techno-optimism innov BS
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3/22 2nd, API Exxon innovation BS ~ regulation/ climate action</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">disambig, see tedtalks (lomborgian libtard strain/hybrid</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see 1776 am exceptionalism story 1 = Am Myth
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">innovation is god term</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">progress is forward, up, scale up, positive growth
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</font></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">shillenberger did one too</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p class="1qeIAgB0cPwnLhDF9XSiJM" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0.25em; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">breakthrough Institute</span> has been a leading "think tank" getting around being called science deniers by claiming concern while delaying actions on climate.</font></p><blockquote class="28lDeogZhLGXvE95QRPeDL" style="margin: 4px 0px 4px 8px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 8px; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 4px solid var(--newCommunityTheme-bodyTextAlpha20); border-image: initial; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; quotes: none;"><p class="_1qeIAgB0cPwnLhDF9XSiJM" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-weight: inherit;">Armed with a degree in Latin American studies and</span><b> confidence borne of inherited family wealth, the Breakthrough Institute’s Rachel Pritzker takes to the Ted Talk stage to promote ... nuclear energy</b></font></p></blockquote></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>interesting ~ to myth of gubmint scientist paid</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://yyy.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/21/universities-must-reject-fossil-fuel-cash-for-climate-research-say-academics</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx many</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Universities must reject fossil fuel cash for climate research, say academics</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Open letter from 500 academics likens fossil-energy funding of climate solutions to tobacco industry disinformation</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, speaks to media before a Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said fossil-fuel funding ‘has been used to compromise leading academic institutions’. Photo]</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Fiona Harvey environment correspondent</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Mon 21 <b>Mar 2022 </b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Universities must stop accepting funding from fossil fuel companies to conduct climate research, even if the research is aimed at developing green and low-carbon technology, an influential group of distinguished academics has said.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, the Nasa data scientist Peter Kalmus, and prominent US climate scientist Michael Mann are among close to 500 academics from the US and the UK who have written an open letter addressed to all university leaders in the two countries, calling on them to reject all funding from fossil fuel companies.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Accepting money from fossil fuel companies represented “an inherent conflict of interest” and could “taint” essential research and “compromise” academic freedom, they wrote. For the companies, it was a chance to “greenwash” their reputations and skew the findings of research in a way favourable to them.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The letter draws a comparison to the tobacco industry and its disinformation campaigns, noting that numerous public heath and research institutions reject tobacco funding for these reasons and calling on fossil fuel cash to be treated similarly.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Universities and the research they produce are vital to delivering a rapid, just transition away from fossil fuels. However, such efforts are undermined by fossil fuel industry funding. Academics should not be forced to choose between researching climate solutions and inadvertently aiding corporate greenwashing,” the signatories wrote.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University,</span> told the Guardian: “This sort of funding has been used to compromise leading academic institutions.<b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> It’s a two-for for polluters: they purchase the imprimatur of these institutions and their presumed authority and objectivity, while funding research that often translates into advocacy for false solutions and ‘kick the can down the road’ prescriptions like massive carbon capture,</span> which is unproven at scale, and geoengineering, which is downright dangerous. That is entirely the wrong path forward.”</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Genevieve Guenther, founder and director of the End Climate Silence campaign, and an affiliate at the New School university in New York, said: “Funding research enables oil and gas companies to ground their promotional statements in enough truth to give substance to the green shadows in which they hide their most polluting and deadly activities. We must remove fossil-energy interests from our institutions so that our children can have a chance at a liveable future.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Universities have been under pressure from their students and some academics for several years to divest their investments, such as pension funds and endowments, away from fossil fuels, and many have done so. However, this is the first major call from senior academics for them to go further and cut all research ties with fossil fuel companies.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There is no clear estimate for how much money universities accept from fossil fuel companies, as most do not publish their sources. An investigation for the Observer last year found <b>UK universities alone had taken at least £89m from oil companies in the previous four years.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some scientists disagree with the letter. James Hansen, former chief scientist at Nasa and one of the first scientists to warn governments of the impending climate crisis, told the Guardian: “It’s the wrong focus, causing young people to waste their energy on unproductive activities, while they actually have the potential to lead a solution.