The Vienna Circle Was A Gerbil Wheel And Techbros Are Still On It

Today's techies and nerd pundits rather remind me of logical positivists and Anglo-American analytic philosophers. They too fancied themselves the Smartest Guys in the Room and after superficial readings of rich archives rolled up their shirtsleeves. They declared themselves eager and able to circumvent or dismiss philosophical quandaries and topple moral/political Business As Usual. They confidently declared themselves masters of topics they largely missed the point of, re-invented a lot of wheels to run around on. They established lots of marginal fandoms devoted to official puzzle-solving and ignored everybody while everybody else ignored them.

Now our nerd pundits offer up reductive superficial pie-charted "explainers" as our techies breathlessly re-invent laissez-faire pieties. Our nerds are so "smart" they think appliances are intelligent and our tech-talkers peddle "progress" while denying commonwealth. Our anti-intellectual "Thought Leaders" are so uneducated they don't even know their facile errors are a stale re-run of earlier errors.

I know that nerds and geeks Rule now (at least the dim white reactionary reductionist ones) but nobody cares about logical positivists. I don't expect people outside the clubhouse to care much for long for our innovative Thought Leaders "getting to the bottom of things." Sure, the coterie of super-rich techies can do some damage with their market fundamentalist pieties but that's just because they're rich. But the anti-historical sociopathic reductionist nerds and geeks are mostly just dumb, another American anti-intellectual boy's club.

By way of conclusion I'll add that I don't think geekdom had or has to play out in this cramped uncritical fashion http://t.co/1HvsNweAa0