I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
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.
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
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
It is true for multiple topics too, like economics. It is almost worse off for people to take these 100 level classes without then taking 200 and 300 level continuations. They think they have extra knowledge in the subject because of the classes but it was really just a primer later to tell them why all that stuff sounds good at first but is completely wrong and useless.
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
He's gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when he get to James Lemon, and then he's gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- he's gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.
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.
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.
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.
At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
> At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms.
While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else.
I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society.
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
Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way.
Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones.
Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
> Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.
And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.
The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example?
But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.
Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
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.
Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
> 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.
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.
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.
In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
We've let the government get bloated, inefficient and corrupt by allowing private enterprise to have an outsized effect on it. Private enterprise can hire people to live next to DC and spend every waking minute pushing their agenda on politicians. Private enterprise can funnel huge amounts of money into campaigns for their preferred candidates. It only benefits the corporations when we have ancient, technically illiterate politicians jockeying their favorite hobbyhorse policies while throwing up their hands at how "the other side" is blocking them. It's a designed deadlock.
> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
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.
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
It's easy to give businesses a pass on internal inefficiency because you don't typically need to do business with any particular company in order to live your life and businesses don't tax you in order to pay for that inefficiency like governments do. If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
> If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
Right, but if someone’s point is that bloated government should be replaced by lean, efficient companies, then it does matter whether they are actually lean and efficient.
It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately. Health care insurance companies definitely "tax" you for their inefficiencies (through higher costs) and they are definitely something you "need to do business with".
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
Health insurance is so regulated and so intertwined with public policy aims, that ostensibly private health care companies are themselves essentially an arm of the government. Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation. The American health insurance system is one of the most unpleasant (sets of) bureaucracies I personally have to deal with, especially because I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance (which itself really annoys me - I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with). I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so; and I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
> Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.
Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…
> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc.
I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.
Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.
I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.
I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.
On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?
So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:
1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.
2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).
There's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?
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.
No, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social 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.
I don’t really understand this perspective? I’m not a small government guy, I think the government ought to play an important role in providing a good regulatory framework and a strong social net. But if someone’s going to have direct power over my life, I’d much prefer a business owner or boss I can freely choose in principle rather than a government official who may not view me as part of their winning coalition.
The flip of this is that businesses aren't elected, and you have no control over them. If they have a monopoly, then you're 100% fucked, you have no choice.
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.
I really don't like this type of arguing where people try to play stupid. You know it's different, because you used the word "sanctioned". And this was really the whole point of my comment.
We live in a representative democracy. We all have a choice in who we vote for, what polices we support. In addition, we have checks and balances in place to prevent the consolidation of power. The government is not "one thing", it's hundreds of things working together.
Now, the system is not perfect, and I never claimed it to be. But compare this to how corporations functions. Corporations function as totalitarian dictatorships. You cannot vote. You have no influence. And they make decisions unilaterally, regardless of how harmful or stupid said decision may be.
The arm in which we control corporations IS the government. It IS regulation. The only reason you're not working 80 hours a week and dying young is because of the government. Now, again, that doesn't mean the government is perfect. But those regulations were protested for and voted in by people just like you and me, and I think that's good. So sue me.
You seem to be putting a lot of viewpoints on me I never proclaimed.
That is not the only arm we control corporations with, corporations even die sometimes for doing the wrong thing. And voting internally is not the only way to change a corporations behavior. I think talking about them being a dictatorship is confusing the aspects we're talking about.
I don't know when I said the government and corporations were the same thing when monopolies, but I still hold one is much more destructible than the other when they are properly separated (they aren't).
I don't think markets and capitalism solve everything. I would say when democracy and capitalism are both working well (not right now) their combo is awesome.
I don't think placing all blame on corporations is productive because it's a misdiagnosis. I am more afraid of the ratchet effect than I am of Google, but they both scare the shit out of me.
Edit- I admit my original comment wasn't very good, I apologize.
I will agree one benefit of corporations is that they're more destructible, but the flip side of that is there are less guarantees. The constitution is pretty indestructible, and I consider that largely good, because it guarantees some baselines for us. I also agree they need to be properly separated, which they are not currently and haven't been for a while.
