concept of limbo, a place that was neither heaven nor hell, but a state of suspension, a holding pattern for the souls of the righteous who had died before they could be properly redeemed by the coming of Christ, and must wait in ontological détente for that day of salvation.

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Kurzweil is an inventor of many ingenious devices—the flatbed scanner, the print-to-speech reading machine for the blind—and the cofounder, with Stevie Wonder, of Kurzweil Music Systems, whose synthesizers are used by such diverse acts as Scott Walker and New Order and “Weird Al” Yankovic. As a writer, he is a controversial figure, a business-casual mystic whose arcane projections chart the furthest reaches of techno-utopian speculation. But he is by no means a marginal presence in the tech world; he is, rather, a tutelary spirit of Silicon Valley—a status that was more or less formalized in 2012, when he was brought in as director of engineering at Google, to act as thought-leader-in-chief for the company’s pursuit of machine learning.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Streeter and Turner also ignored the degree to which he felt that his effort in building a workable, not-for-profit digital culture upon the WELL had been a failure. They also failed to make the distinction—made later by Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy—between Brand’s original technological utopianism and Silicon Valley–centered digital libertarianism that emerged with a group of Stanford-educated young Turks known as the PayPal Mafia during the dot-com era. In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand made a decidedly non-neoliberal argument: “The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green.

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Among the first to catch wind of the significance of cyberspace and personal computing, in the 1980s he helped create an early online virtual community. Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned. He went on to rethink modern architecture from a biological perspective and later publicly broke with the environmental movement over nuclear power and GMO food. Both as a young man and more recently, he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.

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Within, O’Neill proposed a vision of a vast industrial-scale space-based platform for the exploration and colonization of the universe, a concept that horrified many of the Whole Earth Catalog’s devotees. The issue, which also featured an article by E. F. Schumacher, of Small Is Beautiful fame, and a transcription of a conversation between Governor Brown and Bateson, would drive a wedge between Brand and some of his closest environmental allies and cement his reputation as a “techno-utopian.” O’Neill laid out his argument that there was no good reason why an off-the-planet colony shouldn’t be an established fact by the year 2000. Brand added a full-throated defense of the idea in his introduction: “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem. . . .

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

So at the University of California, Berkeley, I met with dozens of professors who had studied different aspects of technology and society. I spent hours tracking down dusty, bound volumes in the stacks of libraries across campus. And here is what I learned. Theorists, despite many fine shades of distinction, fall roughly into four camps: technological utopians, technological skeptics, contextualists, and social determinists. These terms will be defined in a moment, but one thing that jumped out was that the scholars fought like Furies. For example, the economic historian Robert Heilbroner wrote, “That machines make history in some sense . . . is of course obvious.”2 This view is called technological determinism, because it implies that technology determines social outcomes.

…

As Captain Jean-Luc Picard explains in the movie First Contact, “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.”4 That is to say, in a few more centuries, advanced technology makes economics itself obsolete. Instead, people are free to focus on greater ends: “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” Star Trek is fiction, but its technological utopianism is very real. MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte clearly shares it. So does Google chairman Eric Schmidt. In The New Digital Age, he and coauthor Jared Cohen wrote, “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.”5 And then there are technology cheerleaders like Clay Shirky, who shakes pom-poms for Team Digital in a book subtitled How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators.6 Many engineers and computer scientists also hold this view.

…

Many believe that every kind of problem can be solved by some invention, often one that is right around the corner. Whether the issue is poverty, bad governance, or climate change, they say things like, “[There] is no limit to human ingenuity,” and “When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce.”7 Besotted with gadgets, technological utopians scoff at social institutions like governments, civil society, and traditional firms, which they pity as slow, costly, behind the times, or all of the above. I sympathize with the utopians because I was one myself. When I started the computer class in Nakkalbande, it was in the hopes that exposure to the technology would improve lives.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Even the engineers behind some of the most successful and ubiquitous algorithmic systems in the world—executives at Google and Netflix, for example—admit that they understand only some of the behaviors their systems exhibit. But their rhetoric is still transcendent and emancipatory, striking many of the same techno-utopian notes as the mythos of code as magic when they equate computation with transformational justice and freedom. The theology of computation that Ian Bogost identified is a faith militant, bringing the gospel of big data and disruption to huge swaths of society. This is the context in which we use algorithms today: as pieces of quotidian technical magic that we entrust with booking vacations, suggesting potential mates, evaluating standardized test essays, and performing many other kinds of cultural work.

…

., 113 Foxconn, 133–134 Fox News, 170 Fredkin, Edward, 23 From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Turner), 46 Future of Life Institute, 191 Galloway, Alexander, 46, 50, 54, 121–123, 143, 144 Game of life, 29–30 Gamification, 12, 133 addiction and, 114–119, 121–122 blurred reality and, 120–121 chess and, 135–138 cultural transactions and, 119 culture machines and, 115–116 Deep Blue and, 135–138 enframing and, 118–119 exploitationware and, 115–116 Facebook and, 114–115 FarmVille and, 114–115 informatic control and, 122–123 interface economy and, 123–131, 139–140, 145, 147 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Galloway), 121 Gates, Bill, 174 Gawker Media, 170–175, 210n35 Gender, 60–61, 80, 82, 210n43 Geocities, 209n20 Ghost in the machine, 55, 95, 183 Gillespie, Tarleton, 20, 46 Gilliam, Terry, 142 Glass Cage, The (Carr), 38 Gmail, 65–66 Gödel, Kurt, 24, 40 Gods, 1, 3–5, 7, 51, 57, 71, 83, 96, 113, 192 Golden Ratio, 2 Golumbia, David, 18, 21, 38, 45–46 Google advertisements and, 66, 74, 156, 158–160, 178 algorithmic arbitrage and, 111, 124, 155–156 algorithmic worldview of, 20 Alphabet and, 66, 155 anticipation and, 73–74 as arbiter of digital culture, 66 augmenting imagination and, 186 autocomplete databases and, 186 black box of, 169 Brin and, 57, 155–156 business model of, 20–21, 71–72, 93–94, 96, 155, 159 cloud warehouse of, 131 company value of, 158 cultural architecture of, 42 DeepMind and, 28, 66, 181–182 disruptive technologies and, 124 earnings of, 158 effective computability and, 42 global computation infrastructure of, 131 Gmail and, 65–66 gutter problem and, 110 impact of, 65–66, 87, 195 interfaces and, 66–67, 124 intimacy and, 75–76 KnowledgeGraph and, 71–73, 75, 94 Kurzweil and, 184 machine learning and, 66, 181–186, 191 Maps and, 59 market issues and, 66 massive infrastructure of, 131 Memex and, 188 neural networks and, 185 OK Google and, 51 ontology and, 159–160 Page and, 155–156 PageRank and, 20, 111, 155–159, 169, 177–178, 189 parsing data and, 182 pragmatist approach and, 18, 20 product improvement and, 42 programmable culture and, 169 Project Loon and, 66 Schmidt and, 66, 73, 127 search and, 26, 42, 48, 69, 75–76, 87, 157–159, 169 sharing economy and, 127 simplification ethos and, 97 Star Trek computer and, 11, 65–82, 159, 186, 191 system behavior and, 16 techno-utopian rhetoric and, 16 X Lab and, 66 YouTube and, 65–66 Google Glass, 66 Googleization of Everything, 68 Google Now, 51, 73–74, 76, 82, 160 Gou, Terry, 133 Grammar, 2, 16, 25, 38–41, 62–64, 110–112, 138, 178–179 Grand Theft Auto (game), 122, 124 Grinding, 120, 140 Guardian (newspaper), 170 Guattari, Félix, 76 Guilds, 121 Gutter problem, 110 Habermas, Jürgen, 105–107, 109–110, 114, 172–173, 175–176 Hackers, 1–5, 38, 46, 50–51 Hackers (film), 3 HAL computer, 181 Half-Life of Facts, The (Arbesman), 188–189 Halting states, 41–46 Hardt, Michael, 145 Hastings, Reed, 97–98 Hayles, N.

