Hell to the yes, y’all. I know it’s not appropriate to celebrate others’ misfortunes, but I’ma dance on this one cuz fuck technocrats.
For those who ain’t know, a month ago dat nigga Z-Buck founded his front organization called FWD.us, designed for one reason and one reason only, to bring in more of those precious, precious indentured servants that also happen to computer program, which shouldn’t be that much of a problem because Silicon Valley owns that whole Pennsylvania Avenue block, but it is because Obeezy was all like “I can’t give y’all visas and leave my Mexican homies out to dry. We put it in.” and so Z-Buck and his boys was all like “Oh we got to wait for the Mexicans to get theirs too? Don’t this nigga know we own all his email and photos? Time to quit talking and actually disrupt politics y’all”
A month later, and the only thing disrupted is Mark Zuckerberg’s stomach. What had happened was, whatever political consultant they hired had seen too many episodes of House of Cards and decided to go full Machiavellian on comprehensive immigration reform, setting up ideologically opposite money-funnelling groups in order to run ads, one called “Council for American Job Growth”, but more importantly one called “Americans for a Conservative Direction” which proceeded to drop a cool milli on ads that praised motherfuckers such as Lindsay Graham for supporting Keystone and ANWAR drilling, at which point liberal environmental groups were all “You gon’ learn today”.
Proceed to calls for boycotts of Facebook from CREDO Mobile and MoveOn, and two Silicon Valley heavyweights kickin FWD.us to the curb.
But why you may ask is Z-buck’s embarrassment worth getting hype over, other than just pure haterade-infused dopamine? Because these motherfuckers thought they could do it. Now I’ve never actually studied computer science, but I’ve been in the room when it’s been discussed to understand that what it’s basically about is getting trillions upon quadrillions of obedient, very stupid people to do what you want to do in rapid succession. Almost all of the power players in Silicon Valley come from that background. Which means, their approach to everything is technocratic and suffers from epistemic closure. Witness, this instructive-ass quote from Tim O’Reilly, the guy who came up with “Web 2.0” and the “open source movement” (and y’all really should read the whole essay. My boy Ev-Jen Mor-zov is on fucking point)
I remember having a conversation with Nancy Pelosi not long after Google did their Panda search update, and it was in the context of SOPA/PIPA. . . . [Pelosi] said, “Well, you know, we have to satisfy the interests of the technology industry and the movie industry.” And I thought, “No, you don’t. You have to get the right answer.”
The problem here is that engineers believe that there is only one right answer to any problem, while the whole function of politics is to take people with diametrically opposite ideas of what is right and to get them to work together. For many in the Valley, this idea is literally beyond their comprehension, which is why they called us humanities majors “fuzzies” as a pejorative.
But technocracy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean have y’all seen Greece? Countries are burning down over a gotdamn Excel spreadsheet error.
I introduce this shit because FWD.us was straight up playing a politics inspired by computer science. These niggaz don’t understand that this is a democratic republic. However you feel about immigration reform, the people that are against got voted in by a democratic majority of their constituents precisely to oppose it. Z-buck was like “But look at all this money. We can’t get NOTHIN for it?” And Congress was like “it’s complicated.” And here’s how they done fucked up: they treated the American people like a bunch of transistors to turn on and off when it suited them through spending millions of dollars on political ads, but politics don’t work like that. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley done forgot why we let them be our future overlords in the first place. Yeah, what they doin ain’t all that different from our favorite supervillains in Washington (oil companies, pharma, and the delightfully ineluctable military-industrial complex), but the whole legitimacy of their regime is based on the idea that they’re different from those evil capitalists of the past. Yeah, it’s pretty much all PR, but PR fuckin’ matters. I get the MoveOn emails, these niggaz were like abused puppies. They felt betrayed. But what is betrayal? Just a much colder form of education, and it’s always a cause for celebration when people are led out of ignorance and into the light.
Real Tek Thoughtz 