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics</b>, said it was reasonable for universities to accept funding from fossil fuel companies if those businesses showed genuine commitment to transforming themselves. “Fossil fuel companies that are genuinely committed to the transition [to a low-carbon economy], including net zero emissions, can and should receive help from university researchers, particularly with the development of technologies for carbon capture and storage, renewables and emissions reductions. However, universities should be careful about accepting funding directly or indirectly from oil, gas and coal companies that are not genuinely committed to the clean energy transition and which are attempting to greenwash their reputations.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A spokesperson for Imperial College London, which the Observer found last year had accepted £54m from oil companies since 2017, said: “Decarbonisation is our top priority when working with energy companies. </span>This goal requires a radical shift in industrial systems, technologies and business models in the energy sector. We are using our influence and expertise to accelerate this transition and actively engage with energy companies to push them to meet the Paris Agreement targets. We will monitor progress and only continue to work with companies who demonstrate commitment and credible action to achieving these targets.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Some academics argue that fossil fuel funding is needed to develop the technologies necessary for a low-carbon economy, and that if western universities reject such funding it will be accepted in other countries around the world</b>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Guenther disagreed: “It’s a myth that fossil-energy companies are spending large sums to aid the green transitio</b>n. According to the IEA’s 2021 World Energy Investment report, a mere 1% of fossil-energy companies’ capital expenditure is devoted to research, development or deployment of technologies that either abate or do not produce greenhouse gas emissions.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">At the end of this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish the third part of its comprehensive review of climate science, examining the potential ways of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This will include technology such as renewable energy and nuclear power, and novel ideas such as sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The report will throw the spotlight on the potential technological solutions to the climate crisis, which will require tens or hundreds of billions of pounds in funding to be brought to market and deployed widely around the world.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist who is signatory to the letter, said the funding should come from governments. “The US and UK are among the richest countries on Earth, and their governments enjoy total monetary sovereignty. They have the capacity to finance the necessary research many times over, at the touch of a button. Most of the major innovations and public projects that have changed history over the past century have relied on public funding for research,” said Hickel, who is professor of environmental science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a fellow of the LSE.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The letter did not specify whether companies with interests in fossil fuels amid a broader portfolio should be included in the ban. Ilana Cohen, a Harvard student who led the organisation of the letter, said it was directed at the top 200 fossil fuel companies.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Cohen said the organisers had confined the call to US and UK universities for now as these are where many fossil fuel companies are concentrating their funding, but that it could be widened in future to a global effort.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></span></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 stories at war at fossil fuel ceo:</font></span></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">note god devil terms</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://gizmodo.com/republicans-slobbered-all-over-themselves-to-apologize-1847959116">https://gizmodo.com/republicans-slobbered-all-over-themselves-to-apologize-1847959116</a></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">ref 3 gizmod</font><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;">o bAD CODE NO LNX</font></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;" /></span></p><div><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" /></span></font></font></font><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style=""><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">gop have a, shall we say,...relationship. But that relationship went from snuggly to downright NSFW on Thursday at a hearing ostensibly about...The House Oversight Committee welcomed executives from four fossil companies and two trade groups as well as a pipeline welder to probe decades of campaigns to confuse the public. There’s plenty of fodder. The past few years have seen...$59,956 in oil and gas money in the 2020 election cycle) said, thanking the company for increasing production. “I want to thank those companies that are actually increasing production,” Jordan later added.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“These companies being<b> villainized,</b>” said Rep. Jody Hice (recipient of $5,000 from the oil and gas industry in 2020, which talk about getting your money’s worth). Hice did not ask a question.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s just people who don’t have anything better to do than type on their keyboards,” Rep. Byron Donalds ($18,110 from oil and gas interests so far this cycle) said of climate activists before turning to the oil CEOs. “Let’s be very clear, you need an<b> apology</b>. What I witnessed today is<b> rank intimidation</b> by the chair of this committee. ... It is disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting. Somebody better call Merrick Garland, tell him to get in here, and <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">watch the intimidation </span>that came from this very panel today. It’s not about defending Big Oil. ... I’m sorry for you. And I’m sorry for the people in our country who have to witness shenanigans like this.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“While this committee may not like you because you’re executives, because your companies have been successful, I just want to apologize for the decorum. Because thank you for what you’ve done,” said Rep. Yvette Herrell ($115,126 from the industry she was overseeing, making her the second-biggest oil and gas recipient in the House so far this cycle). “There are people here who believe in you. Thank you. ... In fact, I would just submit to<b> saving anybody who has gotten a vaccination</b> or who is going to get one, thank you to the oil and gas industry because I would bet that almost every single one of the syringes has been touched by a petroleum product. ... I just want to thank all of you for being here today.