…

., 59 Jenkins, Henry, 102 Johansson, Scarlett, 78 Jonze, Spike, 11, 77–79, 84–85 Journalists, 3 automatization and, 38 Bitcoin and, 12 cultural values and, 171–172 Facebook and, 116, 170, 172 gamification and, 116 Gawker Media and, 170–175, 210n35 Google and, 75 Siri and, 58 Thiel and, 170–171 transactional algorithms and, 151 “Trending Topics” widget and, 180 Uber and, 129 Kael, Pauline, 175 Kasparov, Gary, 135–138 Kindle, 195 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 47–48 Kiva Systems, 134 Kline, Ronald, 31 KnowledgeGraph, 71–73, 75, 94 Knuth, Donald, 17–18 Kurzweil, Ray, 184 Labor, 7, 18, 46, 122 Adam Smith on, 146 affective, 145–148 arbitrage and, 97, 112, 123–145 Bitcoin and, 164, 178 capitalism and, 165 cloud warehouses and, 131–445 culture machines and, 93, 119 deep structures of, 123 faking sincerity and, 146–147 feedback systems and, 145–148 HITs and, 135, 139, 141, 145 identity and, 146–147 intellectual, 12 interface economy and, 123–145 ludic, 120 mandatory smiles and, 146 Marx on, 165 Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 pickers and, 132–134 Taylorism and, 93 worker conditions and, 8, 132–134, 139–140 Lambda calculus, 24 Langlois, Ganaele, 111 Language abstraction and, 2, 24 advertisements and, 178 algorithms and, 24–28, 33–41, 44, 51, 54–55 cognition and, 39 color words and, 4 culture machines and, 39–40 epistemological layers and, 4, 11, 148, 155, 157, 175, 177, 188 ethos of information and, 159 grammar and, 2, 16, 25, 38–41, 62–64, 110–112, 138, 178–179 imagination and, 38, 185, 196 incompleteness and, 24, 40 as intellectual technology, 4 intelligent assistants and, 11, 57, 62, 64–65, 77 machine learning and, 2, 112 many registers of, 1–2 mathematics and, 2, 55 meaning and, 1 metaphor and, 183–184 (see also Metaphor) natural language processing (NLP) and, 62–63 of new media, 112, 122 plasticity and, 38, 191 power of, 1–2, 4–5 procedural, 3–4, 6 reality and, 1 rhetoric and, 6, 16, 22, 30, 45, 89, 96, 101, 104, 110, 112, 123, 127, 136 Siri and, 57–65, 71–84 spoken, 2, 58, 60, 62–63, 67, 84, 185 symbolic, 2, 26, 38–41 tricks and, 3–4 Turing Machine and, 33, 41 universal, 5 vocabulary and, 2, 4, 25, 138, 160, 190 Wiener and, 28 Language of New Media, The (Manovich), 122 Lawsuits, 90, 171, 175 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 25–27, 72 Lem, Stanislaw, 184 Levy, Steven, 3 Lewis, Michael, 12, 151, 153, 168 Leyden, Peter, 160 Library Computer Access/Retrieval System (LCARS), 67–68 Life magazine, 31 Literacy, 5, 39, 52, 75, 109, 129, 159, 177 LiveJournal, 209n20 Loebner Prize, 87, 203n50 Logic general substitutability and, 33 Gödel and, 24, 40 halting states and, 41–46 information theory and, 10, 27 invisibly exclusionary, 110 pragmatist approach and, 18–25, 42, 58, 62 process and, 41–46 proofs and, 15, 24–25, 41, 44 rationality and, 38, 40 symbolic, 2, 21, 24, 39, 41, 44, 54–55 “Long Boom, The” (Schwartz and Leyden), 160–161 Lyft, 123, 127–130, 145, 148 Machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) and, 2, 15, 28, 42, 62, 66, 71, 85, 90, 112, 181–186, 191 big data and, 90 computationalist approach and, 183 DeepMind and, 28, 66, 181–182 Google and, 66, 181–186, 191 imagination and, 181–186 language and, 2, 112 Netflix and, 182–183 neural networks and, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 Siri and, 62, 182 (see also Siri) Turing Machine and, 182 (see also Turing Machine) Macy Conferences, 30, 199n42 Madrigal, Alexis, 92, 94–95 Magic agency and, 78 artificial intelligence and, 135–136 cached content and, 159 code as, 1–5, 8, 10, 16, 49–50, 196 computation as, 4, 8, 10, 46, 52, 59–60, 94, 96, 121, 161 constructed reality and, 39 curses and, 1 data cloud and, 131, 134 fantasy and, 121, 124, 126 government currency and, 172 hacker powers as, 3, 51 incantations and, 1, 3–5, 51, 196 invisible sides of system and, 178 machines and, 137–138, 188 Memex and, 188 metaphors for, 32–36 myths and, 1–2, 10, 16 ontology and, 62–65 ratings and, 130 rational language for, 25 shamans and, 1, 3, 5 Siri and, 59–60, 62–65 sourcery and, 3, 10, 17, 21, 33–34 symbolic, 105 Manjoo, Farhad, 75 Manovich, Lev, 112, 122 Market impacts advertisements and, 34 (see also Advertisements) arbitrage and, 152, 161 attention and, 119 automobiles and, 127 Bitcoin and, 163–180 crashes and, 151 cryptocurrency and, 160–180 digital identity and, 159 digital trading and, 152 eliminating vulnerability and, 161–162 encryption and, 153, 162–163 fungible space and, 54 gaming and, 119, 121 gaming the system and, 153 Google and, 66 high frequency trading (HFT) and, 151–158, 168–169, 177 hyperinflation and, 166 international trade and, 12 invisible hand and, 33 labor and, 8 (see also Labor) Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 NASDAQ and, 152 Netflix and, 87, 97, 107–110, 114–115 NYSE and, 152 parallel computing and, 139 pension funds and, 151, 168 Siri and, 59, 75–77 stock market and, 12, 15, 154 transaction fees and, 164–165 transparency and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 virtuous action and, 146 Wall Street and, 16, 66, 109, 151, 153, 171, 185 Marx, Karl, 165 Master Algorithm, The (Domingos), 183 Materiality, 26, 47–49, 53, 133 Mathematics abstract symbolism, 2, 55 algebra, 17 Babylonian, 17 Berlinski and, 9, 181 calculus, 24, 26, 30, 34, 44–45, 98, 148, 186 complexity, 28 computationalist approach and, 23, 183, 185 Conway and, 29–30 culture machines and, 49–50 Descartes and, 26, 69, 75 effective computability and, 40 “extended mind” hypothesis and, 40 Fibonacci sequence, 17 Golden Ratio, 2 Hilbert and, 23 Hindu-Arabic numerals, 17 language and, 2, 55 Leibniz and, 25–26, 72 logic, 2, 10, 24 machine duplication and, 22 materiality and, 26 Moschovakis and, 17 Nakamoto and, 161–162 Netflix Prize and, 87–91 ontology and, 84 perceived reality and, 20 Post and, 9 Pragmatic Chaos and, 90 proofs, 15, 24–25, 41, 44 pure, 47 reality and, 34 Rendell and, 30 Shannon and, 27 Strogatz and, 44, 183 theory of computation and, 18 Turing and, 6–9, 23–30, 33, 39–43, 54, 73, 79–82, 87, 138, 142, 182, 186 Mathesis universalis, 25–26, 28, 72 Matrix, The (film), 3, 36, 109 Maturana, Humberto, 28–29 McClelland, Mac, 132–133 McCloud, Scott, 110, 154–155 McCulloch-Pitts Neuron, 28, 39 Meaning acceleration of epistemological change and, 188–189 algorithms and, 35–36, 38, 44–45, 50, 54–55 belonging and, 122 black boxes and, 7, 15–16, 47–48, 51, 55, 64, 72, 92–93, 96, 136, 138, 146–147, 153, 162, 169–171, 179 Chun on, 35 Cow Clicker and, 116, 118–119 cultural exchange and, 12, 111–112 data mining and, 175 decision-making and, 20, 28, 34, 37, 90 digital culture and, 3, 7, 18, 22, 43, 49, 66, 87, 156, 160, 191, 193–194 endless hunt for, 184 imagination and, 184 (see also Imagination) intimacy and, 75 language and, 1 Mechanical Turk and, 136–140 metaphor and, 183–184 (see also Metaphor) obfuscations and, 7, 55, 64 organization of, 8 PageRank and, 169 Siri and, 65 structures of, 89, 96 value and, 155 vs. information, 9, 9–10 Mechanical Turk Google and, 12, 135–145 history of original, 136–138 meaning and, 136–140 as metaphor, 143 von Kempelen and, 135 worker conditions and, 139–140 Mechanisms (Kirschenbaum), 47–48 Memex, 186–189, 195 Memory computation and, 18, 21, 37, 43–44, 51, 56, 58, 69, 75, 159–160, 176, 185–186, 191–193 culture and, 43 human, 37, 43–44 process and, 21 technical, 51, 192 understanding and, 37 Metaphor, 121 assumption of code and, 43 cathedral of computation and, 6–8, 27, 33, 49, 51 Church-Turing thesis and, 41–42 cloud, 131 for communication, 32–36 computational, 22 cultural, 50, 54 effective computability and, 34 human cognition and, 39 imagination and, 183–184, 189 interfaces and, 25, 60 Mechanical Turk and, 143 Netflix as, 96, 104 obelisk and, 155 reality and, 10, 50 Samantha (Her) and, 84–85 Microsoft, 97, 144, 152 Miners (Bitcoin), 165, 167–168, 171–172, 175–179 Money abstraction and, 153, 159, 161, 165–167, 171–175 algorithmic trading and, 12, 20, 99, 155 arbitrage and, 151–152, 155–163, 169–171, 175–179 Bitcoin and, 160–180 as collective symbol, 165–166 ontology and, 156–159, 178–179 Moore’s Law, 43 Morowitz, Harold, 23 Moschovakis, Yiannis, 17 Moth machine (Wiener), 31–32, 34 Musk, Elon, 191 My Mother Was a Computer (Hayles), 21, 93 Myths ancient, 28 Campbell on, 94 code and, 7–8, 16, 44 cultural space and, 5 culture machine and, 55 fantasy and, 78 government currency and, 172 human-computer interaction and, 36, 51 magic and, 1–2, 10, 16 material reality and, 47 ontology and, 26 origin, 68 personalization and, 106–107 power of language and, 6, 44, 196 Sumerian, 3, 5, 16 unitary simplicity and, 49 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 161–162, 165–167 Nam-shubs, 1, 3–6, 37–40, 56, 135 Nardi, Bonnie, 121 NASDAQ, 152 Natural-Born Cyborgs (Clark), 37 Natural language processing (NLP), 62–63 Natural selection, 44 Negri, Antonio, 145 Netflix, 161 abstraction of aesthetics and, 87–112, 205n36 abundant choices and, 176 arbitrage and, 94, 97, 109–112, 124 art of personalization and, 97–103 Bogost on, 92–95 business model of, 87–88 Cinematch and, 88–90, 95 commissioned shows of, 97–98 computationalist approach and, 90, 104 consumer desire and, 93–96 disruptive technologies and, 124 effective computability and, 93 Facebook and, 91, 110 fan making and, 100–101 FCC and, 90 genre categories of, 94 ghost in the machine and, 55, 95, 183 gutter problem and, 110 Hastings and, 97–98 House of Cards and, 11, 54, 92, 98–112, 192 influence of, 87 interface economy and, 124 Leibniz and, 26 machine learning and, 182–183 market issues and, 87, 97, 107–110, 114–115 metaphor and, 96, 104 ontology and, 92, 94, 96 original content by, 97–98 parsing data and, 182 personalization and, 97–103, 109 Pragmatic Chaos and, 89–90 predictor ensemble and, 89–90 quantum mechanics and, 91–94, 96, 99, 112 recommendation algorithm competition of, 87–91 rejection of big-data approach and, 11 serendipitous glitches and, 55 Spoiler Foiler and, 101–102, 108 streaming and, 90 system behavior and, 16 taggers and, 54, 88, 92–93, 96, 99 techno-utopian rhetoric and, 16 Neural networks, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt), 66 Newitz, Annalee, 60 Newton, Isaac, 17, 166 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 152 New York Times, 170 Nielsen ratings, 102 Note Book (Nunokawa), 53 @NSA_prismbot, 194–195 Nunokawa, Jeff, 53 Nyby, Christian I., II, 95 Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right (Thurston), 12, 140–145 OK Google, 51 One-way functions, 162–163 Ontology Apple and, 62–63, 65 computationalist approach and, 8 consciousness and, 178 culture machines and, 62–65, 68–69 Google and, 159–160 ideology and, 68 imagination and, 69, 73–74 of information, 8, 63, 69–71 mathematics and, 84 meaning and, 8, 21–22, 26, 39 money and, 156–159, 178–179 Netflix and, 92, 94, 96 Siri and, 62–65, 71–73, 82, 84 work of algorithms and, 122 Open source software, 6, 162, 167 ORION, 19, 47 Orwellian surveillance, 132–134 Page, Larry, 155–156 PageRank, 20, 111, 155–159, 169, 177–178, 189 Pariser, Eli, 46, 50 Parisian Great Exhibition, 80 Pasquale, Frank, 21 Pension funds, 151, 168 Perfect knowledge, 13, 65, 71, 73, 190 Perry Mason (TV series), 95–96 Phaedrus (Plato), 37 Phoenix, Joaquin, 77 Pickers, 132–134 Pitts, Walter, 28 Planned Parenthood, 64 Plato, 4, 31, 37–38, 40, 82 Popova, Maria, 175–176 Post, Emil, 9 Pragmatic Chaos (Netflix), 89–90 Pragmatist approach algorithmic, 2, 18–25, 42 effective computability and, 25–26 experimental humanities and, 193 growing power of computation and, 27 justice and, 146 models of reason and, 47 reframing humanities and, 193 Siri and, 58, 62 Privacy, 49, 62, 75, 90, 160–161, 163, 173 Private keys, 163 Programmability, 16, 178 Programmable culture, 169–175 Programmed Visions (Chun), 33 Project Loon, 66 Proofs, 15, 24–25, 41, 44 Protocol (Galloway), 50 Public keys, 163 Purdy, Jedediah, 146–147 Quantum mechanics Netflix and, 91–94, 96, 99, 112 Wiener and, 26–27 Raley, Rita, 194–195 Ramsey, Stephen, 52 Raymond, Eric, 6 Reading Machines (Ramsey), 52 Religion, 1, 7, 9, 49, 69, 71, 80, 136 Rendell, Paul, 30 Rice, Stephen P., 144–145 Rid, Thomas, 199n42 Riskin, Jessica, 136–137 Robotics, 31, 34, 43–45, 132–134, 188 Rood of Grace, 137 Rotten Tomatoes, 96 RSE encryption, 163 Samantha (Her), 77–85, 154, 181 Sample, Mark, 194–195 Sandvig, Christian, 107, 131 Sarandos, Ted, 98, 100, 104 Schmidt, Eric, 66, 73, 127 Schwartz, Peter, 160–161 Scorsese, Martin, 59 Searle, John, 4 Shannon, Claude, 27 Sharing economy, 54, 123, 127–129, 145, 148 Shoup, Donald, 127 Silicon Valley, 3, 9, 30–31, 49, 54, 87, 100, 124, 182 SimCity (game), 194 Simondon, Gilbert, 40, 42–44, 53, 59, 84, 106, 118 Singhal, Amit, 72, 76 Siri abortion scandal and, 64 abstraction and, 64–65, 82–84 anticipation and, 73–74 as beta release, 57 CALO and, 57–58, 63, 65, 67, 79, 81 cognition and, 57–65, 71–84 computationalist approach and, 65, 77 consciousness and, 57–65, 71–84 conversation and, 57–65, 71–84 DARPA and, 11, 57–58 Easter eggs in, 60, 148 effective computability and, 58, 62, 64, 72–76, 81 emotional work and, 148 Enlightenment and, 71–76, 79–80, 82 gender and, 60–61, 80 interfaces and, 59–60, 63, 75, 77 intimacy and, 11, 75–81 language and, 57–65, 71–84 launch of, 57 machine learning and, 62–65, 182 market issues and, 59, 75–77 meaning and, 65 ontology and, 62–65, 71–73, 82, 84 parsing data and, 182 performing knowledge and, 59–61 quest for knowledge and, 71–75, 82, 84 reading, 58–59 reduced abilities of, 59 speed of, 131 Skinner boxes, 61, 115–116, 119–120, 122 Smith, Adam, 12, 146–147 Smith, Kevin, 88 Sneakers (film), 3 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 1, 3–5, 9, 17, 36, 38, 50 Social behavior, 22, 146 addiction and, 114–119, 121–122 discrimination and, 21, 130 exploitationware and, 115–116 Social gaming, 114, 118, 120–122 Social media, 6 Arab Spring and, 111, 186 changing nature of, 171 digital culture and, 3, 7, 18, 22, 43, 49, 66, 87, 156, 160, 191, 193–194 Enlightenment and, 173 identity formation and, 191 in-person exchanges and, 195 intellectual connection and, 186 newsfeeds and, 116, 177–178 peer review and, 194 raising awareness and, 174 Spoiler Foiler (Netflix) and, 101–102, 108 transaction streams and, 177 Uber and, 148 Software agency and, 6 Apple and, 59, 62 apps and, 6, 8, 9, 15, 59, 83, 91, 94, 102, 113–114, 124, 128, 145, 149 blockchains and, 163–168, 171, 177, 179 cathedrals of computation and, 6–8, 27, 33, 49, 51 Chun on, 33, 42, 104 Church-Turing thesis and, 25 consciousness and, 77 dehumanizing nature of, 116 depersonification of, 6 digital materiality and, 53 experience and, 34 as foundation of computational expression, 47 imagination and, 186, 194 in-house affect and, 59 interfaces and, 124 (see also Interfaces) logic of general substitutability and, 33 Manovich and, 112 material layers and, 48 as metaphor for metaphors, 35 Metaverse, 50 networks vs. individuals and, 118 open source, 6, 162, 167 Pasquale on, 21 reality and, 10 self-modification and, 1, 38 Weizenbaum and, 33–40 Solaris (Lem), 184 Sourcery, 3, 10, 17, 21, 33–34 Space of computation, 2–5, 9, 21, 42, 45, 76, 154, 185 Spacey, Kevin, 98–99, 106–107 Spoiler Foiler (Netflix), 101–102, 108 SRI International, 57, 59, 63, 169 Srinivasan, Balaji, 169 Star Fleet Federation, 67 Star Trek computer anticipation and, 73–74 conversation and, 67 Google and, 11, 65–82, 159, 186 interfaces and, 67–68 LCARS and, 67–68 Memex and, 186–189, 195 public expectations and, 67 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series), 67 Stephenson, Neal, 1, 3–5, 9, 17, 36, 38, 50, 51 Stiegler, Bernard, 43–44, 53, 106 Streaming content, 49, 54, 87, 90–92, 97, 99, 101–102, 104, 205n39 Strogatz, Steven, 44, 183 Sumerian myths, 3, 5, 16 SuperPACs, 174 Symbolic logic, 2, 21, 24, 39, 41, 44, 54–55 Symposium (Plato), 82 Tacit negotiation, 20 Taggers, 54, 88, 92–93, 96, 99 Tanz, Jason, 116 TaskRabbit, 124 Taylorism, 93 Teller, Astro, 66 Terminator (film series), 191 Terrorism, 163, 178 Theory of Communicative Action, The (Habermas), 109 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 12, 146–147 Thiel, Peter, 170–171, 174 Third parties, 59, 114, 125, 132–133, 147, 162, 170–171 Thurston, Nick, 12, 140–145 Tindr, 128 Transaction fees, 164–165 Transcendent Man (Kurzweil), 184 Transparency bazaar model and, 6 cryptocurrency and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 feedback and, 146 freedom and, 9 interfaces and, 189 market issues and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 politics of algorithms and, 18, 20 proprietary platforms and, 9 Traveling salesman problem, 19 “Trending Topic” widget, 180 Turing, Alan, 8, 23, 42, 79–80, 182 Turing Machine, 182 Berlinski and, 9, 24 computability boundary and, 23–24 concept of, 23 effective computability and, 42 finite-time processes and, 42 game of life and, 29–31 language and, 33, 41 McCulloch-Pitts Neuron and, 28 as though experiment, 23–24 as uniting platform, 25 Turing’s Cathedral (Dyson), 6 Turing test, 43, 79–82, 87, 138, 142 Turner, Fred, 3, 46 Twain, Mark, 151 Twitter, 53, 101–102, 173, 177, 179, 194–195, 210n43 Uber, 9, 12, 97, 138 abstraction levels of, 129 African Americans and, 130 business model of, 54, 93–94, 96 feedback system of, 145–148 interface economy and, 123–133, 145, 147 massive infrastructure of, 131 threats to, 129 Ubiquitous computation algorithms and, 3–4, 15, 33, 43, 54, 119, 124–125, 127, 178, 189–190 Bitcoin and, 178 colonization of margins and, 119 gamification and, 124 imagination and, 189–190 interfaces and, 189 Uber and, 125, 127 Unit Operations (Bogost), 118 U.S.S.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

