Parents in Silicon Valley’s tech industry prefer to send their kids to schools without technology.
.https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2020/01/01/what-motivates-tech-free-silicon-valley-parents-to-enrol-their-children-in-makerspaces/
There has been a rising trend among tech elites of ditching digital devices at home. “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs raised their kids tech-free” was a popular headline for news stories two years ago. The trend is proven by the enrolment of the children of tech industry parents in unconventional low-tech schools such as Brightworks in San Francisco and the many Waldorf schools across the country. These schools are known for their emphasis on creative play and a strategic lack of technology based on the belief that kids learn best through playful, learner-led approaches.
The parents might seem like hypocrites who shield their children from the technology that they created and sell to the world as a panacea. However, the parents are not really educational Luddites and the reality is more complicated. These Silicon Valley parents actually do expose their children to technology – but only in a restricted way. They want their children to be creative, and so they limit their children’s exposure to creative technology (for example, in “makerspaces”) and avoid destructive technology.
What we found is that tech-elite parents seeking makerspaces don’t really focus on the technology but are keen to cultivate creativity and messy play in a safe place, away from what they view as the harms of unfettered technology use. One could even argue there is a distinct synergy between the ethos of the makerspace and that of early years’ learning (even though most makerspaces are for adults, as is most research about them).
Makerspaces range from no- to high-tech but the ones we observed in Silicon Valley all relied on technological resources to a greater or lesser degree. And despite claims of “tech-free” parenting among tech-elite parents, we found them eager to benefit from makerspaces provided for young children. Although seemingly contradictory, as noted in our previous work, parents attempting a deliberately low-tech home draw a distinction between productive uses of technology and “mindless” screen time. As they told us, on the one hand, they restrict technology use at home but, on the other, they see makerspaces as opportunities for children to engage with the technological resources in a more controlled way that, as they see it, is productive rather than “socially destructive.” Indeed, despite restricting technology at home, these parents still recognised the importance of digital skills today. Their aim is to stave off technology as long as possible, building their child’s other skills first in the hope that they would be sufficient to ensure later responsible and safe use of technology.
However, they may be enmeshed in a contradiction by carefully guiding their children’s use of technology (and not banning it) because the corporations that they work for are pushing for the unrestricted use of technology.
Again, to their credit, these Silicon Valley parents do publicly admit that technology can be destructive. Their bosses don’t talk that way — but in their actions they not only admit it but broadcast it to the world. Tech industry leaders are buying estates in Hawaii and New Zealand in order to escape from a potential apocalypse that their own technology is helping to bring about.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-40814714
By the standards of American history, this seems like a strange situation on several levels.
It would have been unthinkable if industrialists in the 1920s openly built estates on distant islands to escape the fall of Western civilization. It would have been regarded as the stuff of comedy or treason, especially after the deaths of over one hundred thousand young American men in the trenches of Europe a few years earlier. There was in particular a WASP attitude that the captain goes down with the ship when things do go awry.
Also, the sentiment did not seem to exist a century ago that industrialists were essentially drug barons getting people addicted to hatred for one another (although “yellow press” barons like William Randolf Hearst did whip up hysteria that got America into wars). The industrialists of the past — like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller — might have felt guilty about the lives that they destroyed or the businesses that they crushed or the politicians that they bought, but they believed that they were fulfilling a historical mission by building a new economy. Also, they dealt with their guilt by dedicating their fortunes to trusts, endowments, and universities. Perhaps Bill Gates embodies that old pattern of being a hated but respected figure who built a useful and transformative monopoly, and then dedicated himself to philanthropy. But Gates seems a singular figure today in this traditional form of reputation laundering (and he has ironically become a polarizing figure for presciently warning about pandemics and investing in vaccines and so forth).
The industrialists of a century ago were compelled to share their wealth out of a mix of calculation and religious belief.
.https://daily.jstor.org/the-social-responsibility-of-american-industrialists/
In the 1890s, the first public relations professionals began advising the wealthy on how to use philanthropy to placate the public. Many Gilded Age industrialists, like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, donated money to support cultural institutions and scientific advancement.
