Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Used to be ~2016 that “Tech” was a cult-like coherent derp and techlash was a chaotic stream of confused critical commentary of very variable quality — mix of great insights and profound wrongness. Now it’s flipped. Tech is a chaotic stream of great and terrible ideas and Techlash is a cult-like coherent derp.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
In 2016 you could predict the contents of a tech-positive essay based just on the headline. All drew from the same well of VC-startup hustle porn and talking points. Now you can predict the contents of a techlash piece based on the headline.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It’s an effect of institutionalization. In 2013-14, when I wrote my breaking smart essays, people were still working out the core arguments of tech positive worldviews and the critics were just starting to notice that it was worth engaging it. Everything being said was fresh. My essays still read mostly fine to me.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
By 2016, the tech positive ideas had been turned into an mindless techbro derp. Techlash ideas were just gaining maturity. Then 2017 happened, Techlashers went to town gleefully, tech positive crowd performed a defensive lobotomy on themselves in retreat.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
By 2019, the Techlash had self-lobotomized too, turning into a caricature of itself, marked by a profound lack of technical curiosity. Hatred of techbros got conflated with political resistance to fascism, SV helped by getting moronically redpilled and reactionary, and we had ourselves an idiot discourse.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The pandemic era was interesting. SV discourse vanished past its own assh… I mean event horizon *cough* clubhouse *cough* and the techlash turned into a profoundly illiterate (of not just engineering and science but vast swathes of humanities, esp history) religion, with a knee-jerk rejection doctrine for everything
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
But I think the pandemic, by breaking SV’s stranglehold on technology conversations, also managed to scatter the discourse in an interesting way. Fresh thinking started appearing on the margins of the devastated core where scorched-earth derp-vs-derp wars of lobotomized cults had destroyed all thought 2017-20.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I may be biased but the Techlash did *not* have a comparable pandemic revival. It turned into a solipsistic Death Star of self-certifying wrongness, self-righteously writing itself into not-even-wrong irrelevance. I almost miss early Techlash. Morozov was bad-faith and often wrong but usually interestingly provocative
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
While I am sometimes guilty of obscurantism, this isn’t a particularly obscure line of thought. If you were even slightly on the inside of this stuff you’ll grok what I’m saying and how it shaped recent history. If you were a pure spectator, it’s hard to explain. https://warpcast.com/les/0x7b25b1
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
One reason I’m excited about the Summer of Protocols is that it’s a chance to reboot the tech conversation around one of the most interesting marginal sprouts of regeneration. One that benefits from the legacy of SV era tech discourse without being bound by it, carrying water for it, or paying for its baggage
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Surfer pfp
Surfer
@surfer
Very nice one
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