[HN Gopher] The Californian Ideology (1995)
___________________________________________________________________
The Californian Ideology (1995)
Author : rbanffy
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-01-07 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bruces.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bruces.medium.com)
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| > In cyberspace... market after market is being transformed by
| technological progress from a "natural monopoly" to one in which
| competition is the rule.
|
| Of all the bad predictions in this essay, this is most dead-
| wrong, deader than a doornail wrong.
|
| The internet favors natural monopolies, despite its decentralized
| design. Or to be more accurate, people using the internet favor
| natural monopolies.
|
| He's a little goofy, but I think Slavoj Zizek is right when he
| says information technology is communistic. Because it benefits
| from unified standards and data centralization and suffers from
| heterogeneity and data silos, it seems to be that information
| technology will progress from competitive markets, to monopolies,
| to utilities, to state control in some cases.
|
| I'm sure there's some information theory which can express this
| better than I am, but it's weird that market forces, which are
| traditionally explained as the least bad way to handle low-info,
| distributed decision making, don't perform as well when it comes
| to the distribution and regulation of information itself.
| tinyspacewizard wrote:
| Feels like the California Ideology has moved to slightly cheaper
| locales... Colorado, Austin Texas, etc. Perhaps a Covid effect?
| fmajid wrote:
| Most of the worst aspects of the San Francisco Bay Area long
| predate the tech industry boom. The NIMBYs that made housing a
| largely unaffordable luxury, and its inevitable consequence of
| large-scale homelessness, are precisely the Boomer hippies who
| turned coat with Reagan and adopted the greed-is-good naked self-
| interest with a vengeance. They've got theirs, and they couldn't
| care less if you drop dead.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Yeah no. You have:
|
| 1. Population growth. I would say this is the largest factor to
| making housing unaffordable. Unless your claim is that all
| growth if from local boomers kids (hint: it isn't).
|
| 2. Geography. San Francisco is surrounded by quite a bit of
| water if you haven't noticed. The Bay Area is fenced in with
| hills. I would argue that geography creates as much of the
| problem as zoning laws (because if there was easy room to
| expand people wouldn't be pushing to cancel long term planning
| and zoning laws and just force through high density housing).
|
| But nice try trying to blame someone on the fact that you want
| something (to live in a certain area) and think it's fair to
| trample peoples property rights to get it, make them out to be
| villians and 'others' worthy of scorn, while ignoring the
| largest factors (population growth and geography).
| kodah wrote:
| Those NIMBYs largely call themselves Progressives now:
| https://reason.com/2022/08/11/are-san-franciscos-nimbys-fina...
| There are some articles that call out the political
| affiliations more directly, but all of the elected officials
| they're talking about are Progressives.
|
| I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Progressivism is a big tent. In the early 20th century it was
| associated with urban politics of a rather authoritarian
| streak which promoted things like eugenics and a rigidly
| segregated labor market, fearing the "unfair" competition of
| non-white workers.
| threadweaver34 wrote:
| > I'm curious how one goes from Reagan to US Progressive.
|
| The common conservative critique of progressives is
| progressives say "affirmative action, affordable housing,
| wealth redistribution are all great, unless it affects me."
| fmajid wrote:
| There's the rhetoric and lip service, and then there is the
| actual pursuit of a nakedly self-serving agenda. Both can be
| done simultaneously, e.g. the trust-fund baby Dean Preston's
| successful efforts to block anything from being built in his
| district.
| [deleted]
| Mouthfeel wrote:
| [dead]
| nonethewiser wrote:
| They don't
| treeman79 wrote:
| Compare standard of living of free market capitalist counties
| with socialist / communist countries.
|
| There are very good reasons you let markets choose with minimal
| government interference.
|
| People are going to be greedy in either scenario. But one is
| government officials having power. The other is regular people.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Have you ever experienced the standard of living in a
| Scandinavian country?
|
| High taxes, but it's much easier to start and run a business,
| there are numerous unicorns, housing is affordable, locales
| of all kinds tend to be more pleasant, especially in cities.
