I want to know why management cybernetics wasn’t part of my degree.
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Because it was a historical dead end? I know a little about it, at least from the Socialist side, as I had a friend who did his masters thesis on cybernetics and the East German state. They ultimately rejected it, but I think that’s true in the US as well, at least in connection with practical needs of a CS program as CS programs tend to be linked to the needs of private industry (unless you’re in a research oriented/theory program?). I’d guess that the people who actually talk about cybernetics now are mostly historians of computing?
It might have been an interesting thing to include in my cybernetics degree, though? Even if only for historical interest? A few mentions of Norbert Wiener was about it for that.
Would have been better than the crappy business management module I had to do, at any rate (yeah, yeah, low bar).
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Agreed, but yeah, that’s my point… a corporate model won’t be interested in a critical history of the field, which is depressing as hell. If it’s anything the corporate model really wants to avoid it’s critical history…
That is one thing I want to be more inclusive about, is the history of computing. I was never able to include that, because at GSU we have to do the whole of US history, so lots gets left out. But it seems like an important aspect of our modern history to teach, the history of computing and things that get ignored, like cybernetics or the fact that the earliest programmers were generally women.
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Look, ma, no history!
Yeah… no reason to leave history out of such a course, unless of course it’s considered unhelpful in cranking out worker bees…
For the Unicorns, this is 100%. Absolutely. True. And that is what the show Silicon Valley nailed. Peter Thiel ^c^c^c Gregory exclaiming, “What didi buy!? That’s not what I bought, that is the product!!”. (I’ve only seen season 1).
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That’s What I was getting at.
And I think he’s right.
Is uber a business model? Because its not a technology, you could cobble an uberlike app with off the shelf FOSS technologies if you really needed to. You could leverage other technologies to do the same thing.
The idea that Uber is better for society than public transportation depends on presenting Uber as an informal economy of scale. Which its not. Uber makes money, If it doesn’t make money, uber dies, along with its business model.
The idea that technology will make our lives better distracts us from realizing that technology is a natural consequence of us being human. In that manner technology cannot come and save us from ourselves.
Silicon valley understands this. Its rockstar CEO’s spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise, while retired CEO Bill Gates is fighting poverty and disease.
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Season 2 of Silicon Valley was far far better because Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) became a writer. Season 1 was frankly kind of awful except for the last episode. Season 2 was consistently great and had sharper satirical teeth. You could tell the writers knew the culture.
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Yeah. I think Mike Judge’s 3 months in Silicon Valley in the 80s gets less and less relevant as time goes on.
I am really looking forward to the next season’s. I didn’t think season 1 was awful though, every scene with Peter Gregory made me laugh.
You know the actor died during the filming of series 1, right?
I did not. Holy crap.
I am now… Very moved by his account and deeply saddened.
John Perry Barlow is believed to have said
Apple is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution conducted by people in three-piece suits.
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