2025-07-24

what'll you do?

Jasmine Sun has an interesting interview with Fred Turner on the offshoots of Silicon Valley culture from the Whole Earth catalogue portion of the 1960s California counterculture. It’s a little weird to me that this information is described as if it is a hidden history, with an almost conspiratorial air, because it seems to me people are generally very open about either ideological roots. For example, this interview by Packy McCormick with Brie Wolfson, on Kevin Kelly.

My personal opinion is that this combination of individualism and technological progress have brought about great benefits for humanity, yet confusingly everyone keeps talking as if it has failed and doesn’t work, a sort of inverse to certain ideological alternatives which are relentlessly retried despite never working. Fred repeatedly describes a cultural emphasis on efficiency as techno-fascism akin to Mussolini; my understanding of this “trains running on time” quote was that it was primarily fascist propaganda, but also that it’s more of an indictment of early 20th century Italian governance than anything else. If there’s any lesson to be learned from it, it’s that you absolutely have to make sure that things are working, because otherwise all your other projects will come to nothing. Only after the bare minimum is reached can you focus on things like redistribution, or pointing out the various areas where relentless efficiency is suboptimal.

I think the key crux here is in this quote: “I've had people say to me, ‘Well, Fred, if this product were so bad, people wouldn't use it.’ As if consumer choice were the same thing as a political voice. It's ridiculous.” It’s interesting that Fred mentions Balaji in this interview, because he has recently released a bunch of podcast interviews which present basically the most extreme version of the Silicon Valley ethos¹. In them, one of the things he repeatedly mentions is that, yes, consumer choice and the ability to exit are indeed the ultimate form of political expression. Likewise, Fred points out that if you define your company’s goals as doing good, then “what's good for Google is good for the world”; Balaji would certainly respond that, yes, if you believe in an ideal then you indeed have a responsibility to build and then grow it. The distinction is that Fred thinks these companies are so myopically focused on their own goals that they write off everything else. It’s actually the opposite way around: the best companies are myopically focused on their singular goals because that’s the way to release the best products, and that’s fine, because this also precludes them from expanding domains and becoming the only game in town. It’s because of their focus on efficiency that you as a consumer have access to a broad range of quality products from different companies, and it’s your choice of services which reveals your ideals and functions as a vote as to how resources should be allocated among them.

In some sense, the government is the ultimate convenience service, because if you feel you can’t properly manage your own consumption (or more commonly, feel that everyone else is choosing wrongly), then the way to ensure that everyone gets served the same “correct” bundle is through regulation. This is again related to the Fred Turner interview, where he says: “So now I'm making a pile of money, I want to keep making money, and by the way, money is a sign of the rightness of what I'm doing. It begins to look like politics, regulators in particular, might get in the way of that.” ²

One more quote to finish off: “Before, we said we weren't going to be evil, and we were going to save the world. Then some people said that we were doing it wrong or that we were making mistakes. So now we will throw away all of our pretense of saving the world. Yes, we are just trying to make a lot of money and build a lot of technology, and yes, we're going to run over a bunch of people in the process.” It’s my personal opinion that people in tech still care more about morality than those working in almost any other profession, hence their obsession with obscure substacks on topics such as insect suffering. I don’t think they’ve given up on morality, rather it’s that they’ve concluded that the outside world just doesn’t get it, and so now they are only going to be accountable to each other and on their own terms.

Sam Harsimony linkthread.

1. Which I haven’t mentioned because to a large extent they seem like premature victory laps that retread old ideas rather than adding new ones.

2. On that note, the US government’s AI Action Plan was released today. Interestingly, most coverage on this plan seems to be from geopolitics writers like ChinaTalk or Kevin Xu, with relatively few from AI reporters like Nathan Lambert. I suspect this is because this plan is less of a notice than a wish list, in that the government doesn’t actually have any levers by which they can directly steer the AI industry along their desired directions. The main thing is to loudly declare what the government intends not to do.