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Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

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Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#91

Post by rightbyte »

verandaguy wrote: post #18
rightbyte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.

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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#92

Post by Jtsummers »

hunterpayne wrote: post #80
strken wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

> 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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#94

Post by ReptileMan »

strken wrote: post #70
ilamont wrote: post #22

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 Asimo…

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.

>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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#95

Post by Jtsummers »

hunterpayne wrote: post #66
JohnFen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ei…

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 whe…

> 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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#96

Post by bonsai_bar »

WalterBright wrote: post #24
RevEng wrote: post #8

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 t…

[flagged]

X has probably the lowest level of censorship for right-wing racist incels of any social media platform.

FTFY.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#97

Post by danans »

swiftcoder wrote: post #68
ygjb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#98

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #32
yoyohello13 wrote: post #25

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.

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?

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.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#99

Post by j16sdiz »

swiftcoder wrote: post #68
ygjb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tim Cook might be not. One of the AI companies might.

Imagine what one could do with an infinite Charisma, propaganda generating machine.

Re: Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

#100

Post by t-3 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #68
ygjb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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