Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. --Niklaus Wirth

Technocracy 2.0 - The Brooklyn Rail #society #futurism #longread

The Origins of Technocracy

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was going through the pains of its industrial transformation. Cities were booming in population, and politics was rife with discord over what would become of American life. New ideas began to circulate over who would helm this path forward. Some were moved by the plight of workers, while others found a cause in battling corruption. But above all, this generation desired reform. They were loosely called the Progressive movement. As one of its leaders, Herbert Croly, argued, now was the time for a “New Nationalism.” Yet few agreed on what the nation’s needs exactly were.

A growing subset of Progressives found their cause within science and technology. Because it had made the Industrial Revolution possible, it was easy to assume its experts should also lead. These Progressives believed society was growing too complex to be left to insular self-interest and politics. Intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Louis Brandeis, Charles McCarthy, and Frederic Howe put forward arguments that any future administration of experts needed a clear separation from politics.

This was the seed of what would later become technocratic thinking: the idea of a state of appointed experts. Yet, it was not only politics that was increasingly viewed with suspicion. Businessmen, too, were becoming suspect because of their narrow interests. This argument was most famously made by economist Thorstein Veblen, who was a leading influence on the early technocrats. Although initially more sympathetic to industrial workers, by the 1910s Veblen shifted toward a belief in rule by engineers. A critic of capitalism himself, he viewed business managers as incapable of understanding the system they were handling. They were poorly educated in the “industrial arts,” and distorted what should be industrial society’s priorities. These “ignorant businessmen with an eye single to maximum profits” had to be replaced by a new class of people, the technicians.

By 1919, Veblen began publishing a series of magazine essays that would be compiled in The Engineers and the Price System (1921). A “soviet of technicians” had to be established where engineers, not workers, would take over from the capitalists, he argued. This new philosophy would be given a name that year—“technocracy”—and then give rise to a short-lived organization named the Technical Alliance. Veblen was one of its founding members and its intellectual anchor.

The ideological coordinates of these early days of technocracy were confused. The Technical Alliance brought together a group of very different individuals, united only by the belief that technology now dominated social progress. The alliance worked on research with the radical left-wing union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but many of its members remained non-committed politically. While fellow travelers of left causes, there was no focus on the proletariat, class struggle, or workplace organizing. Their only point of agreement was that capitalism was inefficient and holding back industrial society’s potential.

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REVIEW OF 1984 By Isaac Asimov #literature #history #futurism #dystopia #longread

4 times drinking coffee was illegal—or even punishable by death | Popular Science #history

Rulers once closed cafés, burned beans, and even executed someone—all for a cup of coffee.

TL;DR

1. Mecca’s early 16th century ban on coffee
2. In Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Murad IV executed coffee drinkers
3. Sweden banned coffee five different times
4. Prussia’s secret “coffee-sniffer” force

Wirth's Revenge #software #longread

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes ofstorage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell #internet

One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset.

U.S tech backlash grows as countries and startups seek alternatives - Rest of World #digitalsovereignty #internet #privacy

Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms. Companies that take on big tech platforms with alternatives have often failed. Government backing and user choices can help drive innovation and staying power for non-U.S. tech companies. In just the past week, France has banned its public officials from using American technology, more governments are considering keeping young people off Silicon Valley’s biggest social media platforms, and UpScrolled saw a surge in users over censorship fears on TikTok in the U.S. All of these moves point to a growing unease with U.S. tech firms and tech policy.

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US | AP News #software #copyrights #digitalsovereignty

In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. Soldiers in Austria are using open source office software to write reports after the military dropped Microsoft Office. Bureaucrats in a German state have also turned to free software for their administrative work.

Around Europe, governments and institutions are seeking to reduce their use of digital services from U.S. Big Tech companies and turning to domestic or free alternatives. The push for “digital sovereignty” is gaining attention as the Trump administration strikes an increasingly belligerent posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access.

Ian's Shoelace Site #fashion #fun #lifehacks

Fun, fashion & science in the Internet's #1 website about shoelaces – and home of the Ian Knot, the world's fastest shoelace knot. If you want to lace shoes, tie shoes or learn about shoelaces – this is the place!

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