|
| And no one is bankrupted by health care.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Scandinavian countries are ranked among the most
| economically free (i.e. "capitalist"), despite the high
| taxes. This was not always the case either, it's just how
| the 1980s "neoliberal revolution" (which was hugely
| influential throughout the West and arguably the world at
| large, well beyond the most commonly mentioned UK and US)
| played out there.
| analognoise wrote:
| Dying because insulin is up 1000% in 40 years is the most
| free capitalism - not what Scandinavia has.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Weird then how no one ever dies of starvation because
| bread is up 1000%. What market would you think of as
| freer to entry by new upstarts, the one for bread or for
| insulin?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Insulin is up that much because of regulations that
| prevent entry by other competitors
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Californian Ideology_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Californian Ideology_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28376086 - Sept 2021 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18123754 - Oct 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 - Dec 2017 (95
| comments)
| nimbius wrote:
| christ this whole article reads like a hot wet handjob for the
| west coast. am i somehow supposed to golf clap the libertarian
| gig economy that leaves office workers living out of cars in san
| jose and uber drivers pissing in soda bottles for slave wages
| under the 405 while simultaneously crucifying the mental health
| of a generation of youth and silencing all but the most brand
| loyal speech online?
|
| the thing this article never mentions is californias hippies sold
| out, bought up all the real estate, became landed gentry and left
| their kids with the bill. apple replaces your itunes with drm
| tunes and the rights are to be a consumer, not to repair.
|
| the hackers left a looooong time ago, and now most of them hack
| tractors lately. in fact the minute gig fiber showed up was when
| the virtual class ceased to be anything but an exodus for
| california. this is nostalgiabate.
| scandox wrote:
| > However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these
| techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the
| most atavistic features of American society, especially those
| derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision
| of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other
| -- much less positive -- features of life on the West Coast:
| racism, poverty and environmental degradation.
|
| > And who would have suspected that as technology and freedom
| were worshipped more and more, it would become less and less
| possible to say anything sensible about the society in which
| they were applied?
|
| > One of the weirdest things about the rightwards drift of the
| Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a
| creation of the mixed economy. Government dollars were used to
| build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities
| and other infrastructural projects which makes the good life
| possible in California. On top of these public subsidies, the
| West Coast hi tech industrial complex has been feasting off the
| fattest pork barrel in history for decades.
|
| Bruce Sterling is not a fool or a shill.
|
| I'm really not convinced you read this entire article.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Anyone care to mark this piece to market? Somehow I don't think
| "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever did construct a
| cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.
|
| Looking at the "More from Medium" sidebar, we see suggestions for
| cyberspace activities that are neither rare nor (presumably) are
| well-done... - 20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT
| You Never Knew Were Possible - 5 Unique Passive Income
| Ideas -- How I Make $4,580/Month - Don't Just Set Goals.
| Build Systems
|
| ...which (in combination with bleak near-future HN prediction[2])
| reminds me of nothing so much as Lem's 1971 _Futurological
| Congress_ [3].
|
| ====
|
| [0] considering it hails from the country that brought us both
| Moliere and Minitel Rose, https://www.journalduhacker.net is a
| bit disappointing. The revolution may not be televised, but it
| will probably --at least on this side of the GFW-- be discussed
| online in (maternal or non-maternal) english.
|
| [1] although I am here on Th' Continent now, despite having in
| 1995 been in California, so in the meantime I've apparently
| chosen my meatspace with my feet.
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34231343
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
|
| > _He sees that people do not drive cars or ride in elevators,
| but they run in the streets and climb the walls of empty elevator
| shafts, which explains why everyone in this new world is so out
| of breath. Robots whip people in the street and protect order.
| Through successive doses of more and more powerful types of up
| 'n'at'm, Tichy sees increasingly horrible visions of the world,
| climaxing in a frozen horrorscape where people sleep blissfully
| in the snow, and the police robots are revealed to be people who
| are convinced that they are robots. The frozen state of the world
| explains why he has always found the new world to be so cold._
| balsam wrote:
| >Somehow I don't think "the European artist-engineers"[0] ever
| did construct a cyberspace[1] which is inclusive and universal.
