Rick first alerted me to the end of the popular rationalist blog Slate State Codex. Then it was all over my internet. I have never been a huge fan of the rationalist community, mostly because they don’t do history very well, but this is a big deal.

It has also produced some great conversation on both sides of the American cultural divide. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote an excellent meta-piece on the whole affair. Lewis-Kraus uses “Silicon Valley” as shorthand for the intellectual right. This is more correct than wrong, even though the region votes Democrat, because Silicon Valley is more of a mindset than a geographic place.

Lewis-Kraus’s Silicon Valley is a new, decentralized informational ecology. He contrasts Silicon Valley with the old media: big corporations trying to maintain a stranglehold on “the narrative.” (Lewis-Kraus readily admits he’s part of the old media.) For Lewis-Kraus, Silicon Valley is trying to build an alternative mediascape. Big corporations such as the NY Times are fighting back.

It’s an interesting cultural war to follow, if you’re in to that kind of stuff. I can’t seem to shake my uneasiness about the rationalist community, though. As I mentioned, they don’t do history, or they don’t do it well. They are also into communes, which I distrust immensely. Utopian and communitarian experiments are bad for all of your healths (physical, emotional, etc.). I don’t know how the rationalists ended up on the side of Silicon Valley. My guess is that the big corporations didn’t like what the rationalists had to say, or how they lived, so the rationalists found solace in the decentralized ecology of Silicon Valley.

I think the verdict is still out on who the victor of this cultural war will be. The big corporations have government backing, and they own the narrative bought by most of the American public, but the old media has shown its true colors in how it covers Donald Trump. I didn’t vote for the guy but it’s obvious his administration is not being reported on by the old media; it’s being slandered and attacked, with lies or with small untruths, rather than objectively reported on. The rationalists and their decentralized allies in the Silicon Valley informational ecology at least have truth on their side. Not the truth, but a commitment to the truth by way of discussion, the sharing of information, and fighting to protect the freedom of everybody’s conscience, rather than just their own team’s conscience.

We live in interesting times, and this makes blogging – a decentralized activity if there ever was one – all the more important.