I write about technology at theluddite.org
I wish we had less selection, in general. My family lives in Spain, and I’ve also lived in France. This is just my observation, but American grocery stores clearly emphasize always having a consistent variety, whereas my Spanish family expects to eat higher quality produce seasonally. I suspect that this is a symptom of a wider problem, not the cause, but American groceries are just fucking awful by comparison, and so much more expensive too.
Excellent thank you very much for this.
So true! I hereby retract that antizombo slander
I like single purpose concept websites that don’t do anything. They’re the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you’re always glad that they’re there.
Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.
Other people have already posted good answers so I just want to add a couple things.
If you want a very simple, concrete example: Healthcare. It depends on how you count, but more than half the world’s countries have some sort of free or low cost public healthcare, whereas in the US, the richest country in the history of countries, that’s presented as radical left wing kooky unrealistic communist Bernie idea. This isn’t an example of a left-wing policy that we won’t adopt, but of what in much of the world is a normal public service that we can’t adopt because anti-socialism in this country is so malignant and metastasized that it can be weaponized against things that are just considered normal public services almost like roads in other countries.
A true left wing would support not just things like healthcare, but advocate for an economic system in which workers have control over their jobs, not the bosses. That is completely absent.
Also, this meme:
It’s glib, but it’s not wrong. Both parties routinely support American militarism abroad. Antimilitarism in favor of internationalism has been a corner stone for the left since the left began.
This is nowhere near the worst on a technical level, but it was my first big fuck up. Some 12+ years ago, I was pretty junior at a very big company that you’ve all heard of. We had a feature coming out that I had entirely developed almost by myself, from conception to prototype to production, and it was getting coverage in some relatively well-known trade magazine or blog or something (I don’t remember) that was coming out the next Monday. But that week, I introduced a bug in the data pipeline code such that, while I don’t remember the details, instead of adding the day’s data, it removed some small amount of data. No one noticed that the feature was losing all its data all week because it still worked (mostly) fine, but by Monday, when the article came out, it looked like it would work, but when you pressed the thing, nothing happened. It was thankfully pretty easy to fix but I went from being congratulated to yelled at so fast.
I think zoning is a related and secondary issue, but so long as the housing market is a market, and a few people have almost all the money, all zoning changes can do for housing prices is temporarily alleviate the problem. People with money are always looking for places to park their capital and collect rent. There’s no better vessel for that than real estate.
Obviously, we need to gut literally every aspect of American urban planning for a million other reasons too, but on this specific issue, I think it’s second order.
🤡
This is galaxies away from a good faith argument. You don’t seem like a dumb person, so you’re either engaging in bad faith for reasons all your own, or you’re so defensive about any criticism directed towards your work that you don’t realize how silly you’re being. Either way, I think this is the end of the line for us. Hope you have a pleasant rest of your Sunday. I unfortunately have to keep working for a bit but will be done soon. Cheers!
Your total unwillingness to critically engage with what you do for a living continues to say more about you than it does about Vonnegut.
Wonderfully put. Couldn’t agree more. It looks like you and I took away some very similar things and commented them in parallel.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with your interpretation of the ending. I think your interpretation of the whole book says a lot more about you than it does about Vonnegut or other people; it’s misanthropic, unempathetic, and patrician to the point of infantilizing others. I suspect that our views on what we as humans need to be fulfilled, what true freedom really is, and how we should treat each other are so far apart that there’s no bridging it. I hope you one day you reconsider. Until then, it’s been fun chatting. Good luck out there, friend.
Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true.
Are you saying that reading and interpreting the work of one of the most beloved authors in the English language is “like religion?” If so, you could not be more wrong. Reading, interpreting, and reinterpreting the work of those who came before us is actually the very core of any academic pursuit. It’s the most basic description of what every single academic does with their time.
Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making
I did, actually. I could not have addressed it more directly. Let me do it again, but this time greatly expanding it.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
It’s been more than ten years since I read the book, but were Vonnegut a less subtle writer, that could be a literal line of dialog from one of the engineers in the book. I could imagine one of them defensively saying exactly that in an argument with the minister (whose name I forget).