To the economist this means a state of perfect efficiency: the efficiency of a perfectly frictionless machine. They have a powerful ally in computer technology, able to assemble and process masses of data in ‘real time’. This promises to realise, at no distant date, the economist’s vision of the human as a perfect calculating machine. The writings both of neoclassical economists and technological utopians reveal the prescriptive nature of their callings. They are allies in their ambition to ‘make the crooked timber of humanity straight’. So economists’ theories are meant to inspire greater efficiency. There is some evidence that the prescription works. In a marvellous book, I Spend Therefore I Am, Philip Roscoe (2014) reports studies which show that students of economics were markedly more calculating than those of other subjects, though whether it was their calculating nature which drew them to economics, or economics which made them more calculating, is not clear.

…

That people may actually behave more and more as economists tell them they do behave? This would be an ironic inversion of Bayes’ theorem, with the objective reality coming increasingly to resemble the subjective bets economists place on humankind. To transform human nature, not just to describe it, has always been the dream of social engineers, as today it is that of the techno-utopians. It is the foundation of the doctrine of progress. But how far can it, or should it, be pressed, before humans cease to exist in a recognisable form? And is there something irreducibly human which will resist the ambitions of the engineers of the soul? A better map The two main problems we have identified in this book are related: insufficient generality of premises (epistemology) and lack of institutional mapping (ontology).

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Dirty tricksters could now reach their target audiences directly. Cryptome, a radical transparency site and in effect the world’s first leak portal, was created in 1996 by the married couple John Young and Deborah Natsios to call attention to dual-use technology. Young had been active on the cypherpunk list, a loose group of technology utopians with an antigovernment, anarchist bent. From West Texas, son of an oil worker, he became an architect in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side. Yet for decades, Young operated Cryptome on the tiny budget of less than $2,000 per year.1 His vision was rather romantic: “Cryptome, aspiring to be a free public library, accepts that libraries are chock full of contaminated material, hoaxes, forgeries, propaganda,”2 Young told one interviewer in 2013.

…

A diffuse group of pro-technology, anti-intelligence activists emerged in the late 1970s, gathered momentum in the late 1990s, and would unleash torrents of raw political energy another decade after that. Early hippie activists tapped into the power of First Amendment activism in the United States, later incorporating strains of techno-utopianism, hacker subculture, cyberpunk, anarchism with a libertarian bent, anti-authoritarianism, and an obsession with encryption and anonymity. Many early crypto and anonymity activists became known as the “cypherpunks,” after a famous email list by that name. The second issue of Wired magazine, issued in May 1993, featured three of these “crypto rebels,” faces covered by white plastic masks with keys printed on their foreheads, bodies wrapped in the American flag.