Hamer suggests that these men were motivated not just by public relations concerns but also by their own moral codes. Rockefeller’s Baptist faith, for example, taught him that his monopolistic business practices were in line with Godly behavior, but also that he was obligated to contribute to his church and to social causes.
On the other hand, to a number of other business leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, philanthropy was in conflict with their personal beliefs. Hamer writes that Wall Street investment speculator Jay Gould “considered philanthropy hypocrisy, and the future of the public dependent upon his willingness to take business risks.” Meanwhile, Cornelius Vanderbilt demonstrated that he wasn’t worried about looking like a bad guy. He won public favor by reducing transportation costs, but, once the price cuts had driven competitors out of business, simply hiked them again. “He cared nothing for public affairs, business ethics, or charity,” Hamer writes.
Today, the growth of global, publicly financed companies has further rationalized the business world. It’s up to consumers to decide whether or not efforts like Walmart’s are cynical public relations ploys or genuine attempts to do what is right.
The tech billionaires of today are less religious, and so they may be less inclined toward philanthropy. But in other ways, they may be captive to the techno-utopianism of 1970s science fiction, and this is where their religious impulses have been channeled. Like Jay Gould, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may see their work as their true legacy and suspect that philanthropy is a distraction. On the other hand, most of the tech billionaires might not have any idealistic impulse at all. The historian Jill Lepore examined Facebook’s evolving mission statements and noted that its earliest statements were merely utilitarian and described Facebook as a useful tool to keep in touch with acquaintances, but as Facebook became more controversial the mission statements took on an increasingly overblown idealistic save-the-world tone. It turns out that the story of Facebook is really more about a parochial, for-profit, family-owned business like Forever21 failing to adjust to its eventual gigantic scale, and not a tragedy about American idealism gone wrong. Once upon a time, California was ruled by ruthless visionaries like the Stanfords and the Chandlers, but Silicon Valley today is more like the amoral Cornelius Vanderbilt talking like Andrew Carnegie.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/02/facebooks-broken-vows
Perhaps we are all still living in the “reality distortion field” created by the computer salesman Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs created a subtle techno-dystopian nightmare when he recast personal technology as rapidly obsolete consumer luxury goods — and then he tricked idealists into swooning over Apple’s high-tech jewelry as symbols of progress. Silicon Valley did not have anything like this prior to Steve Jobs, but so much that came after Jobs seems like fake gurus and deluded con artists conning themselves.
How realistic is the prospect that Western civilization will collapse? There was an article in Foreign Policy that described how state failure follows a predictable course. In the early stages, the political culture becomes increasingly corrupted even though political institutions remain functional and intact. At first, politics starts to resemble lighthearted entertainment, with politicians like Mussolini behaving like clowns. However, once installed in power, these politicians aggressively undermine public institutions, and within at most a generation the government collapses. In Russia, the staid mid-level KGB officer Vladimir Putin came into power in 2000 and soon thereafter started strutting around like a cartoon character without a shirt; it could be that by 2025 or 2030, Russia will have collapsed and fragmented into multiple states.
In the democratic world, state collapse might happen in a more benign fashion. Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, and Britain might fragment into different countries by 2045 (including northern and southern England comprising two different countries). Maybe by that time most Britons will see this as a blessing. After all, a carefully managed dismemberment of a union that does not make sense in the 21st century might seem more appealing than perpetual stagnation and ineptitude.
Perhaps state failure can be compared to the stages of drug addiction. In the first stage, warnings from family and friends about recreational drug use might be greeted with amusement, and only if they see others spiral out of control and crash will the casual user cease with their indulgence. Maybe the Italians were in the first stage of state failure under Silvio Berlusconi, but Italians might have some kind of immunity to spectacle after centuries of it, whereas northern Europeans really fall for it (at least, this is one theory of why Protestantism took hold in earnest northern Europe but not in the more cynical and blasé Mediterranean that have had thousands of urban civilization).
In the second stage, people become permanently and irreversibly addicted, and in some cases there is no choice but to cut them out of your life. That may be where the British have been since the end of WW2, with their imperialist cosplay paraphernalia of nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, pretend monarchy, and James Bond movies.
The third stage is when the brain and body have been permanently wrecked. That might be where Russia is today.
When does a country reach the point of no return in terms of its own fundamental internal cohesion?
