In all fairness, Cory is definitely not promoting Amazon (or Google) any longer, given the language he sometimes uses about them. Some of his analyses, of the power of Big Tech and the need for anti-monopoly regulation and Lina Khan-style enforcement, are pretty good. Like Yasha, he has been pretty vocal about denouncing the genocide in Gaza and Biden's role in it, which should be something to be taken for granted - but isn't.
I think he's right about some things and wrong about others. I agree with his "right to tinker" agenda, though maybe not with the exaltation of "the hacker spirit" etc. Some of his political novellas, such as "Unauthorized Bread" and "The Masque of the Red Death" (from the collection "Radicalized") are actually very good.
But he's very much a child of the Silicon Valley culture. I also don't agree with his exaltation of the "old Internet". And I don't agree with him at all about what is needed in a future society if we are to handle climate change. He believes in the techno-optimist "abundance" or "post-scarcity" concept, that technology will make us so much smarter that we can have a fair, sustainable society and still maintain the same standard of living.
I don't see it. I think there's no way around reducing our standards of living in order to reduce emissions. I think his techno-optimism is sort of irresponsible in that way.
I criticized his book "Walkaway" for kinda-sorta promoting the impossible concept of "uploading your consciousness", which should be a joke but unfortunately isn't in today's Silicon Valley:
I find Cory's presentation of it sorta-kinda irresponsible given the currency it actually, and absurdly, has in tech circles.
At the time, I hadn't really latched on to the post-scarcity ideology that also permeates the book, yet. The Brit Aaron Bastani is also a proponent of that idea. I think it's a red herring, but then ...
The idea of "uploading your consciousness" also echoes ideas propounded by Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow and others about the mind as "pure spirit" which simply don't make any sense, philosophically; and which is also behind the quest for the divine "AGI". We're back to what Timnit Gebru calls "Tescreal", accelerationism. One response to that is that the human mind could never be disembodied, we *are* our connection to our bodies, so to speak.
Correct again. You are also correct when you state that the dissemination of correct information (such as this) doesn’t seem to mitigate the effect of “the spectacle.” Your and Evgenia’s thing on Seymour Hersh brought me right back to my own Quixotic attempts at changing the world through adversarial investigative journalism, which only managed to get me threatened and pigeonholed as an uncooperative malcontent. Which I am.
Might I recommend a palliative to all this (which Yasha has no doubt read): the first chapter of The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, which retells the lesser known story of the first photocopier made by a soviet jew by the name of Vladimir Fridkin back in the fifties, who got the idea to make it from an american research paper on electrophotography.
When the director of his institute saw what Fridkin had made, he exclaimed "You do not understand what you invented!". At first Fridkin was lauded and feted on television, and a factory in Chisinau was going to mass produce the things. However, in 1957, the KGB sent a pretty young thing to sit and chat with Fridkin at the institute of crystallography he was promoted to, who told him "I have to take away your device and destroy it".
The soviet security state all the way back in the pre-digital 1950s fully understood the threat something as simple as a knockoff of a xerox machine posed to the post-Stalin regime, and it only got worse from that point on.
The Electrophotgraphy Copying Machine No. 1 was smashed to pieces, but one remaining critical part of it - a slab of mirror - was salvaged and put up in the women's restroom.
Thanks for the reminder. Well in the 1980s and 1990s Russia got all the xeroxes. And what happened? Also this is where Debord's concentrated vs diffused spectacles are a good at highlighting approaches to management of an information society.
I'll be discussing Surveillance Valley next week with my class on the cold war. I've focused enough on the CIA and the rest of the national security apparatus that your thesis will not sound unreasonable to most my students.
Have you read Ways of Being? James Bridle gets at thus problem from a forward looking position, absent nostalgia and without romanticizing what these tools are doing (to us) now.
He is perhaps too optimistic but has an interesting perspective.
In all fairness, Cory is definitely not promoting Amazon (or Google) any longer, given the language he sometimes uses about them. Some of his analyses, of the power of Big Tech and the need for anti-monopoly regulation and Lina Khan-style enforcement, are pretty good. Like Yasha, he has been pretty vocal about denouncing the genocide in Gaza and Biden's role in it, which should be something to be taken for granted - but isn't.
