The End of Civilization.

[IdleRich]

whether or not he is he pretty clearly thinks he's profound, he's probably not aiming for some kind of cheap Alan Sokal gotcha moment

Yeah I think he goes for bigger targets than that - though whether successfully or not is another question. Look at his whole career and it's hard to disagree.

 

[version]

nah. I just watched Aguirre last week, first non documentary herzog, and thought it was mostly boring.

Yeah, that's mostly my experience of his films too. I like the opening descent of Aguirre though. Good soundtrack too.

Heart of Glass
The setting is an 18th-century Bavarian town with a glassblowing factory that produces a brilliant ruby glass. When the master glass blower dies, the secret of producing it is lost. The local Baron, who owns the factory, is obsessed with the ruby glass and believes it to have magical properties. With the loss of the secret, he descends into madness along with the rest of the townspeople. The main character is Hias, a seer from the hills, who predicts the destruction of the factory in a fire.

 

[luka]

nah. I just watched Aguirre last week, first non documentary herzog, and thought it was mostly boring.

Yeah he's a fraud total joker

 

[sus]

have they changed the world or just altered the ways we accomplish the same things? A bar is a heterotopia, crudely put, in that 'socializing' or 'drinking' or 'merriment' or whatever you'd like to call it is the universal that codes everything in the space. A public restroom is a heterotopia because pissing and shitting do the same work. Its a paradigm entirely alien to the space outside the hetertopia. I don't think a start up has ever affected that type of change.

Wait what? The Internet's one of the biggest shifts in how humans live & organize themselves since the Industrial Revolution. Obviously startups didn't lay the infrastructure for that shift, but individual players in GPS systems, search engines/indexing, social media, blogging/forums, notekeeping systems, webchat, workchat, videochat, etc dominate everyone's day-to-day, especially in the pandemic era.

 

[sus]

To be clear though, the "change the world" and "heterotopia" bits were different points. It's specifically startup cultures, as in the first 50ish employees, at these places that exist in a kind of heterotopic frontier or something.

The "change the world" business was just about their motives—the claim that startup folks are all "in it for a slice of the pie" shows a pretty deep remove from actual Valley culture, unless you think they're all engaging in self-deception (possible but). There's always grifters, and there are definitely a lot now, but it still has one of the highest Live Players to Dead Players ("grifters") ratio in any industry

 

[linebaugh]

Wait what? The Internet's one of the biggest shifts in how humans live & organize themselves since the Industrial Revolution. Obviously startups didn't lay the infrastructure for that shift, but individual players in GPS systems, search engines/indexing, social media, blogging/forums, notekeeping systems, webchat, workchat, videochat, etc dominate everyone's day-to-day, especially in the pandemic era.

sure but I was talking in regards to heterotropias. all of those things you mentioned are just optimizations of means to reach ends already present prior. a heterotopia has a separate set of ends.

 

[sus]

Sure but that's separate, I'm saying that there are frontier cultures in the startups, not in the social platforms they create

 

[sus]

this doesn't matter I'm over it it doesn't matter

so who's gonna volunteer to spearhead the whole "revolutionary sensibility" business so we can get this off the ground

 

[linebaugh]

I don't think frontier culture is synonymous with heterotopias but now were just having two separate conversations next to each other

 

[luka]

I don't think we've ever had anyone of this specific human type before. The 'actually the real rebels are the businessmen' type.

 

[luka]

We've had loads from the right and the far right but I dont think any of them had the specific being a businessman is the new rock and roll angle.

 

[sus]

I don't think we've ever had anyone of this specific human type before. The 'actually the real rebels are the businessmen' type.

Have you had someone who hangs in Valley culture yet? Do you know software engineers?

 

[sus]

Have you literally ever heard of Stewart Brand or hacker culture

Look, I'm not saying that's what Google is now, or that startups are free of charismatic sociopaths good at fundraising and BSing, there's plenty of that

But also many of the most interesting and free-thinking people in the world are engineers, many of them are involved or around startups, and if you're closing that world off because of some midcentury notion of "business men" and "rebels" it's your own loss

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

We've had loads from the right and the far right but I dont think any of them had the specific being a businessman is the new rock and roll angle

yeah cos those are political positions this is a cultural take

 

[luka]

I have to admit it's a culture shock for me. I've come across a few Indians who work in IT with this kind of starry eyed view of start-ups and business generally, that's the closest I've got.

 

[shiels]

The Californian ideology by Richard barbrook links sixties far out free thinking to Silicon Valley dominance in an interesting way

 

[luka]

I have literally never heard of Stewart Brand. Hacker culture I've heard of cos in the 90s they always had a hacker character in action films to 'hack into the mainframe.' Then they furiously type away while a bead of sweat slaloms down their forehead
'Jesus Christ Gavin, we need you to get us in there, just make it happen'

 

[sus]

I have to admit it's a culture shock for me. I've come across a few Indians who work in IT with this kind of starry eyed view of start-ups and business generally, that's the closest I've got.

UK vs California maybe

Like Shiels says, Valley ideology originates in large part in Sixties thought

 

[sus]

Urbit - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the startup people and engineer folks I've come across were almost uniformly inveterate yuppies

plenty of them were "interesting" "creative" "freethinking" etc but never in a way that got outside that fact

I mean those are generally qualities that were favored in their jobs I imagine