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Thank you for sharing that Orwell essay and some key points from it. I don’t have much to add, but I noticed defining human brotherhood as the goal of socialism is intriguing because plenty of non-socialists would agree on it as a worthy goal.
Consider a sentence to similar effect: “The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.” This is the first sentence in an essay[1] by the American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. If I had to guess though, the English language is probably eclipsing Christianity among young people as the most common notion of brotherhood? It is certainly the language of global commerce.
But enterprise, as you and Orwell said, is not the same as happiness. Without happiness to break up our days, any enterprise is probably doomed. So the proper administration of wealth (no matter how a capitalist or socialist sees it) takes us back to this focus.
[1] https://www.carnegie.org/publications/the-gospel-of-wealth/
@Tanner
While it isn’t receiving a lot of writing as such, I do think you should include center-right policymakers and lobbyists alongside one of these veins of techno-optimism. Take the former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s H.R. 1 for example. That resolution is a gigantic pile of bills that involve lots of natural gas and mining deregulatory policy that his party members sincerely believe will drive greater technological gains with lower energy input costs. I think if you look at the current state of German industry shipping over to China with higher American natural gas costs, it becomes clear that technology and energy input costs on the margin have an important relationship.
I would also draw on J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car for that energy point, although he goes down a rabbit hole about cold fusion(!) in his book. But basically, I suspect all of the above energy gets very little of the online hype because it’s largely connected to mid-size business and industrialists in the Republican party’s coalition who do not care to subsidize big futurist think pieces beyond your occasional fossil fuels futurist like Alex Epstein or Mark Mills (who is a very nice guy, fwiw). Yet it seems enormously consequential if we’re going to have more electric vehicles, more forms of energy storage, and more industrial production to drive these things. It’s also especially relevant in a comparison with Chinese industry and technological thought! Don’t just compare Silicon Valley thinkers to Chinese thinkers running factories and coal operations, compare them to Louisiana’s liquid natural gas loading ports as well.
I understand including this entity would be somewhat jarring to a hypothetical reader, and I myself have struggled to conceptualize it for a potential essay. But I suspect your analysis of techno-optimism will be incomplete without it being mentioned in some form and so I feel the need to strongly petition for its inclusion.
I’d love to see someone write on the evolution of of blockchain and crypto enthusiasts into AI enthusiasts. There’s a lot of hype concerning these technologies (including risks), but so far it seems the practical applications are quite mundane. I’m totally open to AI being different. But before I even get into their mockery and quips towards others, I’d like to see more clear impacts.
John Von Neumann allegedly said about Oppenheimer that “sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.” It seems far more plausible to me that the internet will gradually become harder for humans to use than any of the more apocalyptic predictions. At any rate, there’s a lot of hype before we’ve eliminated the white collar office work. It’s worth keeping some perspective.
Since Twitter is so enormous, I don’t think there will be one place. I quite enjoyed using it early in my career in DC to connect and meet with new people who shared my interests. But there are drawbacks to using it. Do you mean a particular subset of Twitter users, like you refer to with infosec.exchange on Mastodon? The Left prediction assumes Musk’s poor judgement and bad political views will doom Twitter, but it seems to me like the biggest problem is this kind of website never made a profit.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads has nowhere near the same list of features and relies on an unbreakable link to Instagram user accounts. Similar to how Netflix encouraged everyone to get into the streaming business, Twitter has tempted several to think they can make a massively multiplayer online message board … but it turns out there’s no money in this product model! The money is a big problem. So maybe this type of forum might be the future? If people get exhausted of doom-scrolling (and thus generating ad revenue), expect a lot less free online forums to connect with people on. That might be a good thing in the long run.
Is this part of a broader cultural trend against *earnestness* and towards ironic detachment? Doing something for its own sake can be seen as a bit suspicious, while declaring you are doing something for a transparent motive can be amusing, reassuring, and non-confrontational. I suspect the hyper-referential nature of humor among young adults, especially online humor, is connected to this. But I don’t have a better theory than that so far.
If the Democrats win 2024 with a solid economy, I’m not sure we can predict the implications for America’s intellectual/cultural sphere. The post-WW1 period witnessed an unprecedented rise in the welfare of ordinary people as electrification, indoor plumbing, and various forms of machinery became common for middle class Americans. The 1950s were a similar period, although less so in technological novelty, closer to a completion and refining of that new middle class life. But could the 20s or 50s be described as a cooling down of America’s intellectual/cultural sphere? You had Americanization and McCarthyism, to name respective intellectual concerns. Then again, the average American didn’t care. So I might have to agree with you! The coming period could be intellectually unsatisfying, but the average American won’t care at all.
@Maanas
It depends how much the “woke” phenomenon relies on culture as opposed to policy. The United States is still in the thick of a progressive social cause that has ideas about public safety, gender and K-12 education, racial inequality, immigration enforcement, and so on. I can think of several policies President Biden’s White House has overseen to that end. In 2024, it seems quite plausible that Trump or whoever else the Republicans might nominate is going to face intense criticism along these particular lines, and white collar professionals in Democratic partisan-heavy milieus will face a lot of intense pressure to shut up if they disagree with it.
Insofar as we’ve hit a *plateau*, I can see a case here. But there’s not yet an alternative driving attitude in American mass culture, and a lot of desire to rationalize American culture and Americans much like the Americanization movement did during the exact period Tanner describes (WW1 to the early 1920s.) We’re might be approaching the fall-off, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. The commercial excess this thread’s original post envisions is in an uneasy place between real median wages only now recovering and economic uncertainty in Germany and China. Supply-side progressivism is certainly alive in columns in the New York Times and New York Magazine, but I’m not sure that translates to policy or even mass politics. Which means “woke” is still be a real useful animating principle for the leaders of center-left politics in the United States.
Hi everyone. My name is Avery James, I work at a center-right polling firm in Alexandria, VA, just outside of D.C. proper. Previously, I studied political theory and economics in college and interned or worked at a few think tanks since. While I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve lived in the DMV for about seven years now.
As far as interests go, one book I recently read was David Frum’s first book, Dead Right. My interests include American history, politics, energy, and East Asia. Since I’ve enjoyed reading Scholar’s Stage for years on such topics, I’m looking forward to discussions with all of you on this small forum.