How Silicon Valley Utopianism Brought You the Dystopian Trump Presidency

[SolarpunkFan]

Wired.

TWO YEARS AGO, journalist Anand Giridharadas took the stage at the TED Conference and told the attendant techno-solutionists that they were, in fact, part of the problem. Literally, that’s what he said. Here, I’ll quote him directly:

“If you live near a Whole Foods, if no one in your family serves in the military, if you’re paid by the year, not the hour, if most people you know finished college, if no one you know uses meth, if you married once and remain married, if you’re not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what’s going on and you may be part of the problem.”

Seen from today, as Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president, Giridharadas’ message joins “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” as one of the great unheeded warnings of the 21st century. That socioeconomic despair was profitably channeled to elect a president who—beyond his politics—represents a threat to most of the values the technocracy holds dear: transparency; multiculturalism; expertise; social progress. And, in the greatest of ironies, he used the tools and language of the technocracy to do it.

At least since the 1960s, the computer—and, beyond that, the Internet–has been a symbol and tool of personal liberation. Stewart Brand called the computer revolution “the real legacy of the sixties”–—an outgrowth of the “counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority.” The ideology was codified by WIRED alum Steven Levy in his 1984 book Hackers, in which he summarized the Hacker Ethic:

Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.

These precepts inspired a worldview that saw institutions and middlemen as malign forces that mostly constrained human potential, and that placed unlimited faith in unshackled individuals to improve the world and their own lives. For much of the past three decades, that philosophy has borne out. It has become an unspoken truism of corporate and civic life.

But Trump’s inauguration provides a damning counterargument, an example of how each of those ideas can be exploited to advance the very values they were created to oppose. Universal access to computers created a greater audience for Trump’s culture-jamming Twitter feed. An outpouring of free information sowed confusion and created cover for half- and untruths. Trump used anti-authoritarian rhetoric to sow mistrust of the very institutions that might have provided a firewall against his own authoritarian tendencies. Democratizing the tools of creative production created not just ennobling art but a million shitposts and Pepe memes.

In the wake of the election, some despairing technologists have wondered how to improve the products and systems that led to this result. “There are things we were optimizing for that had unintended consequences,” says Justin Kan, a venture capitalist at Y Combinator and co-founder of Twitch. In designing to maximize engagement, social networks inadvertently created hives of bias-confirmation and tribalism.

Or consider the effect innovation in computing has had on employment. “Thirty or 40 years ago, you could have a good, steady paying job without a college education,” says Ben Parr, cofounder of Octane AI and author of Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention. “There aren’t as many of those jobs any more, and a large part of that is because tech has changed the world over the last 40 years, and Silicon Valley played a big part in that.”

No doubt. But it might be time to ask even bigger questions. Questions like: Is technology always an ennobling force? Questions like: Does allowing humanity untrammeled access to one another always result in a better world? Questions like: Are individuals capable of processing all the information that they once relied on institutions to process for them? Questions like: After people free themselves from their social and cultural shackles, then what?

If it’s any consolation, Trump-era Americans will not be the first to ask themselves these questions. During the Second World War, psychologist Erich Fromm asked in Escape From Freedom why, despite an overarching trend toward greater personal freedom, large chunks of the western world had embraced authoritarianism. It was tempting, he argued, to consider this an aberration, the fault of a few madmen who “gained power over the vast apparatus of the state through nothing but cunning and trickery,” and who rendered their constituents “the will-less object of betrayal and terror.” But Fromm argued against this attempt to shift blame. There was something inherent in humanity that feared true freedom, that preferred to be dominated. In other words, Fromm thought this was a feature of human nature, not a bug.

To explain this tendency, Fromm distinguished between two kinds of freedom: negative freedom, casting off the shackles of social, political, and cultural restrictions; and positive freedom, finding a truer expression of self and identity. When the former occurs without the latter, he wrote, “the newly won freedom appears as a curse; [mankind] is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.”

This distinction might sound familiar to students of the Iraq War and the Arab Spring—when dictators, toppled in the name of “freedom,” gave way to chaos, power vacuums and warlordism. It also might help explain Trump’s ascendance. In casting off many of the middlemen, sclerotic corporations, and bureaucracies that throttled human accomplishment, people have achieved negative freedom. But without the tools or power to forge a more meaningful society—a positive freedom—some have plunged back into the comforts of authoritarianism and domination.

