Is Technology Magic?
24 Jan 2024 - 30 Jul 2024
- A good question, but this page is just about a podcast episode: (1412) Is Technology Magic? | With John Ganz, Max Read, and Tara Isabella Burton - YouTube
- Max Read: it's all interest rates, putting pressure on software industry, moving it from frothy startups to centralized big government-like projects.
- Ganz: SV has never really been a business, more of an avant-garde, sometimes left, sometimes right
- Tara Burton: a theologist(!) and esthetics. Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World: Burton, Tara Isabella: 9781541762534: Amazon.com: Books She noticed a linkup between reactionaries and tech. Revolt of elites against the masses (seen as mediocre). Yarvin comes up. "Encountering a re-enchanted world"
- Also Rational Magic an article about postrationalists and TPOT, mentions Meaningness and Ribbonfarm. Came up in WS Discord.
- Max Read cites Whole Earth Catalog and Fredrick Turner, SVs particular hippie libertarianism. Brand likes the turmoil of the market, Thiel and others not so much. (His dad was a CQ subscriber, man, I feel old). Engineering, tinkering, autodidact mindset (for better and worse).
- Burton: The Mage stance, Chaos Magick and Crowley etc. Big in SV underground. Appeals to the sense that we are elites who can shape reality. Nietzsche, power, memes as embodiments of power. SB and "We are as gods".
- Ganz: Lord of the Rings mentality. Some people have powers, others don't.
- Magic appeals to those with no power, but also to those with to justify and "rationalize" it.
- meme magic for the terminally online.
- Burton: "techno-vitalists" if we are in a Jamesian pragmatist universe. Functionalism, because nothing is real.G
- Ganz: machinery, race, magic, all somehow related.