Bedazzled by Tech

This post started with @internetofshit commenting on an NYT article titled "The Tech That Might Help Cyclists and Cars Coexist Safely', the comment was "i promise you it's not more tech in cars that'll make things safer for cyclists. it's ... fewer cars". I realized there is an entire style of writing that can be summed up as "technobabbling centrism", or "pastime of the globalist moderate cuck".

Tech is nice, it is shiny; but slapping it onto everything, does not always work. In its extreme, the solutionist turns into a person with a hammer, eveything looks like a nail. Surely this slant of worldview had a certain pull on Dems, as with everyone else, first due to its shiny effect, but also from another direction, on its politicians.. Politics, as a job, is mainly knowledge work. It deals with information, decision, having to adjust to an existing canon (the law).. All that cld pull them towards financiers, Silicon Valley honchos, etc.

Technical knowledge is good of course, we want technically aware lawmakers, like LBJ was in his heyday (the Apollo Moon program was his idea), but if this turns into a class conciousness, we have a big problem. Low income ppl lose representation, and Dems lose power bcz white collar, aflluent folk, forming a mere 20% + concentrated in big cities, cannot be of help in deciding most elections.

The position of this site is tech, knowledge work will ultimately usher in a new era, called the Third Wave. But if 3W ppl are influential, a potential problem is that in the current half-assed development of it, the needs of this crowd not connecting with the general population; White collar ppl have skills, are on demand. Lots of my past / present collegues / coworkers are like this, tech talented, so they are always employed. Then who cares if healthcare is tied to your job? They always have a job!

To repeat 3W development is nowhere near complete. Its arrival is choppy, representation in terms of people power not too high.

The pull towards conflating tech with other areas can be tempting... I've seen examples of this over the years. Take globalization for instance; it has nothing to do with tech (last century's industrial tech was enough for them to bang on about globalization just like today's lost souls) yet half-brained commentators kept doing this all throughout the 90s. Toffler for one didn’t care much about it, nor did the care about the latest gizmo of the day. His worries were larger.

Bright-shiny-object-ism is also used, very adaptly, by corporate Democrats, to deflect from econ issues along with 4G (Guns-Gays-God-Green). The single-party apparatus requires such smoke-and-mirrors in order to generate the presence of disagrement, while aggreeing pretty much on everything else. Don't have healtcare? Well “dynamic price discovery, Moore’s law, synergy between hardware and software blah blah”. There. You have your answer [the questioner looks on blankly, not understanding a word, and still without healthcare].

Third Wave tech can overwhelm Second Wave institutions. IMO to provide some sort of sanity before the ultimate shift, politicians need to cut off the extra noise, work extra hard to do that, otherwise the central institutions will be bombarded. Remove even the smallest direct democracy practices, along with referandums, making the whole process to go through representatives. Remember the California recall election circus?

The waves are like oil and water. They cannot mix. Until the shift, industrial democracy needs to proceed within its limits and its proven tools.

I leave you with the satirical image of the TV show The West Wing done by Seth Meyers, depicting the state of technobabbling dipshittery, looking good but delivering nothing.