…if neither mean anything to you…the filming location for burying the house elf was going to be a part of a place for a power line…&…well
Harry Potter NIMBYs force diversion of undersea power cable so it doesn’t disturb ‘Donny’s grave’.
Relocated to avoid a fictional elf’s pretend grave, a power cable now encroaches on a real-life human Bronze Age burial site instead. Apparently idiots leave stones reading “Here Lies Dobby” despite being asked not to by the National Trust because the beach is an ecologically sensitive site. Christ.
…ok…probably the doesn’t embed by itself pair of images that the comments don’t size that way unless I think more than I usually remember to about how to fiddle with the html tags is when it stopped being a fit for the comment part…but…by then the second…& possibly third & maybe some after that…thoughts had yoked cars to to the train…in yon terry pratchett discworld books…along with mention of things like third thoughts & the existence of higher orders…the cause of the golem is…well…let’s just say I think terry’s way of doing that was considerably more…well considered?
…the first golem to be freed was a bit of problematic paradox for arguably plot-motivated purposes that simply involved someone deciding to gift the golem to itself…but even the ones loudly complaining about the golems taking their jobs don’t want free golems for free in vetinari’s ankh morpork…hence the trust bootstrapping its way to helping them bootstrap their their status as agents of free will in a deterministic magical flat world riding elephants turning endless circles atop the great space turtle…as you do
…I forget…but I think the cost of emancipation for a house-elf is…yup…giving them a thing at all be it ne’er so meagre…specifically clothing it seems but charitably perhaps any form of ownership bestowed upon one by their master transmutates their station from owned-thing to thing-that-owns…so, like…an old sock or something will do it…so…they’re cast as having a lot in life such that such a gift “understandably” renders one so overwhelmingly grateful as to swear eternal fealty to their benefactor…which is “fine” because he’s the good guy because he’s the principle protagonist of the piece & the centre of the solipsistic reading of the characters & framing that underpin “it’s good if harry does it…or one of his friends…don’t worry about it”…& also owning property is the bar for being a free person sort of a person?
…kinda seeing dan’s point…or at least recalling that the thing he said was a(.n. other) thing that seemed plenty messed up about the “sure, it’s more fun than being treated like the family with the asshole kid do & there’s magic & eldritch creatures & enchanted talking pictures sound cooler than autoplay ad videos on websites…but…like…when the unseen university are largely a liability you can’t survive the surprisingly frequent really-weird-shit without in the discworld setting…rowling’s wizarding world has all the self-awareness demonstrated by the author
…escapism via fiction is all very well…but…the house elf stuff was well down the road into building out stuff you can’t claim you stuck with because it’s how you told it to your kid the first time…this is why it shows when people think about stuff that wasn’t much of the book it crops up in if they do another one that it is…or if it comes after one of those…mind you…terry’s golem stuff is a lot more fun that the pitching-close-to-wasp-factory-iain you get in the one about the digital hells that iirc he does a rare instance of bringing a previous character back in that loops in use of weapons…surface detail…one of the other parallel protagonists is not only a literal chattel slave but there’s a whole thing about the most taken-to-extremes tattoo deal
…sigh…I know…I know it sounds like it’s just me but “historian jill lepore”…as in this jill lepore
…mentions being married to a computer scientist & not being anti-tech per se…also says stuff like
I stand by everything in that piece. [At the time, Lepore wrote, “Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature.” Christensen responded that Lepore broke “all the rules of scholarship that she accused me of breaking.”]
I reread it last summer when I was working on this book. What I would say here is, trying to be a peaceable human being, I think it really is a problem that historians have not engaged with these ideas. One of the reasons I wrote that article about disruptive innovation — which was not an idea of mine, it was an assignment […] — was because I just felt like, “Disruptive innovation is a theory of history. It’s a theory of historical change, and it’s based on evidence from the archives.” And I just thought, as a historian, it makes no sense. His use of evidence is completely unacceptable by any proper understanding of historical method. Its argument is in conversation with no meaningful understanding of how change happens.
So I went and redid the research, and it just did not stand up at all. I felt like I had to write it. And I wish that I felt like there were more engagement, in the years since, of academic historians thinking through the nature of change — which are questions that genuinely and authentically interest people who are involved in developing new technologies.
