alt Hacker News“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.”
This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite).
Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics
Replies
This is pretty reductive. There are different systems (even broken ones like the Soviet union managed to build up an army and feed its people) and there are vital and useless technologies.
Thiel is engaged in surveillance (PayPal, Palantir) and takes government money and calls all opponents "The Antichrist". Yes, deranged rich people are bad.
People are not born without rights, it takes a society or group to take them away. Who do you think opresses women and those in minority groups? Societies didn't evolve to be enlightened, they evolved into discriminatory systems. Those systems get torn a little bit down, built back up, asymmetricaly across societies, constantly and probably forever.
Just gander across our current collection of societies and marvel at how diverse those systems are, even in high tech societies.
Peter Thiel is the definition of "rich people bad", he's the stereotype of the billionaire who wants to rule over the state because somehow he knows what's best for us.
He's a lunatic.
Where are you getting this opinion from? Because the vast number of matriarchal hunter-gatherer societies throughout history would disagree with you. Those "woke" policies existed prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions and were stamped out by the "mentally developed" societal and economic systems that we invented along the way.
I'm not sure where you're getting your "fundamental truths" from, but as the fields of sociology and economics don't actually have anything of the sort it'd be worthwhile to expand your reading list and adding some history in there for good measure.
>Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Uh what? How do you think they came up with systems of government, economics, and religion if you characterize them as basically cows on pasture?
Without technology, say bye bye to at least 6 billion people. We've turned the earth into a machine for sustaining life. It's clear that we need people who understand how the machine and its parts work, well enough to keep it running.
But those people don't necessarily need to be gods or kings. In fact gods and kings seem to be exquisitely bad at it.
A relative of mine was a senior operator at a nuclear power plant, now retired. He deeply understood how to keep the plant running, and was compensated nicely for it, but he didn't presume to know better than the next person how to keep society running. He didn't aspire to be a king.
"Rich people bad" seems like a straw man. I think there's a fairly widespread perception that letting some people become rich enough to turn themselves into gods or kings is worth reconsidering.