This is the world the tech industry now faces, a world—at least in part—of its own creation. The machinery and language of personal liberation have been colonized and subverted by the very forces they were intended to topple. By all accounts, governmental doublespeak, authoritarian intrusion, and state-sponsored surveillance promise to define the coming era. Americans may be able to resist these trends—maybe by reclaiming the technological forces that have carried the country this far. But Americans also now know that’s not enough. The tech industry has achieved negative freedom. The question now is: What do people do now?

Surprising seeing this from Silicon Valley lover Wired.

[Tribble]

Psh. IMO tech didn't have much to do with it - after all Obama managed to pull off two victories in states which later flipped for Trump. Here is my version:

For Democrats:
"If were either too lazy to get off your ass and vote and/or you refused to vote because you didn't like Clinton, you were a part of the problem".

For the media:
"You deliberately gave Trump billions of dollars worth of free advertising to boost your ratings. You were a part of the problem."

For Republicans:
"You voted for Trump, you gullible toads. You are a big part of the problem".

[K. A. Pital]

The techno-libertarians are part of the problem. Just ask Peter Thiel, certified Trumpista.

[Block]

Psh. IMO tech didn't have much to do with it - after all Obama managed to pull off two victories in states which later flipped for Trump. Here is my version:

For Democrats:
"If were either too lazy to get off your ass and vote and/or you refused to vote because you didn't like Clinton, you were a part of the problem".

For the media:
"You deliberately gave Trump billions of dollars worth of free advertising to boost your ratings. You were a part of the problem."

For Republicans:
"You voted for Trump, you gullible toads. You are a big part of the problem".

You're entirely ignoring the structural issues that have absolutely been created by technology that the author points to. But sure, just laziness.

[Tribble]

Psh. IMO tech didn't have much to do with it - after all Obama managed to pull off two victories in states which later flipped for Trump. Here is my version:

For Democrats:
"If were either too lazy to get off your ass and vote and/or you refused to vote because you didn't like Clinton, you were a part of the problem".

For the media:
"You deliberately gave Trump billions of dollars worth of free advertising to boost your ratings. You were a part of the problem."

For Republicans:
"You voted for Trump, you gullible toads. You are a big part of the problem".

You're entirely ignoring the structural issues that have absolutely been created by technology that the author points to. But sure, just laziness.

Those very same tools helped Obama get elected in both 2008 and 2012, and I don't recall seeing Wired complaining about it then. So what's their point? That technology for various reasons can play an important role in determining an election's results? Or that technology is now evilz because those damn dirty evilz Republicans are now exploiting it?

IMO of greater impact on this election, in addition to what I listed above, are the Democrats running an establishment figure when its clear a good chunk of the population was not in the mood for one, the Electoral College system which is designed to ignore the popular vote and the Republicans open attempts at voter suppression. Technology certainly played a role, but IMO that role in comparison to everything else that was going on was not the main factor for Trump's victory.

[Zixinus]

The thing is that the best point the article has is about how the hopes of internet and computers have come to discredit the hopes of its creators. Which is nonsense, because they did come to fruition. At best, it just shown that technology is a tool and that what can be used can be abused.

Flooding public debate with demagogy, using misinformation to discredit a candidate, attacking institutions before they can create a stand against a liar, all of these things have happened before computers. The turning of politicians to populism has been a process that has been going on for quite some time. It simply took this long for people like Trump to have refined how to use computers to do this.

It's kind of silly that Trump being elected is somehow not supposed to have happened and people are grasping at straws to show that this is somehow the dark lord coming. The truth is that this isn't the first time an idiot was put in the white house and not the last time either. The US citizens keep electing them.

[Adam Reynolds]

On the idiot point, remember this line from the 2000 debates: "This is a man who's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think that not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator." Many people treated that talking point as having been superior to the one that came before it, in which Gore correctly pointed out that Bush's math didn't actually work. Bush also lost the popular vote, albeit by a smaller margin than Trump. There were extremely notable cases of voter suppression and corruption in Florida, in which the secretary of state was also a major Bush supporter.

I would actually argue that what got Trump elected is the same thing that has gotten every American president elected in the last several decades at least, that they are the direct opposite of their predecessor in a key area that fills the public consciousness. Trump was elected because he was a bully, making up for Obama's perceived flaw that he had no backbone. Obama was elected because he comes across as intelligent as a skilled orator and Harvard educated law professor, making up for Bush's flaw that he came across like an idiot and often was one. Bush was elected because he comes across as faithful to his wife as a born-again Christian conservative, making up for the Clinton sex scandals.

You could keep this trend going at least as far back as Carter, in which he was elected because he was seen as a moral figure after the corruption of Watergate. Which was nice until Iran-Contra showed his weakness, which is why Ronald Reagan was then elected. Bush senior is something of an outlier with this theory, but he could almost be seen as a third term of the generally popular Reagan.

