The great western asocial media collapse
tag > Technology
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Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto as redaction poetry
In "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" (2023), Marc Andreessen cites Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of "Fascist manifesto" (the OG Italian one) as well as neo-reactionary accelerationism father Nick Land, and he quotes the Futurist manifest approvingly - a document which says that war is the only true hygiene of the world and that museums and libraries (and feminism) should be destroyed. It was a proto-fascist text that inspired Mussolini. History does not repeat itself but it does rhythm...
Interesting related read: Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto" - by Dave Karpf
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The current tech industry is dominated by MBA & Finance types. Had this been the case during the golden age of innovation in the 20st century, would the birth of computers, the internet, and various other breakthroughs ever had happened - or would the suites have rejected it all?
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Coming generations will come to see In-silico machine learning as an extremely naive dead end, which was finally overcome by techniques such as neuromorphic engineering, photonic computation & leveraging self-organizing water molecule & time-crystal networks.
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Phonosemantics from Bell Labs in 1926. "early technical investigation into visualisation of sound and voice patterns.
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The CEO of RISC-V says that "possible government restrictions on the open-source technology will slow down the development of new and better chips, holding back the global technology industry"
Future historians will marvel at our era, dubbing it the 'Digital Dark Age', an epoch characterized by rampant closed source systems. They'll muse, in an era where open source is default, how we ever functioned in such a restricted technological and cultural landscape.
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High WEIRD-ness
Watching the keynotes of any of the US tech giants in 2023, i find it rather surprising how they are still - despite their "diversity" push in recent years - laser focused on products made exclusively for the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) demographic, which represents a mere 12% of the worlds population. Meanwhile, Asian tech giants are successfully serving billions across the non western world with products driven by strikingly different visions. Who do you think will win in the mid term?
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Google is the world's leading purveyor of fine Computational Comedy 🤡
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"Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
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Solar energy new builds in 2023 is about 392 gigawatts globally. That's the equivalent in generation terms of about 1 nuclear reactor every 10 days. And the solar boom is still accelerating & tech getting better.
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A society that systemically disrespects the rights of non-human life (animals, plants, etc.) but celebrates the rights of machines, is inherently insane.
The currently popular notion that "more energy use = better outcomes overall" is naive juvenile nonsense. Nature strives for ecological coherence in a complex web of life-forms, that are hyper attuned to their environment, use energy highly efficiently and create minimal waste.
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Die Bombe: If you have to make a movie about the origins of the atomic bomb, at least make it about people that mattered, like Paul Rosbaud, Otto Hahn, Hans Kammler & the German intelligentsia milleux of the time.
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In 1945 John von Neumann published the EDVAC paper, which became the technological basis for all modern computers & included decisions like using binary to represent numbers
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Seymour Cray, the inventor of the Cray 1 the world's first supercomputer, drew inspiration for his work from the elves who would talk to him while he dug tunnels by hand.
