Haven't finished reading it yet, so this is an undigested opinion, but early on this article managed to tie a few pre-existing thoughts together:
Some context. For several years now, I've been developing a growing discomfort with a philosophy of relating to technology I call Waldenponding (after Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment on which Walden is based). The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms."
Might this kind of reactionary... reaction to tech and technology be endemic to a sort of anti-neoliberalism?
Perhaps the article will provide an answer - I'm still only a paragraph in.
But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level. It's a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding/tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load required to keep the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) running effectively.
39/ If you are a genius who rises to Level 25 Omega Super Adept in a monastery in the mountains, who knows everything there is to know about candle flames, that's kinda... very convenient for the Pope and the King. Smart person out of the way in a log cabin learning Candleology out of FOBO.
40/ A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar: actionable insight you can bet on in the real world.
45/ We are all now part of a powerful global social computer in the cloud that is possibly the only mechanism we have available to tackle the big problems of the world that industrial age mechanisms are failing to cope with. We might as well get good at it. Do your part. Stay as plugged in as you can.
Very impressive - does well to express many of the things I'm rather scatterbrainedly trying to express, as well as things I haven't even considered.
So yeah I'll stick with the first point I made in this post: that there is a sort of reactionary rearguard, as well as a hyperconsumptive vanguard that mark the two extremities on the distribution of people's interpretations of techne's progress, or perhaps more specifically the immaterial world. (edit: the author got at this with the X axis denoting timescale of the information processed.)
The former "fights" the external past while the latter "fights" the external future - how to best process the past, and how to best process the future. The article describes it as "betting", so instead of fighting it would be betting on the best interpretation of the past, and betting on the best interpretation of the future.
The article describes the rearguard as succumbing to FOBO, fear of being ordinary, and describes the vanguard as succumbing to FOMO, fear of missing out. I can attest: its easy to succumb to the former while under the impression that you are climbing higher.
edit: that article/manifesto sated my inner zealot, and I would recommend it.