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You guys all have a good story to tell. Don’t be afraid to tell people <b>how much cleaner things are than in the past</b>. It doesn’t do any good for you any good to get all<b> woke </b>on us,” Rep. Glenn Grothman ($30,576 from oil and gas in 2020 and $3,570 so far this year.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s been very </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">shameful</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> how the other side wants to </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">demonize our </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">oil and gas industry. I’m </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">very proud of our oil</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> and gas industry, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">the</span><b style=""> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">innovators</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);"> that adopt </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">new tech</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">, provide a higher standard of living, and jobs throughout our country,”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> said</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Rep. Bob Gibbs, the $28,558</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> oil and gas man in 2020. He later added, “I’m disappointed the chair failed to recognize that and </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">demonize</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> them on that.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I apologize to our witnesses that were called and asked to take part in this today,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, who has so far received $11,400 from oil and gas interests and raked in $237,375 in 2018. (2020 data was unavailable.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“There is a moral case to be made for the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuels as a whole,” Rep. Pat Fallon, who has taken in $5,600 in oil and gas money. “If we want more abundant and inexpensive and cleaner energy—which we all should do—these witnesses here should be the ones that we are supporting and <b>applauding and not demonizing.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“These very important energy companies and the [American] Petroleum Institute understand you’ve got yourself here, you’ve seen the attitude of the folks on the left of this committee. When you get asked this morning that, aren’t you <b>embarrassed, that’s really an irrational</b> question to ask CEOs about their company,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, the receiver of $27,253 in oil and gas money in 2020.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“My, my, my. Good lord help us to be protected from this threat from within. <b>American patriots are so done with career politicians </b>and <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Democratic socialist insanity..</span>. We are nauseated by the<b> continuous attacks on working [ie real ie white?] Americans and American industry.</b> This entire debacle of a hearing today of why my colleagues across the aisle will lose their majority status very soon,” Rep. Clay Higgins predicted. (Higgins has received $10,426 in fossil fuel cash so far this cycle and $40,773 in 2020.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Did President Biden or anyone from the White House <b>apologize</b> to you?” Rep. James Comer, who received $18,500 in fossil fuel cash in 2020, asked the welder Republicans invited. (For the record, he did not....</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">a United Nations report out this week warns the world as a whole is facing a “production gap,” with more fossil fuels on tap to be produced than is compatible with a safe climate. Other reports have warned that new fossil fuel exploration must stop next year, emissions must fall at unprecedented rates over the next decade, and that cutting fossil fuel production and use is the most surefire way to do that. The reason we’re at this precipice is because the fossil fuel industry pursued a misinformation campaign while further entrenching their product with the global economy, fully aware that it would cause major climate damage.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is also because Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) have blocked climate action, and have maintained a grip on power in no small part thanks to millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry. The industry has directed roughly 85% of its donations in 2020 to Republicans, and is on track to do the same this year (and has done the same in past years, too). Those same Republicans who apologized to the industry and thanked it on Thursday.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Anyways, this is all very cool and very legal.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div></div></div><div><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></font></font></div><div><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /></font></font><div><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div><b>Liberal policies are incoherent because Democrats have been polluted by these two failed world-views</b></div><div>
</div><div>Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon August 4, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>There are no hippies on Haight Street anymore. Along the eponymous road in the storied San Francisco neighborhood, arguable birthplace of the counterculture movement, tourist shops hawk tie-dye memorabilia to commemorate hippie culture, music and style. Yet aside from physical tchotchkes, the spirit of the 1960s no longer permeates the Haight: gone are the grinning, barefoot peaceniks, as are the free clinic and the Diggers. In their place? Aggrieved, techie millionaire property-owners whose primary spiritual tenets are not free love but property values.</div><div>
</div><div>Though the modern Haight resident may seem at odds with the busking, guitar-strumming hippie of yore, the two have far more in common than they might seem. The counterculture ideology of the 1960s was absorbed into Silicon Valley: many of the hippie era believed earnestly that technology, in particular computers, had the potential to revolutionize the world. Author John Markoff, who chronicled the history of the early computer industry in Silicon Valley, writes that the inventors of the PC clustered around Stanford were “deeply influenced by the 1960’s counterculture and by the anti-war movement.” “The computer technologies that we take for granted today owe their shape” to the hippies, he writes, noting that hippies were politically “split between modern-day Luddites and technophiles [w]ho believed better tools could lead to social progress.”</div><div> </div><div>Though it sounds quaint now, many of those who fell into the latter category, including the acid-downing Steve Jobs, thought that networked computers would usher in a populist, user-led revolution where, as digital beings freed from government’s oppressive shackles, we would overcome the The Man.</div><div>
