Glenn Reynolds recently wrote an essay that is a good one to contemplate. There isn’t a right answer or a wrong answer. We can see the wake the boat left behind that Glenn is talking about. I subscribe to Glenn’s substack and pulled this quote out but you need to read the whole thing to grab the full context. For what it’s worth, he and I are roughly the same age.
It was easy to be optimistic in the 90s and at the turn of the millennium. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell, and freedom and democracy and prosperity were on the march almost everywhere. Personal technology was booming, and its dark sides were not yet very apparent. (And the darker sides, like social media and smartphones, basically didn’t exist.)
And the tech companies, then, were run by people who looked very different from the people who run them now – even when, as in the case of Bill Gates, they were the same people. It’s easy to forget that Gates was once a rather libertarian figure, who boasted that Microsoft didn’t even have an office in Washington, DC. The Justice Department, via its Antitrust Division, punished him for that, and he has long since lost any libertarian inclinations, to put it mildly.
In the comments, I found this insightful:
Nietzsche writes:
"One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires ‘justice,’ i.e., equal power.”
My wife has often asked me why someone wants power over a place that is decimated. When we look at places like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities that are absolute cesspools, we wonder why the politicians there are framing the world the way they are framing it. Nietzsche gives her the answer.
The other day, I received more confirmation of this when I read that moose are big criminals when it comes to causing climate change. This is so nonsensical and silly that you’d think the researcher might pinch themselves and wake up. Nope. See Nietzche.
When you read certain tech people’s Twitter, you can be very optimistic. Marc Andreessen is a quintessential tech bro. Raised in Wisconsin, he gets the Midwest. He went to Silicon Valley in his early 20s and was one of the builders of the way the world looks today. He could have been sitting on a sack of soybean seeds in rural Wisconsin but instead became one of the movers and shakers of the entire tech world. You can understand why he is optimistic.
At the same time, he’s not blind to the cracks he sees in the system. Neither are other Bay Area people. Many are moving out. Andreessen can rise above all the bullcrap so he doesn’t have to move, but he still sees it. Here is one example:
At the same time, tech innovation marches on. Chat GPT-3 has become Chat GPT-4. You might be afraid of artificial intelligence and I certainly can empathize with why you might be. However, the gains we will make from having it will far outweigh the negatives and will eventually overcome the fear flowing through your brain. Here is an example that you might not have considered:
I rarely if ever answer my phone now because it’s usually junk callers. Imagine if I could effortlessly create a lawsuit. Imagine if we did it en masse and a class action was created. End of junk calls.
Sure, Big Tech is corporate and it’s tied at the hip with the bureaucracy and left-wingers in Washington DC. Democratic and newly re-elected Senator Mark Kelly from Arizona the other day wondered why we need free speech rights. We are stuck with him for six more years. Why does he think that way? See Nietzsche.
One thing I know about technological innovation is that it makes things cheaper so more people have access. I don’t agree exactly with this chart. Some nuance is in order but it makes the point that increasing the level of technology in an industry is good for consumers.
The other concept that jumps out at me from this chart is the red lines are heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
One can certainly understand anyone who is pessimistic given the way the people elected to our government govern. One can further understand the pessimism given the way the people in the bureaucracy have treated citizens. “We’re from the government and we are here to help.” is a phrase that should send a shudder up and down your spine. If people don’t understand why we small government less intervention people are the way we are, they ought to look at that graph. Of course, based on the last week a lot of people talk a good game about being a free market capitalist and scream bloody murder when it hits them in the face.
Heck, technology put me out of a job. I was a trader making high six/seven figures a year like clockwork and thought I’d do it until I died. Then, poof, gone faster than deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. I tried to requalify myself but even after doing that and having success on my own, I was told that I am still not qualified or “right for this”. I am still optimistic, but I went through hell.
I’d rather be age 20 today than age 60.
When Glenn writes about the 1990s, we assumed that most people in government were competent. We have seen a lot of upheaval and change since then. By the 2020s, we know those same people aren’t competent and have an agenda that is unconstitutional. They are the people Nietzche writes about.
At the same time, technology marches on. There is a technological earthquake that will happen. I don’t know when. ChatGPT and its evolution ought to have you licking your chops. The people that think they are in power are going to get a comeuppance they don’t see coming. I don’t know where. But it will. The last earthquake was a phone you could hold in your hands back in January of 2007. We are due for another.
Maybe it won’t be ChatGPT. Maybe it will be quantum computing. Maybe it will be the world waking up to the fact all this green energy stuff is bullshit and nuclear is the path forward. Maybe we will see stem cell, gene therapies, and robotic technology that makes our healthcare cheaper and better.
See the red lines? The technologists are coming for them. That makes me optimistic.
"My wife has often asked me why someone wants power over a place that is decimated."
The answer was provided by Milton, in Paradise Lost:
"Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven"
I was sitting at loomis Lab in Urbana doing some lab work for my physics (electricity and magentism elective) way back in my undergrad days at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The work was done on what then were called plato terminals - it was an acronym that i cannot for the life of me remember from when i was in college. There was this guy at one of the terminals a couple down who was busy for at least a couple of hours. It turns out the guy wrote a bunch of code to help the terminals work for the university. guess who. Marc Andressen before he left to start work on Netscape. To this day i wonder if he was actually working on mozilla when i saw him.