Computers, Oil and Merit
This has been in draft for a while, Im starting to get somewhere almost good with it so I figured I'd share it :)
The first, second, third, fourth, fifth try: then
I'm slowly building up my understanding of the world, how its developed and its history. I'm doing so messily, reading a lot of biased books and and making a lot of mistakes. At the moment I think I've developed a neat view of some things though.
Throughout history, individuals or groups are given power and they can end up mis-using it. The classic cycle is that they abuse it and get worse and worse. The masses (who have more power, even if they don't realise it) end off worse and worse, until eventually they have no choice. They rise up and change things. A new person or group is put in place with new laws and new systems. They understand the truth: that they're working for the masses, and are being allowed to hold that position by them. Therefore, they respect it. This slowly is forgotten and the cycle repeats.
At some point in this process, those in power have to validate their existence at the top, even when they shouldn't be there. This is a tough task, and normally won't work. But, through Brandolini's law of bullshit, eventually some will stick and those that stick will stay around and develop. Its memetics, ideas evolving like creatures do.
The modern western world has an especially sticky memetic right now. A really strong idea thats really good at holding people in places of power. It can spread itself into the minds of a large number of people within the masses and cause all sorts of issues. This memetic is the idea of a meritocracy. In this essay I want to talk about that idea and how I view its development, from my personal experiences. None of what I say will be new, but I feel like I have a nice lens we can use to project it onto the modern day near the end.
[An aside to kill merit]
Firstly, before studying meritocracy, we should probably kill it, save any confusion later.
Meritocracies arn't real, as we will explore later, they are lies made to validate peoples existence at the top, and their egos. The classic argument against them is the point that anyone with any power likely was born into a good position to get that power, or got very lucky. The world is a messy place and in its natural state, people with skill and intelligence won't always do well. Whilst this is true, there are many other better points to make.
- A meritocracy assumes merit is a universally measurable unit. Value, merit and even intelligence, are all pretty subjective concepts that change with time and context. A tech guru would flounder in a farming commune and our "greatest minds" have done more damage to the planet than any Native American collective.
- A meritocracy acts as if those with less merit are less deserving of pleasant lives. Everyone deserves to do well.
- A meritocracy assumes a specific breed or type of person is well set for power and control. We need a wide array of people of all different skills and background if we want to make good decisions, not just those that standard meritocracy implies are well built for the task.
In my mind, merit as a memetic spawned around the time of the British Empire. It came in a slightly different form then, but it was still around. This was the idea of racial merit, phrenology, slave races and such. This came about as a way of those enacting the slavery, both convincing themselves and others that what they were doing was correct.
This idea danced around a while, but changed as civil rights changed. It separated itself (though only in the most obvious ways) from race and turned towards class. America had started rising, and it shared a symbiotic relationship with merit. The American dream brought tens of thousands over from other countries and gave America its population.
In my mind this is most visible in oil.
My points here apply to oil very well. There's 0 skill in finding oil, its luck, but its wealth has to validate its own existence and merit does that. Even if its a hard lie to sell, its one that can be applied easily. Especially when you shout it to the world and have thousands coming with the soul aim of seeing it.
America, Britain and slowly other countries, fell into the default assumption that comfort had to be earnt, those suffering had just been born like that and the people in power were the best suited to it.
Though, once again, this has evolved. Now we don't have oil barons. We have tech ceos, or as I think we should call them, tech barons.
Countless cycles, the next try: now
My grandparents have a decent amount of money, a big house worth £1 million or so with a hot tub and a nice garden. They rent a property or two, they have more money than they really need.
They used to be so poor they would sometimes have to catch frogs and cook them.
My grandad was a phone line engineer, he slowly moved into computing, found he enjoyed it and started doing it as a hobby too. Eventually his hobby became profitable and he started making digital timers for sports. He built the worlds first digital scoreboard, he used to show me the reams and reams of hand written assembly code he would manually insert into the chips for that thing. The stack of paper literally a foot and a half tall.
From that he became relatively well off, pretty quick, he soon ended up programming big systems for local councils and phone networks. He still maintained some of them for free in his retirement until only a few years ago.
I imagine he sees himself as someone who earnt his place, started at the bottom and worked his way up.
I love him, dearly and truly, but I see it differently.
He was lucky, he got into the right field at the right time, happened to enjoy it and have the brain for it. Because of that, he shot up.
Computing is oil.
We say "data is the new oil", "ai is the new oil". I'm less sure. I think, computers were always the new oil. We've been in that boom from the get go. Now its not even new, its been happening since my Gramps rode Big Blue's wave. Now They're just oil. We're in the depths of the culture now. We're in the depths of the destruction mass compute requires. The depth of the labour displacement white collar work requires.
I'd go as far as to say computing was worse than oil, oil required baseless claims to maintain, there's no skill to finding oil, no skill to selling or maintaining it. Not any skills that have a positive influence on the world anyway. That's a hard lie to maintain.
Computing is different, it requires an small amount of encapsulated problem solving. There's your base, your argument, your merit. Build an entire industry on it. Take oils lie, in carved into your brain anyway, act as its proof and build entire landscapes on it.
Technology has done what it did to my Gramps to many many others, on an incomprehensibly larger scale. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon. Most of them didn't intend to start what they have now. They happened upon something useful.
The people that run those companies argue on merit, they play with the asthetic, only hire "the best of the best" to maintain that air. But they didn't get there on merit and even if they did, they shouldn't have the power they do.
We need to stop calling them tech gurus, tech bros, tech ceos. We need to name them what they are. Tech Barons. Like those before them, they got where they are through luck more than anything else, and they know no better how things should be than the rest of us. They've manipulated and built an entire culture just to validate their egos. Unlike oil barons, I don't think they even fully realise they're doing it, not the full depth of it at least. They just think its reality, truth, and they're just pushing for it.
Merit runs on organs that maintain themselves.
They fell for the old lie, fit themselves into it and are propagating it.
These people shouldn't be idolised, they shouldn't be trusted. Call them barons, that's what they are. And whatever you do, don't trust them to visualise our future, don't fit them into your worldviews. Anyone who confidently knows how the world should work is lying. They don't deserve optimism, they've earnt skeptisism.