…

The Fifth Estate was a volunteer organization, with new headquarters established at 2000 P Street NW, just off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The Fifth Estate grew out of late-1960s counterculture, and was especially inspired and modeled on the Whole Earth Catalog, then a cult publication. Produced in the San Francisco Bay Area by Stewart Brand, an iconic, technology-embracing hippie maven, the Whole Earth Catalog was an early techno-utopian vision of back-to-the-land living that embraced cybernetic feedback loops, community, wholeness, flattened hierarchies, and the motto “access to tools.” Brand’s catalog would become a prototypical social media platform (and later became the first actual social media platform when it was taken online, in 1984, as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL).

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

New Departure ball bearings keep parts in perfect alignment, support loads from any angle and require little or no maintenance. Commenting on this ad, Matt Novak writes wryly: “General Motors, like so many advertisers that would come before and after them, loved to position themselves firmly at the future’s door. An association with the sleek, techno-utopian ideas that were just around the corner meant that even a product as boring as ball bearings could look as bright and sexy as a rocket to the moon.”35 What we elegize now—the promise of robot nurses, colonies on Mars and food replication machines, even the notion that once all of humanity was connected we would establish some kind of global nervous system that would make war inconceivable—were also part of a worldview, a psychological framework.

…

In 2013, Martine Rothblatt, who is also the founder of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics, was one of the speakers at Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Global Future Congress in New York City. Clearly, her spiritual beliefs fit right into the tenor of the times. In fact, they neatly dovetail with the overall techno-utopian belief system revolving around “faith in the (technological) future.” In this extreme but also now mainstream belief system the goal of technological upgrade, of speeding up the process of change, isn’t the perfect iPhone; it isn’t a device downloaded into your brain, amplified and accessed via Google Glass; it isn’t even an army of robots we control with our minds who do our bidding and create unimaginable wealth and luxury for all.

…

But if we want to accept where—and what—we really are, we will be required to embrace what Nietzsche called “a strict, hard factuality”; not hope, but “courage in the face of reality.”21 The reality is that no matter how many new livers and kidneys the labs will grow, how many versions of the tricorder we come up with, how many houses will be conjured from 3-D printers the size of dragons, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to situate hope in visions of a techno-utopian future nearer to us every day. Even Peter Thiel seems to be getting impatient with the bets he has made. “Moore’s Law is good if you’re a computer,” he said at a 2012 public discussion. “But the question is, how good is it for human beings, and how does this translate into economic progress for humans?”

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In our line of work, however, the most common prescription is the further pursuit of Enlightenment rationality, achieved through some combination of two options: (1) "Do more research, reduce uncertainty, take action" and (2) "Educate the unwashed and the opposition." After all, if only everyone understood the facts, then the right course of action would become obviousthat is, either (a) embrace and promote technological change or (b) embrace and promote essential humanness. We see these sorts of approaches (the utopian, the hard-ass, the rational techno-utopian, the rational techno-dystopian) as further symptoms of the world we have struggled to describea world unable (and perhaps increasingly unable) to come to grips with what it does to itself. We will take a different tack and offer up a modest set of attributes, for institutions (ranging from governments to research organizations) and for individuals, that we think would help constitute a world better able to manage the complex consequences of its own ingenuity.

…

., 19 Struldbruggs, 83 Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development, 122 Synthetic biology, 68ff Synthetic reality, 82 222 Index Taylorism, 79 Techno-dystopianism, 160 Technological Society, The, 44 Technological sublime, 198 Technology as cultural competitive advantage,84 as earth-system state, 84 and geopolitical dominance, 27 Technology clusters, 79££ Techno-optimism, 7 Techno-utopianism, 160 Telegraph technology, 72 Telepathic control, of avatars, 82 Terraforming,10 Terrorism, 125 "Think globally, act locally," 105,110 Time, measured differently, 72 Tour de France, 3, 4 Toxic chemicals, in manufacturing, 51 Transhumanism, defined, 5, 6 Treaties of Westphalia, 13 7 Trojan horse, 127 Twitter, 81, 144, 148 Umesao, T., 168 Uncertainty about future, 88££ United Kingdom, 144 United Nations, 112, 164 United States, 139, 183 and brands, 134 and climate change, 113 and geopolitical dominance, 27 and higher education, 134 and venture capital, 134 Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 139, 141, 151 Vaccines, 40ff, 46, 49ff, 60, 63, 98,107,174 Values, conflict of, 88££ Van der Leeuw, S., 9 Venter, C., 68 Vietnam, 131 Vietnam war, 136, 139 Vishnu, 10,78,119 Visvanathan, S., 66 War, laws of, 152 War Made New, 130 "War on drugs," 125 "War porn," 155 Watches, 34 Webber, M., 109 Webster, D., 74 Whitman, W, 74, 77 Whole Earth Catalog, 10 Wilson, E. 0., 122 Winner, L., 44, 45 Wired for War, 141 Wolfpack sensor system, 143 Woodhouse, N., 56 World Charter for Nature, 181 World Economic Forum, 49 World Health Organization, 48 World Trade Organization, 135 World Transhumanist Association, 5 World War I, 76,127,151 World War II, 127, 131 Xe,141

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

And even Bowie knew he was lucky to have started his career in a predigital age, before music had become a commodity, telling a reporter in 2002, “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.” When you think that Bob Dylan’s first album sold four thousand copies in two years, you realize that today his contract would never have been renewed. The techno-utopians like Alexis Ohanian told us that the Internet would “kill all the gatekeepers.” But what’s really happened is that a new set of gatekeepers—Google and Facebook—has replaced the old. Google’s market capitalization is $532 billion. Time Warner’s is $61 billion. The balance of power in the world of entertainment has shifted to monopoly platforms.

…

How far is this from Jefferson’s great inspiration, the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who defined the good life and freedom in the following terms? • The company of good friends. • The freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work. • The willingness to live an examined life with a core faith or philosophy. If we think about the world techno-utopians are envisioning, it may be hard for the average citizen to have the freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work. Would a life where your daily existence relied on driving four hours a day for Uber, serving as a concierge for your Airbnb guests in the spare room, and spending your evenings doing crowdwork on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk meet Epicurus’s test?

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This is where various elements of the right currently converge, around the idea of increased employment through reduced workplace rights. There are various aggressive neoliberal aspects of the current Tory policy agenda that haven’t gone anywhere. There is one emerging economic model that ties all of these strands together, satisfying regressive nineteenth-century liberals, techno-utopian libertarians, communitarian conservatives, corporate elites and policy pragmatists equally. This is the cluster of platforms and services known as the ‘sharing economy’. These seek to push a rentier mentality into more and more corners of society, making the ownership of assets (homes, bedrooms, cars, capital equipment, free time, and so on) the condition of an income.

…

This fulfils a liberal dream of allowing labour to find its ‘correct’ price in an entirely flexible, maximally liquid market, just as financial markets do for shares and bonds according to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. I would expect this argument to gain new momentum over the coming years, advanced as much by those with a regressive fantasy of liberal Victoriana as by those with a techno-utopian fantasy of capitalist upheaval. Outside of Nigel Farage’s local pub, where people dream that their warm beer breaks EU rules and take pride in refusing to wear seatbelts on their drive home, modern societies are never unregulated. The irony of liberalism after Brexit is that, in sticking up two fingers to the regulatory power of the unelected technocrats in Brussels, it probably hastens the regulatory advance of invisible and unspoken algorithms in Silicon Valley corporations.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short by Jamie Bartlett

augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Free Software Foundation, John Perry Barlow, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Laura Poitras, Mondo 2000, Satoshi Nakamoto, technoutopianism, Zimmermann PGP

Why, charged the Intelligence and Security Committee, who conducted an investigation into the affair, hadn’t this been picked up? Because of the processing power of modern computing and the explosion of data, people have come to expect that every bit of information and data can be collected and analysed, and things can be spotted in advance. This sort of techno-utopianism is questionable in principle and unworkable in practice. There are thirteen billion direct messages sent on Facebook alone every single day. Trying to spot the one that clearly hints at criminal intent is not an easy task – less like spotting the terrorist needle in the haystack, and more like finding a specific piece of hay.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Essentially, once you find yourself outside the frictionless world of perfect markets, there’s a potential role for an intermediary to sit between the two sides.14 Lots of market evangelists have taken the notion that better technology and more nuanced feedback algorithms will end the informational problems that were the focus of Akerlof, Spence, and other information economists. One article on the libertarian Cato Institute’s website recently trumpeted in its title that we are approaching “The End of Asymmetric Information.” We doubt it. They’re confronting some pretty thorny information and enforcement challenges, and it’s far from clear that the techno-utopians will win the day. A wronged textile merchant from medieval times or a disgruntled homeowner from 1980 has nothing on the parental anxieties of the twenty-first century. This has led to enormous inefficiencies in the market for babysitters, with parents focused on a narrow set of sitter options: the neighbors’ kids, a friend’s sitter, or a bonded babysitting service.

…

Although proponents of the sharing economy tout its ability to reduce market frictions, the only way they’re going to make the kinds of profits they (and their investors) want is to create new ones. That’s something they’re not interested in talking about to the public at large, or to their representatives in government. This leaves a bit of a paradox in the techno-utopian free-market narrative. A great entrepreneur will use technology to create a fantastic new market, then will use technology to set up market frictions to protect it. As entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Competition Is for Losers.”12 Don’t get us wrong.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Musk had struck me as a well-intentioned dreamer—a card-carrying member of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian club. This group tends to be a mix of Ayn Rand devotees and engineer absolutists who see their hyperlogical worldviews as the Answer for everyone. If we’d just get out of their way, they’d fix all our problems. One day, soon enough, we’ll be able to download our brains to a computer, relax, and let their algorithms take care of everything. Much of their ambition proves inspiring and their works helpful. But the techno-utopians do get tiresome with their platitudes and their ability to prattle on for hours without saying much of substance.

…

But the techno-utopians do get tiresome with their platitudes and their ability to prattle on for hours without saying much of substance. More disconcerting is their underlying message that humans are flawed and our humanity is an annoying burden that needs to be dealt with in due course. When I’d caught Musk at Silicon Valley events, his highfalutin talk often sounded straight out of the techno-utopian playbook. And, most annoyingly, his world-saving companies didn’t even seem to be doing all that well. Yet, in the early part of 2012, the cynics like me had to take notice of what Musk was actually accomplishing. His once-beleaguered companies were succeeding at unprecedented things. SpaceX flew a supply capsule to the International Space Station and brought it safely back to Earth.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

These seasteads, as adherents described the open-water settlements, would be outside the control of any government, giving residents the freedom to experiment with illicit substances and enjoy any other pleasure currently denied by the world’s two-hundred-odd countries. He teamed up with a couple of other techno-utopians to write a paper, which he posted online, explaining the ideology and practicality of “water-based lifestyles.” It covered the pros and cons of incinerating human feces, the possibility of using inexpensive Chinese-made cruise missiles to defend against attacks from hostile naval fleets, and the promise of creating a society free of taxation.

