Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

SV and many HN readers have lived in a golden age of entrepeneurship, when people widely believed in optimism, innovation, change, and our ability to improve our world and solve any problem; that it could be done by one person in a garage or anyone in the company; and a belief in merit above all, which requires a belief in truth.

Now the socio-political trend is extremely in the other direction: Disparage, shame, and ridicule any intent to improve the world and any interest or intent in innovation; that competition for survival, rather than improving our world, is the only purpose; that only corporations and wealthy people can accomplish anything; that only 'bosses' have worthwhile ideas; and fetishizing power, corruption, and 'post-truth', and exercising that for profit rather than merit.

We were right the first time - you can see all that was accomplished. Those truths haven't changed. But it's harder going when so many disparage them.

View on HN

Let's review these accomplishments shall we? Implemented a global digital panopticon, check. Bricked news media as a credible source of information, check. Eliminated affordable housing as a concept in major metro areas around the globe, check. Centralized merchandising to the point that one dude can afford to buy Wyoming while hundreds of millions of would-be shop keepers and artisans are forced to participate in the online equivalent of a protection racket just to maintain solvency, check. Implemented and normalized methods for atomizing society, check. And now we're on the cusp of unrecoverably eliminating the trust metric for all content online permanently thanks to late breaking improvements in AI. All of that is certainly innovative, but where are the improvements?

Availability, ease of acquiring and applying knowledge. Also logistics and availability of products is amazing, we take a lot for granted. I can get almost anything in any midsize town with a few trips during business hours. Almost anything else can be delivered in a few days.

We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.

Uh, nope. In its infancy the internet was absolutely revolutionary in making information available, the entirety of the last 30 years of "innovation" in this arena have undermined this basic premise to the point that it has inverted, which is to say the internet is now more effective at producing and disseminating misinformation than anything factual.

As for touting international logistics as innovative, I guess we're ignoring the last couple thousand years of sea trading? The only innovations in this space are new shipbuilding techniques and the dismantling of international trade tarif regimes, neither of which involves the kinds of technology touted here.

As to claimed productivity gains, you can do more of what, exactly?

It is really bizarre but for reliable (traditional) recipes I nowadays go back to my paper recipe books, because online everyone has their own take to the extent that you have to start averaging recipes and still don't know for sure if it's right.

(Yes, there are many variations to traditional recipes and there often is not one official recipe, but I see that as something else from the many different recipes found online for the same thing)

The problem is, you’re confusing the gold rush with the gold. The last thirty years have just been the monetisation phase. Most of the revolutionary tech that produced those benefits you describe were created by universities and government funded agencies, often with a pure research focus.

I think broadly you're right at the moment (the mood seems to have turned very negative for no reason other than moods do that). But vertical farming has always been hugely oversold. It's at best a niche tech for growing tropical crops in cold/temperate climates IF we decide to just stop shipping things around. It has no current economically viable or practical use.

We've had 30 years to review the claims of SV hype mills as well as the actual real-world results of the "innovation" they tout, and almost without exception the actual results bear no relationship to the claims and are frequently socially net-negative and occasionally bordering on dystopian. The only thing mysterious about the ongoing shift in public sentiment is why it's taken this long to occur.

And I have never understood if the shipping of food around is so big deal. If it is done in relatively short distances. 100km for example would already be a huge area for doing farming on the ground.

Shipping not well preserving crops from other side of the world is weird. But that doesn't mean it has to come from across the road. From massive vertical building.

I think people prefer fun sounding solutions and are happy to pretend there is a pressing problem. It's more entertaining that accepting what we actually need is a way to allocate capital 0.1 basis points more efficiently in residential property market etc or if you want to save the environment, make internal combustion engines 0.001% more efficient.

> (the mood seems to have turned very negative for no reason other than moods do that)

I strongly disagree. If you think it's incidental, you make yourself a victim. You can see the campaigns by people like Thiel to promote nationalism and the power of the wealthy, and by groups like the Federalist Society and the very large neo-reactionary movement (my term).

Framing the debate and the 'mood' is the most powerful thing you can do, and many smart people know that and work hard at it. You can look up the research by people like the Heritage think tank, who develops talking points that frame the debates, and that eventually you hear people you know unwittingly repeating. Also, if you read HN you are aware of the grassroots disinformation campaigns by governments. Social media gives them much more power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com