People really want to think [about], “What is this? What am I doing? What are going to be the consequences? Is there anything I could learn from history? What happened when the automobile replaced the horse? What happened to the law? How did we end up with driver’s licenses? How did we end up with traffic law? We didn’t have traffic rules before the automobile. We didn’t have certain kinds of insurance systems. We didn’t have driver’s tests. How did those things emerge? How did [we develop] those guardrails on a technology that was tremendously exciting, improved people’s lives in many many ways, utterly changed the landscape, revolutionized tort law? Maybe I should think about that.”
I just wish that historians were more in conversation with technologists over these years, and with entrepreneurs. Not just because we can stand around and say, “You know, I have a lecture to offer you on history,” but I think there’s a real conversation to be had.
All of which is just to say, thanks for having me on.
…but…also…earlier on
I think a lot of people — this is certainly true of my students, my undergraduates — really believe that technological change equals progress. And not only that, but the only kind of progress is technological change. That’s a novelty in human history. That’s an intellectual invention of the 19th century, and it is partly because technological change was accelerating right at the time that Charles Darwin was devising and then publishing his theory of evolution.
So there’s kind of a weird marriage between evolution as progress and technological change as progress, and what drops out of that are all other, earlier notions of progress, which chiefly involve moral progress — like, things are getting better because people are becoming better, or things are getting better because people are more free.
There are a lot of other ways we might think about progress, but what dominates today is this 19th-century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress, and therefore all technological change is progress, as opposed to — objectively, it’s only progress if things are getting better.
But in any event, that confluence in the 19th century of the idea of technological progress and the idea of evolution meant that people who were thinking clearly were like, “Well, if the machines keep getting better and faster and able to do more things — not just labor, but maybe talk or think or move around — what if they evolve to become better at everything than we are? Not just better at running a loom, not just faster at moving through time and space like a railroad car?” And with that grew an incredible anxiety that found form in science fiction again and again and again and again and again.
My favorite one of these stories was published, I think, in 1909 by E. M. Forster, right around when he was writing “A Room with a View.” He wrote this story called “The Machine Stops,” which could be subtitled, “The Room Without a View.” He imagines a near future in which everybody just lives in these rooms, these little cells. You never see other people because everything you need comes right to your room. It’s like DoorDash, your food is delivered, you have a screen where you can communicate with other people. All your needs are met.
The thing that people fear most is the natural world. No one wants to ever see the sun, it’s a little “Matrix”-y, and they all worship the machine that organizes their lives and brings to them in their cubby-like rooms all the things that they need. The story is about, “Humans have become essentially slaves of the machine, which is stronger, more powerful, and has more capacity than humans do, and humans have lost what capacity they had.” And then the climax of the story is when the machine stops.
If readers were to go look at that story, it feels like it could be written today, except that it’s less science fiction-y today than it is the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.
…&…not only is it fun to see EM forster in the spot I might have filled with player piano or something vonegut because there were a few & I have an ulterior motive for not picking philip k dick for this bit…but…in addition to being right about that as far as I can make out the lady also happens to observe
I mean, Twitter is actually a good example, right? […]
And really, what happened was that politicians, elected officials began using Twitter in ways that enhanced their political power, in ways that amplified their messages, in ways that allowed them to reach a younger audience, in ways that allowed them to have a constant connection with an audience. Politicians and political campaigns really kind of convinced Twitter — at least insofar as I see them, I don’t have an inside account of the company — but somewhat begrudgingly, Twitter came around to like, “Twitter’s gotten so big, and people post about politics so often that it’s almost like Twitter is a town hall.”
By the time you get to, I think it’s 2012 — many years into Twitter’s fairly short history — they publish this thing called the Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook, which is really a guide for political candidates and elected officials and how to most effectively use Twitter. And then they begin the rollout of, “It’s a town hall in your pocket, and it’s improving our democracies because we’re restoring the defunct New England town meeting,” and that’s all just bananas.
Objectively, nothing could be further from the truth. At that time, one in five Americans had a Twitter account. Most people who had Twitter accounts had never used them, and above 90% of all tweets about politics were posted by fewer than 10% of the people that did use Twitter all the time. There was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate. Twitter was a representation of the most extreme, politically active, hyper-partisan among Americans, who were following politics really avidly. Looking at it now, we can see, “Well, that’s really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they’re getting really bad information.”
…&…still sort of working backwards as I figure out I ought to include include more rather than less of this part
Absolutely. I’m a historian. I’m not a tech writer. I’m not a tech journalist. I’m not a computer scientist. I’m a historian, and I’m chiefly a political historian, though I’m also a literary historian. And so, one of the things that I’m really interested in unraveling for readers in this book is all the what-ifs, all the alternatives, the paths along the road that were not taken and why.