…

They responded to and amplified the blog posts that his surrogates published. They stalked his inner circle on Twitter and adopted his own language as their own. A young army of Thiel acolytes—most of whom simply wanted to start companies and get rich, ideally with Thiel’s money—started talking like techno-utopians or contrarians. They had their own language—many identified as “rationalists”—and their own literary canon. It included Tolkien and Rand, of course, along with arcane texts that venerated technology, among them Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 600,000-word fan fiction epic that adapted J.

…

“If you were to apply the standards you have in biotech to video games, you would not have a video game industry,” he said. When a journalist asked about Paul, Thiel could barely muster any enthusiasm—not for Paul, nor for democracy itself. “I’m sort of skeptical of how much voting actually works,” he said, before giving a techno-utopian answer that seemed straight out of Yarvin’s Moldbug. “One of the things I like about technology is that when technology’s un-regulated you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it’s not subject to democratic control, and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change.”

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

The origins of the smart city date back to the 1930s and the rise of both automobiles and modernist design, when legendary architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier presented their sweeping visions for the future. Wright’s Broadacre City, Corbusier’s Radiant City, and, later, Buckminster Fuller’s insane plans to cover whole swaths of cities with giant glass structures were marvels of futurist technological utopianism. Each reflected the aesthetics of its creator, but they shared similar traits, including clusters of identical skyscrapers, broad boulevards and motorways, flying machines and pods, manicured lawns, and ample parking. In the century since, smart city designs have become more digitally driven but no less idealistic.

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Digital education strips school down to specific subjects: math, science, reading, writing, engineering, and so on. The computer favors a one-way flow of information—from the teacher out to the pupils, who are expected to make sense of it from the other end of the Wi-Fi signal. It is a system designed to send information, not for learning. The techno-utopianism of the digital future in education is driven by many things: optics, fear of falling behind, greed, a drive for cost savings and efficiency, a politicized hatred of teachers’ unions’ bargaining power. But rarely, said Cuban, has the push for the digital future of education been driven by hard evidence of what works best for the broad goals of education’s place in society.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Since robots harvested the food we needed and built our houses in self-chosen tribal groups with independently chosen government structures, humans were free to imagine and create utopian worlds with more art and research than ever before. One of the themes of this book has been the narrowing of ideological horizons, the way that both political utopianism and religious idealism have lost their grip on the contemporary imagination. But a kind of pure techno-utopianism, infused with secularized religion, plainly still exists among the people who work at the existing technological cutting edge: they don’t believe God or politics can save us, but some of them still think that science alone will suffice to do the trick; that we can be as gods through the power of digital technology alone, and that if they just hang on long enough to see it, their bodies will be transformed, their minds uploaded, and their very selves freed, empowered, and near-permanently preserved.

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(Burning Man almost gets you there, but not quite…) Maybe that’s impossible; the Western intelligentsia tiptoed in that direction in the spoon-bending, “What’s your sign?” days of 1970s religion, but nowadays our intellectuals seem embarrassed by anything too frankly supernaturalist, and our Silicon Valley overlords prefer to launder their religious impulses through techno-utopianism rather than New Age rituals. Moreover, the last extended elite flirtation with neo-paganism reached a horrific apotheosis in Nazi Germany, and today’s elite is justifiably frightened of releasing those dark forces—meaning that they might cling to the egalitarian aspect of Christianity even if it’s part of a strained and incoherent world picture, rather than risking the aristocratic, decidedly inegalitarian temptations that can creep in when you make the natural world your moral standard.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Latest-generation web cameras incapable of recognizing the faces of African-American users (yet functioning flawlessly with Caucasian users)?1 Bad training data. Rampant and historically unprecedented growth of corporate surveillance? Terms of usage. No matter the problem, it seems, a chorus of techno-utopian voices is always at the ready to offer up “solutions” that, remarkably enough, typically involve the same strategies (and personnel) as those that helped give rise to the crisis in the first place. We can always code our way out, we are assured. We can make, bootstrap, and science the shit out of this.

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The contributors to this volume—scholars who approach computing and new media from a variety of critical perspectives derived from humanistic, social scientific, and STEM disciplines—have come together to issue a manifesto that can be summarized as follows: Your computer is on fire. Humankind can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism or technoneutrality, or by self-assured and oversimplified evasion. Every time we hear the call of a lullaby—soothing words such as “human error,” “virtual reality,” “the Cloud,” or others meant to coax us back to sleep, leaving the “adults” to continue driving—our response should be a warning siren, alarming us and those around us into a state of alertness and vigilance.

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Like Pyne’s literal flaming planet, our planetary picture of computational systems run amok can be improved—with economic regulation, collaborative education, and some geopolitical gearshifts. Combining the work of sixteen researchers into a book that we hope is more than the sum total of our individual findings, we offer not just a frightening warning but some well-tested escape routes. Errors and Approximations Underneath the euphoric techno-utopian pronouncements as well as the romanticist technophobic tirades that rage across our planet in the early twenty-first century are some simple errors. Humanists and technologists are equally susceptible to these. When Apple’s user interface design registers global applause and Steve Jobs tells a graduating class that the humanities are key to good design, professors of poetry release a satisfied sigh, expecting students to flock in to appreciate the timeless beauty of iambic pentameter.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

And like the polemicists of authenticity, when it comes to helping us make sense of our digital lives more broadly, these experts often speak in generalized extremes. Most of us recognize the split between these experts’ polarized groups: cheerleaders and doomsday prophets. Social media’s champions argue the internet is bringing us closer together and making our world smaller and vaster all at once, in all the best ways. These technological utopians believe the internet is enhancing our quality of life to a previously unimaginable degree, opening up endless possibilities for authentic self-­expression and the dissemination of information. This side of the conversation speaks of social media with the wide-eyed wonder of an astronaut, the affection of a poet, sometimes even the fervor of a prophet, and it’s hard not to get swept up in their conviction that our digital platforms are making us more efficient, more interconnected, and more able to express ideas in striking new ways.

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Responding to critics of his day who figured that technological advances—which, in the 1830s, included a steel plow for farming, a type of sewing machine, and a more sophisticated bicycle—would harm our “spiritual nature” and turn us into machines, Walker argued instead that “machines would free our minds by freeing our bodies from tedious labor,” writes Taylor. Thus liberated, Walker suggested, we can all become artists, philosophers, and poets. (I’m sure my grandpa will be thrilled.) This refrain continues today, with techno-utopians arguing that technology will free us up to do the things that truly matter. In theory this ought to be true. In This Life, Yale University’s Martin Hägglund explains that through technological innovation, we should be able to “decrease our realm of necessity (the time required to keep ourselves alive) and increase our realm of freedom (the time available for activities that we count as ends in themselves, which includes time for engaging the question of what matters to us and which activities we should count as ends in themselves).”

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

Driverless Car of the Future, advertisement for “America’s Electric Light and Power Companies,” Saturday Evening Post, 1950s. Source: The Everett Collection Figure 6.3 The electronic highway in action. Source: Radio Corporation of America (RCA), courtesy the David Sarnoff Library Figure 6.4 The “Turbine-Powered” GM Firebird concept car entering an autopilot lane. This techno-utopian fantasy was set in 1976 but created in 1956 for GM’s Motorama Exhibit. Source: General Motors Figure 6.5 The History of Driverless Cars: Key milestones in the evolution of autonomous vehicles. Figure 8.1 An infamous stretch of road in the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2005 called Beer Bottle Pass, approximately seven miles from the finish line, featured over twenty twists and turns.

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As described by its advertising, GM’s concept car, the Firebird, “anticipates the day when the family will drive to the super-highway, turn over the car’s controls to an automatic, programmed guidance system and travel in comfort and absolute safety at more than twice the speed possible on today’s expressways.”15 The Firebird, despite the appeal of its sleek lines and single, vertical rear fin, would be GM’s final high-profile foray into driverless cars for decades. Figure 6.4 The “Turbine-Powered” GM Firebird concept car entering an autopilot lane. This techno-utopian fantasy was set in 1976 but created in 1956 for GM’s Motorama Exhibit. Source: General Motors Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, other researchers continued to refine variants of automated highways using GM’s and RCA’s basic system of electrical cables, metal coils, and magnetic sensors. In the United Kingdom, the Transport and Road Research Laboratory tested a driverless Citroen DS that was guided by cables embedded in the surface of a test track.16 In the United States during the 1960s, Ohio State emerged as a leading research hub for a field of automotive engineering that, by then, was known as automated vehicle guidance and control.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

In this case all due care means much more scrupulous caution than would be necessary for dealing with Ebola or plutonium.”21 Why are people so scared? Let the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom explain. He’s hardly a Luddite. Indeed, he gave a speech in 1999 to a California convention of “transhumanists” that may mark the rhetorical high water of the entire techno-utopian movement. Thanks to ever-increasing computer power and ever-shinier biotech, he predicted then, we would soon have “values that will strike us as being of a far higher order than those we can realize as unenhanced biological humans,” not to mention “love that is stronger, purer, and more secure than any human has yet harbored,” not to mention “orgasms … whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human has yet experienced.”22 But fifteen years later, ensconced in Oxford as nothing less than the director of the Future of Humanity Institute, he’d begun to worry a great deal: “In fairy tales you have genies who grant wishes,” he told a reporter for The New Yorker.

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If you were eventually able to engineer her to the point where dashing up Mount Everest presented no great challenge, you would have robbed the entire exercise of its point. Flow doesn’t increase if you have more ability; it simply requires challenge sufficient to your ability. We are already capable of being as absorbed and engaged as we ever could be. We’re good enough. 17 One reason that techno-utopians don’t worry about the loss of human meaning is because they’re not particularly attached to humans. There are, to be sure, plenty of doctors hoping for new ways to treat human suffering. But the streak of misanthropy that runs through the conversation of the digital and technological elite is hard to miss: Human brains, the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once explained, are simply “machines that happen to be made out of meat.”1 Robert Haynes, president of the Sixteenth International Congress of Genetics, said in his keynote address that “the ability to manipulate genes should indicate to people the very deep extent to which we are biological machines.”

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Instead of radiation from an external source, which damages healthy living tissues along with cancer, these robots release a radio beam inside the body that emits radiation into cancer cells with pinpoint accuracy. Using 3D printing, a medical engineer can even create a customized implant that can travel through a patient’s body to fit perfectly where it’s needed. Despite the promise of robot-assisted surgery, it is important not to jump to techno-utopianism. Allegations of unreported injuries from robotic surgery are troublingly common. The Journal for Healthcare Quality has reported 174 injuries and 71 deaths related to da Vinci surgeries. With the pressure on insurance companies and health care providers to lower costs, I worry that there will be market forces pushing robots into the operating room at times when a patient is better served by a human being.

