New book on how silicon valley companies leveled up the far right

Adrianna Tan

Gaming Democracy

How play and gaming culture have mainstreamed far right ideology through social media platforms.From #Gamergate to the ongoing Big Lie, the far right has gon...

MIT Press (mitpress.mit.edu)

ティージェーグレェ

I'm not sure when Silly-Con Valley jumped the shark?

I was born here.

IMHO, it has always been bad.

My suspicions are the bad happened when Spanish conquistadors came with their genocidal missions.

It got worse with the Gold Rush in the 1800s.

By the time Silly Con Valley started doing tech chicanery it was already well into Eisenhower Military Industrial Complex territory (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo ).

Project Paperclip and NASA hiring real WWII Nazis (e.g. Tom Lerhrer lampooning Wernher Von Braun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio written "long before 1964").

I remember my dad getting a German shephard from someone. The poor dog was trained to obey commands, "Auf Deutsch".

We had German American neighbors who had daschunds.

California didn't outlaw forced sterilization until 1979 (also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_California) and kids such as I who grew up under that shadow were painfully fucking aware of it (hell I wouldn't put it past my ex-wife for "encouraging" me to get a vasectomy as part of that hold over).

TL;DR, Silly Con Valley has ALWAYS been chock full of far right fascist sorts.

It is almost insane that counter cultural stuff such as Engelbart's Augement Group even happened at SRI, but when I learned first hand from one of his colleagues that Doug was fired from SRI and then quietly re-hired after J.C.R. Licklider came sniffing around offering (D)ARPA funding to the team that had created collaborative networked computing in the form of NLS (oNLine System) it kind of made sense.

John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said) explores a bit of psychedelic counter cultural stuff in Silly Con Valley that certainly was a bit of a backlash. Despite Whole Earth Catalog feel good times in the era ever so briefly, many decades ago (hello summer of love! Good bye, summer of love!?). I can't even count how many ex "hippies" and "punks" eventually sold out and became multi millionaires or billionaires and have actively made the world a worse place for everyone but themselves, while the tried and true counter cultural sorts have gotten ripped off, ignored and worse for decades. I could name names of the "good guise" but they probably don't need more name dropping, they're still "doing the work" and they don't need more attention, they don't need more people using their code (everyone already does) we need fewer greedy genocidal fuckwits and there seems to be an endless supply of those who abuse every last shred of wealth and power they ever inherited. ;(

Having written as much, Innerspace (1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innerspace) seemed to capture, on film, the last time when Silly Con Valley wasn't sprawling suburbian samsara and there was still more greenery even in San Francisco. Yet, even there, it's some weird tech start up subverted by mercenary industrial complex interests all in the name of greed and bad biological objectives.