I know this post is intended for a Bay Area audience, but that stated for readers outside the United States reading about politics is confusing. The words “liberal” and “conservative” mean moderately different political ideas in Western countries aside from the United States, and “libertarian” and “socialist” mean very different things in other countries, especially outside the Anglosphere, than they typically connote in the U.S. Americans typically mean by “capitalist” what other Western countries mean by “capitalist”, since we all live in capitalist societies. I assume most readers on LessWrong know that the stereotypical use of “socialist” to generically mean “big government” is inconsistent with the meaning of “socialist” everywhere else in the world, which suffice to say refers to a type of “big government” not specified in typical American usage of the term. Maybe some Americans use “capitalist” to refer to “crony capitalism” and “socialism” to refer to a “mixed-market economy with much more regulation and nationalization of industry than we currently have”. Depending on who you ask, those are just two types of state capitalism. Of course the United States isn’t the only part of the world where people lose all the original meaning of political terminology. It definitely feels like when a lot of people say “capitalism”, they’re using it as a boo light to castigate whatever “big multinational corporations” or “the American empire” are currently doing.
This is all to say for non-American readers like myself, it’s confusing to read of this pretense of Silicon Valley as apolitical instead of inherently capitalist when from the outside it looks like almost every institution is unambiguously capitalist to begin with. I know some American libertarians might joke the U.S.A. is already a socialist country, but real conversation is limited when the definitions of terms as we use them in context aren’t pinned down and made common knowledge. The optimal solution to synchronizing definitions/usage of political jargon hasn’t been found yet. LW really doesn’t need more kinds of jargon to deal with though.
I know this post is intended for a Bay Area audience, but that stated for readers outside the United States reading about politics is confusing. The words “liberal” and “conservative” mean moderately different political ideas in Western countries aside from the United States, and “libertarian” and “socialist” mean very different things in other countries, especially outside the Anglosphere, than they typically connote in the U.S. Americans typically mean by “capitalist” what other Western countries mean by “capitalist”, since we all live in capitalist societies. I assume most readers on LessWrong know that the stereotypical use of “socialist” to generically mean “big government” is inconsistent with the meaning of “socialist” everywhere else in the world, which suffice to say refers to a type of “big government” not specified in typical American usage of the term. Maybe some Americans use “capitalist” to refer to “crony capitalism” and “socialism” to refer to a “mixed-market economy with much more regulation and nationalization of industry than we currently have”. Depending on who you ask, those are just two types of state capitalism. Of course the United States isn’t the only part of the world where people lose all the original meaning of political terminology. It definitely feels like when a lot of people say “capitalism”, they’re using it as a boo light to castigate whatever “big multinational corporations” or “the American empire” are currently doing.
This is all to say for non-American readers like myself, it’s confusing to read of this pretense of Silicon Valley as apolitical instead of inherently capitalist when from the outside it looks like almost every institution is unambiguously capitalist to begin with. I know some American libertarians might joke the U.S.A. is already a socialist country, but real conversation is limited when the definitions of terms as we use them in context aren’t pinned down and made common knowledge. The optimal solution to synchronizing definitions/usage of political jargon hasn’t been found yet. LW really doesn’t need more kinds of jargon to deal with though.