This whole debate seems philosophically sloppy. The rate of return on capital investments, the pace of technological change, the disposable income of ordinary people, and subjective quality of life are all different things that are only loosely related. But if we throw around the word "progress" without carefully defining it, we might imagine they're all the same thing.
Ultimately it comes down to the hardest question: What is the meaning of life? And one reason society is fragmenting is that we disagree more than ever about the answer.
New subject, sort of. This reddit comment argues that Jihadism is National Socialist, Not Fascist. I didn't know there was a difference, but the author explains it as the difference between violent gangs run by the state, like in Putin's Russia, and social groups run by the party, like the Hitler Youth. From the key paragraph:
Jihadism and Nazi Germany are the respective symptoms of the same problem, which is the local collapse of society, the lack of economic development, the end of competitive capitalism and the replacement of it with a monopolistic, stagnated capitalism and all the misery it creates. They are both the result of a fetishistic view of how to save the world, both focused on the destruction of the enemy on which the percieved problems are focused. And they both achieve the realization of the uniform people's community.
Again from today's Hacker News, commenting on ISIS cutting its fighters' salaries by 50%, someone makes a fascinating comparison between ISIS and startup companies:
They saw initial success and had fast growth. They wanted to keep growing so they recruited heavily. To recruit a lot of soldiers they promised generous pay and benefits and even offered to support the families of soldiers so dads could go fight. Their burn rate was astronomical, but was okay because they were staying ahead of it through growth. But the growth ended up being unsustainable, because competition arrived and contained them. They kept it up for a long time because they had a lot of funding, but their burn rate finally caught up to them since they haven't been able to keep growing as before. Leadership did not/have not made the transition from wild startup CEOs that give pitch talks and sell to investors into the sensible, sustainable CEOs that manage a company in a saturated market with an eye toward creating a mature company. Remaining in the mode of a wild growth startup company is not an option for these guys. There is no viable strategy for a terrorist group that says "we'll grow like crazy and then sell out to Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft while we are popular and they'll handle the maturity stages." Terrorists have to make the maturity transition themselves because they can't be bought out.
I said this was sort of related to the decline of America, because any amount of exponential growth is unsustainable. The whole global economy is just a slow-burn version of Nazis and startups. But where Google had to transition from fast to slow growth, the world has to transition from slow growth to zero, something that has never been done smoothly.
]]>Google didn't go from adding z to the end of names to having the world's best security because someone gave a rousing speech or wrote a convincing essay. They did it after getting embarrassed a few times, which gave people who wanted to do things "right" the leverage to fix fundamental process issues. It's the same story at almost every company I know of that has good practices. Microsoft was a joke in the security world for years, until multiple disastrously bad exploits forced them to get serious about security. Which makes it sound simple: but if you talk to people who were there at the time, the change was brutal. Despite a mandate from the top, there was vicious political pushback...
People push back if the change threatens their job, or even if it threatens their comfortable beliefs or routines. And what if the people pushing back have more power than the people who want the change? I think this has happened to the whole global economy, and it comes back to the subject of economic inequality.
Any defense of wealth inequality must start with the assumption that wealth is earned: that how much money a person or product makes is a reflection of its value to society. Paul Graham made an airtight defense of inequality by never seriously questioning that assumption, but it's so far wrong that the truth is often the opposite. You can make minimum wage by serving society, but you make real money by following bullshit scripts, by valuing surface flashiness over deep integrity, by pandering to fools, by taking advantage of human inattention instead of trying to fix it.
This becomes more true as wealth becomes more unequal, because wealth is not just the freedom to buy luxuries -- it's the power to make other people go along with your bullshit. Being rich in a capitalist economy is a milder version of being dictator of North Korea. Why are Whole Foods customers terrible people? That article doesn't try to explain it, but it's because Whole Foods prices are so high that their regular shoppers are people who don't even notice the price of groceries, so they probably have enough money to go through life being selfish without being seriously challenged.
It's tempting to imagine this trend driving us to total collapse, but I think the first world will find equilibrium, where the rich don't completely abuse the political system, and the poor don't overthrow it, because there are just enough reforms to keep life tolerable.
What the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society or even what we want. Because under conditions of extreme inequality, the market is biased towards people who have lots of money, at the expense of virtually everyone else.
Most of us outside of Palo Alto have no idea how a product as fucking stupid as Peeple gets valued at $7.6 million while a 4th grade teacher can't pay off her student loans and pay rent at the same time. But according to Paul Graham, those creepy Peeple women created value where that school teacher is just a stupid loser.
Ask a nurse who saved, like, three lives today what her salary is and then go ask the guy who made Candy Crush Saga what he got paid for it. Candy Crush Saga was valorized at over $7 billion. According to that same market, a human life is only valorized at $129,000. Meaning Candy Crush Saga is worth more to society than the combined value of 54,264 human lives.
Because that's where this stupid game gets you. You end up going to absurd lengths to rationalize mediocre ideas because they happen to make tons of money instead of questioning the legitimacy of a system that confers so much value on to stupid things.
A reader sends this article with more details about the beliefs of Silicon Valley elites, and I'm skeptical of the idea that a few smart people are doing more for the good of the world than everyone else, because it's based on dumb ideas about what's good for the world.
On basically the same subject, Anne has another new post, Entrepreneurship Means I Give Up, or Entrepreneurship is Hopium for the Economy: with the 20th century economy dying, and real wages steadily falling, we can still believe in capitalism and economic growth by focusing on a few people who strike it rich in the small business lottery.
]]>The first "job" today's kids have to answer is, what the hell am I going to do that anyone is willing to pay me for? And each kid, increasingly, is expected to answer this alone as an individual. When poor or less-educated people do this, it's called "hustling" but when it trickles upwards to the children of the 1%, it's our national economic plan.
]]>...the surest sign of an actual technological collapse would be the inability to encompass and interpret what was happening; if a collapse is to be irremediable, it would also have to be permanently inexplicable. This is beyond the radio station going down and you can't figure out why the internet has been out for a week - this would place the root causes beyond the technology of human knowledge and understanding for the meaningful future.
...
In an age of total information awareness, unknowable blankness is emerging as an existential horror all its own and - pace Melville - is accumulating its own color, mass and meaning, becoming a rebuke to the very assumption of narrative continuity.