Today’s links Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense: We’re living through a revolution, but all we hear about is scams. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: None Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense (permalink) If there was any area where we needed a lot of “innovation,” it’s in climate tech. We’ve already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating. Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher’s lament about “the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads.” Today’s best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho NFT frauds: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/ Or planet-destroying AI frauds: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain If that was the best “innovation” the human race had to offer, we’d be fucking doomed. But – as Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect – there’s a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and exciting innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech: https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/ The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing…Pluralistic: Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense (30 May 2024)