> This, to paraphrase Portlandia, is one of the dreams of the ’90s — that our work selves and our true natures could be one and the same.

I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.

Even Epsilons can be useful in this brave new world of finding purpose through your job.

Kifflom!

You will be a functioning part of an egregore whether you like it or not!

Unfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose.

There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).

There are, without a doubt, a lot of jobs nobody wants to work. Not sure anyone wants to clean restrooms in fast food establishments, for example.

So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.

Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.

So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.

You should travel around the world (or even your own country) a bit more. There is a lot of such people in various cultures and places, but you won't see them if living in any sort of success bubble (ie SV).

One of main reasons communism always failed - it never took this basic human nature into account, rather working with some idolized Star trekkish human with strong desire to work on bettering oneself and society, incorruptible, not selfish at all and so on.

>To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.

A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.

Computing was less annoying before it became a branch of the advertising industry.

This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.

There were a lot of annoying detours.

A lot of the bad parts of computing originated in hollywood. They wanted certainty that you could only play "protected" music or video.

This sort of thing made it "necessary" to lock bootloaders and eventually with the iphone... The ship of theseus didn't belong to theseus anymore, it was just a license.

now lots of devices are cash registers, surveillance devices, e-meters and pop-up generators.

Don’t forget our final and most essential technology - the slot machine.

Advertising is a cancer on society. It corrupts all forms of media, ever since the invention of publishing and broadcasting. The internet is its most lucrative victim yet. It's where they've taken the sociopathic ideas pioneered by Bernays to their maximum expression. It is the most powerful global psychological manipulation machine, influencing everything from what we spend our money on, to how we think and act. It is unequivocally a major cause of the sociopolitical unrest and conflicts we see today. The really insidious part is that most people don't consciously realize they're being manipulated, and are happy to exchange that for some "free" products and services. This has, of course, made many companies very rich, by operating in a dark data broker market exchanging the data we've given them, and more prominently, data they've stolen or inferred from us.

To people working in these companies: you're complicit in the breakdown of society. Grow a moral backbone, quit, and boycott them.

Advertising is like pollution. Normal people realize they’re getting poisoned, but they still get to where they need to be, so don’t bother to change it.

We need to make collected data and metadata public. If a cabal of advertisers is considered an ethical steward of the information, a public database can’t be much worse. Scare the bejeezus out of moms and pops and watch the tide shift.

I disagree, the problem is the race to the bottom in advertising.

Drugs ads being able to show 30s of the one positive side effect and then spend 0.5s speed talking through all the negative ones is not a fair description of the drug.

Almost every product advertising being here's a celebrity (who has no idea how the product works) using the product without any real description of what the product does. Imagine a car ad that had to show you had to pump gas!? It's like one of the most common things you do with a car.

And other product advertising being 100% vibe based. We're the company of tomorrow! The fuck does that even mean?

Conceptually, you need advertising. How else will you learn about new technology? The problem is that current advertising only teaches you the existence of something and not what it does.

If somebody works for tobacco or predatory lending they are stigmatized. Perhaps we should extend it to people working in advertising or anything causing the major problems in society today. From sugar drinks to algorithmic timelines.

I can assure you that the employees of Altria at least are not stigmatized in their community.

It's well trodden ground already. Bill Hicks had it worked into his routine 30+ years ago.

OK great, taking what you've said as true, what's your solution?

How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.

Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.

Be careful what you wish for. I hate the current data collection paradigm but advertising allows media to pay their own way and remain independent.

> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.

If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.

Businesses not being able to find a sustainable business model is not my problem.

Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.

It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:

- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.

- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.

So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.

As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.

If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.

The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess

One small beacon of hope, perhaps, is that I see perspectives like this becoming more common over time. A few years ago there were (anecdotally) way more true believers in the current MO of pervasive profit seeking to the detriment of all else, true believers in the "free market" etc.

It's easy to see how absurd the practice of advertising is if you think about the actual dynamic.

As human beings we all have intentionality. When we want something, we seek it. "Hey, I really need to cut the lawn, let me find a lawnmower"—I'll go out and research lawnmowers to find one that helps me accomplish my intended goal.

Advertising totally inverts this dynamic. Instead, apropos of nothing, some person I don't know and have no relationship with interrupts some other thing I am in the middle of intentionally doing to tell me all about their fancy lawnmowers. At its worst (and most effective) it short circuits my own potential formation of intentions and reshapes my intentions, manipulating me, and at its least effective it's just a completely annoying distraction from what I was originally trying to do. It's horrible and antithetical to any notion of respect and dignity you might ascribe to the limited time of other human beings.

Forcing people to fork out money for any product or service they used also made many companies very rich. See Microsoft, Oracle... A very long list. But you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

There's a world of difference between broadcasting true capabilities of a product or service, and embedding subconscious thoughts into the minds of people to associate a brand with a feeling, in the form of "lifestyle brands", "torches of freedom", etc. The former is informing people about something that exists, while the latter is psychological manipulation straight from propaganda playbooks. Please read about the life and work of Edward Bernays, and this distinction will be clear.

Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't. The story that marketers tell themselves that they're simply informing the public about a product or service they might not know about is absolute BS. If it were true, large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't need to advertise at all. The truth is that it's all about constantly molding the public perception of a company in a way that makes them associate it with a positive feeling, so that they will subconsciously choose to give them their money. These are the same tactics used in propaganda, but instead of making people part ways with their money, it makes them think or act in any way that's beneficial to a specific cause.

