Silicon Valley/Tech View of Democracy, governance & the future

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Pulling this from the DOGE thread as a separate focus of discussion as Silicon Valley, Crypto bros and AI evangelists have enormous impact on the Trump Admin, it is worth considering what their world view may be …

Some of the initial posts of links by me will feel super dystopian because of the understandable freakout about the enormous powers over the government that Trump and the GOP Congress are blindly ceding to Elon Musk, but I’m also interested in the potential positive impacts …
 

Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency​

Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.

www.newyorker.com

Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency

Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com

“… Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts.

doge is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals.

“Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.

He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency.

The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.)

Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump.

… In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”

… A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.

… Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations.

As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.

With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.

… the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself.

Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.

One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning.

Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption.

Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress.

His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputedthe claim.) …”
 
www.theatlantic.com

Why Silicon Valley Lost Its Patriotism

The tech industry was built in partnership with government, and it once pursued innovation as part of a shared national project.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

WHY SILICON VALLEY LOST ITS PATRIOTISM​

The tech industry was built in partnership with government, and it once pursued innovation as part of a shared national project.

“…
This early dependence of Silicon Valley on the nation-state and indeed the U.S. military has, for the most part, been forgotten, written out of the region’s history as an inconvenient and dissonant fact—one that clashes with the Valley’s conception of itself as indebted only to its capacity to innovate. The United States since its founding has always been a technological republic, one whose place in the world has been made possible and advanced by its capacity for innovation.

But there is also another essential element of American success. It was a culture, one that cohered around a shared objective, that won the last world war. And it will be a culture that wins, or prevents, the next one.

… The modern incarnation of Silicon Valley has strayed significantly from this tradition of collaboration with the U.S. government, focusing instead on the consumer market, including the online advertising and social-media platforms that have come to dominate—and limit—our sense of the potential of technology.

A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—their rallying cry that they intend “to change the world” has grown lifeless from overuse—but many of them raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer.

A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the middle of the 20th century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual.

The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as start-up after start-up catered to the whims of late-capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social-media platforms and food-delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

… As Silicon Valley turned inward and toward the consumer, the U.S. government and the governments of many of its allies scaled back involvement and innovation across numerous domains, including space travel, military software, and medical research. The state’s retreat left a widening innovation gap. Many cheered this divergence: Skeptics of the private sector argued that it could not be trusted to operate in public domains while those in the Valley remained wary of government control and the misuse or abuse of their inventions.

For the United States and its allies in Europe and around the world to remain as dominant in this century as they were in the previous one, however, they will require a union of the state and the software industry—not their separation and disentanglement.“
 

How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy​

Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.

www.technologyreview.com

How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy

Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back.
www.technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com

“
The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for theEconomist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be.

While Wooldridge didn’t say precisely when this techlash would arrive, it’s clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact happen—and is arguably still happening. Say what you will about the legions of Elon Musk acolytes on X, but if an industry and its executives can bring together the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham in shared condemnation, it’s definitely not winning many popularity contests.

… Two of the more recent additions to the flourishing techlash genre—Rob Lalka’s The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power and Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley—serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, the books chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back.

…
One of the nine entrepreneurs in the book, Peter Thiel, has written that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and that “competition [in business] is for losers.” Many of the others think that all technological progress is inherently good and should be pursued at any cost and for its own sake. A few also believe that privacy is an antiquated concept—even an illusion—and that their companies should be free to hoard and profit off our personal data.

Most of all, though, Lalka argues, these men believe that their newfound power should be unconstrained by governments, regulators, or anyone else who might have the gall to impose some limitations.

Where exactly did these beliefs come from? Lalka points to people like the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, who famously asserted that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase profits, as well as to Ayn Rand, the author, philosopher, and hero to misunderstood teenage boys everywhere who tried to turn selfishness into a virtue….”
 
Continued

“… So what exactly do you do with a group of men seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values?