I think, though, when we see many (all?) corporations exhibiting the same bad behavior, and said bad behavior materially negatively affects the population, that's a sign we have a gap in legislation. We shouldn't, and really can't, play wack-a-mole with corporations individually with individual actions. We should fix it upstream.
How do you ever choose your boss at work? Never. Oh, by quitting that job and getting another? That's called "moving" when applied to politics. Which is super unattractive in much of regular life, unless you don't need people.
Most people change jobs much, much more frequently than they move between even states, much less countries. The latest cohorts for which we have full-career data held about 12 jobs over their lifetimes, and job hopping is much more normalized now than it used to be. Obviously it's hard enough that we all have to put up with some frustrations and inconveniences in our career, but it seems like it mostly works out.
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.
Getting a new job is completely different from denouncing your citizenship and moving to a different country. Oh also there are no territories without government so you can’t even do that.
We seem to be quickly approaching, if we are not already there, a point where you can no longer choose to simply not associate with the billionaires anymore. They have such extreme access to resources and power they essentially control the direction of society whether we want them to or not.
We believe it because it’s true. I think it’s actually way more common for people to have your opinion that governments are not bloated or inefficient as a general rule. And you always criticize the private industry and not the government when it’s the government who has this power in the first place. That’s like over feeding your cat and then blaming the cat.
I don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill.
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.
If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.
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.
It depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.
I don’t think writers have automatic oracle status or anything, but they tend to issue commentary that has a better track record of being borne out than what is communicated by business leaders with a very strong vested interest in advancing their own interests.
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.
> “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
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.
> "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. 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. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
Sometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points.
What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
Barlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.
People have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel.
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.
I think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's.
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.
Play devils advocate for a bit: of course they should model themselves after the villains! Villains get shit done and change the world, and use it to the fullest potential.
'Heroes' are the schmucks who get roped around and fail to make things better until the very end at best, and even then leave massive amounts of preventable harm.
If one sets out to change the world don't be a hero, be a villain. It is horrifying, sure but it is the logical conclusion.
There is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc.
AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation).
So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story.
To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.
I think it’s true that when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, “Yes, this story is a template for what I should do with my company,” that’s bonkers. But there is [also] this technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on.
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?
The historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.
Think about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. 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.
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.
> Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection.
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.
> I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
> 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.
I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.
Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...
>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.
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.
I mean, exploring how people make irresponsible voting decisions in sci-fi contexts might be an interesting, but Starship Troopers is actually a story about how a structure of power dedicated to conflict with faceless aliens seeks to perpetuate itself by only permitting those who have had obedience to it literally beaten into them to vote, and Heinlein (at least 1950s Red Scare Heinlein) isn't exactly critical of it or even ambivalent about it.
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.
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.
This was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book.
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.
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
I very sure that she would disagree with my attempt at summarizing her ideas, nevertheless, I think her key insight is that technology is corroding democracy because:
1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
As I said, I don't agree with her on this, mostly because it's a very subjective perspective. She has a certain view of an ideal society and criticizes deviations from that.
I find it fascinating because it raises good points. She paints a vivid picture of the modern world--I just think it is incomplete.
> 1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
Hardly any proof is given for this. It's just "Twitter is now the town square", but it's not as if the town square was ever a state service created specifically to provide a place to discuss politics. That happened in many, many places, including things like (privately owned) inns. A pertinent question is: What services are now not supplied by the state that were before and to what extent is that mediated by 'artificial' technology?
The actual relevant insight here imho is "privatization and anti-government sentiment has pushed society towards positions where it is beholden to megacorporations".
"Artificial state" is a red herring there, papering over the exaltation of private industry and capitalism in general.
> 2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
This is a very old insight (and quite a debatable one at that).
> 3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
This is just conjecture on her part, no proof is provided. I can't classify this as an insight. A hypothesis at best.
> I find it fascinating because it raises good points.
I think only well-founded points are 'good' points. In this case I would argue that it is very much a bandwagon set of views with some fancy sounding unsubstantiated labels like "artificial state" slapped on to it.
I don't know Lessig's work, but that chain of thought sounds like a more narrowed down version of Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1) The way in which technology shapes our world varies greatly, and I like his writing concerning how nuclear technology shapes politics towards centralization of power.
