The rise of the new tech right - eviltoast

Caught the bit on lesswrong and figured you guys might like.

  • self@awful.systemsM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    so many! sometimes the first tell that you’re reading techfash bullshit is when they lead in with the worst take you’ve ever heard about a work of sci-fi you’ve enjoyed. I firmly blame these fuckers for making cyberpunk boring as fuck, turning singularity fiction into a religion, and ruining post-scarcity sci-fi, all by way of stubbornly refusing to understand any of the work they’ll never stop trying to claim as their own

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Apropos:

      Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

      Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

      “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

      And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.