|
| Otlet & La Fontaine came close when they tried to get Le
| Corbusier (quite the artist-engineer) to build a version of the
| Mundaneum. They intended it to be public and electric, even
| somewhat decentralized. The surviving bits of it is fully
| wheelchair accessible.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| simulo wrote:
| - A version that is better formatted and has links to serveral
| comments (praising and adversarial ones) is avaliable on the
| article's original author's website:
| http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-i...
|
| - Adam Curtis' documentaries convering similar topics have been
| mentioned here alread, but not...
|
| - ...Fred Turner's "From Cyberculture to Counterculture", als
| discussing politics and ideas about the future in tech-culture.
| If you do not want to read the book (which is excellently written
| imho), you might enjoy his shorter articles like Don't be evil
| [1] and Burning Man at Google [2]
|
| - The article has already been discussed several times here (not
| surprising) [3]
|
| [1] https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
|
| [2]
| https://fredturner2022.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiy...
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| daedlanth wrote:
| [flagged]
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Hacker News rules state "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious
| conversation".[1]
|
| Your account has been active since 2015, so you should know
| this by now. In what world does your comment live up to that
| description?
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| daedlanth wrote:
| Very interesting, there's a first time for everything... and
| a last.
| daedlanth wrote:
| [flagged]
| balsam wrote:
| That's the whiff of freedom (probably no grapes involved)
|
| https://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeche...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| grape as in https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/th
| umb/0/02/Bo... ?
|
| << aujourd'hui, on prefere un coup de (phosphore) blanc >>
| api wrote:
| One of the weirdest developments of the past 25 years since this
| was written has been the wholesale conversion of a huge set of
| these people to a weird hybrid of elements of the original
| current and traditionalist reactionary right wing ideology.
|
| I watched it happen through the mid 20-teens and I am still
| puzzled about why and how this got such traction.
|
| In any case one result of this was to cause the whole project of
| the "Californian ideology" to jump the rails. The original
| ideology was very libertarian about LGBT issues and generally not
| racist in the classical "race blindness" framing. This made it
| loosely an ally of the left at least on social issues, with the
| two agreeing to disagree on economics.
|
| When the power of the technical aptitude of these folks met hard
| right reactionary ideology, you got high tech highly savvy
| movements like the whole 4chan-borne Pepe the frog... thing.
|
| That in turn disgusted the left and turned off a bunch of the
| remaining adherents of the original ideology in its original
| libertarian form. Many of the latter were driven fully to the
| left, abandoning libertarian economics and certain less-lefty
| libertarian social positions.
|
| Meanwhile the left got less liberal. I'm not sure how this
| happened either. Someone more familiar can tell that story. The
| time frame was the same though: the 20-teens.
|
| This left us in the end with a techie community split between
| technocratic leftists who now believe in censorship and
| benevolent concentrated power and technocratic rightists who now
| believe in actual monarchy or even fascism or theocracy.
|
| (I think this is a choice of two different awful dystopias.)
|
| Some of us remain though. I feel like a baffled refugee after
| some kind of apocalypse. I continue to work on decentralized
| human centric tech designed to deliver both freedom and human
| dignity and empowerment like we thought we were doing in the 90s.
| I sometimes feel alone. I feel less alone on Mastodon where it
| seems some of us now hang.
|
| Edit: or maybe what happened is just that the masks fell off. A
| lot of tankie reds and technocrats maybe once pretended to be
| more liberal while a lot of authoritarian rightists pretended to
| be libertarians. Maybe everyone stopped pretending, leaving those
| of us who actually believed in the fusion of liberty and humanism
| bewildered.
|
| Also Californian ideology is a bit misleading. One did not have
| to be in California, though it did seem to be concentrated there.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Libertarianism has become deeply unfashionable. Many on the
| right talk about libertarianism as a gateway drug to the hard
| right. As some who is broadly libertarian this is quite
| distressing. We have no representation in government or the
| mainstream parties and no media machine like the hard right /
| alt right or even the far left!