…because brevity is somehow always my path least taken or whatever…but also because the lady makes a sequence of good points even if you reverse the order…which…doesn’t always turn out to work that way but that’s a whole other post & probably goes places with daemons where angels fear to tread
…anyway
At one point, you say the rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights, and it’s “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” Can you just say a little bit more about why you see it in such stark terms?
Yeah, I do have a pretty negative view of it, and I think it’s important to distinguish the artificial state from technology itself or modes of technology. I’m not an anti-technologist. I’m married to a computer scientist. I’m really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we’re in the midst of right now.
That’s not my beef, right? My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. No one consented to that. This has been a kind of gradual, largely accidental transformation of how many nation-states around the world work — it’s happened first in the United States.
I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well intentioned; they originate with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. And then, I think, only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation-state.
And that’s not my speculation. You hear a lot of a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation-state. […] A lot of futurists in the ’90s were libertarians, and they had a specific interest in using the advance of the internet and the successive innovations that followed as a means to eradicate the nation-state.
…which she sort of tags back in with the later bit talking about
But if you wind the reel forward in time, down to 2026 — stops along the way include the 2016 election when Facebook News, in response to its critics, establishes a Supreme Court. You get to last year, when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution. You get to recently, when Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and said [in response to a question from Rogan], “Oh, an AI president would be a great idea.”
In some ways, they’re silly examples. But you see the ways in which these corporations, these tech companies from Silicon Valley, and especially their charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders, are just taking on the trappings of the nation-state and the functions of democracy.
They’re not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it’s like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously. And these companies have so much power.
…just…not the power to comprehend the things they claim inspire their thinking?
While Lepore’s book examines technocratic philosophies that go back centuries, she argued that many of Silicon Valley’s “charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders” — especially Elon Musk — seem to be ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books.
“But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
…I’ll quit it with the block quotes…but…to do that with one more that could have gone the way of the above remarks by the lady who isn’t me…this one is 2x a wrote-the-book-on effort from henry farrell…who co-wrote “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” (with a guy called abraham newton)…& Dan Wang of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”…that the FT ran
Amid all the excitement, there were familiar notes. Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars.
But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be. It is Dick’s far weirder sensibilities that offer the better guide to Silicon Valley today. […] Above all, it is Dick’s understanding of political economy that is urgently relevant today, as Trump-produced instability is compounded by AI-generated unreality.
An unholy tangle of elites tends to hover over every Dick novel: corporate titans who have created new technologies, property developers who own a chunk of Mars or a demesne in California, conglomerates managed by charismatic founders. Though some government authorities are checked out (replaced by androids), others run technology-fuelled police states that reduce citizens to bundles of data that can be monitored and eliminated.
These elites are smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of self-deception. They imagine that they are entangled in the plots of some mastermind who is even more sinister than they are. Dick’s most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings. […] The fusion of business and hallucination reaches its peak in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a business tycoon returns from the stars, promising to fulfil the wishes of everyone who steps into the fantasy worlds that he has created. Eldritch’s every move threatens to destabilise the existing corporate and political order. Those who use his product, a drug called Chew-Z, find themselves plunged into worlds that revolve around Eldritch, infecting them with his blurred vision, alienation and despair. Though Elon Musk has reportedly been a prolific drug user, he has not yet released his own variety of dope.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated about megastructures that could encircle whole stars to capture their energy, before dismissing the idea as “a little joke”. Now such ideas inspire not just science-fiction novels but SpaceX’s business plans. Wild speculative fiction has become the fuel of wild financial speculation. Morgan Stanley projects that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4tn by 2040, presumably the year that these particular stock analysts expect to retire.
Grand visions of technological transformation are everywhere, and everywhere they hide realities that combine extraordinary moneymaking schemes with bizarre beliefs. On the one hand, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital partnership funds gambling apps and a start-up promising to “cheat on everything”; on the other, the Silicon Valley Trump whisperer promises that our descendants will “live in the stars”, writing his own quasi-religious credo, complete with “patron saints”. Peter Thiel combines a superb record of picking tech winners with an obsession with the eschaton; he has brought his gloomy discourses on the nature of the Antichrist to the doorstep of the Vatican. Sam Altman says that thanks to AI, we “are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”.
Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K Dick? [FT via archive.ph]
…ok…for one thing
…so…neither of those are optimus…let alone these
…& the dance battle joke is…art imitating life…or…imitation life, maybe?