You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund. In Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, readers are presented with a road map for how such regulation might take shape, along with an eye-opening account of just how much power has already been ceded to these corporations over the past 20 years.

There are companies like NSO Group, whose powerful Pegasus spyware tool has been sold to autocrats, who have in turn used it to crack down on dissent and monitor their critics.

Billionaires are now effectively making national security decisions on behalf of the United States and using their social media companies to push right-wing agitprop and conspiracy theories, as Musk does with his Starlink satellites and X.

Ride-sharing companies use their own apps as propaganda tools and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into ballot initiatives to undo laws they don’t like. The list goes on and on. According to Schaake, this outsize and largely unaccountable power is changing the fundamental ways that democracy works in the United States.

“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions; from lauding freedom of speech to becoming curators and speech regulators; and from criticizing government overreach and abuse to accelerating it through spyware tools and opaque algorithms,” she writes. …”
 


Recent interview with reporter Gil Duran, who has done great work on the subject too.
 

How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms​

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

“…
Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the ’50s through the ’70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in ’94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force.

This goes back to the role of Al Gore, who I got to know quite well, and Bill. Basically it was the pro-business Democratic Party. It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-start-up Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore and their administration were incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. Al Gore was just thrilled. He’s like: Wow, this whole program that I funded in the Senate worked incredibly well. The internet worked, and now we’re going to have this giant economic boom. It’s going to be led by dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism. They celebrated it. They loved it. They embraced us. It was like a full-fledged love affair.

…
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

… The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn’t take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.

…
And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.

The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.

… And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

…
They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. …”
 
Were the kids responsible for the cancel culture and intolerance born from their inexperience and being naive, or did the universities instill that in them as part being radicalized?
 
Paine said:
What’s fascinating is a lot of these guys, even Yarvin, are just dumb. No awareness of history.
Click to expand...
The words "lived experience" as a rebuttal to their nonsense tends to make them very upset. Mostly because they can't really argue against it and no lived experience supports their vision of the future.
 
StrangePackage said:
The words "lived experience" as a rebuttal to their nonsense tends to make them very upset. Mostly because they can't really argue against it and no lived experience supports their vision of the future.
Click to expand...
Imagine thinking you’ve discovered some great insight into the future by…*checks notes* reinventing feudalism.

They know these ideas aren’t popular, that’s why they have to hide and obfuscate what they’re doing by calling it a nerdy ass name. Cosplayer dorks who now control the federal government.
 
nycfan said:

How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms​

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

“…
Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the ’50s through the ’70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in ’94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force.

This goes back to the role of Al Gore, who I got to know quite well, and Bill. Basically it was the pro-business Democratic Party. It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-start-up Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore and their administration were incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. Al Gore was just thrilled. He’s like: Wow, this whole program that I funded in the Senate worked incredibly well. The internet worked, and now we’re going to have this giant economic boom. It’s going to be led by dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism. They celebrated it. They loved it. They embraced us. It was like a full-fledged love affair.

…
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

… The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn’t take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.

…
And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.

The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.

… And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

…
They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. …”
Click to expand...
Fuck that guy.

He could have just saved himself a lot of keystrokes by typing, “I jumped ship because my personal greed outweighs my love for my country.”
 
nycfan said:
They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. …”
Click to expand...
He is such a fucking liar.
 
breepf said:
Jesus's start-up began with only 12 employees and, wowzers, he disrupted Judaism and the Roman Empire!
Click to expand...
Not exactly true. Paul staged a hostile takeover of the movement and his successors eventually took over the empire. It eventually became the Holy Roman Empire that was none of those.
 
Paine said:
He said FDR ran the government like a start-up during the New Deal. His evidence for this was an anecdote about FDR yelling at Frances Perkins in a meeting.
Click to expand...
LOL.

I've long been concerned -- since the 1990s -- about what would happen as wealth increasingly flowed into the pockets of computer guys with little formal education (and what education they do have is technical and more like advanced skills training). I guess Curtis Yarvin is what happens.
 
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