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >Many on the right talk about libertarianism as a gateway
| drug to the hard right
|
| Lolwut?
|
| Both the left and the right complain that libertarianism is a
| gateway drug to the other party. "We'd have won if it weren't
| for that obnoxious 2% that won't vote for anybody who's
| platform is all about controlling people" and all that jazz.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I think people on the _right_ talk about it pushing people
| "hard right" they're specifically talking about the rise of
| the Mises caucus:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Caucus
|
| I think there's a separate complaint about the Libertarian
| candidates peeling voters away from conservative
| Republicans in close contests, resulting in a Democratic
| victory. The problem with this argument is that many of
| these Libertarian voters have zero interest in major-party
| politics, and may not be closely aligned with either party.
| So if you removed the Libertarian candidate from the
| ballot, many Libertarian voters would rather stay home than
| decide on the "lesser evil", and those that did choose a
| major party wouldn't support one party over another enough
| to matter.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Sorry I don't have any links to share but this is common
| view in the alt right
| Mouthfeel wrote:
| [dead]
| api wrote:
| I heard this once: "A libertarian politician is like a
| teetotaler in the brewery business." So maybe that's the
| deal. Maybe people who get into politics do so because they
| want to control people or beat up on some other group because
| of grievances. People who have neither control issues nor
| bigotries maybe spend their time in other ways.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Progressives do not equal hippies yet somehow they took over as
| the representatives for that group. Hippies were very
| libertarian. When I was a kid our commune had everyone from
| atheist communist hedonists to super religious Muslim political
| refugees from Egypt, everyone was welcome. Progressives only
| welcome fellow Progressives, and heaven forbid you mention the
| L word (libertarian) around them. They go into 'attack the evil
| witch' mode and lose all reason.
|
| Somewhere along the line Progressives were able to take up the
| lead as if they were the continuation/inheritors of the hippie
| ideal, but they in no way were/are, they are the opposite. They
| take the 'hippies were trying to make the world better' then
| add 'and WE KNOW what rules will make it better, so we are
| therefor an extension of the hippie ideals'.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Regarding the left becoming "less liberal", I think it really
| became "more international."
|
| The left realized that most liberal democracies have laws
| against hate speech, technocratic power centers, extensive
| regulation, etc.
|
| If Germany can outlaw hate speech, fringe political movements,
| and private ownership of firearms, why can't we?
|
| Notice how the Democrats focus on healthcare, even when it
| hurts them (they were killed at the polls over Obamacare in
| 2010). If every other country has state guaranteed affordable
| healthcare, why can't we?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If every other country has state guaranteed affordable
| healthcare, why can't we?
|
| Because government meddling has already made healthcare
| unaffordable?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The "market good government bad" really is one of the most
| poorly considered and hard to defend positions.
|
| In the US the government is wholly captured by the
| oligarchy. There's a reason why health care is extortionate
| and the defence budget is a huge pork factory, and it's not
| because voters are content with that balance.
|
| That's one of the points of the original article. The US
| pats itself on the back for being a market driven economy
| of freedom and opportunity, when in reality for most of the
| population it's a labour camp. It's true there are various
| levels of comfort, but they all _demand_ time and labour
| and non-compliance is punished severely.
|
| Genuine freedom requires at least an eight figure net
| worth. Without that the system treats you like a disposable
| NPC.
|
| Independent opportunity is possible, but most people quite
| literally cannot afford the risks.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > In the US the government is wholly captured by the
| oligarchy.
|
| All large-enough organizations are captured by an
| oligarchy of some kind. It's an iron law of social
| organization. The term for a genuinely decentralized
| counterpart of organization that's immune to such capture
| is, well, a "market". (And yes, non-monetary markets can
| exist. HN itself is, in no small part, a market for
| upvotes.)
|
| > ... when in reality for most of the population it's a
| labour camp. It's true there are various levels of
| comfort, but they all demand time and labour
|
| People who have lived in a less-developed country will be
| well aware that this description is far more applicable
| to such places than the U.S. The U.S. is far from
| perfect, there's plenty of room for improvement. But the
| direction of improvement is for more involvement of a
| genuine free market, not less of it.
