House of Eratosthenes

I once worked for a company like this, following the sage advice of keeping my political leanings under wraps. It didn’t work out well. That’s probably a good thing. The problem remains that this thing we call “social media” is the 21st century’s version of the telephone and the radio, and it’s dominated by libs.

What to do about it? It’s not just conservatives and Republicans who have an interest in changing the status quo, assuming it can be changed. It’s the whole country. We know this because we’ve put forth a good-faith effort to implement their ideas and it turned out the same way it always does; some people benefited and some people were fleeced, and liberals are right there to stick a microphone into the face of whoever benefited. And, like always, and this is one of the most reprehensible things they do out of everything else, ignore the plight of the ones who were fleeced. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Now their sign-carrying Facebook-typing enablers say there are underlying reasons for the pattern and this is the moment for me, and other conservatives, especially those of us who work in tech, to show some requisite humility. They do have a point. I’ve yet to build a billion-dollar empire or launch a car into space. If Sergei or Larry or Jeff or Mark say it would’ve been good if Hillary won, who am I to argue?

But then there is this: If there’s one thing on earth more loathsome than a failure to show the requisite humility when someone else does something better than you, it has to be a lack of gratitude. Watching these liberal tech-giants act out their chosen roles as liberals-first tech-giants-second, I’m put in the position of knowing — for sure, having seen proof first-hand — a lie is being told, which others hearing it have no idea is a lie, and being unable to comment. It’s not a comfortable position by any means. And I’m not a nothing. I do work in tech. My victories don’t stop with MyStuffWorks, I’ve actually made a living out of it. I do pay a mortgage with my brain, and if it all comes to a stop bright and early Monday morning never to be revived again, it’s still three decades. That’s something. I’ve seen many a swaggering cockswain make a good pretend-show of comprehending the implementation details while knowing nothing, and directing resources, ordering others about, and manufacturing a series of disasters before calling a stop to the charade and going back to selling Amway or something. And in the case of the most braggadocious, such implosions follow a lot less time than that. So maybe we’re not looking, here, at a problem with me speaking above my station. Maybe we’re looking at the opposite. Maybe I’ve been quiet too long.

Having opined on many other things in these pages over the last fourteen years, allow me a few paragraphs to indulge that and let’s see where it goes.

Starting with the conclusion. Based on what I’ve seen thus far, it is that reality is reality and it has certain characteristics to it; one must behave certain ways around it. One must swear allegiance to it, forsaking all others, and call out betrayal against it. Think the Bible says something about that, does it not? And people who have built things that actually work, know this to be the case. God agrees, technology agrees.

If you can’t build anything that works thinking like a lib, how come so many of these tech conglomerates are run by and staffed by such emotionally-immature liberals?

Could it be, as the liberals insist, that this is not merely an indicator that you can build working things thinking like a lib…but, maybe it’s necessary? Can it be that this is where I show my willingness to perceive truth? And so I am obliged to do an abrupt but expected about-face, racketball style. Maybe I have to be a liberal to get the plum jobs anyway. And I don’t really know tech if I’m not one. They’re right what they say about conservative cavemen…how ’bout it?

And the answer is — not only no, but I don’t seriously consider it for a fraction of a second. And I’m not looking back at the wreckage in my rear-view mirror, not even sparing it a glance. I can’t; I know better. Watch liberals “work” for just a bit. Watch the libs in the Google video. It’s all about creating the correct emotional climate. It’s true of everything they do. Generate the excitement in this, generate the disappointment in that, give off the correct vibe, make the wave. Real technology does surprising things. Whether the crowd does or does not expect the thing to work, has so little to do with whether or not it really will. To merely grasp the essentials, you have to learn the very first thing about reality which is: There is one. Objects exist, they have certain states to them, and human emotion is entirely disconnected with all of this. The masses are asses. Majority-opinion can maintain that the freezing temperature of water is 50 degrees, or 68, or 12; this has nothing at all to do with what it really is. Public sentiment is right the way a busted clock is right.

Run the tests. That’s how you know.

I can’t claim to know more than these moguls about how to make tech work in business. But my mortgage is paid so I must know something; and I don’t need to know much to comment. I know enough. You have to do two things after you get the darn thing to work right, you must layer and you must market. I’m maintaining the proper respect for all these men and women — interesting, I think, nearly all the heavy hitters are men, but that’s a side-point. They must be experts at the layering and the marketing. And you can read about marketing anywhere, which isn’t my field anyway. Let’s talk about the layering.

It is, to explain it crudely, a vertical arrangement of interfaces. You might think of it as “Now that I used threading to get the nut to attach properly to the bolt, how do I fasten the alternator to the frame of the car?” You get the simple stuff working first, then you work your way upward to build complex stuff out of the simple stuff. This is how you build a powerful application that can do complicated, amazing things, without losing the necessary attribute of maintainability. You do it with layers.

