Casino Royale

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When we tell the story of the development of digital technology through the turn of the last century, we often talk about the cultural and political philosophies that influenced the dreamers and schemers who took the great leaps and climbed out on all limbs. They were the ultimate gamblers; they broke things, built things and placed bets on the future, all with the idea that the new systems, products and platforms would guide us down the path to a society that the Bay Area counterculture movements only dreamed of. They played the ultimate game in fictional Casino Royale. So why has technology, with its promise to connect the world, left us feeling so disconnected, so isolated, so twitchy? It\’s too easy to blame the tech itself. Too easy to say we are living under the tyranny of algorithms, when it is actually the people, not the tech, who are to blame.

Not that we have anything against risk takers. Without the original bets on technology, we wouldn\’t have the abundance of communication options, cameras in our phones and the entire on-demand world we have come to rely on. Tech seemed so innocently revolutionary at first. All that decentralization, self-expression, and self-sufficiency it provided was our road to equality. The PC, in whatever form, became the ultimate social signal: that of modernity. But unfortunately, not all futurists were created equal, and tech has become the beauty or monster in the eye of its beholder.

In fact, there are stark ideological differences between those who originally shaped new technology to serve a purpose, who came up in the cultural continuum that emanates from the Bay Area, and that next wave of visionaries, risk takers, gamblers and disrupters, who saw themselves as geniuses in a vacuum, dreaming not of the broader future, but of only the future of tech. Fair enough, but as technology touches everything in our world, these gamblers\’ inability to think outside their user interface has inadvertently disconnected us from not only from our shared reality, but from each other as well.

Silicon Valley veteran Randy Komisar thinks what ails the Valley is culturally twofold. First, that the Google-and-beyond crowd, those who built the systems we struggle with today, didn\’t grow up in the Bay Area reading The Whole Earth Catalogue, steeped in the history of American social movements and their aftermath. These \”Techno Utopians\” like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and even Bill Gates endeavored to use emerging personal computer technologies to seize control from the establishment and democratize not just technology, but also the power and wealth it engendered.

They were not myopic technology zealots; rather, technology was just their latest weapon in the culture wars. But today\’s new generation, defined by people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, don\’t share the Techno Utopian quest to use technology to further social change. According to Randy, \”They were Techno Libertarians, convinced that technology was a movement in its own right.\” Read more in Down in the Valley.

Also, with the build-up of a false tech mythology, overexposed by a fawning press, tech culture has an inability to consider that a lot of its successes have been just pure luck. Randy explains, \”Even in a world where the best fail more often than they succeed, everyone feels they can beat the odds because they are smarter than the rest. Techno Libertarians believe in the superiority of technology, and as a consequence tend to believe in their own superiority as the masters of it. Successful business people cringe at that word. It robs them of what they covet most: a sense of superiority. Of being winners. Of being self-made. Heck, if you are a Techno Libertarian, luck is anathema. Many argue that since luck must be evenly distributed, their success must be about them, not luck.\”

The problem is that we bought into the idea that these internal architects, the ones who have built the systems, written the algorithms, and structured the cloud, knew what they were doing or had a purpose in mind — at least one less vaguely superficial than \”do no evil, connect the world, or defend and protect the user\’s voice.\” And now we\’ve been left with a disjointed panicked society more interested in hitting refresh than getting some fresh air. Yep, it all went wrong. And of course, they claim not only to not be responsible for the monsters they built, but more shockingly still, claim that they alone can fix it. But their algorithms, like it or not, do not have minds of their own, they are merely echoes of the dangerous minds who authored them. For them it\’s just betting double or nothing, while they continue to break society\’s bank.

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