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They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.
Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.
Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.
Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy
I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term.
It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
I think it is a little bit more complicated:
I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.
So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:
1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)
2. has a predisposition for narcissism
It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.
People with NPD make terrible leaders and they literally have a very tenuous grip on reality.
These are exactly the people who get promoted to billionaire status, which hugely amplifies their ability to damage everything and everyone.
The entire system is insane.
The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect.
It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.
In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.
This doesn't make me anti-government.
I see the need for it & I want it work well.
But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.
I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.
It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.
And realistically, they don't require a monopoly. If there are 1000 competitors but they all have the same evil ideology at the helm, the result is identical. Your choice is now "flee the country".
Except, wait no. Those companies have the entire western world by the balls. Want to avoid extreme surveillance from Google? Maybe there's a forest somewhere you can forage in.
For example, I find it very annoying to have to fill out time cards or such, and other people find it very annoying to have any demands whatsoever on their time outside of core working hours. If we had to have a political debate about which is the one true working model, we'd get pretty worked up about it, and if I lost I'd go away bearing a pretty strong grudge about the daily annoyance that was inflicted on me against my will. Instead, there's some companies that do it one way and some that do it the other, and we self-sort between them according to our preferences.
Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.
They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets."
They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist.
But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent.
See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.
The stuff about nation states and corporations taking over seems confused as well, since pretty much everywhere goverments, regulation and taxation are highest/largest they've ever been. Also, it is very strange taking the interest of some people in getting rid or moving beyond nation states as sinister since this has been a stated goal of democratic projects like the EU. Furthermore, in China technology is completely subservient to the state and they intentionally kneecapped the whole sector fairly recently since it grew too big.
Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.
Like, you can find plenty of historical examples of writers saying that automobiles will cause a social collapse or whatever, but you can find a lot more historical businesspeople who advanced insane claims about their business interests.
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lapore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."
...and on and on it goes...
That said, I disagree with a lot of her conclusions.
Contra her assertions, I believe that technological change is the principal cause of historical change. Lawrence Lessig wrote Code is Law, which highlights how specific software system decisions constrained the available legal regimes that could apply. The same thing happens for all technology: the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization, which is the real reason nation states are eroding.
I do agree with her about the undesirability of an "artificial state"--an algorithmic government that rules by deterministic rules instead of representative human judgement. And I do agree that many technologists think that we'd be better off being ruled by machines instead of people. But that is (a) not a new phenomenon, and (b) equally found outside Silicon Valley. Paul Krugman often writes about Asimov's psychohistory being a strong influence on him. He longs for a world of Philosopher Kings who make decisions logically and without the messy delusions of the masses.
There's probably nothing powerful in society than the wealthy elite. They have the power to slow down or stop technological change if it threatens their sources of continued wealth.
(1): https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652?seq=1
Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?
The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.
"An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates to have latched on to the lingo of Stranger in a Strange Land while apparently never having read a sentence of Heinlein's prose. As a rule of thumb, those who say "grok" do not.
And it's always Stranger in a Strange Land for the messiah figure. Here, have a better Heinlein story.
https://archive.org/details/Unknown_v04n06_1941-04_PDF_unz.o...
I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore.
There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves.
I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.
Just because the PR dept of a company spouts some bullshit doesn't mean that it actually represents the company's views. A super bowl advert referencing 1984 does not literally mean the company sees itself as the protagonist of 1984
I see no evidence they even read these SciFi books in the first place let alone misunderstood them.
The other canonical example of this is the naming of Palantir, of course.
In many cases I think it's less that they misread the fiction, and more that they intentionally model themselves after the villains in fiction.
From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today.
From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects.
From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today.
From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.
(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050173
Is there some evidence for this claim? Lepore in her reply says "I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan" and then there is a lot of talk about Asimov. I also read a very old article about Amazon, and the journalist noted that a book by David Niven was the only one on Bezos' office bookshelf.
But, so what? I read Heinlein and Niven and Asimov when I was young, too, along with a bunch of much pulpier stuff (James P. Hogan, anyone?). Does that make me and millions of other science fiction fans technocratic libertarians? If not, why do people regularly point to science fiction as the source of these three men's libertarian leanings?
Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
Look at the arguments. They are all over the place, and almost schizophrenic. There is a lot of reaching and pulling of narratives from individual quotes. When someone is selling you something, its probably best to ignore any sort of deeper meaning in what they are saying. They are selling you something, full stop. Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection. They will say whatever they think will get you to buy. There is no deeper meaning. People with actual life experience know this. Somehow, she doesn't. The executives will say whatever they have to to get you to buy.
It's sort of funny that you accuse the author (using evidence only from an interview) of projection and also write this in the same comment:
> She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.
Talk about projection.
I am kinda tired of those [expletive]. Paul Verhoeven the first in line.
Heinlein's thesis was that power unearned is power abused. And since voting is gifted power - people abuse it. Heinlein's idea that the only way to earn the franchise is to first serve the society may be wrong, but no one engages with its bigger idea - that the franchise must be earned. And it is true - people will gladly vote hitler and hamas into power. They will vote on tribal, ethnic, cultural and religious lines. They will vote to troll.
What people rarely vote for is the best interests of themselves or their nation.
It doesn't have a lot to say about not voting on tribal, ethnic, cultural or religious lines or voting for candidates to troll, but does have an awful lot to say about the virtues of militarism.
It's okay that you didn't know that! https://xkcd.com/1053/
But the answer is, no, it doesn't. I would say that Becker covered a lot of the same ground, and does it better.
There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.
As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that is an artifact of modern mass media. In the Abrahamic traditions idolatry and an aversion to imagery exists exactly for this reason, because it leads to a culture in which people cease to be able to distinguish how something appears from what it's supposed to point to.
They aren't unrelated at all. People like Musk or Zuckerberg are the way they are, because they grew up in an environment that disregards the moral, intellectual, religious and even aesthetic dimensions of fiction (or non-fiction) and are effectively overgrown toddlers as a result, and in that they're just like most people now, except with more power.
I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting.
If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.
Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
I remember my first pass reading of Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was bedazzled by some of the tech … it was later readings that the comments like “biomass” (the recent echo in AI “meat proxy”), or how the Primer was ultimately a failure sank in later readings.
So it’s kind of worse than Idiocracy
... but I guess some people took this as positive reinforcement.
Someone here on HN crowned Sam Altman as a "sociopat sociapat" i.e. playing sociopats for money. I think that was the insight of years for me.
Battle Royal explodeing collars for the working class in his doomsday bunker. Or was that Seth of Reddit?
It is a especially visible concept in the new tech sector war industry. Edgelord as a Service.
They took most of us employees to see Ready Player One in the cinema when it came out (sometime after the Oculus acquisition, but before "the metaverse")
Correct...and that is why the type of analysis in this interview is useless. The word cherry-picked was invented for this type of thinking. And its really similar to a lot of those executive talks too. Its like that spiderman meme where everyone points to everyone else. Its psychological projection at scale. Neither side really has any idea what they are talking about. Its just creating and framing debates for their own purposes.
No one suggested otherwise.
Every child starts out thinking, "if I was in charge, I could fix this. It's so simple!"
Then you actually see that when you make bad choices, you or others get hurt, and you realize that you don't always know what's best.
But these guys never get hurt, because they have the money to be shielded from it, so they end up being these delusional wrecking ball assholes, who think they know better than everyone else and don't need anyone else's consent (I.e. votes) to make whatever overly simplistic or authoritarian changes their underdeveloped brains concoct.
Every worse, they -- like pretty much all of us -- tend to think that most people are just like them, so they think not only that they understand normal people, but that they are normal people. And the ones that don't either tend to think that their will should be imposed on the rest of us because we're too stupid to understand what's good for us and/or just view us as resources to be mined.
If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader.
Where is your evidence for this? It's a pretty strong claim.
You may want to get your info from more places than Fox News.
other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class.
that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You don't keep your money if you dont have any concept of risk.
https://thetechleaders.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-exploring...
In the early days of Silicon Valley, tech companies were disrupted. But we shouldn't forget that the true origins of Silicon Valley were in defense contracting. Modern tech companeis have become so large that they have become almost indistinguishable from the state (ironically, in a way that people accuse Chinese companies of doing). Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are now in the same category as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
Put another way, tech companies haven't sought a utopia, they've simply amplified the current system, which is one of increasing inequality.
They she doesn't understand centralization, surveillance to the nth power, and IQ loss that comes with AI.