| cagenut wrote:
| You might find some of Adam Curtis's films help you feel less
| baffled. Not that they have 'answers' but good contextual
| analysis that will give better understanding. Century of the
| Self, and Can't Get You Out of My Head are the most relevant
| here. Power of Nightmares, Bitter Lake and Hypernormalization
| are great too.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still pretty
| libertarian. One thing about social media (Twitter especially,
| but Mastodon, too, partly because of a concentration of people
| from Twitter) is the exaggeration of positions and the
| conflation of markers for actual beliefs. Like someone will
| agree with a Republican on leftist overreach and be branded a
| fascist, meanwhile maintaining a consistent opposition to far
| right political elements or figures. The latter is not ever
| retweeted by folks you follow, and folks who point this out are
| often mocked (and acknowledging it is avoided because we now
| see social media as platforms for meting out mob justice by
| calling out perceived wrongs via quote-tweets to our followers
| instead of trying to arrive at the truth), so a distorted view
| develops, and the same kind of ideological tribal epistemic
| closure that has existed among many on the right starts
| infecting the left and center-left because of the algorithmic
| and social dynamics of social media.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still pretty
| libertarian.
|
| You don't really see this on HN though. Economic illiteracy
| is rife here as is, more generally, social-science illiteracy
| about how politically-driven decision making works in large
| real-world organizations (Including but not limited to
| governments). These are the insights that the core of
| libertarianism is based on. Of course if you mean the rather
| more self-serving, "I'd rather not pay taxes" Sovereign
| Citizens' kind of libertarianism you may well be correct.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > > I think a lot of the libertarian techies are still
| pretty libertarian.
|
| > You don't really see this on HN though.
|
| Spot on!
|
| I have a weird interest in the old-times, when geek were
| actually libertarian? (well, based on my readings and what
| people told me, they seemed to be different from now)
|
| And it's not just the people: instead of "safe" languages
| like rust, people liked "unsafe" perl that let you do about
| everything!
|
| I really wish there was some time travel, to get the chance
| to live and work in the 1990s-early 2000s where there
| seemed to be both optimism _AND_ libertarianism in the tech
| world, instead of the current pro-big-government /social
| conformity trend.
|
| But since tech is now mostly fueled by advertising $$, it
| is difficult to get techies to understand something, when
| their salary depends on them not understanding it.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In the early 90's we thought the net would change the
| world, but what actually happened is the world changed
| the net.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > In the early 90's we thought the net would change the
| world, but what actually happened is the world changed
| the net.
|
| To me it seems to be a bit of both?
|
| BTW having read a bit of your other comments, I find your
| analyses both insightful and introspective.
|
| You seem to be from the EU and to have worked in tech
| during the 1990s.
|
| Have you lived in the US too? Can you tell me more about
| how you saw things change in the US and the EU from then
| to know?
|
| I have some weird interest in old tech: hardware like
| Thinkpads, software like Perl... but the culture is also
| very foreign and interesting.
|
| I just watched a documentary about "Dinosaurs"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_(TV_series) and
| it seems so modern yet quaint?
|
| I want to know more from the viewpoint of someone who
| lived in that era!
