empirical science -> capitalism

Source: Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest

Empiricism <> Quantification

• “Early empirical scientists sought to contain the forces of nature by quantifying them. Everything had to be measured in terms of mass, heat, force or some other metric. The quantification of our world contained and controlled everything that mattered, while ignoring the pesky, undefined aspects of reality that men of science didn’t want to mess with—especially emotions, meaning, and ethics.”
  • EG: subjugation of women as witches
    • “First off, women healers, using a very different language for the properties of herbs and curative methods, were still proving themselves entirely more effective at treating medical conditions than the men of science with their leeches and bloodletting. Second, the Royal Society and its scientists were themselves being accused of “atheistical” materialism by the Church. By acknowledging the power of black magic and joining the witch-burning frenzy, men of science distanced themselves from their own from their own godless, materialist picture of the world, while also eliminating their greatest competition. In the process, they robbed themselves of experiential approaches to science and several thousand years of retained knowledge from those practices”

⇒ Capitalism

• “By divorcing itself from meaning systems (especially the ones from which it emerged), science made itself particularly vulnerable to forces that sought to leverage it for domination and extraction. Renaissance-era science, which categorized reality from above, was compatible with the top-down, one-size-fits-all approach of the industrialism that followed”
• “Thanks to early scientists’ objectified, quantifying, transactional biases, science and the technologies it spawned became the fast friends of colonial capitalists who were looking for ways of putting a monetary value on everything”

⇒ Silicon Valley

• “Dawkins’s model of human-as-hardware, and those of intellectually compatible colleagues like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, won out in Silicon Valley. Their views were entirely more compatible with business models that depended on manipulating human beings instead of empowering them—exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity. If people were really just passively responding to lines of genetic or cultural code, then why not be the ones writing that code and capitalizing off it?”

Excerpt From Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Rushkoff, Douglas This material may be protected by copyright.