Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/15/which-side-are-you-on-6.html
…
4 Likes
"Back to work slaves" said Google, Fbook, etc. etc.
3 Likes
Has nobody warned them unionizing leads irreversably to Pol Pot and the Killing Fields?
5 Likes
That really chapped my hide too.
So now can you synthesize those cut-and-paste thoughts into an opinion on socialism in Silicon Valley?
Fixed it.
Matthew Pancia, an engineer in Silicon Valley, told Salon that tech workers are generally a liberal group of people, with liberal social views, but they often align themselves with “an overarching and really oppressive technolibertarian vision of Silicon Valley”
In other words, they follow this:
I’m glad that there’s finally some pushback against the Libertarian economic orthodoxy component, but what’s really happening isn’t growing support for socialism per se but for Scandinavian-style mixed-economy social democracy.
The discourse in America has just been debased to the point where things like workers’ calls for unionisation or their refusing to work on projects for unscrupulous clients somehow fall under a broad category of (implied radical) “socialism”.
11 Likes
Just trying to help…
syn·the·size
/ˈsinTHəˌsīz/
verb
- make (something) by synthesis, especially chemically.
“the drug was first synthesized in 1929”
- combine (a number of things) into a coherent whole.
“pupils should synthesize the data they have gathered”
- produce (sound) electronically.
“trigger chips that synthesize speech”
It’s going to turn Silicon Valley into Venezuela. Everybody knows that Venezuela is the reason no liberal policy can ever work anywhere in the world ever.
8 Likes
Huh. I wonder what digital strike-breaking is going to look like?
Why would “digital strike-breaking” be any different from the physical violence of the past?
1 Like
Metadata.
2 Likes
I’m working right now! Kinda.
5 Likes
The solution to two monopolies is make one monopoly and let Trump be responsible for it?? This guy would do good to research what happened when the U.S. tried to break up the big telecoms.
I’m not sure how prevalent it is, and maybe it is just the outspoken techies that are Libertarian, but I see a lot of that in the Valley. There is a kind of mindset where you are very good at solving technical problems in ways nobody has thought of before, and you take the leap and see social problems too as something that can just be fixed, if you are willing to try an unconventional solution. This tends also to go with a fair amount of contempt for government-based (vs. private tech based) solutions, and also contempt for mainstream politicians and political parties who are still trying to solve social problems with more established methods and with all the messiness of getting to a political consensus.
The problems are, most techies are not geniuses at social engineering, they don’t see the downsides or unintended consequences of their schemes, and people are messy and tend not to like techno-elites running their lives. Also big corporations are totally self-serving, while government is at least putatively serving the public, and sometimes succeeds at that.
6 Likes
No.
Maybe this message will get through one day, if it is repeated often enough.
10 Likes
For future reference, that’s called “Engineer’s Disease”. It’s frequently co-morbid with Libertarianism.
5 Likes
Socialism doesn’t require (and is, in fact, anathema to) authoritarianism, and never has.
1 Like
Explain “National Socialism” then? galaxy brain
1 Like
