by
Noam Cohen
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There is something jarring about a group of self-styled survival-of-the-fittest free-marketeers committing to a strategy of collective risk and mutual support. At least one pillar of the Silicon Valley ideology was toppled by this arrangement: that success was handed out to an entrepreneur strictly according to ability and hard work, no matter his station in life or place of origin. Marc Andreessen once expressed this faith in individual merit in an interview with the New York Times journalist Tom Friedman, offering another example of how the world is flat: “The most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is, I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.” Somehow, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Instead, a collection of male executives from a single company, a few of whom were hired as much for their right-wing political beliefs as for any latent computer or business talent, managed to create a roster of successful companies. A kid in Romania, it seems, no matter how talented, didn’t stand a chance against these guys.
Considering their origin in university friendships and earlier start-ups, networks like the PayPal mafia tended to be nearly uniform when it came to sex, race, and educational background: white, male, elite. Somehow, though, the experience of profiting from connections and college friendship hasn’t diminished the lecturing from Silicon Valley about how other institutions—typically highly unionized ones like the public school system or the automobile industry—are rife with favoritism. Here is Hoffman explaining Detroit’s decline in The Start-Up of You, his business-advice book: “The overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. . . . Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism.” Hoffman makes no mention of any similarity to the PayPal mafia, which he describes this way: “My membership in a notable corporate alumni group in Silicon Valley has opened the door to a number of breakout opportunities.”
Who would have thought to impose the values of the lab on the world, anyhow? That person was Frederick Terman, Stanford’s ambitious provost who didn’t understand why his university and its students and faculty shouldn’t profit from their brilliant ideas. He promoted the idea that engineers should become rich and powerful, starting with two of his early students, William Hewlett and David Packard. Stanford benefited. Shareholders benefited. Society benefited. If engineers set the agenda for the country, and the world, then at last we would be certain that the brightest would be in charge, as his father, Lewis, the student of “gifted children,” had dreamed. Ordinary folks wouldn’t need to be weighed down by questions they couldn’t understand, anyhow. On efficiency grounds, Terman’s vision might make sense. On humanitarian grounds, less so. Do we really want engineers—and their hyperrational comrades—to determine how we live? Democracy, for all its faults, is the best way to ensure that the public is being served by its leaders. No one can look out for your interests as diligently as yourself and no engineer is so unemotional as to be acting purely rationally without bias or self-preservation.
But rather than offer a set of policy proposals, I would repeat a prescription for a just society that begins with “a commitment to the local, the plural, the small scale and the active.” Those are the qualities the Web must have, even if it means cutting off the flow of revenues to giant companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay. We can’t tolerate an Internet, or a society, led by a few self-proclaimed geniuses claiming to serve mankind. The Internet can and must work for us, instead of the other way around, through a diversity of voices and platforms free to organize and collaborate on their own rather than through a few centralized services. This way the Internet can help build the social connective tissue we so desperately need, as Berners-Lee originally intended.
hmmm i dont really like this tbh
I became a regular visitor at the Volchaninovs. Usually I would sit on the bottom step of the terrace, depressed by feelings of dissatisfaction with myself, regretting that my life was passing so quickly, so uninterestingly. I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest. [...]
‘The people must be freed from heavy physical work,’ I said. ‘We must lighten their yoke, they must have breathing-space, so that they don’t have to spend all their lives at the stove, wash-tub and in the fields, so that they have time to think of their souls, of God and thus develop their spiritual lives. Man’s true vocation is the life of the spirit, the constant search for truth, for the meaning of life. Liberate them from this rough, brutish labour, let them feel they are free – then you’ll see what a farce these dispensaries and books really are. Once a man recognizes his true vocation, only religion, science, art can satisfy him – not all this nonsense of yours.’
‘Free them from labour!’ Lida laughed. ‘Can that be possible?’
‘It can. You must take some of their labour on your own shoulders. If all of us town and country dwellers unanimously agreed to divide among ourselves the labour that is normally expended by humanity on the satisfaction of its physical needs, then each of us would probably have to work no more than two or three hours a day. Just imagine if all of us, rich and poor, worked only two or three hours a day and had the rest of the time to ourselves. Imagine if we invented labour-saving machines and tried to reduce our needs to the absolute minimum so as to be less dependent on our bodies and to be able to work even less. We would harden ourselves and our children so that they would no longer fear hunger or cold. We wouldn’t be constantly worrying about their health, unlike Anna, Mavra and Pelageya. Imagine if we no longer doctored ourselves, didn’t maintain dispensaries, tobacco factories, distilleries – how much more leisure time we’d finally have at our disposal! All of us, working together, would be able to devote our leisure to science and art. Just as peasants sometimes mend roads, working as a community, so all of us, as one big community, would search for the truth and the meaning of life: and the truth would be discovered very quickly, man would rid himself of this constant, agonizing, oppressive fear of death – and even from death itself – of that I’m convinced.’