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Well, that's a big question; hope you don't mind if I
| reflect a bit before attempting to answer! (any specific
| qs, go ahead and I'll do my best)
|
| I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s (among which,
| both in Silicon Valley and in "flyover" country, with
| non-domicile tours in Boston, Seattle, and the DC
| Beltway)
|
| Have you read _Microserfs_ yet?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
|
| It's a pretty good capture of our Zeitgeist. In fact, I
| distinctly remember one day when I was at my desk, and
| two of my colleagues were enjoying the afternoon sun on
| the balcony of my office. We had started to discuss
| Microserfs, through the open window next to my desk, and
| one of them remarked: "it's pretty accurate ... except
| they're all dating within the company". One year or so
| later, the company had grown by a factor of two or three,
| and it turns out Coupland had indeed called it in
| advance: all three of us were then in intra-company
| relationships. (which was again, a topic of balcony
| discussion)
|
| (sorry, no idea about Dinosaurs: we were working extreme
| hours [some days the company was comping us ~$2'000/day
| (in 2023 USD), which was considered very good money back
| then for "kids" not many years out of uni], and except
| for attending watch parties for Simpsons, Beavis &
| Butthead, and Spike & Mike's when it came through town, I
| was _not_ getting much pop culture exposure during these
| years)
|
| Another anecdote: our landlord once complained that the
| janitor had found porno mags in the restrooms, and as the
| other tenants were law firms, maybe they might have been
| from us, possibly one of our contractors? My boss,
| indignant, called them up and she asked them if they knew
| we were an internet company? With a T1 connection? How
| could they possibly think any of _us_ would still be
| paying for porn on dead trees?
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Well, that's a big question; hope you don't mind if I
| reflect a bit before attempting to answer!
|
| Not at all, please take your time! And if you have more
| insights, feel free to post them later! I'll check again
| the comments for the next few days, because all this is
| so intriguing to me!
|
| > I was living in the US in the 80s and 90s
|
| This begs many questions: where you born here? Where do
| you live now? (and ...why?)
|
| > Have you read Microserfs yet?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs > It's a pretty
| good capture of our Zeitgeist
|
| I haven't but if it's a good capture of the 1990s
| zeitgeist, I will!
|
| > (any specific qs, go ahead and I'll do my best)
|
| Besides the lack of optimism, what are the other
| differences between now and then that stand out to you?
| [deleted]
| watwut wrote:
| Having lived in 1990s-early 2000s, there was definitive
| system of codes you had to conform to in order to be "in"
| or socially accepted. And "expected" sets of both
| behaviors and opinions you was expected to have.
|
| I mean following very genuinely: if everyone has to claim
| he is libertarian, then what you have is group thing.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| 90s geeks were as often as not listening to Pacifica
| radio in the office. We did have a conference room with
| Star Trek TNG videos playing at lunch. So we did have
| optimism for the future (a big government controlled
| optimistic future at that). If you are looking across the
| river and seeing the green grass and wishing 'if only you
| play there' remember, when you get up close, that grass
| in the park is filled with dog shit.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Economic illiteracy is rife everywhere, because it's been
| deliberately seeded. In the UK workers who haven't had a
| significant pay rise for more than a decade are being told
| they can't have one now because it would be inflationary.
| Meanwhile the real drivers of inflation are an energy price
| shock - again - and corporate profiteering.
|
| But that's not the official narrative. So perhaps if you
| want to think about politically-driven decision making you
| might want to include the network of funded think-tanks and
| both covert and overt influencers in the media who invent
| and push these narratives. And maybe even consider why
| they're so dominant, and why their definitions of "freedom"
| and "economics" are so consistently and exclusively pro-
| oligarch.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The real driver of inflation and low workers' wages is
| lack of attention to long-term growth potential. This is
| not a partisan issue, least of all in the UK; both sides
| have done things that hurt long-term growth. By way of
| example, we're still waiting for those billions that the
| Brexit folks once promised as increased NHS funding.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think in general there's an effect something like this: Let's
| say I'm some person curious about a political party that I
| think makes some good points in an area I care about. I'm a bit
| uneasy about some of their points that seem a bit extreme, but
| overall they don't seem unreasonable. When I, the hypothetical
| voter, talk to other people, they say these people are
| literally the worse than the devil, and I am to be tarred and
| feathered and dragged through the streets for even considering
| voting for them. This doesn't feel justified to me, and I, the
| hypothetical voter am not convinced to change my mind, but I'm
| rather pushed toward this somewhat extreme party, that in my
| eyes seems less extreme than the people threatening to lynch me
| for being curious and open-minded.
