Blockchain tech is the intersecting black hole in the Venn diagram of everything wrong with the tech industry. Delusional anti-govt rhetoric, utter bullshit alternating with fraud, solutions in search of problems, environmental waste—a vast domain of vicious uselessness.
Itamar Turner-Trauring on the blockchain hype
Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of [mass media manipulation], the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism.
From A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction by Jill Lepore.
In a broader sense, there's nothing to be gained by despairing at the current situation, assigning blame, reacting instead of acting. Create, don’t disparage. Don’t get tangled up in petty debates, have a vision and convince people by laying the groundwork.
Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.
[…] [Greta Krippner’s] thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn't have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. […]
Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.
Matt Stoller trying to define the word everyone tends to project their hate onto.
[Some dipshit] quits working and writes spammy blog shit for a living. Hackernews decides people don't like to work because all work is either meaningless or evil, but it's definitely everyone else's fault. Also the entire monetary system is worthless, we should envy the impoverished, capitalism will kill us all, and they all quit jobs they loved because someone was mean to them. The unanimous consensus: take a couple years off and just fuck around.
n-gate on 'cutting ties with the evil corporate world and pursuing your passion' types
Traveling, writing, photographing, ESL teaching etc. is just, to borrow the phrase, ‘fucking around’ and will not make a positive impact on the world. Do what makes you happy in your spare time and start shouldering some responsibility.
so random schmuck today finds himself in the following situation: if he goes anywhere, taking uber, all his travel is in [some usage database].
if he visits any website, both amazon and cloudflare have records, which can even be compared. how's that for ECC asciilifeform !
obviously if he pays anyone anything that's tracked. and in his dumbass case, this includes bitcoin
which he buys via amazon instance > cloudflare and he spends via amazon instance > cloudflare.
might as well use fucking visa rather than all this wastage.
then when i say bitcoin is not for the poor, people are like ‘oh noooo…’
why waste all the fucking cycles to do visa poorly ?
Mircea Popescu on payment anonymity
If it makes you feel better about yourself, go ahead and let your toilet stink or take shorter showers, but don't pretend that will have any kind of measurable effect. It's nearly as pointless a placebo as separating your trash is. All aggregate personal use can't hope to even compare to what is done at industrial scales. Remember: the damage that BP did in the Gulf every five seconds completely obviated all the recycling you personally ever did in your life.
Jamie Zawinski during the California drought
Read this should your inner cynic require nourishment.