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Lawrence Michaelmas's avatar

I'm not in essential disagreement with any of this. But ....

I think you utterly miss the historical reality by overrating the impact of "the incoherent set of attitudes that emerged on the West Coast of the United States at the end of the 1960s. Drawing on everything from Wilhelm Reich to Gurdjieff to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Beatles fame ... (etc.) .... the generation that went on to create Silicon Valley, leveraged buy-outs and many other symbols of our modern, dislocated world, emerged from … the idea that nothing was really, like, real, man."

You know as well as I do that this is only a simplistic cartoon you find it comfortable to invoke. (Also, I'm pretty sure you've never spent much time in Silicon Valley). What you vastly underrate -- what I see no mention of here -- is what's done far, far more to create our current situation than any cultural attitudes of the "nothing is real, man" type. And that's what *actually* came out of Silicon Valley (and DARPA, NASA, and other places that were quite often part of the MIC), which is the simple, brutal, overwhelming, omnipresent *reality* of instantaneous, globally networked electronic media, and the manifestations of autonomous software systems and now, increasingly, AI upon those networked media.

Firstly, the particular form of neoliberal capitalism that's created and advantaged today's PMC, with its attendant offshoring, globalization, predatory financialization, and all the rest of it, only became possible, after all, when those instantaneous global electronic networks became reality.

Secondly, the inception and growth of these technologies and the creation of Silicon Valley itself was nothing to do with the things you cite, but was entirely predicated on the fact that in 1960 the Pentagon bought 100 percent of all microprocessor chips the Valley produced for purposes like ICBM guidance systems and early-warning radar networks; and as late as 1967 the Pentagon remained the buyer of 75 percent of the Valley's microprocessor chips. Before that, for that matter, the first electronic computer's development was spearheaded by John von Neumann to run the calculations on fluid dynamics necessary to build the H-bomb.

*That's* the reality of Silicon Valley. I lived and worked around the SF Bay Area and the Valley for decades, and any concerns the people I knew there ever had with things like the Maharishi, the Beatles, etc. were for not even skin-deep PR purposes.

Overall, I'm suggesting we live in the world J.G. Ballard and -- I guess, still -- Marshall McLuhan described. Not so much Baudrillard, Derrida, Berardi, Fisher, Foucault, or any cultural commentator. Because in 2023 the culture mostly arises downstream from the reality of practically omnipresent, instantaneous global media. In this world, the simulation can indeed constitute the reality, or a form of it -- at least, until the networks break down.

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Johnb's avatar

Aurelius, you really are a Sage for our times. Thank you

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