I do have the requisite humility. I think these guys are geniuses at marketing; and, layering. I respect their leviathan thought-controlling goose-stepping conglomerations. I acknowledge the many layers within them. I’ve seen them, up close. They are numerous and strong, as we should expect them to be, like rivets holding together a passenger jet that really flies.

But you can’t build tech thinking like a lib.

I said “thinking like.” There certainly are successful people in technology who are liberals. Some of them — far, far more slender a proportion of the overall workforce, compared to what the layman might think — have achieved, or started with, a respectable command of the implementation concepts. But there is some falsehood going on here, some two-facedness. If they’re still contributing to the growing technology, there has to be a switch being flipped whether they consciously realize it or not. You can’t get that code working thinking like a lib. You can’t figure out why it’s not doing what it should do, thinking like a lib. Can’t figure out which component is faulty, can’t figure out how to validate the inputs so that the gizmo will yield the correct behavior in practice.

There’s another rule about this:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

These people, being good at layering, necessarily became agile about it. And they found themselves responsible for building, not just a gizmo that worked, but a proper working environment for their employees. A rapidly expanding, exploding work environment. They could delegate the responsibility, of course, but it’s still a lot of responsibility, arriving after having not been sought, guesting without being invited. Gushing in within an exceptionally narrow piece of time.

The truth is that, while you can’t think like a liberal and do tech, tech allows you to get away with thinking like one. Mmmm, that’s quite good innit? As long as I’m taking a breather from requisite humility, let me go back and admire that. It’s good enough for a tee shirt, bumper sticker or coffee mug.

It’s also true. We’re dealing with a Butterfield fallacy here.

As Master Taleb would say,

Primo:

Is it possible that the reason these different social media companies won the social network game is by being picked by the legacy media? Alternatively, in 2004 when I joined facebook in college it was truly much better than myspace and the timing did seem to be right. Some of these social media products were truly better. However, Youtube was only _bought_ by google and the original google search was vastly better than alta vista, et al. Also, Ashkenazi’s are smarter than us viking-descended goyim and they are vastly more left leaning… So, I’m not sure if the source of the winners of social media were chosen by legacy media or were actually just so much better.

Secundo:

As a fellow software engineer, what is there to do about this whole social media mess? I’m really starting to actually think that maybe Richard Stallman isn’t crazy and that concerns me very much… We can’t trust software that we can’t fork and remove power from SJW-entrants, because conservatives aren’t ever zealous enough to cast the leftists out into the darkness and protect their own. Even though I quit facebook when Obama was elected the 2nd time and I lost hope for America, I’d love to switch and promote an alternative, but the product with the most steam is Matadon and it really _is_ run by Stallman, so they also blacklist people for being insufficiently leftist… What is there to do Mr. Freeberg?
- fwh | 09/15/2018 @ 18:48
We do what conservatives do; retain fidelity to reality, at the expense of fidelity to pre-canned narratives. And give credit where it’s due.

If Facebook, YouTube, Amazon et al are run by a bunch of tofu-sucking liberals, and they make it to market and their stuff works, go ahead and use it and admit the liberals are capable of bringing something to market. Sure they’ll never in a million years admit Chick Fil A and In n Out make decent burgers, but you know, let them play the game their way…that’s what makes them liberals, elevating the pre-canned narratives above reality.

The neat thing about reality is, it REALLY doesn’t care. So it says: Black Rifle makes a coffee just as tasty and potent as Starbuks, and New Balance makes shoes just as comfortable as Nike.

Tech is going to remain dominated by liberals, for the reasons I spelled out above. We have liberalism, as we know it today, because of tech. Two hundred fifty years ago, if you were a lawyer you did your lawyering after you made sure your sugar beet crop or your corn crop or your cauliflower crop was decent and healthy so your family wouldn’t starve. So people didn’t indulge in #MeToo or Common Core or 16 oz. soda serving requirements, and it wasn’t because they loved slavery or sexism or illiteracy or childhood obesity, it was because they didn’t have time for silly things.

So it makes sense that where tech, as we know it, is manufactured, we should expect to find liberalism, as we know it, enjoying a friendly environment. It’s a weak genome that isn’t capable of surviving in an unfriendly one.
- mkfreeberg | 09/16/2018 @ 10:22
[…] Are You Serious? About Yesterday Memo For File CCX Chapters 8 and 9 Kavanaugh and Climate Change Liberals in Tech “Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/31/2018 @ 02:19
[…] and high-tech gadgets for playing games and looking at porn. The gadgetry, as I’ve speculated previously, had to have been built by someone who didn’t think like a lib — at the very least, […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/05/2018 @ 09:25

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Liberals in TechSaturday, September 15th, 2018

Liberals in Tech
Saturday, September 15th, 2018