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.
I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.
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.
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.
Except the strange dysgenics reason for the downfall of high civilization in Idiocracy it is a interesting movie. It should have talked more about cultural enshittification.
> Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
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.
The government has expanded by any objective measure:
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")
I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities.
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.
I think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club".
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.
I think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this.
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.
She is an out of touch nepo baby. Her policies haven't exactly been big successes. Jobs are leaving and the specific stated reasons usually have to do with her. Because of her tax increases and the Laffer curve, tax receipts are falling and there are now significant budget shortfalls opening up. If you didn't know this, perhaps you want to get your info from more places than MSNow/MSNBC.
> Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities
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.
Compared the the majority of the population in the US, and like 95% of the population in South Africa, he seemed to grow up pretty damn wealthy. Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.
No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did, but part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.
If you don't think Musk grew up wealthy after listening to what he says about his childhood, I could only assume you also grew up in an extremely privileged environment and just don't realize how far above the median your life was.
I don't think there's anything deep here. Good fiction is entertainment. The author may or may not also intend to send a message or teach a lesson, but above all fiction has to be entertaining, or it won't get read. A sense of morality is obviously not required to be entertained. People like Musk are science fiction fans who also happen to be morally bankrupt. I believe those two factors are mostly unrelated. Space, rockets, aliens, lasers, pew pew pew, end of story.
Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.
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.
You also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work.
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.
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.
Silicon Valley has been heavily influenced by a different author. It just happens to be Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand sold this idea that selfishness is a virtue. Taken further, you see a strong thread between objectivism and transhumanism.
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 know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.
I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
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.
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
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
Lucky we have the counterexample of a tech company run by a guy who did a humanities PhD under Jürgen Habermas...Palantir.
In his case, it could be called opposition research
And thus you have demonstrated the irrelevance of academic background as a meaningful data point for explaining motivations at the individual level.
A lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”.
I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
People really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue.
So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
It is true for multiple topics too, like economics. It is almost worse off for people to take these 100 level classes without then taking 200 and 300 level continuations. They think they have extra knowledge in the subject because of the classes but it was really just a primer later to tell them why all that stuff sounds good at first but is completely wrong and useless.
It doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
That's a super philosophy lisper
It really depends on what you mean by philosophy. Academic philosophy? Ancient philosophy? Pop philosophy? Self-help content?
For a list of topics that aren't bullshit, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good starting point.
https://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
Well “a lot” in volume sure, but that feels unnecessarily (maybe ignorantly) dismissive of the core corpus of the field.
Find me any field in which there isn’t “a lot” of BS.
If it is known that a lot of the marbles are pink there would have to be other colors. That means there is something to it!
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
He's gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when he get to James Lemon, and then he's gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- he's gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
I like apples.
I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.
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.
Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
> Rule of law, functioning government providing services
Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.
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.
At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
> At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms.
While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else.
I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society.
Rather rules over ashes and all that.
> or those with the resources to buy might
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
I said resources not money. Charisma, religion and promoting hate have empowered just as many psychopaths in history as wealth.
Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Not when he has to compete for them with Zombie Steve.
Tim Cook might be not. One of the AI companies might.
Imagine what one could do with an infinite Charisma, propaganda generating machine.
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way.
Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones.
Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
The problem for them is that in the US, "those who get in the way" are armed.
In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
> Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.
And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.
The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
If I was a semi-rich thug boss I'd hire out my thugs as security to all the nervous billionaire nerds. Including cybersecurity.
Then I could make a move whenever.
It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
laughs in Chechen
That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example?
But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.
Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
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.
And many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds
Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
> 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.
I had a friend who tried to get a job as a trader with one of the big banks. They fired him after six months because he "wasn't hungry enough."
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.
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.
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.
In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
We've let the government get bloated, inefficient and corrupt by allowing private enterprise to have an outsized effect on it. Private enterprise can hire people to live next to DC and spend every waking minute pushing their agenda on politicians. Private enterprise can funnel huge amounts of money into campaigns for their preferred candidates. It only benefits the corporations when we have ancient, technically illiterate politicians jockeying their favorite hobbyhorse policies while throwing up their hands at how "the other side" is blocking them. It's a designed deadlock.
