antipolitics

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
Open in Logseq
    • Rationalism features a prominent disdain for politics. There are many good reasons of course to hate politics, but disliking something does not make it thereby unimportant. And it doesn't excuse you from participation in the actual politics of the present day.
    • We're in a situation where neutrality is complicity, and I feel like an asshole for even saying that, but I think it reflects something real. Refusal to recognize this may be why rationalists like SlateStarCodex keep finding themselves in hot water and making lame or cute defenses for themselves.
    • Miscellaneous

      • Morozov The Internet Ideology: Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley - Debatten - FAZ
        • How do you spot “the digital debate”? Look for arguments that appeal to the essences of things – of technology, information, knowledge and, of course, the Internet itself. Thus, whenever you hear someone say “this law is bad because it will break the Internet” or “this new gadget is good because that’s what technology wants,” you know that you have left the realm of the political – where arguments are usually framed around the common good – and have entered the realm of bad metaphysics. In that realm, what you are being asked to defend is the well-being of phantom digital gods that function as convenient stand-ins for corporate interests. Why does anything that might “break the Internet” also risk breaking Google? This can’t be a coincidence, can it?
      • From LWMap/Naming the Nameless
        • There are a number of defensive strategies people (of varying political views) adopt against the cultural dominance of the left.
        • Respectability politics is a different tactic, and, in this context, usually takes the form of (not very credible) claims to be apolitical. Early forms of this include "Keep Your Identity Small" or "Politics is the Mind-Killer." By declaring the importance of not taking sides, you're already asserting that you're not wholly on one side; a progressive can reasonably infer that any avowedly "apolitical" person disagrees with them at least somewhere.
        • Claims of aloofness from politics have always, correctly, been identified as evidence of covert dissent from "good" politics: "formalism" was a political offense in Soviet Russia. There are many thinkpieces like this one observing (rightly) that Silicon Valley culture is nominally apolitical but implicitly capitalist.