|
| I think overall this is a recurring and common mechanism of
| polarization that has the only people daring to speak chewing
| the scenery like something outta Warhammer 40k[1], and everyone
| in the middle just hunkering down to avoid getting caught in
| the crossfire.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQmrZXewToE
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Maybe I am not trapped in the Star Trek Mirror Universe; I am
| trapped in a W40k timeline? We went from TFA's
|
| > _Emboldened by supposed advances in Artificial Intelligence
| and medical science, the Extropian cult fantasises of
| abandoning the 'wetware' of the human state altogether to
| become living machines._
|
| to the strength and certainty of steel:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88
|
| [Edit: NB, there _are_ countries with viable and functioning
| political centres. They 're just not the countries which
| constitute the cultural centre of the 'net.]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > [Edit: NB, there are countries with viable and
| functioning political centres. They're just not the
| countries which constitute the cultural centre of the
| 'net.]
|
| Which are they? Every country I've got insight into has had
| a marked decline in the political dialogue post
| 2010-somewhere with a significant uptick in polarization
| and shit-flinging (I think coinciding with most of the
| political dialogue moving onto Twitter; where given the
| medium is the message; generalizations and zingers rule).
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| This will take a while; I think I'll limit it to top 10
| by population. Using lower chamber where bicameral,
| regional parties and unaffiliated have not been counted
| (but so far have not been numerous). I take "english-
| country-name parliament" and the first wikipedia page
| that comes up in a google search, and attempt to
| characterise (where not available from WP) as left,
| centre-left, centre, centre-right, right, regional or
| unaffiliated depending upon keywords when clicking
| through to each party's english-language wikipedia page.
| left centre right DE 39 613 79
| FR 74 387 88 IT* 64 134
| 184 ES** 35 217 52 PL 3
| 212 240 RO - 279 32 NL***
| 16 100 28 BE 12 94 25
| CZ - 180 20 EL 21 265
| 10
|
| Note how many governments are centrist coalitions,
| containing both centre-left and centre-right parties, and
| having both wings in opposition.
|
| * 5 star has been counted as left? they claim unaligned,
| but seem to be populists who are --at least currently?--
| in opposition to a centre-right/right-wing government.
|
| ** many small (and some not-so-small!) regional parties
|
| *** The worker's party is only centre-left here, but not
| to worry, there's a "party for the animals" on the far
| left :-P
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| to calibrate, here's my guess for Sweden:
| SE 24 252 73
|
| left: Vansterpartiet centre: everyone else right:
| Sverigedemokraterna
|
| but the current government
| (Moderata/Kristdemokraterna/Liberalerna) is solidly
| centre-right. (w/ Socialdemokraterna as centre-left
| opposition)
|
| Is this close to reasonable?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I won't disagree about a decline in dialogue, just think
| voting records (in places fortunate enough to have (a)
| not succumbed to first-past-the-post mentality, and have
| (b) voting districts that may hundreds to thousands of
| years old, preventing the more egregious cases of
| gerrymandering) show that even though winger parties have
| indeed gained adherents in this century, in absolute
| numbers they are still behind centrists (meaning
| especially that they are still far from the near-
| majorities that they, due to paucity of parties, are in
| my Old Country).
|
| In particular, there was a brief period several years ago
| when the far right in my country ran political posters
| with candidates liberally draped in the national flag.
| They don't do that anymore.
|
| Will conduct a survey of EEA parliaments tomorrow, if not
| later today.
| spamizbad wrote:
| The root of all this has been a disillusionment with
| Liberalism. Which may have put itself on a pedestal after the
| fall of the Soviet Union, and then knocked off during the first
| decade of the 21st century through overreach:
|
| * The response to the 9/11 that lead to multiple western
| military quagmires
|
| * A financial crisis followed by a recession, with lots of
| rhetoric that placed blame on regular Americans
|
| * Privatization of public services that did not bear meaningful
| fruit
|
| Basically we ran head-first into some real limitations of
| Liberalism.
|
| Edit: For what it's worth I think 2022 showed the opposite with
| Russia's own military quagmire, the unrest in Iran, and Xi's
| China we are now seeing the limitations of authoritarian
| regimes.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| "high tech highly savvy movements like the whole 4chan-borne
| Pepe the frog..."
|
| what a phrase
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