by
Noam Cohen
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Beyond the test’s dubious accuracy, there was a flaw in how the study itself was conducted over the years: Terman repeatedly intervened in the lives of his high-IQ subjects, often without their knowledge. He couldn’t help himself. He wrote them recommendations for admission to Stanford, gave small sums of money during tough times, and, in one case, helped a fourteen-year-old be placed in a good foster home rather than returned to his abusive father. (To be clear, Terman didn’t intervene to help any in the control group.) These intrusions by Terman made the study’s conclusions scientifically unreliable, to say the least: readers could rightly question if the geniuses outshone the control group because of their talents or because they had an influential guardian angel. For all its statistical charts and plots of standards of deviation, his work wasn’t science—it was advocacy. His dream was a society led by a hereditary class of super-intelligent beings. A beehive run by a few king bees.
incredible. talk about kingmaking
When Fred Terman praised this system for bringing technical skill to big business in a 1956 address to engineers there were clear echoes of Lewis Terman’s ideas about ensuring that the smartest are in charge. “The idealists, the social planners, the do-gooders, the socialists and others of their ilk . . . called for better distribution of wealth,” Frederick Terman said, while engineers, working within the system of free enterprise, simply got it done, “making possible the creation of so much new wealth that redistribution was unnecessary.”
yeah...no
Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the “theft” of a version of a program that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using “borrowed” time on a university computer that was also paid for by the federal government. The facts may not have been ideal, but Gates nonetheless succeeded in defining the question in a way that played to his advantage. He was insisting that programmers be paid and that computer owners recognize that professional software would make their machines ever more useful.
(i know this story already but saving it anyway cus man, he can fuck right off)
By the early 1990s, the last official barriers to business and commerce on the Internet were torn down through a combination of congressional legislation and new rules from the National Science Foundation, the organization that supported the Internet. The noncommercial status of the Internet was rooted in its history as a government-funded project operating mainly through universities and government agencies, but businesses were persistent in arguing that they belonged online as well. In 1993, the Internet became fully open for business with the passage of the National Information Infrastructure Act, which “clearly took the development of the Internet out of the hands of the government and placed it into the hands of the competitive marketplace.”
More broadly, Barlow was arguing that nothing from the offline world—traditional rules, institutions, and codes of behavior, even history itself—carried any weight in cyberspace, which was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Having ditched America’s living history of racism in less than a sentence, and ignored the misogyny outright, Barlow was then free to demand the familiar absolutist line about online speech. “Anyone, anywhere,” he wrote, “may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” The declaration is a political statement about as nuanced and considered as the hand-scrawled “Keep Out” sign that a teenager tapes on his door. Nonetheless, it accurately describes much of the Web today—the hostility to authority and rules or regulations of any kind; the privileging of freedom over empathy; the fantasy that the Internet is immune to the pull of history.
John Barlow, EFF founder and really weird dude
In fact, McCarthy and the other early hackers were critical of those who saw the computer revolution as a path to personal wealth or its close cousin, personal power. Even Lou Montulli recalls being taken aback by the promise of a quick fortune from Jim Clark. “He filled our heads with giant numbers of how we were going to make riches and be the most important people on the planet,” Montulli recalled, which conflicted with his own “sort of Marxist” belief that “you couldn’t make more than a million dollars honestly.”
he's right tbh. also, clark made 663m the first day of trading post-IPO
In another Twitter essay, Andreessen argued that technological progress has benefited the poor much more than the rich—an observation he insists “flows from basic economics.” Therefore, he writes, “Opposing tech innovation is punishing the poor by slowing the process by which they get things previously only affordable to the rich.” To recommend patience in implementing technical changes is simply immoral. What’s the difference? Well, one difference is the power relationship. In the case of the disruptive democratic politics that Andreessen appears leery of, members of the public are being given greater control over their lives at the expense of an elite; in the case of disruptive technologies, an elite is driving the change.
this motherfucker
“The idea,” which Shaw says occurred to him and Bezos, “was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is, ‘Who will get to be that middleman?’”
my god. capitalism warps your fucking brain
Upon achieving that $ 100 billion milestone, Bezos was prompted to look back twenty years to when he was “driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift.”
when your leader is still wearing his rebel beret, you should be very scared
(they were once the underdog so he thinks they're always the underdog or at least should get the affordances befitting the underdog)
Had all gone according to plan, the two young academics would have created their uncannily accurate search engine, published the results in an important academic paper, earned their PhDs, and become professors. At the same time, the search engine they developed—at first called BackRub and later Google, in reference to the absurdly large number called a googol—would remain noncommercial and freely available to the public through Stanford.
this is what i mean about horizontal central planning (ie removing from the market)