To some degree CIA also infiltrates private orgs to manipulate from inside out. It’s like a private-public partnership /s
> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
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.
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
It's easy to give businesses a pass on internal inefficiency because you don't typically need to do business with any particular company in order to live your life and businesses don't tax you in order to pay for that inefficiency like governments do. If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
> If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
Right, but if someone’s point is that bloated government should be replaced by lean, efficient companies, then it does matter whether they are actually lean and efficient.
It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately. Health care insurance companies definitely "tax" you for their inefficiencies (through higher costs) and they are definitely something you "need to do business with".
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
Health insurance is so regulated and so intertwined with public policy aims, that ostensibly private health care companies are themselves essentially an arm of the government. Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation. The American health insurance system is one of the most unpleasant (sets of) bureaucracies I personally have to deal with, especially because I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance (which itself really annoys me - I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with). I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so; and I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
> Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.
Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…
> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc. I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.
Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.
I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.
I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.
On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?
So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:
1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.
2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Been working for more than 20 years in corporations and I've seen the same.
There's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?
> weren't they right during the Cold War?
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.
No, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social 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.
Yea the economic ideology that seems most correct is the Austrian school.
I don’t really understand this perspective? I’m not a small government guy, I think the government ought to play an important role in providing a good regulatory framework and a strong social net. But if someone’s going to have direct power over my life, I’d much prefer a business owner or boss I can freely choose in principle rather than a government official who may not view me as part of their winning coalition.
The flip of this is that businesses aren't elected, and you have no control over them. If they have a monopoly, then you're 100% fucked, you have no choice.
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.
If the government is in control, it's a sanctioned monopoly. You seem to be opposed to monopoly?
I really don't like this type of arguing where people try to play stupid. You know it's different, because you used the word "sanctioned". And this was really the whole point of my comment.
We live in a representative democracy. We all have a choice in who we vote for, what polices we support. In addition, we have checks and balances in place to prevent the consolidation of power. The government is not "one thing", it's hundreds of things working together.
Now, the system is not perfect, and I never claimed it to be. But compare this to how corporations functions. Corporations function as totalitarian dictatorships. You cannot vote. You have no influence. And they make decisions unilaterally, regardless of how harmful or stupid said decision may be.
The arm in which we control corporations IS the government. It IS regulation. The only reason you're not working 80 hours a week and dying young is because of the government. Now, again, that doesn't mean the government is perfect. But those regulations were protested for and voted in by people just like you and me, and I think that's good. So sue me.
You seem to be putting a lot of viewpoints on me I never proclaimed.
That is not the only arm we control corporations with, corporations even die sometimes for doing the wrong thing. And voting internally is not the only way to change a corporations behavior. I think talking about them being a dictatorship is confusing the aspects we're talking about.
I don't know when I said the government and corporations were the same thing when monopolies, but I still hold one is much more destructible than the other when they are properly separated (they aren't).
I don't think markets and capitalism solve everything. I would say when democracy and capitalism are both working well (not right now) their combo is awesome.
I don't think placing all blame on corporations is productive because it's a misdiagnosis. I am more afraid of the ratchet effect than I am of Google, but they both scare the shit out of me.
Edit- I admit my original comment wasn't very good, I apologize.
I will agree one benefit of corporations is that they're more destructible, but the flip side of that is there are less guarantees. The constitution is pretty indestructible, and I consider that largely good, because it guarantees some baselines for us. I also agree they need to be properly separated, which they are not currently and haven't been for a while.
I think, though, when we see many (all?) corporations exhibiting the same bad behavior, and said bad behavior materially negatively affects the population, that's a sign we have a gap in legislation. We shouldn't, and really can't, play wack-a-mole with corporations individually with individual actions. We should fix it upstream.
How do you ever choose your boss at work? Never. Oh, by quitting that job and getting another? That's called "moving" when applied to politics. Which is super unattractive in much of regular life, unless you don't need people.
Most people change jobs much, much more frequently than they move between even states, much less countries. The latest cohorts for which we have full-career data held about 12 jobs over their lifetimes, and job hopping is much more normalized now than it used to be. Obviously it's hard enough that we all have to put up with some frustrations and inconveniences in our career, but it seems like it mostly works out.