not wrong
The little girls who were sitting or lying on the stove looked down without blinking. There seemed to be so many of them, they were like cherubs in the clouds. They liked the stories, sighed, shuddered and turned pale with delight or fear. Breathlessly they listened to Grannie’s stories, which were the most interesting, and they were too frightened to move a muscle. All of them lay down to sleep without saying a word. The old people, excited and disturbed by the stories, thought about the beauty of youth, now that it was past: no matter what it had really been like, they could only remember it as bright, joyful and moving. And now they thought of the terrible chill of death – and for them death was not far away. Better not to think about it! The lamp went out. The darkness, the two windows sharply outlined in the moonlight, the silence and the creaking cradle somehow reminded them that their lives were finished, nothing could bring them back. Sometimes one becomes drowsy and dozes off, and suddenly someone touches you on the shoulder, breathes on your cheek and you can sleep no longer, your whole body goes numb, and you can think of nothing but death. You turn over and death is forgotten; but then the same old depressing, tedious thoughts keep wandering around your head – thoughts of poverty, cattle fodder, about the higher price of flour and a little later you remember once again that your life has gone, that you can never relive it.
Life became completely and utterly depressing without a samovar in the Chikildeyevs’ hut. There was something humiliating, degrading in this deprivation, as though the hut itself were in disgrace. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the elder had only taken the table, all the benches and pots instead – then the place wouldn’t have looked so bare as it did now. Grannie yelled, Marya wept and the little girls looked at her and wept too. The old man felt guilty and sat in one corner, his head downcast and not saying a word. Nikolay did not say a word either: Grannie was very fond of him and felt sorry for him, but now all compassion was forgotten as she suddenly attacked him with a stream of reproaches and insults, shaking her fists right under his nose. He was to blame for everything, she screamed. And in actual fact, why had he sent them so little, when in his letters he had boasted that he was earning fifty roubles a month at the Slav Fair? And why did he have to come with his family? How would they pay for the funeral if he died here… ? Nikolay, Olga and Sasha made a pathetic sight.
‘Just look at that moon!’ he said, looking up.
It was already midnight. To his right, the whole village could be clearly seen, with the long road stretching into the distance for about three miles. Everything was buried in a deep, peaceful slumber. Not a sound or movement anywhere and it was hard to believe that nature could be so silent. When you see a broad village street on a moonlit night, its huts, hayricks and sleeping willows, your heart is filled with tranquillity and finds sanctuary from its toil, worries and sorrows in this calm and in the shadows of night. It becomes gentle, sad and beautiful, and it seems that the very stars are looking down on it with love and tenderness, that all evil has vanished from the world and that happiness is everywhere. To the left, at the edge of the village, the open fields began; they could be seen stretching into the distance, right up to the horizon, and over all that vast moonlit expanse there was neither movement nor sound.
‘But it’s myself I’m concerned with, not him. I’d like to tell you about the change that came over me during the few hours I spent on his estate. Later, when we were having tea, his cook brought us a plateful of gooseberries. They weren’t shop gooseberries, but home-grown, the first fruits of the bushes he’d planted. Nikolay laughed and stared at them for a whole minute, with tears in his eyes. He was too deeply moved for words. Then he popped one in his mouth, looked at me like an enraptured child that has finally been given a long-awaited toy and said, “Absolutely delicious!” He ate some greedily and kept repeating, “So tasty, you must try one!”
‘They were hard and sour, but as Pushkin says: “Uplifting illusion is dearer to us than a host of truths.” This was a happy man whose cherished dreams had clearly come true, who had achieved his life’s purpose, had got what he wanted and was happy with his lot – and himself. [...]'
this story is nice
‘Every time I went into town I could tell from her eyes that she had been waiting for me, and she would admit that from the moment she’d got up she’d had some kind of premonition that I would be coming. We had long talks and there were long silences, and we didn’t declare our love, but concealed it jealously, timidly, fearing anything that might betray our secret to each other. Although I loved her tenderly, deeply, I reasoned with myself and tried to guess what the consequences would be if we had no strength to combat it. It seemed incredible that my gentle, cheerless love could suddenly rudely disrupt the happy lives of her husband and children – of that whole household in fact, where I was so loved and trusted. Was I acting honourably? She would have gone away with me, but where could I take her? It would have been another matter if my life had been wonderful and eventful – if, for example, I’d been fighting to liberate my country, or if I’d been a famous scholar, actor or artist. But I’d only be taking her away from an ordinary, pedestrian life into one that was just the same, just as prosaic, even more so, perhaps. And just how long would we stay happy? What would become of her if I was taken ill, or died? Or if we simply stopped loving each other?
‘And she seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She had been thinking about her husband, her children, and her mother, who loved her husband like a son. If she were to let her feelings get the better of her, then she would have to lie or tell the whole truth, but either alternative would have been equally terrible and distressing for someone in her position. And she was tormented by the question: would her love make me happy, wouldn’t she be complicating a life which was difficult enough already, brimful of all kinds of unhappiness? She thought that she was no longer young enough for me and that she wasn’t hard-working or energetic enough to start a new life with me. Often she told her husband that I should marry some nice clever girl who would make a good housewife and be a help to me. But immediately she would add that it would be a hard job finding someone answering to that description in that town.