I think he's right about some things and wrong about others. I agree with his "right to tinker" agenda, though maybe not with the exaltation of "the hacker spirit" etc. Some of his political novellas, such as "Unauthorized Bread" and "The Masque of the Red Death" (from the collection "Radicalized") are actually very good.
But he's very much a child of the Silicon Valley culture. I also don't agree with his exaltation of the "old Internet". And I don't agree with him at all about what is needed in a future society if we are to handle climate change. He believes in the techno-optimist "abundance" or "post-scarcity" concept, that technology will make us so much smarter that we can have a fair, sustainable society and still maintain the same standard of living.
I don't see it. I think there's no way around reducing our standards of living in order to reduce emissions. I think his techno-optimism is sort of irresponsible in that way.
I criticized his book "Walkaway" for kinda-sorta promoting the impossible concept of "uploading your consciousness", which should be a joke but unfortunately isn't in today's Silicon Valley:
https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2021/12/05/cory-doctorows-walkaway-some-comments/
I find Cory's presentation of it sorta-kinda irresponsible given the currency it actually, and absurdly, has in tech circles.
At the time, I hadn't really latched on to the post-scarcity ideology that also permeates the book, yet. The Brit Aaron Bastani is also a proponent of that idea. I think it's a red herring, but then ...
The idea of "uploading your consciousness" also echoes ideas propounded by Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow and others about the mind as "pure spirit" which simply don't make any sense, philosophically; and which is also behind the quest for the divine "AGI". We're back to what Timnit Gebru calls "Tescreal", accelerationism. One response to that is that the human mind could never be disembodied, we *are* our connection to our bodies, so to speak.
Correct again. You are also correct when you state that the dissemination of correct information (such as this) doesn’t seem to mitigate the effect of “the spectacle.” Your and Evgenia’s thing on Seymour Hersh brought me right back to my own Quixotic attempts at changing the world through adversarial investigative journalism, which only managed to get me threatened and pigeonholed as an uncooperative malcontent. Which I am.
Doctorow pumps the 'tane for so many gasbags on the Left; I stan fierce on Yasha for this.
Might I recommend a palliative to all this (which Yasha has no doubt read): the first chapter of The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, which retells the lesser known story of the first photocopier made by a soviet jew by the name of Vladimir Fridkin back in the fifties, who got the idea to make it from an american research paper on electrophotography.
When the director of his institute saw what Fridkin had made, he exclaimed "You do not understand what you invented!". At first Fridkin was lauded and feted on television, and a factory in Chisinau was going to mass produce the things. However, in 1957, the KGB sent a pretty young thing to sit and chat with Fridkin at the institute of crystallography he was promoted to, who told him "I have to take away your device and destroy it".
The soviet security state all the way back in the pre-digital 1950s fully understood the threat something as simple as a knockoff of a xerox machine posed to the post-Stalin regime, and it only got worse from that point on.
The Electrophotgraphy Copying Machine No. 1 was smashed to pieces, but one remaining critical part of it - a slab of mirror - was salvaged and put up in the women's restroom.
Thanks for the reminder. Well in the 1980s and 1990s Russia got all the xeroxes. And what happened? Also this is where Debord's concentrated vs diffused spectacles are a good at highlighting approaches to management of an information society.
I'll be discussing Surveillance Valley next week with my class on the cold war. I've focused enough on the CIA and the rest of the national security apparatus that your thesis will not sound unreasonable to most my students.
Have you read Ways of Being? James Bridle gets at thus problem from a forward looking position, absent nostalgia and without romanticizing what these tools are doing (to us) now.
He is perhaps too optimistic but has an interesting perspective.
No have not. Will look.
things can sometimes be pretty nice during the introductory trial period concealing the reality of the thing
that fucking amazon endorsement, gross
this Internet of Bugs guy has an interesting thesis on polarization "the machine" thats kinda intersectional
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmYXyWbis9w