Stanford, UC Berkeley, the High-Tech Frenzy on the Campuses.How (NOT) to Rule the World

"Stanford, UC Berkeley, the High-tech Frenzy on the Campuses How (NOT) to Rule the World"

Presentation by Barry Thornton and discussion of the article he wrote about the book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University

In this book, Theo Baker calls out Stanford’s integration into the high-tech capitalist behemoth, Silicon Valley, and how this has driven a stultifying and terrible culture of greed, extreme individualism and cutthroat competition among the students, on the campus in general, and the whole society. Stanford is the extreme expression, but high-tech capitalism is transforming UC Berkeley, and other campuses.

Students Swept Up in the Start-Up Madness Think They Are Going to Be “Masters of the Universe”—but the truth is They Are in Training to be, as Marx put it, “Capital Personified”.

UC Berkeley has seen years of conscious work by top administrators to chase the high tech gold rush and to change the culture: no more of this “down with corporate greed” atmosphere Berkeley has been known for, it’s time for “greed is good”.

What does this reveal about capitalism itself (digging deeper than “it’s just greed”)?

How does this reflect the extreme parasitism of the system now dominating the world, where enormous profits are made inside the US from production which takes place outside of the US under extreme conditions of exploitation?

What does it mean to meaningfully stand up to all this on a campus?

How can people work for an emancipatory, revolutionary future as the world hurtles to extremes?

What future will you work for? High-tech Nightmare? Or An Emancipated Humanity?

“If you have had a chance to see the world as it really is, there are profoundly different roads you can take with your life. You can just get into the dog-eat-dog, and most likely get swallowed up by that while trying to get ahead in it. You can put your snout into the trough and try to scarf up as much as you can, while scrambling desperately to get more than others. Or you can try to do something that would change the whole direction of society and the whole way the world is. When you put those things alongside each other, which one has any meaning, which one really contributes to anything worthwhile? Your life is going to be about something—or it’s going to be about nothing.” Bob Avakian, revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism. From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, A Memoir by Bob Avakian, 2005