Technology and the laws of power

Is the tech industry partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s what John Robb, who’s always worth reading, suggests in a series of recent posts, citing the great Nassim Taleb in support. His vision: “The nation-state as we’ve known it is rapidly hollowing out … this century’s spike in globalization, financialization, and technological change is gutting it…”

Robb argues that America is increasingly fragmenting into two opposed groups: thetechnorati, “a class united by global outlook, education, financial success, status, and technological adoption,” and the left behinds, “the supermajority of Americans getting creamed by the hollowing out of America.” And he quotes Taleb:

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But wait, you say. They’re not talking about the tech industry, they’re really talking about theEstablishment. Sort of! But — leaving aside the fact that the tech industry is increasinglybecoming the Establishment, and vice versa — I’ve been arguing for some time now that as software eats the world, and leads to winner-take-most economics, it drags us all from Mediocristan towards Extremistan (to quote Taleb again.)

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Extremistan. Its overall output is likely much greater than that of Mediocristan. But it is a land of power-law economic distributions, in which a minority will do very well … while a majority will count themselves lucky to stagnate.

The tech industry and the Establishment are on course to be that wealthy minority, which Robb calls the technorati. The rest? They’re the left-behind. Imagine the inequities of present-day San Francisco as a microcosm of the future everywhere. That seems to be the direction.

[“Source-techcrunch”]