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123

Third Interlude: Modernity Conceives the Future

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terms
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notes

here he has 10 tropes (he calls them "humors") that fit together society & technology

  1. Theocracy: politics is the means to supernatural immortality (i.e., a religious one)
  2. Abundance: technology as a means of transcending material scarcity and thus politics
  3. Malthus: politics will lead to material extinction through overpopulation etc
  4. Rousseau: technology is the means to spiritual malaise; our human identities will falter
  5. Invisible Hand: information technology ought to subsume politics, as markets magically fix everything
  6. Marx: politics ought to subsume information technology (once we get abundance, we'll need politics indefinitely to ensure people get what they need)
  7. H. G. Wells: technology will create human meaning through threats to our existence (aliens, machines--not sure how tech will create aliens tho)
  8. Strangelove: nuclear annihilation for everyone
  9. Turing: soon only technology will exist
  10. Nelson: (after Ted Nelson, the Computer Lib guy) we can have tech that's designed in such a way to keep people as they are, without having to result to extreme politics

Lanier, J. (2014). Third Interlude: Modernity Conceives the Future. In Lanier, J. Who Owns the Future?. Simon Schuster, pp. 123-142

128

[...] If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything? Are our fortunes only temporary? Will they become moot when we're done?

indeed, buddy ... money doesn't go with you when you die

—p.128 by Jaron Lanier 7 years, 1 month ago

[...] If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything? Are our fortunes only temporary? Will they become moot when we're done?

indeed, buddy ... money doesn't go with you when you die

—p.128 by Jaron Lanier 7 years, 1 month ago

the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind

128

Turing's humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand's humor lacks. Turing's algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not.

—p.128 by Jaron Lanier
notable
7 years, 1 month ago

Turing's humor also provides a destination, or an eschatology that the Invisible Hand's humor lacks. Turing's algorithms could inherit the world in a way that the Hand could not.

—p.128 by Jaron Lanier
notable
7 years, 1 month ago
136

I'm no Marxist. I love competing in the market, and the last thing I'd want is to live under communism. My wife grew up with it in Minsk, Belarus, and I am absolutely, thoroughly convinced of the misery. But if you select the right passages, Marx can be read as being incredibly current.

right after his anecdote about accidentally listening to Das Kapital on the radio (he thought it was a story about a startup)

he loves competing in the market because it has worked out for him, not because it's universally better >_> his dislike for communism, mediated by his vicarious dislike for the Soviet Union, completely neglects 1) the extent to which any instance of Actually Existing Socialism is embedded in a larger world system; and 2) the level of technology present at the time (obviously we live in a very different technological landscape today)

—p.136 by Jaron Lanier 7 years, 1 month ago

I'm no Marxist. I love competing in the market, and the last thing I'd want is to live under communism. My wife grew up with it in Minsk, Belarus, and I am absolutely, thoroughly convinced of the misery. But if you select the right passages, Marx can be read as being incredibly current.

right after his anecdote about accidentally listening to Das Kapital on the radio (he thought it was a story about a startup)

he loves competing in the market because it has worked out for him, not because it's universally better >_> his dislike for communism, mediated by his vicarious dislike for the Soviet Union, completely neglects 1) the extent to which any instance of Actually Existing Socialism is embedded in a larger world system; and 2) the level of technology present at the time (obviously we live in a very different technological landscape today)

—p.136 by Jaron Lanier 7 years, 1 month ago