</div><div>That, clearly, did not happen; computers, and particularly networked computers — meaning, the modern Internet — have oppressed us in new ways unforeseen by our utopian hippie forebears. Indeed, Silicon Valley’s internet giants now profit primarily from surveillance, selling targeted ads based on observed knowledge of their users. Yet despite a compelling lack of evidence for its efficacy, this techno-utopian mindset reigns supreme in Silicon Valley, so much so that the scions of Silicon Valley often genuinely believe they’re doing good when they are really engaged in so much surveillance or exploitation.</div><div>
</div><div>How could a movement defined by free love and civil liberties be digested into the tech industry’s cynical maw? The answer is actually quite simple: the vast majority of hippies, in the United States at least, lacked a coherent class-based analysis undergirding their politics. They did not understand, ideologically, the ways in which the rich oppress poor; that meant that a businessman who did not behave like one — who perhaps exploited his workers but wore tie-dye and read Baba Ram Dass — might be seen as a fellow traveler in hippiedom, whereas a poor working-class worker who detested the hippie aesthetic might be seen as an incorrigible enemy, a foot-soldier of “The Man.”</div><div>
</div><div>This lack of a coherent class-based analysis doomed the American hippies’ politics, and their vague and ideologically flexible ideals could be easily folded into something as sinister as Apple, the epitome of wasteful planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption. Partly this was due to the class upbringing of many hippies: most emerged from the middle-class, and were generally white. Thus, their politics were encapsulated by their petit-bourgeois upbringings; indeed, it takes a certain degree of material comfort to be able to drop out and live on a commune for a few years. While there were pseudo- or fully-Marxist political groups ancillary to the hippie movement — in particular the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, American Indian Movement and the Young Lords — these groups were the exception to a largely formless mass movement whose primary politics were social libertarianism and anti-war sentiment.</div><div>
</div><div>But to return to Silicon Valley: there is even a term for the school of thought that defines this synthesis of counterculture libertinism and techno-utopianism: it is called the California Ideology. Jason Rhode, writing in Salon, called it the “belief system of the ruling techie class.” “T]ech culture is right-wing economics covered over with a layer of hippie rhetoric,” Rhode writes; the doctrine’s “central tenet” is that “machines [will] fix everything,” he continues.</div><div>
</div><div>What Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism consistently misunderstands is that technology does not exist in a vacuum; technology is politics. Pieces of technology are borne of political decisions and have political origins; most are designed to maximize profit for the creator. This is a political function of the highest order, and explains why technology never solves social problems, as it literally can’t; only politics can</div><div>
</div><div>Few of the techies who have absorbed these hippie ideals would identify with their indirect origins in hippiedom. Yet on the other side of the see-saw, there are today still some New Agey neo-hippies, direct ideological descendants of the 1960s — people who perhaps have lost the aesthetic, but still believe in counterculture tenets, and have some vague understanding of “love” as the universal answer to all our problems, political and otherwise. Many of those who count themselves among this New Age fork of hippiedom are readily identifiable celebrities: Deepak Chopra, Masaru Emoto, and of course, Marianne Williamson, spiritualist, author, and Democratic contender for President. Williamson is particularly adept at articulating her vague and inconsistent worldview in quick soundbites, as she did towards the end of the second round of Democratic debates:</div><div>
</div><div>I want a politics that goes much deeper. I want a politics that speaks to the heart, because the only way to fight — you keep talking about how we’re going to fight Donald Trump. You can’t fight dog whistles. You have to override them.</div><div>
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</div><div>And the only way you can override them is with new voices, voices of energy that only come from the fact that America has been willing to live up to our own mistakes, atone for our mistakes, make amends for our own mistakes, love each other, love our democracy, love future generations, something emotional and psychological that will not [be] emerging from anything on this stage. It will emerge from something I’m the one who’s qualified [sic] to bring forth.</div><div>
</div><div>This reads like an ahistorical spin on a Marxist class analysis. In Williamson’s worldview, oppressors like Trump will not cease oppressing because their subjects rise up — but rather when said oppressors’ voices are “overridden” with an emergent love.</div><div>
</div><div>Historically, this doesn’t tend to work. You can’t appeal to some imagined conscience of those who exploit you. In general, those who are engaged in oppression or exploitation — especially when it has a material basis in which it enriches the oppressor — have shaped their entire belief system around their perception. Or, in Upton Sinclair’s words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”</div><div>
</div><div>There was never a war that was won because of appealing to the power of love, and there was never a strike that was won by appealing to the power of love. Mass movements are borne of people, action, and protest. The rich won’t change their minds and empty their wallets because you ask them to feel more love — and anyway, even if a few of them did, that wouldn’t undo the structural underpinnings of the system that enables their ilk to exploit. The “power of love” schtick can be part of this type of protest, but it cannot be the only thing — because a lack of love is not what drives exploitation. A want of power and money is.</div><div>
</div><div>The point of all this is, much of American liberalism is trapped politically between two false gods: the utopian technologists of Silicon Valley and the “power of love” crowd exemplified by Williamson. Both are unworkable paths to social change.</div></div><div><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;"><font color="#222222" face="Georgia, serif" style="font-size: 18px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></font></font></div></div></div></div>