1y ago

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

newrepublic.com

The article doesn't mention SSC directly, but I think it's pretty obvious where this guy is getting his ideas

24 comments

I’m here from !all but decided to read the article. This man is crazy af and cringe af.
The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.
- What if the Technocracy Movement fucked NASCAR
  What if Nazis but the uniforms are Gildan instead of Hugo Boss
  What if fascists were stopped with atomic wedgies instead of atomic bombs
- “Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.”
  Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first).
  got it, Balaji’s future is a lot like if the classic dystopian game Syndicate was written by a 6 year old. but something tells me this crayola Nazi shit mostly exists to make Tan’s equally monstrous and insane plans look reasonable by comparison, so Tan can continue to pay journalists to call him a moderate Democrat and shift the Overton window as far right as he can.
  
  Ah yes, the Bloods and the Crips. Because those two gangs are well known for peacefully coexisting (?!?!?!?)
- Unadulterated baby-brain hitler nonsense
“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen.
10/10, no notes
- produces a fascist vision of society with less sophistication than a bad dystopian YA novel
  Marc Andreessen: "This man is the greatest genius of our era!"
- Him being into idea guys explains a lot.
I have written about Balaji's amazing brain previously. Wait till you get to the PiTato. He's one of the VCs who was super scared by GPT-3, I think because you could replace his twitter with an LLM and the quality would go up.
“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan.
How many farts do I need to huff before I am able to say this with a straight face?
- One thing I never got, even if I understand lot of things is the obsession with Gay Pride. So many things make sense from the techbro/tech nerd/technofascist/reactionary etc mindsets, but that so many of them are obsessed with Gay Pride just doesn't seem to make sense to me.
  E: Don't get me wrong, I can make up reasons and make them fit into some ideological framework, but they always feel like rationalizations/excuses to me, and not the real issue.
  
  I think they can’t handle people being happy and proud to be different from them. There’s also a long standing misogyny in tech bro culture. Idk I see so many tendrils of the same thing there. It’s the same thing as when the bros at the game shop get misogynistic. It might be self pity? I know I see a lot of that in these guys. I guess at its core it’s probably ego, fueled by sacrifices made to get where they are, but they never became someone who can just be happy with themselves.
  It’s easy to call them machine men with machine hearts, but our society made these people. They have everything but people. And I suppose they must feel very alienated by a community that often defines ourselves by the times we’ve had nothing but ourselves and each other. Sometimes it feels like they’re people who failed to be techno anarchists but that feels like I’m projecting.
How is this not satire? It’s that fucking stupid/scary.
I guess this is what happens when critically insecure nerds get a lot of money. They fantasize about a world where people fear them and the bullies do their bidding.
- How is this not satire?
  This is what I ask myself every time I read any of this techfash nonsense, but then I remember that this isn’t even a new idea. These are the same people who once read a John Titor knockoff shitpost on Reddit and thought, hey, that’s a brilliant idea and we should totally do that.
  I’m pretty sure there’s even a post about it on old SneerClub or probably TechTakes.
I mean yes this is all very off the rails fascist but I can do better.
bribe the government for nuclear bombs and detonate them in volcanoes to trigger The Big One and separate the bay area from america
Install high powered laser to roof of salesforce that sweeps the bay
clone elon musk
I have plenty more where that came from. Money please, m4s a8n
- I initially deleted this because these ideas aren’t really that fascist, so I was gonna take a second pass. Then I remembered that thinking of fascist ideas makes me feel awful so here we are.
- conveniently all information needed to make american-pattern nukes already is in california (LLNL and UCLA)
  with all their finesse techfash trying to get CNWDI would definitely cause a considerable incident
“Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.”
Tells you all you need to know about this “genius”. 🙄
- ahem technically he was betting on the dollar hyperinflating. He still lost though.
  Receipts here: https://gerikson.com/btcticker/index.html#balajis
  
  The current difference between that target and the price now is USD -936,852.77. (the number in red)
  lol.
- Worker: why don't we get a larger share of the profits?
  Owner: Because I'm taking most of the risk!
  Also Owner:
man its not even good sci-fi

24 comments