[TheFeniX]

I don't think the author's main point is "we created the technology that these people used to get their guy elected, this is terrible," but it does play a part. It seems more like people wrote off a subset of America as dead/dieing, had no understanding of what it's like to struggle with real issues, bought into their own hype of how awesome everything is, then lost their ass because they got lazy thinking they had it in the bag.

IMO: All that technology did was let Liberals and Conservatives both come together (separately) in their Internet echo chambers/hugboxes and reinforce their world-view with each other. The problem was that the Conservative world-view was "HOLY SHIT! HRC might get elected: vote you idiot" and the Liberal one was "No way Trump is getting elected, did you see he only has a 6% chance to win? Guy is a clown, don't worry."

Bush was elected because he comes across as faithful to his wife as a born-again Christian conservative, making up for the Clinton sex scandals.

Just giving my own dumbass opinion here: Gore didn't get Democrats riled up to vote. He was basically looked at as 4 more years of Clinton. Even Republicans couldn't be all that motivated to vote for GW. He was just a good ol' boy living off his daddies name and was mostly harmless. Those two candidates only get the "always vote straight party ticket" people out. And that's when you end up with these bullshit kinds of elections. Turn-out was incredibly low for 2000. The economy was doing fine, everyone was fat and happy. Also, this was kind of at the end of the MTV "Voting is for losers" kind of mentality.

Voter turn-out was pretty low in 2016 and people like to blame all sorts of things for Clinton's loss (even though it was a bunch of things), but I think it was mostly because people who had no reason to vote for her except "OMG, Trump might win this" did what they always do in that situation: stay home.

[Shroom Man 777]

You're entirely ignoring the structural issues that have absolutely been created by technology that the author points to. But sure, just laziness.

Those very same tools helped Obama get elected in both 2008 and 2012, and I don't recall seeing Wired complaining about it then. So what's their point? That technology for various reasons can play an important role in determining an election's results? Or that technology is now evilz because those damn dirty evilz Republicans are now exploiting it?

My god this is a dense and reductive approach.

It's not that the specific technologies themselves created these conditions. The specific technologies brought changes and made a new playing field - which is fine and which in your Obama example, was used pretty fine because the message he was delivering was founded on positive stuff.

But what the article states is that in this new playing field ushered by those specific technologies, people arrived there with a lot of their old unresolved baggage and so they shat on that playing field. They weren't ready for it, they were hobbled.

That isn't the fault of the specific technologies.

The problem is that there is myopia, tunnel vision in seeing that the only thing that matters or exist is those "specific technologies." Without a perspective that takes into consideration other sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitica, etc. factors, contexts and such... then those "specific technologies" won't solve the old problems in the world that they were designed to solve. The "specific technologies" will instead end up being overwhelmed and absorbed by the old problems in the world.

Likewise, for all the positive aspects in society Obama tapped into for his grassroots campaign, as we see he is a centrist compromiser so for whatever good intent he had... it fizzled, the problems OWS were railing about continued on, systematic discrimination and the resulting mistreatment continued resulting in BLM, other disparities worsened leading to identity politics' intensification, whereas intersectional solidarity movements have a harder time, and the hardships AND the rise of progressive movements trigger the regressive psychos as well as those who were failed by the progressives and turned to pseudo- and actual-fascism, hardening their attitudes that in better times might've been softened and made less-bigoted.

It is the whole "behind every fascism is a failed revolution."

Because the old problems were unresolved once more, they festered and the potential for progress collapsed and the alternatives found by those who were lost and forsaken... result in the current shitshow.

IMO of greater impact on this election, in addition to what I listed above, are the Democrats running an establishment figure when its clear a good chunk of the population was not in the mood for one, the Electoral College system which is designed to ignore the popular vote and the Republicans open attempts at voter suppression. Technology certainly played a role, but IMO that role in comparison to everything else that was going on was not the main factor for Trump's victory.

You're not wrong in these details but you're missing the forest for the trees...

As the article states:

Fromm distinguished between two kinds of freedom: negative freedom, casting off the shackles of social, political, and cultural restrictions; and positive freedom, finding a truer expression of self and identity. When the former occurs without the latter, he wrote, “the newly won freedom appears as a curse; [mankind] is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.”

This distinction might sound familiar to students of the Iraq War and the Arab Spring—when dictators, toppled in the name of “freedom,” gave way to chaos, power vacuums and warlordism. It also might help explain Trump’s ascendance. In casting off many of the middlemen, sclerotic corporations, and bureaucracies that throttled human accomplishment, people have achieved negative freedom. But without the tools or power to forge a more meaningful society—a positive freedom—some have plunged back into the comforts of authoritarianism and domination.