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At last measure, the estimated size of the global sharing economy was $26 billion, and it’s growing fast, with some estimates projecting it will be more than 20 times larger in size by 2025. Part of why Chesky’s story is cloying is that Airbnb is now a destination for castles in addition to couches. When I last checked, there were more than 600 castles available, with prices often approaching $10,000 a night. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the techno-utopianism behind its origins and narrative has long been passed by economic reality. In some cases, the sharing economy has turned what might have once been a casual favor into a financial transaction. That is hardly the stuff of “sharing.” In most cases, sharing-economy businesses are just businesses.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“Computing is not about computers any more,” wrote MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. “It is about living.” By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was selling more than gadgets and software. It was selling an ideology. The creed was set in the tradition of American techno-utopianism, but with a digital twist. The Valleyites were fierce materialists—what couldn’t be measured had no meaning—yet they loathed materiality. In their view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid, inflexible, decaying stuff.

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Modern media needed its own medium, the voice that would explain its transformative power to the world, and he would take that role. The tension between McLuhan’s craving for earthly attention and his distaste for the material world would never be resolved. Even as he came to be worshipped as a techno-utopian seer in the mid-sixties, he had already, writes Coupland, lost all hope “that the world might become a better place with new technology.” He heralded the global village, and was genuinely excited by its imminence and its possibilities, but he also saw its arrival as the death knell for the literary culture he revered.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online decision-making platforms’, Sage Journals, November 2019. 12 Edward Malnick, ‘Nigel Farage interview: “At the end of this campaign the Brexit Party will be a lot bigger than the Conservatives”’, Telegraph, May 2019. 13 Darren Loucaides, ‘Inside the Brexit Party’s general election war machine’, Wired, October 2019. 14 Darren Loucaides, ‘Building the Brexit party: how Nigel Farage copied Italy’s digital populists’, Guardian, May 2019. 15 Steve Roberts, ‘The Brexit Party has betrayed us’, Spiked, December 2019. 16 Darren Loucaides, ‘Building the Brexit party: how Nigel Farage copied Italy’s digital populists’, Guardian, May 2019. 17 Darren Loucaides, ‘What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run a Country’, Wired, February 2019. 18 Alberto Nardelli and Craig Silverman, ‘Italy’s Most Popular Political Party Is Leading Europe In Fake News And Kremlin Propaganda’, Buzzfeed, November 2016. 19 ‘Italian lawmaker lambasted for anti-Semitic tweet’, The Times of Israel, January 2019. 20 Darren Loucaides, ‘What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run a Country’, Wired, February 2019. 21 Darren Loucaides, ‘In Italy, Five Star Movement’s war on journalism is picking up pace’, Columbia Journalism Review, June 2019. 22 Jason Horowitz, ‘The Mystery Man Who Runs Italy’s “Five Star” From the Shadows’, New York Times, February 2018. 23 ‘The failures of the Five Star Movement’s Rousseau’, Privacy International, April 2019. 24 Darren Loucaides, ‘Building the Brexit party: how Nigel Farage copied Italy’s digital populists’, Guardian, May 2019. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Matt Honeycombe-Foster, ‘Gordon Brown demands probe into funding of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party’, PoliticsHome, May 2019. 28 ‘Electoral watchdog to review Brexit Party finances after Gordon Brown raises concerns over PayPal payments from abroad’, ITV, May 2019. 29 James Randerson, ‘“Dirty money” claims “ridiculous,” says Brexit Party chair’, Politico, May 2019. 30 Tom Payne, ‘Top Tory donor gives £200,000 to Nigel Farage’s surging Brexit Party and defiantly blasts “the stormtroopers of the politically correct Brexit reversal conspiracy”’, Daily Mail, May 2019. 31 Dan Bloom, ‘Squirming Brexit Party chief repeatedly fails to say if party takes foreign cash’, Mirror, May 2019. 32 Gabriel Pogrund, Tom Harper and Caroline Wheeler, ‘Brexit Party fundraiser is “Posh George”, once jailed in US after money-laundering sting’, The Times, May 2019. 33 Ibid. 34 Rob Merrick, ‘Farage’s fundraising for Brexit Party allows foreign donors to “break rules”, warns elections watchdog’, Independent, May 2019. 35 ‘Brexit Party “at high risk” of accepting illegal donations’, BBC, June 2019. 36 Sam Bright, ‘The new Arron Banks?

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

My intention is not to claim that one future will automatically appear through the magical working out of technical and ecological factors that appear from outside. Instead, it is to insist that where we end up will be a result of political struggle. The intersection of science fiction and politics is these days often associated with the libertarian right and its deterministic techno-utopian fantasies; I hope to reclaim the long left-wing tradition of mixing imaginative speculation with political economy. The starting point of the entire analysis is that capitalism is going to end, and that, as Luxemburg said, it is either “transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”27 So this thought experiment is an attempt to make sense of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Already millions of people use mood-altering drugs, substances to boost muscle mass or selectively erase memory, prenatal genetic screening and gene therapy. These don’t just ameliorate defects, but also enhance us. They were all viewed as unnatural, and immoral, not so long ago. But the science is not almost there. Like every techno-utopian, Zoltan appears to flit with misleading ease between science and fiction, taking any promising piece of research as proof of victory. The three main transhumanist technologies that excite transhumanists like Zoltan are life extension, cryonic freezing and mind uploading. Each of them is advancing quickly.

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These issues will be, within a decade, major political questions as important as immigration or education are now. Zoltan is doing us all a favour by running his campaign. He’s the only political candidate trying to imagine what politics and policies might be in a world of continued and accelerating technological advance.* He might force other politicians to start thinking about it. But Zoltan’s techno-utopianism comes at a cost. Transhumanists’ exaggerated claims about the potential of technology to solve our most challenging tasks mean they ignore current problems and overlook the negative consequences of rapidly advancing technology. Politics involves trade-offs, difficult choices and compromises.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Instead, today’s biggest dangers are all ecological in nature: water crises, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, climate change, and pollution. Over the next few sections, we’ll examine how technology is helping us tackle the WEF’s top five concerns, but this doesn’t happen automatically. Ours is not a techno-utopian argument. Solving our planet’s ecological woes requires technology, for certain, but it also demands one of the largest cooperative efforts in history. If we can learn to work together like never before, we like our chances. But in light of these recent reports, sooner rather than later. And this brings us to Dean Kamen.

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The combination of AI, 5G and AR/VR will provide low-cost education, entertainment, and healthcare to nearly every human on Earth, independent of geography or socioeconomic status. There are, of course, plenty of reasons to disagree with this idea. The gap between the wealthy and poor grows ever wider, and the notion that there’s an easy solution tucked inside our technology has been criticized as techno-utopian. But exponential technologies continue to march onward, and with them the ongoing process of demonetization and democratization. In January 2019, for example, a Wall Street Journal headline reported: “The world is quietly getting better.” The story that followed examined the latest World Bank numbers, which showed a continued decline in the number of individuals living below $2 per day, aka extreme poverty.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

His moral philosophy is based on self-ownership and enlightened self-interest; his nasal earnestness recalls an adolescent boy who has read Ayn Rand for the first time and cannot stand to keep the revolutionary potential of radical individualism to himself. In advocating for better living through technology, Ver channels a bizarre brand of techno-utopianism that the writer Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism,” which Morozov defines as “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” These problems include funding infrastructure, making medical research more efficient, and even death.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes but not just for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. We view people as obedient and predictable users and consumers. Darkness as an antidote to naive techno-utopianism can jolt people into action. In design, darkness creates a frisson that excites and challenges. It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale. A good example of this is Bernd Hopfengaertner's Belief Systems (2009).

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Crypto anarchy embodied the unshakable cybernetic faith in the machine. It combined Wiener’s hubristic vision of the rise of the machines with Brand’s unflinching belief that computers and networked communities would make the world a better place. A direct line connects the techno-utopianism of Timothy Leary to the techno-utopianism of Timothy May, cyberpunk to cypherpunk. Leary felt empowered by the personal computer. For May, just one ingredient was missing: the power of prime numbers. “Cryptography provides for ‘personal empowerment,’” he wrote in 1999.97 The cypherpunks had not a trace of doubt that crypto itself was libertarian, that increasing its use would steadily increase degrees of freedom available to the individual.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. 31Colin Harrison, interview by author, May 9, 2011. 32Jay Nath, “Hacking SF: Innovation in Public Spaces,” Jay Nath, blog, last modified April 12, 2012, http://www.jaynath.com/2012/04/hacking-sf-innovation-in-public-spaces/. 33Phil Bernstein, remarks, Bill Mitchell Symposium, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, Nov 11, 2011. 34“The Transect,” Center for Applied Transect Studies, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.transect.org/transect.html. 35Red Burns, “Technology and the Human Spirit,” lecture at “The Future of Interactive Communication,” Lund, Sweden, June 1998. 36“Transdisciplinarity,” Science and Technology Outlook: 2005–2055 (Palo Alto, CA: Institute for the Future, 2006), 31, http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/TH_SR-967_S%2526T_Perspectives.pdf. 37Adam Greenfield, “Beyond the ‘smart city,’ ” Urban Scale, blog, last modified February 17, 2011, http://urbanscale.org/news/2011/02/17/beyond-the-smart-city/. 38Evgeny Morozov, “Technological Utopianism,” Boston Review, November/December 2010, http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/morozov.php. 39Michael M. Grynbaum, “Mayor Warns of Pitfalls of Social Media,” New York Times, March 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/nyregion/bloomberg-says-social-media-can-hurt-governing.html. 40Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 32. 41Michael Joroff, e-mail correspondence with author, January 28, 2012. 42Janette Sadik-Khan, lecture, “BitCity 2011: Transportation, Data and Technology in Cities,” Columbia University, New York City, November 4, 2011. 43Guru Banavar, lecture, “X-Cities 3: Heavy Weather—Design and Governance in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond,” Columbia University Studio-X, New York, April 10, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The enormous cultural impact of that psychedelic freak-out on American society can be felt today, and it still casts a long shadow over San Francisco. There, Hirshberg has been a driving force behind a new creative space just down the hill from Haight-Ashbury, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Both physically and spiritually, it sits at the intersection of that 1960s counterculture and a new techno-utopianism. It’s just a few steps to either Twitter’s headquarters or the head office of Burning Man, the radical art festival that builds a temporary city in the Nevada desert each summer. Though he takes inspiration from the hippies, Hirshberg is politically pragmatic. He soon slaps his laptop shut and stops playing dumb.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Economic to political to cultural I could stop here, but the next and perhaps final stage is when economic power morphs into what Marxists sometimes call ‘cultural hegemony’: where domination can be achieved through controlling the ideas and assumptions available to the public. The idea – associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his criticism of capitalism – is worth considering here, because there is little doubt that a techno-utopian view of the world has infected society. All technology encodes within it certain values and assumptions about how the world works. Gutenberg’s press was more than a mere printing machine – it popularised the ideal of free information exchange. Similarly, the nineteenth-century penny press papers created a new demand for gossip and a hard criticism of power.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Transhumanism exalts and preserves one particular expression of humanity, while leaving the rest of messy creation behind—or even exploiting it—in order to escape before the body dies or the world ends. 71. The transhumanist movement is less a theory about the advancement of humanity than a simple evacuation plan. Techno-utopians like to think of themselves as orchestrating a complete break from civilization—a leap into outer space, cyberspace, machine consciousness, or artificial life. But their ideas just extend our same blind addiction to consumption, destruction, progress, and colonization. Cyber-wettiko. European colonialists ignored the peoples and places they overran in their conquest of the planet in the belief that they were working toward some greater endpoint, some ordained destiny.

