(2020-10-06) Troynikov Reckoning

Anton Troynikov: Reckoning. In the midst of the ongoing "techlash", we as a culture are in danger of rejecting (rightly) not only the grey-goo padded wall aesthetic that the mature tech platforms have imposed, but (wrongly) the idea of technical progress itself.

The enthusiastic nerds (2005-2015) naively believed that many problems exist only because nobody smart and radical enough had come along to try to solve them with technology, but thankfully they were here now, and they were going to fix it all.

That didn’t pan out, people grew cynical about the enthusiastic nerds, undermining technical optimism overall.

I want to focus on how the huge injection of capital changed perceptions of what ‘tech’ is and what technological progress is really like. Suddenly everyone wanted to be a ‘tech’ company regardless of whether technology had anything to do with their core business.

The intrusion of capital made technology culturally synonymous with wealth. And downstream of that is the cultural repositioning of technology from a creative endeavor undertaken by some fairly strange people, to a way to become wealthy. (Frenzy phase)

Repeated economic shocks and the devastation of entire sectors of the economy gave rise to the phrase that best conveys the current mood; “learn to code”.

It’s undeniable that this route does in fact improve people’s material circumstances.

The sheer bitterness with which this phrase is now uttered represents the capture of technical progress for the purposes of capital replication.

The integration of technical progress into the reproductive cycle of capital is as pure an expression of Robert Pirsig’s ‘death force within technology’ as has been found since the first world war’s mechanized self-governing slaughter.

As a consequence, people have turned away from the promise of technology, seeing in it only the promises of hucksters and money shufflers

In many cases the scale brought on by capital injection impedes scientific / technical progress because it destroys the fundamentally humanistic principles that drive it.

Along with this comes the perception that the frontier of technical progress is closed to those with no access to capital. But in the history of scientific and technical advancement rarely has the revolutionary breakthrough come from those with the most resources.

The way forward is this; small dedicated groups working on fundamental technological/scientific advances can show the world that progress belongs to the human spirit and is not vestigial to a capital reproductive organ. (Network Economy)