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.
Getting a new job is completely different from denouncing your citizenship and moving to a different country. Oh also there are no territories without government so you can’t even do that.
We seem to be quickly approaching, if we are not already there, a point where you can no longer choose to simply not associate with the billionaires anymore. They have such extreme access to resources and power they essentially control the direction of society whether we want them to or not.
We believe it because it’s true. I think it’s actually way more common for people to have your opinion that governments are not bloated or inefficient as a general rule. And you always criticize the private industry and not the government when it’s the government who has this power in the first place. That’s like over feeding your cat and then blaming the cat.
Honestly, at this point both the government and private enterprise are fucking me so vigorously I don’t know who to hate more.
That's not brainwashing, that's lived experience.
I don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill.
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.
If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.
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.
It depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.
I don’t think writers have automatic oracle status or anything, but they tend to issue commentary that has a better track record of being borne out than what is communicated by business leaders with a very strong vested interest in advancing their own interests.
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.
> “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
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...
Also on the front page this morning:
"An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
Re: replacing functions of democratic government, this was already predicted in Democracy Incorporated almost 10 years ago now: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178486/de...
> "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. 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. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
Sometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points.
What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
Barlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.
People have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel.
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.
I think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's.
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.
Play devils advocate for a bit: of course they should model themselves after the villains! Villains get shit done and change the world, and use it to the fullest potential.
'Heroes' are the schmucks who get roped around and fail to make things better until the very end at best, and even then leave massive amounts of preventable harm.
If one sets out to change the world don't be a hero, be a villain. It is horrifying, sure but it is the logical conclusion.
Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.
There is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc.
AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation).
So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story.
To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.
Does this include Pippin ?
Science fiction is entertainment.
There's no way to like, "misread" it.
I think it’s true that when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, “Yes, this story is a template for what I should do with my company,” that’s bonkers. But there is [also] this technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on.
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?
Did you also get hold of a billion dollars at some point? For some reason, those of us who work for a living seem less inclined to such psychosis
The historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.
I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
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.
Think about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. 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.
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.
> Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection.
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'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
> 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.
I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.
Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...
>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.
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.
I mean, exploring how people make irresponsible voting decisions in sci-fi contexts might be an interesting, but Starship Troopers is actually a story about how a structure of power dedicated to conflict with faceless aliens seeks to perpetuate itself by only permitting those who have had obedience to it literally beaten into them to vote, and Heinlein (at least 1950s Red Scare Heinlein) isn't exactly critical of it or even ambivalent about it.
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.
Feels like a bit of a strawman.
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.
This was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book.
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.
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
> there were a lot of ideas packed into it
One could equally say that it is all over the place.
> This was a fascinating interview
Can you give us one or two new insights you gained from it?
I very sure that she would disagree with my attempt at summarizing her ideas, nevertheless, I think her key insight is that technology is corroding democracy because:
1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
As I said, I don't agree with her on this, mostly because it's a very subjective perspective. She has a certain view of an ideal society and criticizes deviations from that.
I find it fascinating because it raises good points. She paints a vivid picture of the modern world--I just think it is incomplete.
> 1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
Hardly any proof is given for this. It's just "Twitter is now the town square", but it's not as if the town square was ever a state service created specifically to provide a place to discuss politics. That happened in many, many places, including things like (privately owned) inns. A pertinent question is: What services are now not supplied by the state that were before and to what extent is that mediated by 'artificial' technology?
The actual relevant insight here imho is "privatization and anti-government sentiment has pushed society towards positions where it is beholden to megacorporations".
"Artificial state" is a red herring there, papering over the exaltation of private industry and capitalism in general.
> 2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
This is a very old insight (and quite a debatable one at that).
> 3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
This is just conjecture on her part, no proof is provided. I can't classify this as an insight. A hypothesis at best.
> I find it fascinating because it raises good points.
I think only well-founded points are 'good' points. In this case I would argue that it is very much a bandwagon set of views with some fancy sounding unsubstantiated labels like "artificial state" slapped on to it.
I don't know Lessig's work, but that chain of thought sounds like a more narrowed down version of Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1) The way in which technology shapes our world varies greatly, and I like his writing concerning how nuclear technology shapes politics towards centralization of power.