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

If so, it is a terrifying one in which anonymity and structurelessness permits total absolution of social responsibility, terrorizing of innocent outsiders, and harassment of those who provide public feedback, criticism and indeed even speak of the group (“You do not talk about anonymous”). It is a P2P, collaborative, digitized “Lord of the Flies” wherein boys’ games devolve into violence for fun. In the perpetual techno-utopian dialectic, this is the feared dystopian future we hope will be avoided, as we aim for the utopia that we can never actually arrive at. 5 2. How this Book is Written “Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.” —Tom Clancy This book was first wri en over 5 days (Jan 18-22, 2010) during a Book Sprint in Berlin. 7 people (5 writers, 1 programmer and 1 facilitator) gathered to collaborate and produce a book in 5 days with no prior preparation and with the only guiding light being the title ‘Collaborative Futures’.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

While Beer’s work, for which he had gained a substantial international reputation, focused on more efficient management techniques, according to Medina’s interviews with Flores, the latter was captivated by how the “connective, philosophical foundation” of Beer’s management cybernetics could serve Allende’s vision of an anti-bureaucratic democratic socialism in which workers participated in management and that would defend individual civil liberties. Management cybernetics, Flores reasoned, could assist the young government in “herding the cats” of the public and worker-managed sectors. The term “cybernetics” today has something of a naively techno-utopian aura, or even a body-horror, dystopic dread about it. But at its fundament, the field of cybernetics simply investigates how different systems—biological, mechanical, social—adaptively manage communication, decision making and action. The first edition of Beer’s 1959 book on the subject, Cybernetics and Management, does not even make reference to computers, and, as Medina is keen to stress, Beer himself was an intransigent critic of how business and government deployed computers.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Some fledgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ride-sharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of distributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures like water and energy. Many of these activities are difficult outside of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary. However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here. ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Frustrated by the effects of high winds on swing doors at their store in Corpus Christi, the brothers started their own door company that sold the world’s first automatically opening doors.2 Today, the Horton Automatic sliding doors are replicated all over the world. When you walk up to a grocery store or hospital, the doors often automatically open. When health-care workers rush a patient into a hospital from an ambulance, the doors just slide open. Um, I know how automatic doors work. The experience isn’t a shocking, please-leave-the-meeting-room, techno-utopian vision, but an expected, boring solution. It isn’t something we marvel at, revere, or even consider special; it’s become an automatic solution we just count on. And that, honestly, is a great thing. These seamless, automatic solutions sometimes take decades (or a few millennia) before they are reliable enough to become part of our everyday lives.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

In fact, almost every scenario we've covered is reflected somewhere or another in New Songdo's marketing materials; the developers have even included the pressure-sensitive flooring for the homes of older residents, where it's once again touted as being able to detect falls and summon assistance. It's quite a comprehensive—and audacious—vision. And while it certainly sounds like something out of AT&T's infamously techno-utopian "you Will" commercials of the early 1990s, New Songdo is entirely real. It's being built right now, at a cost estimated to be somewhere north of $15 billion. That financing for the project is being provided by international institutions like ABN Amro, as well as Korean heavyweights Kookmin Bank and Woori Bank, should tell us something.

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

Elgin had worked with a government commission on population growth looking ahead to the year 2000 and then for the Stanford Research Institute. Over the years, he observed a trend of Americans “returning to the simple life,”10 which the media had turned into a new archetype. Moving to the country, baking your own bread, and establishing cooperative businesses constituted a new social philosophy that mingled with the techno-utopianism of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog circa 1968. Elgin rebranded Gregg’s voluntary simplicity with the acronym VS, which sounds more like a technological device than an idea with centuries of history—once again showing how minimalism erases its own past. Elgin’s version of VS was driven by a sense of disconnection: Economic and political structures had grown beyond human scale, so people wanted to separate themselves from them.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

At the Media Lab, the favorite opener of any story is, “It turns out that…,” which basically means, “We were wrong in this cool way.” It’s also important to note that disobedience is different from criticism. There is, for example, a very important design movement called critical design—a perspective that provides a critique of modern techno-utopianism that we technologists often find ourselves espousing. However, criticism is about our work, where disobedience is the work. Computer security would not improve without computer network hackers, and we wouldn’t exist without our gut microbes—good and bad—although apparently most are somewhere in between.49 PS: Disobedience with a Conscience I often have the nine principles displayed on one of the screens in my primary meeting room at the Media Lab.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The progressive data-sharing mandate—the mechanism we have suggested to ensure such diversity—is designed to protect not just against the concentration of adaptive systems but also, through the sharing of different data subsets, to guard against all competitors using the same data input to build their systems. The key is to foster a diversity that continues to translate into robust competition. When it comes to the broader social implications of data-driven markets, we abhor the gleeful optimism of the techno-utopians as much as we shun the gloom of the perennial doomsday prophets. Rather than pretending to predict the future, we should prepare ourselves to shape it, readying the right levers and mechanisms so that we can stimulate beneficial dynamics and mitigate negative consequences whenever and wherever they arise.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The artists he included in the Zurich exhibition ranged from very famous to obscure outsider artists, but they all had one thing in common: a total conflation of art with life, sometimes even an attempt to live one’s art. Alongside a scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-built Monument to the Third International, one might find a costume from Oskar Schlemmer’s techno-utopian Triadisches Ballett, the spiritual color theories of Wassily Kandinsky, a score by John Cage (for whom “all sounds are music”), or documentation of the Palais Idéal, a structure hand-built with thousands of rocks by a mailman, after he tripped over one and decided it was beautiful. The domes and other art from the Drop City commune would not have been out of place here.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

During the early days on the Internet, there were no agreed-upon standards of etiquette. Templeton helped to define the way people would behave for decades to come. The Virtual Community: The Well In 1985 Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL. The WELL was made up of a new breed of techno-utopian ex-hippies who’d been experimenting with communal living and other alternative lifestyles. These baby boomers had grown up a bit, and where their ’60s brethren had failed, they believed they’d succeed, with the power of network technology. It was all very back-to-the-earth, but with a focus on the power of computing.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

From here, one of the smaller stations, the line turns to follow the hilltops before entering the much more impressive summit station of La Ceiba. With its exposed metal structure holding up a great barrelled roof, La Ceiba is a piece of High Tech architecture transplanted to the barrio. Its technical language is appropriate to a piece of engineering infrastructure, but it also carries more than a hint of the techno-utopian futurism that Archigram turned into pop icons in the 1960s. Archigram’s progeny turned High Tech into the language of airports and banking headquarters. But in Caracas it has been reinvented, in vertical gyms and Metrocable stations, as part of the language of the barrio. That homage to the 1960s extends to U-TT’s terminology.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

When we met in Paris, he was working as a software engineer for Jobbatical, a start-up that helps businesses hire staff from around the world and relocate them. Jobbatical was led by a charismatic Estonian, Karoli Hindriks, who was an enthusiastic graduate of Singularity University, the brainchild of the world’s most famous techno-utopian author: Ray Kurzweil. When I had visited her at the company headquarters in Tallinn a few months earlier, they felt and smelled and looked like a miniature version of the offices of Google that I visited in Mountain View, New York and Paris. The company and the service it provided were one and the same.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

. ******** In a talk about electronic money that he gave in 2014, Charles Goodhart was kind enough to refer to some of my thinking around ‘privacy money’ as a way forward. Chapter 9 Why keep cash? Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread. — Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in his Essays, Civil and Moral (Number XV: Of Sedition and Troubles) There are, of course, many arguments for keeping cash despite the post-war techno-utopian fantasies of cashlessness – a cashlessness that with the wisdom of hindsight we know could not have been achieved with the fiat currencies and technologies of that era. The key arguments in favour of retaining cash were set out neatly by David Keohane in a piece for FT Alphaville (Keohane 2015).

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

In 1997, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans showed a series of fifty-six photographs of Concorde that correspond almost perfectly with my own memory: a dark arrowhead rumbling across the sky, seen not from the luxury cabin, but from the ground. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Tillmans remarked, Concorde is perhaps the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functioning today. Its futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs people’s imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. It’s an environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit … For the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to watch it in the air, landing or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.31 Concorde made its final flight in 2003, a victim as much of its own elitism as the fatal crash of Air France Flight 4590 into the Parisian suburbs three years earlier.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Back to the Future “The only constant is change” Heraclitus Just because things have been a certain way for 100 years doesn’t mean they should stay that way; nor does the possibility of a new approach mean it’s necessarily the correct and immediate way forward. There probably needs to be a balance between the opposite views of “always been this way” vs techno-utopianism. History tells us that all large transportation and communication innovations—whether cars, carriages, canals or cables—have involved great uncertainty. Innovation invites speculation. But our individual ability to influence its direction is interesting. The only certainty is that these technologies will continue to develop - how we choose to use them, and when, is the only open question.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Every time we offload a job to a tool or a machine, or to a symbol or a software algorithm, we free ourselves to climb to a higher pursuit, one requiring greater dexterity, richer intelligence, or a broader perspective. We may lose something with each upward step, but what we gain is, in the end, far greater. Taken to an extreme, Whitehead’s sense of automation as liberation turns into the techno-utopianism of Wilde and Keynes, or Marx at his sunniest—the dream that machines will free us from our earthly labors and deliver us back to an Eden of leisurely delights. But Whitehead didn’t have his head in the clouds. He was making a pragmatic point about how to spend our time and exert our effort. In a publication from the 1970s, the U.S.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Anonymity would allow us to form new identities freed from the limits of our everyday lives, and escape surveillance. There were a host of so-called ‘Twitter revolutions’, misleadingly credited to the ability of educated social industry users to outflank senile dictatorships, and discredit the ‘elderly rubbish’ they spoke. And then, somehow, this techno-utopianism returned in an inverted form. The benefits of anonymity became the basis for trolling, ritualized sadism, vicious misogyny, racism and alt-right subcultures. Creative autonomy became ‘fake news’ and a new form of infotainment. Multitudes became lynch mobs, often turning on themselves.20 Dictators and other authoritarians learned how to use Twitter and master its seductive language games, as did the so-called Islamic State whose slick online media professionals affect mordant and hyper-aware tones.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