The language I use is not hyperbolic, analogies aside. It's the only way of describing the insanity of the world we live in, which now resembles in many ways the fictional world novel authors have been writing about for decades. If you want to engage in the discussion, you can start by refuting anything I've said.

> Actual "honest" advertising doesn't exist. Companies that attempt to do that are outcompeted by the vastly superior revenues of companies that don't.

Same with political parties that don't take corporate money (except in sane countries, where this is recognized and forcefully limited).

> you're so hyperbolic and hysterical I don't even know where to begin.

No they aren't.

The situation is just so absurd and extreme, yet normalized, that accurately describing it makes people sound weird. That's why Chomsky speaks in that extreme monotone, to counterbalance the very real horror and extreme nature of the things he is saying.

How does the belief that advertising drives major behaviour change square with 50+ years of psychological research showing that behaviour change is really difficult?

Long term behaviour change is difficult. Short term behaviour change; not so much.

To take a classic example from the "sociopathic" mind of Bernays himself:

> The targeting of women in tobacco advertising led to higher rates of smoking among women. In 1923 women only purchased 5% of cigarettes sold; in 1929 that percentage increased to 12%, in 1935 to 18.1%, peaking in 1965 at 33.3%, and remained at this level until 1977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

And there's far, far more to it all. Sometimes you don't need people to change their behaviour, you just need them to be confused (say, about climate change, or who to vote for), and sometimes you just need media corporations to go soft on you because they like your money.

Sometimes you're advertising to kids, because childrens brains are more malleable. They form habits early.

Advertising made smoking cool; it made diamonds valuable; it greenwashed fossil fuel companies that sold our species future for short term profit. If you don't call that behaviour change, what do you call it?

I don’t remember any tracking or adverts on computers when windows 95 came out (there were adverts for computers, I used to jay money to receive them in the way if computer shopper.

the first real annoyances were Spam and Punch the monkey, both parts of the advertising industry.

Click the link and put in the fifteenth word in the third paragraph, then click "about" and put in the fourth word in the second sentence.

The good old days before cookies and trackers...

Microserfs has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and really did a great job capturing the zeitgeist of working in tech in the 90s. It was more about the early 90s than the late 90s when I started in tech, but not much really changed until the dotCom bubble burst in 2000. A lot of us who didn't happen to work for GiantTech in the 90s shared the existential anxieties described in earlier chapters of the book, but without the upside of lucrative stock options. It's worth a read if you haven't. A lot of it is still relevant today.

It nails the period. When the article later talks about Coupland’s follow-up J-Pod, I think it’s important to note that the naivety that the book reacts to isn’t just his own, really the entire zeitgeist was like that. Hence the magnitude of 9/11 as a wake-up call.

Po Bronson’s “First $30 Million” is also a classic that seems to have been memory-holed.

The Author, Douglas Coupland also coined the term: Generation X in the novel(?) of the same name. Edit: whoops, this is mentioned in the article.

I think we're in for a new multi-decade round of 'eating the world' .. and Im going to annoy everyone by suggesting that the microkernel of this new megascale world-changing engine of growth is actually the tiny garage startup using Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning to tackle some previously too-hard problem in engineering/logistics/robotics/medicine/industry.

We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging.

Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets.

We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips.

Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology.

I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.

Angel investing is a chumps game

I get the sense that the financial motivations - such as they are - may only be part of it; perhaps only a very small part of it.

I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.

Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.

Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.

I enjoy seeing geniuses who hit winning lottery tickets first go lose it all reinvesting in the lottery.

But I was sure I'd get rich off of Trump Coin!

I know someone who, at least over the last decade of so, says that he would have done far better just putting money in a NASDAQ index than doing angel investing.

fair enough .. how do we fund the next generation of tech development ?

Governments giving money as science grants ?

Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

Philanthropy donations ?

or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?

I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.

> Governments giving money as science grants ?

I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.

As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.

So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.

Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.

My hope is that the actual next generation of tech development isn't going to be VC and hype-cycle funded. I hope that we will go back to bootstrapped smart people making actual things that people actually want, rather than VCs breathlessly hyping stuff like fake money and plagiarism machines that nobody wants.

God, I miss Grantland. It was some of THE best writing on the web at the time. ESPN killed it and Bill Simmons went on to create The Ringer, which he then sold to Spotify. The Ringer pre-Spotify was good, but not as good as Grantland was.

Ah, thank you so much for reminding me of Grantland!!

> The important thing is the sense of manic excitement that pervades the Mutiny scenes this season, and the way it bleeds into the show itself. We know exactly where computers are and aren’t going, but it still feels like anything is possible.

This accurately describes being in a rising tech trend. The most common experience is knowing where things are going but failing to find a way to catch the wave.

They didn't review halt and catch fire after season 2 which is disappointing. It was one of the rare shows which kept on improving after each season

This was one of my favorite books growing up, something it seemed only I have read. I’ve never seen it talked about since. Might be fun to reread it now and see how it’s aged now that I’m on the other side.

What a beautfiul, human-made illustration at the top of this article!

You mean the one that's been there since 2015 and which is attributed to an artist ?

https://web.archive.org/web/20150623211113/https://grantland...

https://www.mariozucca.com

Poe's law strikes again and I hope GPs comment was meant as cynical remark against GenAI slop. It seems life isn't the only thing imitating art, algorithms imitate art as well now.

> With Steve Jobs in exile and the Web’s billionaire boys’ club still a few years away, the Valley in the book is “a bland anarchy,” a kingdom “with a thousand princes but no kings.”

Yet it was the happiest time I remember in the whole saga.