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
I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.
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.
I'm looking forward to reading it, particularly for the SF part.
> the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization
Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?
Americans needing fresh bananas did it.
With Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film
Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
They take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.
Maybe they got sucked into the cool tech?
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.
Heck, we're living Idiocracy right now.
The UFC fight on the Whitehouse lawn was a bit much.
Except the strange dysgenics reason for the downfall of high civilization in Idiocracy it is a interesting movie. It should have talked more about cultural enshittification.
Camacho made the most intelligent man secretary of the interior, Trump would never do that.
So it’s kind of worse than Idiocracy
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
It's basically the Torment Nexus meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
... but I guess some people took this as positive reinforcement.
Yeah. A bit overused by now I refrained from quoting it.
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.
> Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
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")
What did you all think of the, "without triggering seizures" scene?
Zuckerberg style the idea from snow crash
I'm going to assume you mean stole...
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.
Haha it would make sense they're not even sci-fi ball-knowers.
Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
> Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
No one suggested otherwise.
Reminds me a bit of this article that got submitted a few times recently and got a little discussion:
https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050173
It doesn’t misread anything, it doesn’t read at all.
The government has expanded by any objective measure:
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.
> From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
Most of these are state-level though?
> From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects
That's because they didn't give a shit about the environment in the 50s. They just yeeted nukes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site) and people watched them from the Las Vegas strip. One river caught on fire 14 times holy mackerel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River.
> From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
That doesn't tell us anything. There's just more stuff today that simply didn't exist in 1950.
It's possible the regulation dial has been turned too far the other way. But arguing for going back to 0 regulations is also insanity.
> From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
Yeah, let's cut where all that spending went- medicaid, medicare, social security, and welfare...oh
How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?
Which government has expanded? Most communist governments felt after 1990 and privatised their economies.
So you're saying it's improved.
(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")
I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
Fair enough. But why stats from 1950?
Does this article mention Adam Becker at all ?
So, a cool shortcut is that you can go to a website and press "Ctrl-F", which will let you search for a given string on the page.
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.
Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities.
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.
I think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club".
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.
I think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this.
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.
> Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either.
Where is your evidence for this? It's a pretty strong claim.
The fact that its been verified by multiple sources, including the mayor herself.
That's just a claim, not evidence. If she's said it, it should be easy to link to an interview or an article showing these statements.
You're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others.
You may want to get your info from more places than Fox News.
> You're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others.
If it's true she has never paid her own bills and her husband has never had a job, then I'd like that sort of regular life.
If she has been paying her own bills or her husband has had a job in his life, then say so.
She is an out of touch nepo baby. Her policies haven't exactly been big successes. Jobs are leaving and the specific stated reasons usually have to do with her. Because of her tax increases and the Laffer curve, tax receipts are falling and there are now significant budget shortfalls opening up. If you didn't know this, perhaps you want to get your info from more places than MSNow/MSNBC.
> Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities
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.
Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support.
https://thetechleaders.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-exploring...
Compared the the majority of the population in the US, and like 95% of the population in South Africa, he seemed to grow up pretty damn wealthy. Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.
No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did, but part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.
If you don't think Musk grew up wealthy after listening to what he says about his childhood, I could only assume you also grew up in an extremely privileged environment and just don't realize how far above the median your life was.
I very much doubt that Silicon Valley people actually read the books they talk about.
I don't think there's anything deep here. Good fiction is entertainment. The author may or may not also intend to send a message or teach a lesson, but above all fiction has to be entertaining, or it won't get read. A sense of morality is obviously not required to be entertained. People like Musk are science fiction fans who also happen to be morally bankrupt. I believe those two factors are mostly unrelated. Space, rockets, aliens, lasers, pew pew pew, end of story.
Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.
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.
You also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work.
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.
>but above all fiction has to be entertaining
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.
Silicon Valley has been heavily influenced by a different author. It just happens to be Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand sold this idea that selfishness is a virtue. Taken further, you see a strong thread between objectivism and transhumanism.
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 know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.
"I’m really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we’re in the midst of right now."
They she doesn't understand centralization, surveillance to the nth power, and IQ loss that comes with AI.