Perhaps Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a classic example of living in a fantasy world and going too far. The Russia expert Fiona Hill claims that Putin’s objective was not to absorb Ukraine but to shatter it into several pieces, hence Putin’s use of minimal force early in the invasion. Hill also noted that Putin is running for reelection in 2024, and that whenever he invades a country his popularity soars. Of course, two effects of the invasion have been the exhaustion of the Russian military, and the disappearance of the mirage of its invincibility. But the invasion also destroyed Putin’s reputation and that of Russia — perhaps even in the eyes of educated Russians. For example, here is the opinion of a Russian dissident and rock star who escaped from Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/world/europe/pussy-riot-russia-escape.html
Exactly 10 years to the day after the cathedral protest, Mr. Putin delivered a ranting speech in which he called Ukraine a country “created by Russia,” laying the groundwork for his invasion.
Ms. Alyokhina listened to the speech on the radio from a jail cell. The invasion, she said, had changed everything, not just for her, but for her country.
“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”
In a sense, Putin “jumped the shark” in his invasion of Ukraine. Jumping the shark is a reference to when television sitcoms attempt to rejuvenate their declining ratings by pulling outrageous stunts that are out of character for the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
The idiom “jumping the shark” was coined in 1985 by Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) jumps over a shark while on water-skis. The phrase is pejorative and is used to argue that a creative outlet or work appears to be making a misguided attempt at generating new attention or publicity for something that is perceived once to have been widely popular, but is no longer.
It could be that Brexit was the moment that Britain jumped the shark. Prime Minister David Cameron had been warned by advisors that Britain leaving the European Union was so unthinkable that it should never be put on the ballot and instead Britain should negotiate with the EU to alter its status. But Cameron seemed to interpret the warning that Brexit was unthinkable to mean that few would actually vote for it, and by putting Brexit to a vote he could finally eliminate the issue. In fact, it has been argued that even the politicians who were Brexit’s greatest advocates did not actually believe in it or think it would happen because they were just clowning around to get attention. In a sense, they were playing to audience of wealthy white suburbanites and white working-class Londoners who lived in the past and for whom Brexit represented an amusing way to stick it to the Europeans and their Napoleonic project. But the lines of fracture on the vote could have consequences for Britain’s regional politics.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has roused the international community to the possibility of China invading Taiwan. The invasion of Taiwan would be a classic case of jumping the shark in that it would be an outrageous attempt by China to regain popularity with the Chinese people that would backfire. Such an invasion would be impractical, and the media keeps pointing out how Taiwan is one of the leading investors in China and an invasion of Taiwan would be economic suicide for China. On the other hand, all the other sources of legitimacy of the Chinese government have disappeared and the project of “reuniting” China has become China’s only ideological justification. Moreover, reunification has become a symbolic issue that represents something more obscure. That is, conquering Taiwan is not the real objective but rather a symbol of something else — and symbols can take on a greater emotional intensity than the hidden thing that they represent. This emotional intensity increases the possibility of an invasion of Taiwan.
What exactly is that largely unspoken issue that hides in plain sight and feeds China’s anxiety? It is discussed in the American mass media, but only rarely. It is the history of the Western colonization of Asia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/opinion/global/the-trauma-of-colonialism.html
Despite the very different experiences — continuous colonial rule in India and piecemeal foreign domination in China — their history textbooks deal with the past in similar ways. Two rich, glorious civilizations were humiliated and brought to their knees, their lands lost and borders redrawn, their people forced to endure barbarous cruelty and suffering. Today this bitter remembrance plays out in subtle but important ways in the international arena.
The legacy of redrawn borders is a key example. India and China have a reputation for inflexibility when it comes to territories that they believe were “lost” due to colonialism. Yet prior to the colonial era, the rulers of both countries had very flexible ideas about sovereignty.
In India, the Mughal dynasty controlled the subcontinent through the mansabdari system. The power of the Mughal ruler, today often called “emperor” but in truth shah-en-shah, or the king-of-kings, came through his mansabdars — conquered kings or their descendants who kept their wealth and territory but swore allegiance to the Mughals and helped defend and administer their empire.