They are the public this work is created for; rather than sponging off their work, lurkers might even make it easier for the editors—it is hard to imagine the already fragile Wikipedia ecosystem sustaining itself if every single internet user on the internet took an active role. In the early years of enthusiasm for peer production, techno-utopians talked about this dynamic as the 1–9–90 or “1 percent rule”—that is, in collaborative online spaces, roughly 90 percent of people only read content, 9 percent edit the content, and another 1 percent actually create new content. As I reviewed the Wikipedia page for the 1 percent rule, an anecdote jumped out at me.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Today we can see similar responses of yes, no, or maybe to the question of whether the dramatic change swirling all around us is to our benefit. Romantics and xenophobes reject this globalizing technology as somehow offending the laws of nature, even of “humanity” itself (an overused and under-defined word in our digital age). Both Silicon Valley techno-utopians and some critics of neoliberalism insist that the digital revolution will, once and for all, solve all of society’s perennial problems and create a cornucopian postcapitalist future. For them, much of this change is inevitable—“The Inevitable”3 according to one particularly evangelical determinist.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

When personal computing and the internet developed in the 1990s, New Communalists hailed them as the route to the ecotopias they had failed to create in their back-to-the-land phase. The New Communalists’ views morphed into what became known as the Californian Ideology.7 It combined libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions.8 Its core belief was that technology would yield personal liberation and egalitarian community. Individuals could now determine their own fates, as personal computers plus the internet offered ways to earn money without relying on a bureaucratic institution.9 The financial accessibility of computers meant that everyone could join in as equals.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

It was an evocative vision of women’s bodily connection to networked computing, a connection that emerged before the technology itself, beginning with Ada Lovelace and the countless uncounted female computers—a lineage Plant traces in her book, much as I have in mine. Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix are considered the matriarchs of cyberfeminism, a wild, breathlessly utopian, very brief art movement that flourished in the mid-1990s, as the Web began to reshape the world. Cyberfeminism conjures, in many ways, the countercultural, techno-utopian feeling of early Internet culture, and inherits the spirit of those West Coast cyberhippies who believed that computer-mediated communication would create a free civilization of the mind. The motley crew of artists, coders, game designers, and writers who pronounced themselves cyberfeminists joyfully subverted what VNS Matrix called “big daddy mainframe”: the patriarchy hard coded to the technological underpinnings of the world, a backbone built by men.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Beyond the specific complaints—that Siri cannot understand Bronx, for example—were broader, often mocking critiques of the notion of Siri as a productivity booster. Many of Siri’s advertised uses2 (“Siri, find me a latte” or “Siri, play my running mix”) seem less about raising output than providing digital parlor tricks for bored yuppies. Given the way Apple uses cloying techno-utopian hype (the iPad is “a magical window where nothing comes between you and what you love”) to grease its famously aggressive release schedule (new versions rolled out precisely as profit margins on existing ones are fading), it doesn’t take a cynic to see Siri as an unusually elaborate carrot. And yet . . . it’s hard to ignore the thrill I get when, a few days later, I tell Siri to set a timer for five minutes, and she does it.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Google hired him to work in its research laboratory while he continued to teach AI as a tenured professor at Stanford. By 2011, Sebastian Thrun was something of a Silicon Valley rock star, a certified genius and visionary maker of very cool things. He dressed in jeans and stylish T-shirts and married a beautiful professor of comparative literature who liked to tease him about his techno-utopian ways. In March of that year, Thrun was invited to TED (Technology, Education, Design), the annual festival of technologist self-congratulation, where he stood before a rapt audience and described how he and his colleagues at Google had built a self-driving car. Afterward, Thrun hung around the conference to watch the other presenters, including an energetic former hedge fund analyst named Salman Khan.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

He got his start building an open-source aerial robotics community called DIY Drones, and undertook some ill-advised early experiments, such as buzzing Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with one of his self-flying spies. It might well have been a case of antic gene expression, since he’s descended from a founder of the American anarchist movement. Chris ran Wired magazine, a go-to publication for techno-utopians and -dystopians alike, from 2001 to 2012; during his tenure it won five National Magazine Awards. Chris dislikes the term “roboticist” (“like any properly humbled roboticist, I don’t call myself one”). He began as a physicist. “I turned out to be a bad physicist,” he told me recently. “I struggled on, went to Los Alamos, and thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m not going to be a Nobel Prize winner, but I can still be a scientist.’

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Headlines lauded the company’s world-saving mission as well as its cars’ extraordinary features, such as the super quick zero-to-sixty acceleration option that Musk nicknamed “Ludicrous Mode.” And at a time when heroic public figures were an increasingly rare commodity, Musk’s centrality to Tesla’s capitalistic, technological, and environmental ambitions (to say nothing of his numerous other techno-utopian causes, including SpaceX, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink . . . and, of course, the company whose success provided the funding for all of them, PayPal) made both him and his car company even more appealing. As Tesla’s brand solidified and its stock took off, Musk poured gas on the fire.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Southern California’s tech culture had been shaped by both Whole Earth Catalog-tinged counterculture2 and Joseph Schumpeter-inspired “evolutionary” capitalism. But Barlow’s treatise gave such views a wider audience. The essay was quickly mirrored on forty thousand other sites, making it arguably the most impressive example of viral content up to that point. Today the Declaration is often cited as the zenith of 1990s techno-utopian silliness. Barlow himself, when asked The “Nature” of the Internet • 163 about the declaration in a 2004 interview, quipped that “we all get older and smarter.”3 In crucial ways, though, we have not gotten smarter about the internet. Misconceptions about the “nature” of the internet are still the explicit rationale for our public policies.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Polman was an outlier when he took over Unilever, one of the few CEOs willing to question the status quo and set ambitious targets to reduce the harm his company did to the world. Yet today Polman is one of many. Over the past decade, he has been joined by a diverse array of CEOs who have found different ways to push back against Welchism, an effort that extends from the European headquarter of Unilever to the techno-utopian campuses of Silicon Valley. For example at PayPal, the online payments platform that was spun out of eBay into a public company in 2015, CEO Dan Schulman is changing his company’s relationship with its workers, starting with how much he pays them. When Schulman took over PayPal in 2014, he embraced the idealistic language of Silicon Valley, trumpeting a corporate mission statement that suggested technology could solve all the world’s problems.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The Revenge of Analog not only questions our assumptions about digital’s inevitability, but the very certainty at the heart of the digital economy. This is a powerful current to swim against. The notion that nondigital goods and ideas have become more valuable would seem to cut against the narrative of disruption-worshipping techno-utopianism coming out of Silicon Valley and other startup hubs, but, in fact, it simply shows that technological evolution isn’t absolute. We may eagerly adopt new solutions, but, in the long run, these endure only if they truly provide us with a better experience—if they can compete with digital technology on a cold, rational level.

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

We’d do it marrying, arguing, staring at the wall, dining, studying our feet, holding contests, singing, sneezing. Hundreds of thousands of us had cameras. Well, we’d plug them in and leave the tape running for our real life. In this underlying dream, we were neither exactly wrong nor right. The promise of the five hundred channels went to waste. The techno-utopians’ fantasies shifted to the Internet. Nothing like the paradise we hoped for came to fruition on TV, that’s for sure. Instead we got reality TV. — The assessment of reality television depends first on your notion of television; second, on your idea of political community. Here is a standard misconception: since the noblest forms of artistic endeavor are fictional and dramatic (the novel, film, painting, plays), it can be assumed that the major, proper products of television will be its dramatic entertainments, the sitcom and the hour-long drama.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

When I first encountered Google in early 1999, I was teaching history at Wesleyan University. Mostly, I was scrambling to finish my dissertation—which became my first book. Because most of my research drew on sources available on microfilm, search engines had not yet become an integral part of my professional life. I was aware of the techno-utopian conversations about electronic archives and the global delivery of knowledge, but I didn’t think very hard about them. I had a book to write and sell. The Web, for me, was a platform for self-promotion. And existing search engines, like Yahoo, were not helping in that effort. Since about 1995 I had been using Yahoo and AltaVista for my Web navigation.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

—JONATHAN CLARK, ENTREPRENEUR It is dinnertime, and Stacey Asher is sitting at a window-side six-top, talking about how she helps poor people using the power of fantasy sports. She lives in Highland Park, in Dallas, not far from former president George W. Bush. Asher runs a charity called Portfolios with Purpose. It calls itself “a powerful platform combining healthy competition with giving”—a short phrase that manages to hit the notes of techno-utopianism, capitalism, and charity. Though she appears to be in her thirties, she says she worked at “six or seven” hedge funds in New York before moving to Texas, where her new husband had a job, also in finance. Like many from the business world who end up devoted to helping others, Asher has a story about an African epiphany.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The exponential technologies discussed in part one give us the physical tools for radical change, the psychological strategies described in part two are the mental framework for success, and the exponential crowd tools that fill part three provide all of the additional resources (talent, money, and so forth) needed to cross the finish line. Here’s the most important point: Abundance is not a techno-utopian vision. Technology alone will not bring us this better world. It is up to you and me. To bring on this better world is going to require what could easily be the largest cooperative effort in history. In other words, there is a bold and bright future out there. But, as with everything else, what happens next is up to us.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Conclusion In 2008, former Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote an article announcing the “end of theory.” In this ode to big data, Anderson proposed that with an n = all world, theory as we know it would be obsolete. If you have access to “all,” he explained, there’s no need to hypothesize what “all” means. While the argument was lambasted for its unrepentant techno-utopianism, Anderson did manage to introduce readers to an insightful quotation from British statistician George E. P. Box: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”91 Once we accept all models’ functional imperfection, we start to see how the second half of Box’s comment is actually the most significant.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

“The so-called ‘agents of doom’ carry around what my colleague Nassim Taleb calls ‘silent risk’: in trying to buttress their own power, and even in trying (I am sure, with the best intentions) to decrease the long-term existential risk to our species, they themselves pose a terrible risk to civilization, and perhaps to life on Earth,” he wrote in July 2022. By downplaying current risks such as climate breakdown, for instance, because they don’t see it as existential, and by betting the future of humanity on techno-utopian scientific breakthroughs, longtermists were taking a dangerous gamble that could seriously backfire, Read believed. Taleb just thought they were bad at math. He’d met Nick Bostrom at a dinner in Oxford in 2008 and quickly chalked him up as a perhaps well-intentioned, head-in-the-clouds dreamer who lacked common sense.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population