"Everything is Broken:" A Must Read Essay

This essay takes a little time to get going, and you might wonder where it's going at all.

But stay with it. It's really a must-read. Bookmark it for the weekend.

The article rambles about the Silicon Valley drive to make everything "flat" -- basically, all the same, without place or purpose, because that's the Silicon Valley ideal.

We're no longer rooted in any particular place or culture. Such things are too complicated for FaceBook profiles. The real world has been made to conform with the limitations of the fake digital world -- by removing people's individuality.

It has made them flat, because Google's algorithms cannot try to sell shit to three-dimensional people.

It then turns to the consequences of turning everyone flat:

Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them--if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they'd never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food--most of their food, even all of their food--from restaurants that they'd never been to, based on recommendations from people they'd never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories -- "also followed by," "friends in common," "BIPOC" -- that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people's views about anything--even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America's greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook's longtime motto was, famously, "Move fast and break shit," which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.--and no one seemed to care. This heist--by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback--enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness--what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints--who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A's by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements--because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn--will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation--a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country's best thinkers and creators.

I think people are waking up to this "heist" of all culture, thought, commerce, individuality, and humanity by a small group of Woke Plutocrat Tyrants and lunatic religious zealots, but, alas: It might be too late to do a damn thing to stop them.

Oh well, at least Rich Lowry knows that his funding will be guaranteed for fifty years.

posted by Ace at 01:15 PM

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