You are frustrated that the engineers, through their ingenuity and hard work, have given the population a utopia, but the population is ungrateful. Your attitude is the same as the upper classes in that world. What you overlook is the world’s inherently violent class structure, which is revealed as the book goes on. The lower classes in the books are relegated to meaningless existences in sad, mass-produced housing, physically segregated from the wealthy in Homestead. They are denied an active participation in society, made obsolete by the upper classes (wealthy engineers, which iirc are implied to keep it in the family), who control every aspect of society. Again, it’s been a very long time since I read this so I’m hazy on the details, but in the book, some in the lower classes are trying to actively organize to challenge this class structure. They are brutally repressed. They are infiltrated by secret police, and when they rise up in protest, are met with state violence.
What you describe as utopia is actually a repressive regime that meets the subsistence needs of its lower classes in exchange for their unquestioning acceptance of the oligarchy’s control of society, which they justify to themselves and to the lower classes as a technocratic utopia (“freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work,” as you say), but which is also perfectly willing to subjugate the lower classes using deadly force if they dare to question the existing power structure.
How you describe the world is exactly how the regime chooses to portray itself, and how the upper classes, consisting of people like you and me, view the lower classes. In fact, viewing the lower classes as ungrateful for the upper classes’ generosity is actually a staple of upper class attitudes throughout much of human history. At the beginning of the book, since we’re only given an engineer’s perspective, this is an understandable reading of the world. If you read the entire book and still finished it thinking that same thing, you completely and utterly missed the point.
You and I make technology for companies, which are mostly owned by rich people. Vonnegut is asking us to interrogate what the implied philosophy behind our work is, even if we do not intend it to be so. We try to make people free from tedious work, but if you simply ask the people who we’re supposedly liberating from work, they hate us. This is not necessarily because they like the drudgery of their work, but because the wealthy people who employ us will simply lay them off, increasing corporate profits, but relegating the now-obsolete workers to the margins of society.
If the people you and I are “freeing … from degrading filthy boring work” are actually further degraded by this so-called freedom, are we really freeing them? Maybe we should question how our society is organized if the people you and I work to “free” actually hate us for it, or as they’d put it, hate us for taking away their jobs.
I’m so glad, especially given your username.
I spent several years working on manufacturing and logistics automation, and I urge you to reconsider your interpretation of it.
Just from your comment, you totally missed the point of the book. It’s not anti-automation. Your analysis is the exact false binary Vonnegut is interrogating. The book is actually a response to the exact attitude expressed in on your comment.
I’m happy to go into it, but Vonnegut is the master; no one will say it like he does, but you have to be open to it. If you react defensively, you’ll come away thinking he’s just anti technology, and that he must be wrong because technology is good. If you reread it with an open mind, or even reflect upon it again, you might find particularly important insights for the likes of you and me.
Designing freedom, by Stafford Beer
I’d been a software engineer for 15 years. In that time, in all the jobs I’ve had, I’d never once worked on anything that actually made people’s lives better, nor did I ever hear anyone else in tech ever really dive into any sort of meaningful philosophical interrogation of what digital technology is for and how we should use it. I made a few cool websites or whatever, but surely there’s more we can do with code. Digital technology is so obviously useful, yet we use it mostly to surveil everyone to better serve them ads.
Then i found cybernetics, though the work of Beer and others. It’s that ontological grounding that tech is missing. It’s the path we didn’t take, choosing instead to follow the California ideology of startups and venture capital and so on that’s now hegemonic and indistinguishable from the digital technology itself.
Even beers harshest critic is surely forced to admit that he had a hell of a vision, whereas most modern tech is completely rudderless
We live in a vast digital spectacle, but we don’t participate in the spectacle – we consume it. Since nothing is real anymore, since our entire reality only exists through digital media, and since we have absolutely no agency, why not vote for a shit-poster for president? It’s fun as hell to watch him troll all those tedious snobs in DC. Fuck those guys.
Then enough people voted for him that something incredible happened. He won. That wasn’t supposed to happen! For once, something changed, and everyone who voted for him was a part of that change.
Actually accomplishing something is fucking intoxicating. It’s so easy to get hooked on that heady feeling of mattering at all for once in our pathetic, powerless, alienated existences as cogs in a giant wasteful plastic machine. We spend months, then years, then decades drifting without meaning, working jobs we hate, taking our kids to shitty day cares we can barely afford, waiting 19 month to see a doctor about that new weird lump, and so on.
For these people, reality has never been so real. They’re actually in it now, doing things. They’ve chosen a new content-creator-in-chief, and they want his content to take over the whole spectacle.
I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,