Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash
Contents
https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/20/progress-postmodernism-and-the-tech-backlash
- Two aspects of the tech backlash that seem paradoxical, but are both true
- Critics of tech vastly overestimate how many people in the "real world" (i.e. outside of California) believe Silicon Valley companies are villains
- Tech leaders underestimate the resonance and coherence of the anti-tech movement
- The anti-tech movement is best understood as a component of a broader rebellion against postmodernism
What is postmodernism and how did we get here?
- 100 years ago (1920s), modernism was at its peak
- Modernism believes in progress
- Electricity
- Automobiles
- Aircraft
- Medicine
- The modernist mindset embraces making new things
- Modernism believes in progress
- Postmodernism is the hangover the followed the modernist party
- Disillusion with ideals of progress
- Emphasis on irony and meta-awareness
- Remix already existing things rather than make new things
- Eventually, postmodernism displaces modernism as the dominant mindset
- First see postmodernism in art
- Warhol's "pop art", which is remixes of existing advertising
- Hip Hop and R&B, which use sampling to a much greater extent than previous forms of music
- Eventually spreads to business — products become commodity items with branding, sold at a premium
- Clothes — the same white T-shirt can command vastly different prices depending on which brand it features
- Cars — badge engineering — the same "platform" sells for vastly different prices depending on whether it has e.g. a Chevrolet or Cadillac label
- First see postmodernism in art
- One of the key concepts of postmodernism is Baudrillard's idea of simulacra
- A simulacra is a simulation of something that either no longer exists or never exists in the first place
- Starbucks is a simulacra of a small-town coffee shop
- The save icon is a simulacra of a floppy diskette, even though we haven't used floppies for decades
- Postmodernist capitalism emphasizes the creation of new simulacra
- Values experiences over ownership
- Values variety over durability
- The easiest way to meet this demand for variety is to remix existing items into new simulacra
- Example: food
- Food delivery services increase the variety of food that is available to people
- Who knows if the food is getting better, but there's certainly a greater variety of it
Out with progress, in with innovation
- Modernists and postmodernists have fundamentally different conceptions of progress
- Modernists see progress as the inevitable assertion of human power over the natural world
- Postmodernists see progress as the result of risky leaps into the unknown
- Progress is not inevitable — leaps can go nowhere
- Need to calculate the odds of payoff before taking risks
- Postmodernists view progress as arbitrage between the present and the future
- Ironically, the first thinker to hit upon this notion of progress was Marx
Memes, Fortnite, SaaS and Simulacra
- Internet culture (i.e. memes) represents the triumph of simulacra over the real
- The most profitable media franchise today, Fortnite, makes money by selling remixed dance moves and skins for weapons
- The current tech industry is a triumph of postmodern capitalism
- No one cares what the product does, as long as user growth numbers are good
- Most new companies today sell a reshuffling of existing innovations
- Ex: Uber
- Postmodernist capitalism looks at Uber and sees success: existing cars, computers and smartphones have been put together in a new way, turning transportation into a service
- Modernist capitalism looks at Uber and sees disappointment: same cars, driven by the same people, stuck in the same traffic, burning the same gas
Peter Thiel, Marxist?
- Anti-tech criticism boils down to two main points
- Tech industry is the worst of capitalism
- Labor exploitation
- Extractive practices
- Regulatory arbitrage
- No real innovation
- Tech produces "profitable but pointless bullshit"
- Reshuffles existing products rather than creating new innovations because a reshuffle is always a lower-risk leap than a new innovation
- Tech industry is the worst of capitalism
- The important thing to note is that most postmodernist capitalists don't see the above two points as criticisms
- The old has to be destroyed in order to make way for the new
- Every innovation starts out as a toy
- Peter Thiel, on the other hand, seems to understand this criticism
- Asserts that we've stopped believing in the future
- The future is no longer a coherent end state that can be worked towards, it's now seen as the outcome of a random walk
- Calls out software as part of the problem
- Asks how can we distinguish between progress and change?
- Peter Thiel's critiques of the software industry are part of a broader culture war
- Believes that we lost the path to Eden when we stopped believing in the inevitability of progress
- Believes that it's possible to do better than a random walk in building the future, and that we used to do better than a random walk
- Thinks that continuing current trends will result in the perpetual creation of new simulacra, without any real progress
- "Tech is destroying everything" and "Tech will fund superficiality over substance" are both ways of saying that the tech industry takes the real and transforms it into simulacra
