Okay, lately I’ve been becoming more and more suspicious about the techno-libertarianism/utopianism that seems to be increasingly popular in silicon valley and among the STEM culture more broadly, including the corners of the internet I frequent.
There seems to be a very anti-democratic strain to this sort of thinking. Like, the motivation seems to be to develop technology in such an unrestricted and unregulated way as to get around those annoying things like democracy, politics, and culture, in order to create broad based, systemic, and, in their eyes, positive changes to society.
Let our Virtuous Intelligent STEM Heroes break free of the shackles of democracy and government and politics and culture so they can go forth and lead us into a new and Better age with their genetic engineering, AI, big data (and cough constant surveillance cough), private foundations, and so on.
And this trend makes me nervous and suspicious. I don’t think STEM people are any more virtuous, wise, or knowledgeable about ethics as anybody else, but I feel like a lot of technolibertarians/utopians think they are, probably based on some very one-dimensional idea of what intelligence is whereby if you are smart enough to do math well you are obviously smarter at ethics and politics too. I worry that really it’s just one very-self-confident group that is already very powerful, in its technology and its wealth, advocating much more power for itself so that it can impose its (not obviously correct or better than all other) value system on the masses through the technology it creates without any oversight or checks.
It’s actually kinda authoritarian, albeit in a non-standard way, despite being couched in the language of libertarianism.
I agree the cluster you’re talking about isn’t perfect, but - have you talked to actual normal people? They already have too much power, and we’re lucky they don’t have more. Given their authoritarianism, puritanism, status quo bias, sacred values, pathological egalitarianism, etc, routing around these kinds of people is good.
To a first approximation, you’ll get closer to the truth in ethics by adopting a negative “skeptical” strategy towards other people’s moral claims than by making your own positive theories. And at least the technolibertarian cluster is decent at that.
As for it being authoritarian, that’s the same kind of conservative relativism that Eastern European national conservatives (e.g. Putinists) talk about when they complain about the West forcing homosexual equality down their throats. Rejecting other people’s (in this case, the masses’) imposition of power is libertarian and not at all authoritarian, and that’s what’s happening here.
I’m not exactly a central example but I felt like this post was talking about me, so it probably is.
Democracy has a very anti-me attitude so I don’t see why I should have anything but an anti-democratic attitude, when said anti-democraticness simply consists of “don’t impose your values on me no matter how much you think you know better than I do”. Because when people call for democracy on topics such as genetic engineering, I hear “let’s have the mob vote on promethea’s body”. I’m usually correct in hearing that.
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
Sure, they are better than the mob, but these technoprogressives seem to be other-optimizing way too hard and trying to replace democratic coercion with economic-cultural coercion which is not that much of an improvement.
The culture is good at solving white upper-middle-class men’s problems, and other people’s problems as far as they resemble white upper-middle-class men’s problems, but they are worse in solving even white upper-middle-class women’s problems, in a way that would have been perfectly predictable if they had had a healthy dose of austrian economics as a background assumption. The anti-democraticness of “I don’t consent to being paternalized by the mob” is not the anti-democraticness of “people should be paternalized by my culture and company, not the mob”.
2 months ago · tagged #heathy dose of austrian economics meaning #maybe people are non-trivially different #and thus more qualified to run their own lives #than we are to run their lives for them #not let's discard all empiricism #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink
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