In China, the emperor’s relationship with the “barbarians” who peopled the lands around the Middle Kingdom was based on a tributary system in which they kowtowed to his authority and received gifts in return. There were no fixed boundaries; they ebbed and flowed depending on the strength of the relationship.
The rigid stance on border issues today — India with Pakistan over Kashmir, for example, and China with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, as well as tensions over Taiwan — are seen as the result of colonial meddling. External intervention or offers of mediation are vehemently rejected because they revive memories of foreign interference.
“Humiliation” is a word that appears over and over in the two countries — in political speeches, newspapers articles and history textbooks. Government officials are extremely sensitive to any appearance of caving in to foreign pressure and interference.
In their earlier histories, great civilizations were conquered by stereotypical “barbarians” like the Mongols. As intolerable as that might have been, it was not as humiliating as being conquered by a technologically superior West (and this includes social technology, like “democracy”). Making it even worse, the West had a radically egalitarian religion, which swept through the world like a pandemic and served to dissolve and discredit indigenous traditions. In the case of China, a political and economic variant of this alien religion is now the official ideology of the nation (Marxism). Perhaps an ongoing project of self-Westernization creates a lingering self-loathing and a haunting feeling that one is being colonized and humiliated.
There is the possibility that China has already jumped the shark in terms of its post-vaccination zero Covid policy. Putting entire regions into lockdown and killing everyone’s pets is going to outrage the population. But this can be seen as classic jumping the shark in that popularity was the objective of a draconian zero-Covid policy that has become absurd in the face of the extremely transmissible Omicron variants. That is, zero Covid as a policy was popular in the pre-Omicron era and was advertised as reflecting the unique efficacy of the Chinese government. This is an example of the appeal of authoritarianism and how authoritarian states must sell themselves to the population as being capable of doing what other forms of government cannot.
In fact, authoritarianism or any other form of government has democratic roots because in order to survive, the government must appeal to pre-existing values and attitudes. This “sociological democracy” was evident in, for example, the Scandinavian conquest of Sicily in that Sicily’s Scandinavian rulers pragmatically maintained traditional Sicilian institutions and adopted themselves to the ways of the conquered.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/26/travel/tracing-the-norman-rulers-of-sicily.html
But what do these blond-haired, blue-eyed paladins have to do with the folklore of Sicily? This island was once ruled by a people that made Palermo the seat of one of the most brilliant and enlightened courts in all of Europe. The people, who were descendants of the Vikings, came from the north and were called Norsemen or Normans. They brilliantly executed several expansionist campaigns that led to the invasion of France (Normandy) in the ninth century, the conquest of England in 1066 and the acquisition of southern Italy between the 11th and 12th centuries.
Moreover, their tolerance for the existing cultures and their benevolence in ruling gained them such a secure place in the folklore of this land that it is not unusual, even today, for a Sicilian boy’s heroes to include, not only soccer players and rock stars, but also knights of old with names like Ruggero (Roger) and Guglielmo (William) – which are still popular boy’s names here.
Besides being good statesmen and rulers, the Normans also made a significant cultural contribution by bringing together in harmony – in the churches, palaces and castles they built – the skill of French and Sicilian masons, the decorative purity of Arab ornamentation and the splendor of Greek Byzantine mosaics.
Likewise, the Chinese state has to appeal to deeply held traditional values such as the desire for prosperity, security, and prestige rather than an exuberant and potentially reckless open political system. In fact, these same conservative values explicitly underpin Singapore’s democracy. Lee Kwan Yew used to say that China was Confucian and not really communist, meaning that even the revolutionary communist leadership still unknowingly functioned along traditional lines. But what if the tradition in China runs deeper than Confucianism? Recently, there have been violent attacks in China by men against women in public because the women were not escorted by men. The police make obligatory arrests such incidents, but there is no sense of urgency or a desire to address the problem. There is a brutal patriarchal core to Chinese society onto which Confucius merely tacked on his philosophy of education. At least, this was one critique of the 1990 film “Dou Ju” which portrayed an unhappy adulterous couple languishing amidst the brute machinery of their dye factory, which was a metaphor for the patriarchy. The movie reflected Marxist and liberal values and accordingly won all sorts of international awards, but it was banned for a time in China, and was even unpopular among Chinese women.