…but…sure…it’s the tesla ‘bots that are coming for you & your jobs…& maybe this is more…relevant?
…they have/are-trying-to ban roombas but not at present the sale of routers that are like an anti-VPN…why not ban VPNs from the US?
[…hush now…that isn’t a real question & if you know the answer there’s people that aren’t me you could be telling who in fact really could stand to learn that]
…besides
…100% of the production for 2027 hasn’t waited until the last quarter of 2026 to sell out it’s allocation for RAM…HBM & the regular sort us mortals find we need a good bit more of than we used to to do pretty much the same thing from most users’ perspectives…funsies…anyway…plenty of questions begged from here to the horizon
…so…who can say…&…who might you listen to if they did?
…hard to say…pretty clear none of the stand-it-up-fast-&-not-on-the-grid solutions the data center bros picked suggest any of them are threatening to be…so…yeah
…cool…cool…cool cool cool
…depends on who thinks they’re batman, I expect?
6 Comments
pretty nuts they managed to divert power lines for dobbys grave…
iirc it took some serious effort to dissuade the gubment from tunneling a motorway straight under stonehenge…. i would have thought they’d have just bulldozed dobby no questions asked
…yeah…the national trust can’t stop people painting in memoriam stuff on stones to leave there despite it being some sort of theoretically protected environment that somehow isn’t why it isn’t suitable for the power line thing
…the whole thing is dumb every way I can find to look at it other than “joining the UK & ireland by cable that can take power”…which seems pretty reasonable, really?
…my knowledge of the lore is insufficient to answer to where penfold was born…possibly that one picked that to be able to name your spot rather than because there’s a known right answer…& I do think the dobby gravesite thing that’s only there because they took the camera crew there is dumb…but to the best of my knowledge this still looks like it did when this person ran across the image on reddit
…think some bright spark put the little unofficial & unusually below-rather-than-in-or-above eyeline blue plaque on there…then people wanted to take their kids to see it…& those people wanted pictures of that…but it was little & down by the ankles of even an ankle-biter…so…more stuff
…fairly rare for the royal mail to let people do more than tag up a postbox until it gets a fresh coat of paint or a jetwash overnight or something…even people knitting/crocheting tea-cosy type stuff they barely abide most places…but that one’s been going a while, I think?
…they didn’t put it where they did all the animation though…which is the sort of logic that gets you the national trust beach for the dead dobby business…is the thing…that seems like a windup…underlying the thing that seems like a windup…which…might as well go for the hat-trick & get presented through a medium that in & of itself is sort of in the business of being a windup
…there’s meme upon meme about this to the point it becomes hard not to use the term meta in a non-trademark sense to talk about…but…I guess to me it’s like the difference between telling your kid maybe little fairies or gnomes or whatever live in the tree behind the house or in the park…& there being a cottage industry in doll-house-scale mostly-plastic-or-they’re-very-spendy doors & steps & ladders & such to…I think…glue…to the tree…I dunno…it’s not exactly blue peter telling you how to make a tracey island to put the thunderbirds toys you got for christmas out of stuff you were going to throw away because what do you even mean “recycle”?
…maybe one of these forest schools I hear about from time to time would teach your kid how to not only craft but then graft your built-from-deadfall amateur mini-joinery masterpiece to the bark so the tree grows like it’s actually where you hollowed out a bole the thing never had after it lost a branch it didn’t grow…that…might be pretty dope if you had people still swinging by to sometimes open & close the thing so it didn’t get grown over
…hmm…have a vague feeling like I saw a tree-stump somewhere someone had done something a bit like that but bigger to the top of so it was like the way in to the OG lost boys in peter pan…iirc they did actually bore that out a little so the flap on the top hinged both ways but sat closed & if you weren’t a teenage-ish sort of a sized kid you could climb in & crouch & pop back out again like a jack-in-the-box…but from the outside you could sort of imagine it had the whole hidden home bit attached to the hidey-hole…was pretty popular…damned if I can remember where I think it would have been, though…maybe I imagined that…think I remember it, though
…if I’m not careful I’m gonna fall through “what is real, really?” all the way to another bout with quine having the sheer effrontery to headline an essay “On What There Is”
…&…nobody needs that even as much as they did this comment…if you can even imagine…though…you’d have to take it up with quine as to whether you could, I guess?
