December 17, 2024
Answering Marc Andreesen's Question
Marc Andressen has been making the rounds with interviews lately, the two best and most informative can be found below. The Bari Weiss interview is, as is her wont, extremely comprehensive, and while not actively hostile she asks ALL the questions in a meticulous probing manner, very much like one would expect a highly professional reporter to conduct an interview (if one believed in such unicorns). Rogan does a good interview too, but in a more conversational manner.
Both interviews are long and informative, but necessarily cover much of the same ground, though the interviewers are astonished and offer follow up questions to different statements by Andreessen. Still, you can probably get by watching either one.
2hours 5minutes
2hours 40minutes
Both interviews cover the confusion, astonishment and horror that Marc Andreesen felt when the left, which had been so supportive of tech in the 90's and oughts, quite suddenly, in Obama's second term became pathologically anti-tech.
This is not hard to figure out looking at it from the outside and with a historical lens, but must be confusing in the extreme if one is on the inside.
The modern left runs on something that is best described as 'elemental smug'. In most of the rank and file it's not actually the toxic sanctimony of their leadership, it just an aura of a smug, self-assured confidence that the lefties are better, brighter and more creative than the filthy troglodytic plebs who dare contradict them or who don't get with their program with great verve and gusto.
Being on the cutting edge of tech, or imagining being so, fed this smug engine. Other areas of expertise, like banking and industry were strangled and controlled....here, Andreesen explains to Rogan what they did to the banking industry in Obama's first term.
Watch at least until Joe 's eyes roll back in his head and he says "OH MY GOD!"
This sort of thing happened in MOST industries. It's one of the reason that defense procurement is so incestuous. In the early '90s most of the defense contractors were concentrated in to a few huge conglomerates. The theory behind this was that it made them easier to regulate, It also allowed strict gatekeeping and the ability to play them against each other. I should note that this specific economic system, a modern, sort of mutant variant of mercantilism, has a name, and that name begins with "F".
For about 20 years, supporting tech made left leaning policy makers feel smug and superior, after all, progressives were theoretically for "progress" and nothing exemplified progress more than new technology. If new technology displaced the less educated that was surely tragic, and was an opportunity to shed some insincere tears signal one's moral virtue, but ultimately advances in tech that one had financed were an affirmation of one's superiority.
Then, in the early 2010s, tech stopped feeding the smug. First by empowering contradictory voices on the internet, then threatening the jobs of the gentry class as opposed to the peons. At this point, tech needed to be reigned in...as Mr. Andreesen explains to Miss Wise here.
(Watch at least until Bari says "WOW!")
Andreesen seems genuinely confused by this, all of his friends in the DNC used to be so pro tech, but I think that the answer is simply that the Dems did what they have always been trying to do since 1912 (with some noble attempts at change in '60 and '76) which is a technocratic paradise for pencil pushers (and hell for everyone else).
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Pack vs. Herd
An extremely thoughtful, knowledgeable, and readable essay on the two broad types of group dynamics that humans engage in can be found over on Unfolding the World.
I implore you to read the whole thing.
I have little to add except to say that it is considerably more fair-minded in its look at this issue than most analysis we get these days. Teams and groups both have their places and uses, but most who opine on the topic in current year are convinced that one or the other is evil, and the other is a universal panacea. Such rantings are not helpful. The linked article is.
Taoist Miscegenating Tadpoles by Unknown Artist
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December 09, 2024
That South Korean Thing
The pithiest take on the abortive Marshall Law declaration in South Korea I had seen was actually by Pixy, who described the situation as the Korean president having "stripped a gear somehow".
Pixy's take is not far off. However, Nick Frietas and crew have a discussion of the matter that is the very antithesis of pithy, but is quite informative.
1hr 55min.
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