Americans cannot understand the democratic roots of authoritarianism because they think in simple terms of “democracy versus authoritarianism”. Moreover, authoritarian states create their own malignant kind of democracy once they become entrenched. In a totalitarian society, civil society is either eliminated or appropriated by the state, but in its place there emerges a poisonous new kind of democracy in which people become preoccupied with surveilling and snitching on their neighbors. For example, the typical Gestapo officer in Nazi Germany supposedly did not carry a gun because he was a librarian amassing and organizing the copious (and unsolicited) information poring in from ordinary Germans.
The sociologist and computer scientist Zeynep Tufekci warns that the personal information that Americans have been complacent about sharing — such as search histories on the symptoms of pregnancy, location data, medical appointment histories, and purchase records for items such as pregnancy test kits — can now be used as circumstantial evidence in a murder trial. Tufekci does not mention that this information will probably not be rooted out and collected by reluctant and exhausted police officers or prosecuting attorneys, but rather by anonymous do-gooders publishing your private stuff online (with much of the data being erroneous — or worse yet, even the accurate stuff will be misconstrued to imply guilt).
Also, there is already an established puritanical culture of snitching within left-wing academia. The right-wing is purely reactive to and imitative of the left-wing, so that radical activism really starts in left-wing universities and eventually finds a home among conservative populists. Academia today is quite notorious for its culture of ratting out professors and students who are not perfectly “woke” or politically correct (or who have the misfortune of appearing apostate at one forgotten moment long ago). The right-wing will eventually turn against itself in the same way, outing people who are not extreme enough. Among the right-wing, this might involve more than “merely” the loss of a tenure-track professorial job at an elite university, but the loss of life. The point is that snitching — even over illusory transgressions — might go mainstream.
The point is that democracy and authoritarianism are not quite the opposites that Americans assume they are, and this has implications for digital security. For example, it has been noted that Russian and American histories are inverted reflections of one another. That is, the great crimes against humanity committed by the Russian state find their parallel in the USA in the activities of the American public. For instance, in Russia, the tsars pushed their domains eastward into Siberia, whereas in the USA it was ordinary people who ventured out onto the western frontier. In Russia, the aristocracy imposed serfdom on the population, whereas in America it was the majority that imposed chattel slavery on a minority. In the Soviet Union, Stalinist mock trials condemned those who might someday pose a threat to the regime, whereas in the USA there were the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s. Today, the Chinese state is using Covid as an excuse to build up a surveillance state, whereas in America today it is ordinary Americans who are creating such a state through complacency and snitching.
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Perhaps the most peculiar thing about extremely intelligent billionaires preparing for an apocalypse is the ill-conceived way that they are going about it. For example, there are businesses that rent out luxury apartments in decommissioned missile silos; but if the world is slipping into chaos and societal collapse, is the best place to weather out the storm in an underground bunker for months or years with 75 wealthy and heavily armed strangers (especially if the most realistic threat is another pandemic)?
Also, civilizations might collapse, but societies don’t — because they reconstitute themselves at the local level. If civilization were to collapse, eventually the long-aggravated locals on Kauai and Lanai and in New Zealand might turn against tech billionaires in their midst. Also, in the extreme scenario that these billionaires are planning for, their wealth on the stock market might no longer exist, and money might not be in circulation. Also, in the apocalypse, the last place that one wants to be is on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that imports almost all of its food and has an economy based almost entirely on tourism, real estate, and the military, and has only clinics and not serious hospitals.
The best places for the tech elite to survive the apocalyptic scenario that haunts their guilt-ridden dreams might be the same places that have been described as the best places to survive global warming. Everyone seems to have their own list of such places, but in an extreme scenario, the best places would supposedly be just north of mid-sized American cities along the Canadian border which have abundant sources of water. That boils down to at least two places: Seattle, and the chain of cities from the Great Lakes to Maine.
Another way to survive for the super-wealthy would be to stop showing off all their stuff in public. Instead of a $250 condominium in Manhattan that grabs headlines, it might be more prudent to emulate Ted Turner, who owns two million acres of land and ranches bison on it. No one resents Turner for owning ranch land, and it just might make a great getaway during the zombie apocalypse.