Despite the opportunities presented by the specific technologies brought by Silicon Valley, a lot of the older problems were not yet resolved and the causes of those problems - which hobble society and individuals - are still being perpetuated. So the clusterfuck of a shitshow happened.

The article is touching on the sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitica, etc. factors and contexts - vaguer, larger, more abstract forces and chains of causation.

[Tribble]

My god this is a dense and reductive approach.

It's not that the specific technologies themselves created these conditions. The specific technologies brought changes and made a new playing field - which is fine and which in your Obama example, was used pretty fine because the message he was delivering was founded on positive stuff.

But what the article states is that in this new playing field ushered by those specific technologies, people arrived there with a lot of their old unresolved baggage and so they shat on that playing field. They weren't ready for it, they were hobbled.

That isn't the fault of the specific technologies.

The problem is that there is myopia, tunnel vision in seeing that the only thing that matters or exist is those "specific technologies." Without a perspective that takes into consideration other sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitica, etc. factors, contexts and such... then those "specific technologies" won't solve the old problems in the world that they were designed to solve. The "specific technologies" will instead end up being overwhelmed and absorbed by the old problems in the world.

Despite the opportunities presented by the specific technologies brought by Silicon Valley, a lot of the older problems were not yet resolved and the causes of those problems - which hobble society and individuals - are still being perpetuated. So the clusterfuck of a shitshow happened.

The article is touching on the sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitica, etc. factors and contexts - vaguer, larger, more abstract forces and chains of causation.

...And? I mean, is that supposed to be some kind of grand revelation or something? How does this come as any sort of surprise? It should have been nakedly obvious that "specific technologies" are not a cure-all, especially when it comes to sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitica, etc. factors and contexts. All the signs for a Trump-like figure becoming president were around ages ago for those who took the time and effort to look instead of staying nice and safe inside of their own little echo-chambers. I suppose that's basically what the article is about. I guess I could amend my comments to: "article states obvious for some, comes as stunning revelation for others".

[Shroom Man 777]

Okay, I'm glad we're actually on the same page then.

I guess the whole point was that the Silicon Valley types might've had detached utopianism that's as connected to the real world as whatever things celebrities like Sean Penn or Ed Norton or Helen Mirren espouse - depending on how much of the cliche'd "detached techno-nerd douchebro" or "profound feelings artsy fartsy actoress tapping into human nature for realizations and knowing/channeling/depicting truths" cliches actually apply - because certain segments haven't gotten over modernism.

And I guess maybe it's precisely because of the rapid pace of advancement thanks to Silicon Valley that the gap between the technology level vs. where people socioculturally/politically are is widening by a lot, along with other forms of inequality and imbalance. It's not the fault of the tech-magnates for going so fast - oh no. But like... this bipolar "moodswings" of the world are just intensifying more and more. It's always been there, but the buzzword-laden paradigm shift is of such intensity, we're gonna need to talk about and make new words for something we either just gave lip-service with insufficient taxonomy-lexicons or some people sort of knew in their gut or in the back of their minds but never really dedicated much time to discuss.

Like, this won't go away. And has to be resolved with an hours-long gratuitous Metal Gear Solid cutscene talking about philosophy while nuclear armed tanks bite each other and shoot lasers and cyborg ninjas do kung fu and people cover themselves in bees.

In a world gone mad, one man had the courage to cover himself in bees. This is his story.

[Starglider]

The relevant change here is that in the 20th century, if you wanted to be a successful popularist demagogue, you had to co-opt (at least a decent fraction of) the country's mainstream media complex, one way or another. It could be intimidation, bribes, nationalisation, ultrawealthy supporters that buy up private media companies, whatever works. In the 21st century that is no longer necessary; social media and the increased accessibility of fringe media allowed Trump to bypass that. If we were still on the 1970s US big 3 TV networks model, Trump would not have won; in fact to a large extent, the Republican model of stirring up the far-right base but then presenting only center-right candidates as credible in the primary relied on the controlled news flow to work. There is an upside to this; if the fourth estate was still an effective collaborator for coastal elites trying to keep a lid on discontent, Clinton would have won this time, but the discontent would have continued to build and the situation would have gotten even more dangerous for the next election. It may well be that with Trump, the US is getting off lightly.

[Shroom Man 777]

Uh. Trump - and Duterte and others - did have ultrawealthy supporters and I am sure intimidation and bribes are still in vogue.