This is one of the more disturbing things I’ve read in a while, and there’s a genocide going on.
It strikes me that this guy and his followers simply never grew up, because they didn’t have to. Instead of being faced with everyday challenges like the rest of us, their money could insulate them from any degree of hardship or friction. When you live a life where literally everything can be solved with your money, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to never run out of it, there’s no motivation for you to empathize with or even understand other people’s points of view, and thus this scary techno-authoritarianism is born.
These are the people who will prevent us from making any socioeconomic progress. They actually want us all to wear colored shirts and be discriminated against based on our color. Their dystopian vision is genuinely the stuff of my nightmares.
I grew up in Silicon Valley and I can testify what you already know: venture capitalists and tech CEOs are just dumb kids with a lot of money. Many of them landed in their positions by chance alone. We are not obliged to give them more credence than anybody else.
Why is it that when these whackos start describing their fascist plans for society, there are people who respond like it's a groundbreaking concept, some bold new vision of the future? None of this is new, it's the same old tired goosestepping shit.
There have been fascist psychopaths arround as long as humans exist. BUT: when a fascist psychopath gets support among important figures of the industrial and financial sector, that is when you should start to panic.
This guy sounds like he snorted every 60s-70s sci fi at once and now his goal in life is creating the torment nexus. I had no idea that the CEO of Y Combinator(hacker news?) had "friends" like this?
Privilege and money. When you are that rich you aren't really connected to people and humanity as a whole. No one tells you that what you're proposing is fucking insane and awful. Notice most of San Franciscoans aren't calling for stupid shit; they're just struggling to survive.
There's always people like this in various industries.
What they are more than anything is self-promoters under the guise of ideological groupthink.
They say things that their audience and network want to hear with a hyperbole veneer.
I remember one of these types in my industry who drove me crazy. He was clearly completely full of shit, but the majority of my audience didn't know enough to know he was full of shit, and was too well connected to out as being full of shit without blowback.
The good news is that they have such terrible ideas that they are chronically failures even if they personally fail upwards to the frustration of every critical thinking individual around them.
Sharks have a bad reputation just because of movies like jaws portraying them as killing machines, but in reality shark attacks are extremely uncommon worldwide. They're cool animals and the hate they get is pretty undeserved
Silicon Valley needs unions yesterday. Curbing these bros' enthusiasm via the ballot box alone would be very difficult given the amount of money they can deploy onto politicians. Without workers, they can't do anything.
Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism
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In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.
“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).
Conservatives are incredibly fucked up. They can't fathom coexisting with people who aren't like them without wanting to "ethnically cleanse" them, so they naturally assume everybody else thinks like this as well
The techno-authoritarian Curtis Yarvin-type crowd have been around for a while. We can laugh them off or ignore them, but their biggest believers are billionaire man-children in the Valley and that will undoubtedly come to bear fruit in horrific ways.
I couldn’t read the whole thing because I lost interest around the part where he starts describing Grays and their shirts—it’s all very dull because there is a complete lack of understanding on how different cultures established and evolved mechanisms for self-expression and self-determination. People wanted such mechanisms, which is why democracies formed in the first place, and why medieval societies became a relic of the past.
Even medieval kings needed ideals of honor, chivalry etc. to motivate others to knighthood. I think maybe this person is too convinced of his capacity to charm and believes that he’s capable of starting and leading a cult (which is what he’s describing, essentially). But if he was charming someone who’s never heard of him before would be inclined to find some kind of redeeming quality in his ideas instead of being repulsed by his lack of insight and knowledge. I mean, charming people (cult leaders, for example) have a quality where they just make you stupid by their presence. This person lacks the grace, charisma and any requisite presence for such an effect.
Also, what the fuck he is on about w.r.t MSFT? Look at Coinbase and MSFT, a dumb child can tell you which company is more innovative and valuable. This isn’t even a joke, it’s just sad that people are enabling his narcissism and delusions by letting him believe he’s smart or has good ideas. He’s definitely someone’s useful idiot.
Not In My Back Yard. Basically the people in the community who will reject anything that impacts them in a slightly negative way.
For SF, this means homeowners who don't want to see property values drop due to new construction, or who don't want to sell to make room for new construction. Likewise for homeless shelters, train lines, etc. Those things need to go somewhere, but if everyone says "but not here," it doesn't get built.