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
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 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.
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.
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.
Once the Democratic Workers' Republic of America and thus socialist utopia you have been begging for has been achieved, you neckbeard will emerge from your basement as supreme leader for life.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 like almost everyone else 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.
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.
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.
X has massive censorship. Not only are pro-Palestinian accounts regularly banned, reach is restricted on any anti-Israel content. They even censored the Iranian flag! If you post it, X replaces it with their own, incorrect version.
No it does not. It has pro-far-right censorship which is something different.
Many right wingers confuse free speech with "nazi get to talk and everyone else should shut up and not oppose them". So, the mistake is understandable.
Aren't you maoist butcher busy planning your next murder?
Of course you national socialist vermin think free speech means you have a right to celebrate the assassinations of Brian Thompson and Chalie Kirk and incite the next shooting.
Guess murder becomes second nature to you far-left terrorists after you've killed 140 millio
BTW, if I owned X, I would also not allow pictures of mutilated people or sexual content. The previous incarnation of Twitter did not allow that either, but did censor right wing content and anything that disagreed with Fauci covid policy.
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 certainly don't vote like Ayn Rand fans. You are engaging in the same sort of cherry-picking thinking that the historian in the article does and many executives often do as well. The tech firms are far larger than defense contractors. That you don't even know that, means that the rest of your high-flying analysis is probably on shaky ground too. Just like every one else.
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
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".
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Once the Democratic Workers' Republic of America and thus socialist utopia you have been begging for has been achieved, you neckbeard will emerge from your basement as supreme leader for life.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It doesn’t misread anything, it doesn’t read at all.
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.
Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.
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.
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
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?
Haha it would make sense they're not even sci-fi ball-knowers.
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.
Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
> Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
No one suggested otherwise.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 like almost everyone else 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others
X has probably the lowest level of censorship of any social media platform.
??? Elonjet????
Doxxing is not free speech.
It's not doxxing, it's posting public information and it's 100% free speech.
X has massive censorship. Not only are pro-Palestinian accounts regularly banned, reach is restricted on any anti-Israel content. They even censored the Iranian flag! If you post it, X replaces it with their own, incorrect version.
Here's an example of recent censorship: https://x.com/PushDemsLeft/status/2085803160342241367
X has probably the lowest level of censorship for right-wing racist incels of any social media platform.
FTFY.
No it does not. It has pro-far-right censorship which is something different.
Many right wingers confuse free speech with "nazi get to talk and everyone else should shut up and not oppose them". So, the mistake is understandable.
Aren't you maoist butcher busy planning your next murder?
Of course you national socialist vermin think free speech means you have a right to celebrate the assassinations of Brian Thompson and Chalie Kirk and incite the next shooting.
Guess murder becomes second nature to you far-left terrorists after you've killed 140 millio
> It has pro-far-right censorship which is something different.
Just what is he censoring? I've seen plenty of far-out posts from both the left and right on X.
Here's one example: https://x.com/PushDemsLeft/status/2085803160342241367
And there it is, posted on X.
BTW, if I owned X, I would also not allow pictures of mutilated people or sexual content. The previous incarnation of Twitter did not allow that either, but did censor right wing content and anything that disagreed with Fauci covid policy.
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 certainly don't vote like Ayn Rand fans. You are engaging in the same sort of cherry-picking thinking that the historian in the article does and many executives often do as well. The tech firms are far larger than defense contractors. That you don't even know that, means that the rest of your high-flying analysis is probably on shaky ground too. Just like every one else.
"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.