…jk rowling will sic the house elves on you & the lawyers if you don’t pander adequately because she made money in plagiarism with a middle-class single-mother backstory
…joanna lumley…now that’s a middle class class act…from patsy in AbFab to champion of the gurkhas
…why can’t we have a few more people you can agree with when they say “it’s bloody preposterous, frankly…”
…instead of all this modern rubbish
…now…if you’ll excuse me…I need to tie this onion to my belt so the cloud I have to yell at will know I’m a local
pretty nuts they managed to divert power lines for dobbys grave…
iirc it took some serious effort to dissuade the gubment from tunneling a motorway straight under stonehenge…. i would have thought they’d have just bulldozed dobby no questions asked
…yeah…the national trust can’t stop people painting in memoriam stuff on stones to leave there despite it being some sort of theoretically protected environment that somehow isn’t why it isn’t suitable for the power line thing
…the whole thing is dumb every way I can find to look at it other than “joining the UK & ireland by cable that can take power”…which seems pretty reasonable, really?
I mean, what’s next? Are they to outlaw drilling on the forest moon Endor?
…my knowledge of the lore is insufficient to answer to where penfold was born…possibly that one picked that to be able to name your spot rather than because there’s a known right answer…& I do think the dobby gravesite thing that’s only there because they took the camera crew there is dumb…but to the best of my knowledge this still looks like it did when this person ran across the image on reddit
…&…that seems somewhere beteween harmless & kinda cool?
…think some bright spark put the little unofficial & unusually below-rather-than-in-or-above eyeline blue plaque on there…then people wanted to take their kids to see it…& those people wanted pictures of that…but it was little & down by the ankles of even an ankle-biter…so…more stuff
…fairly rare for the royal mail to let people do more than tag up a postbox until it gets a fresh coat of paint or a jetwash overnight or something…even people knitting/crocheting tea-cosy type stuff they barely abide most places…but that one’s been going a while, I think?
…they didn’t put it where they did all the animation though…which is the sort of logic that gets you the national trust beach for the dead dobby business…is the thing…that seems like a windup…underlying the thing that seems like a windup…which…might as well go for the hat-trick & get presented through a medium that in & of itself is sort of in the business of being a windup
…there’s meme upon meme about this to the point it becomes hard not to use the term meta in a non-trademark sense to talk about…but…I guess to me it’s like the difference between telling your kid maybe little fairies or gnomes or whatever live in the tree behind the house or in the park…& there being a cottage industry in doll-house-scale mostly-plastic-or-they’re-very-spendy doors & steps & ladders & such to…I think…glue…to the tree…I dunno…it’s not exactly blue peter telling you how to make a tracey island to put the thunderbirds toys you got for christmas out of stuff you were going to throw away because what do you even mean “recycle”?
…maybe one of these forest schools I hear about from time to time would teach your kid how to not only craft but then graft your built-from-deadfall amateur mini-joinery masterpiece to the bark so the tree grows like it’s actually where you hollowed out a bole the thing never had after it lost a branch it didn’t grow…that…might be pretty dope if you had people still swinging by to sometimes open & close the thing so it didn’t get grown over
…hmm…have a vague feeling like I saw a tree-stump somewhere someone had done something a bit like that but bigger to the top of so it was like the way in to the OG lost boys in peter pan…iirc they did actually bore that out a little so the flap on the top hinged both ways but sat closed & if you weren’t a teenage-ish sort of a sized kid you could climb in & crouch & pop back out again like a jack-in-the-box…but from the outside you could sort of imagine it had the whole hidden home bit attached to the hidey-hole…was pretty popular…damned if I can remember where I think it would have been, though…maybe I imagined that…think I remember it, though
…if I’m not careful I’m gonna fall through “what is real, really?” all the way to another bout with quine having the sheer effrontery to headline an essay “On What There Is”
…&…nobody needs that even as much as they did this comment…if you can even imagine…though…you’d have to take it up with quine as to whether you could, I guess?
Probably just afraid JK Rowling will sue and accuse them of not being transphobic enough for her tastes.
…I mean…what’s the world coming to
…jk rowling will sic the house elves on you & the lawyers if you don’t pander adequately because she made money in plagiarism with a middle-class single-mother backstory
…joanna lumley…now that’s a middle class class act…from patsy in AbFab to champion of the gurkhas
…why can’t we have a few more people you can agree with when they say “it’s bloody preposterous, frankly…”
…instead of all this modern rubbish
…now…if you’ll excuse me…I need to tie this onion to my belt so the cloud I have to yell at will know I’m a local