It's not a pipeline. 2018 and 2025 guys either had 2014 guy killed or they ruined his life and forced him into suicide.
never forget Aaron Swartz
yes, different levels of maturity of the technology attract different profiles.
Gutenberg wanted to spread the word, Murdoch is in the hate business
RIP Aaron Swartz
And we’ll never know, selfishly speaking, the possible extent of his further contributions to society. Died at 26 after an incredible life already.
Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?
RIP Aaron
(Reposting my comment from last year)
Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?
Our lives. Working until you die is a common occurance, and especially now that Elon and Trump buttfucked Social Security, that will only be worse.
I hear child
slaverylabor is coming back, too in many red states.
"I want to change the world with this tech"
...
"3 billion you say? The company is yours!"
Honestly selling the company is understandable. Getting out is normal.
It's the ones that turn into sociopaths that bother me.
People like 2025 guy have never held thoughts like the other 2, they were always self serving cunts. They just kept a facade till they depended on others, but once they joined the rich fucks club, they dropped the facade.
Bad meme. Implies "information wants to be free" leads to "have you considered monetizing empathy?"
I disagree. It’s not “one leads to the other,” it’s that people change. Far too often people start out, not just in tech, bucking the system in some way. Anti-authority, pro-privacy, anti-centralized control, etc.
But when the server costs start mounting for a service that gets popular and money needs to come in, people change. Now you need to monetize via ads or whatever, now you get attacked, you circle the wagons, get investors, and it’s all downhill from there.
Digg and Reddit are big examples, Google could arguably be a similar case, it happens in music too where a band “sells out”, like Metallica for example. An originally anti-authority metal band starts lawsuits and banning fans to protect profits.
Sure there are plenty of situations where services remain open and free (for now), like wikipedia, linux distros, etc. but we aren’t always that lucky.
You may have missed the word "pipeline." I'm not denying people change, but this meme is suggesting that good intentions are the first step toward bad intentions.
Sure there are plenty of situations where services remain open and free (for now), like wikipedia, linux distros, etc. but we aren’t always that lucky.
It's got absolutely fuck all to do with "luck." It has everything to do with adoption.
Most people won't adopt things that aren't sufficiently pretty. They're more than happy being data whores for social media pimps because it's so fun.
Nah.
I mean, if they became rich, maybe. Certainly contrast Stanford-era Brin with modern Google, sure.
But um.... Nah.
Beware the AI slop Pipeline
Its ai generated sir but it kinda checks out.
If you are subverting the means or process of exploitation against itself, well, that's pretty subversive, anarchist, punk.
If you're doing that in the digital realm?
Pretty fucking cyberpunk.
These idiot tech bros whoooshed over understanding the cyberpunk genre as a warning of what not to do, and instead adopted its aesthetic and are just now building that world, as its villains.
Well fine then.
Time to reclaim our culture.
Money .... it's always about the money and power
I'm sure there are tech bros out there that we will never hear about or see or know about .... those are the ones who just want to do tech stuff and not care about anything else
The ones we do hear about who become billionaires were only ever in it for the money and power
"Tech Bro" as a term though does pretty much imply insufferable nouveaux-riche douchbags devoid of any genuine emotion, who are happy to squash human dignity on an industrial scale for profit, and think themselves cool for doing it.
If someone is into tech for the true sake of technology then by definition they aren't a "tech bro" - they are a programmer, a hacker, a hardware tinkerer, an open-source evangelist, or any number of cool things that don't involve being an huge dickhead :)
It's really just about power, but money is one of the best ways to obtain it.
2030: By the implementation of AI, the orphan crushing machine can now process 35% more biomass per hour, providing a sustainable power source to our server parks
Hey, you figured out a way to get MAGA types to support abortion - just find a way for tech bros to monetize aborted fetuses for shiny tech thing. Starte= referring to them as "extruded excess biomass" or something.
No, that is wrong. You have to wait for them to be born, as all life is sacred. After that, they can die of measles or rot on the street, it doesn’t matter anymore
The suit infestation of tech
Yup, I very much doubt more than a handful of c-level people at the big tech companies went through these phases. The change is a result of money people who dont give a damn about technology getting a tighter and tighter grip over tech companies and pushing out the people who do care.
They’re called MBAs and they’re a cancer on society.
The first one is a hacktivist, the second one is an OSS dev, and the third is a tech bro. So not really a pipeline since there are still hacktivists, OSS devs, ans tech enthusiasts (also most tech bros started in finance)
That feels like saying evolution isn't real as there are apes, great apes and humans at the same time.
Ai slop
I have a very very real problem with this oversimplification of very distinct tech viewpoints.
Like, what, you dont think information should be freely available? You LIKE the model where information is locked down with hefty fees? Because that's what the actual "tech bros" want.
This is at best ignorant and at worst just hateful.
Also the timeline should ne more like 1990 : Information wants to be free
Bill Gates: No
Etc.
Hardstuck 2014. I'm not changing
I'm so sick of seeing this exact fucking face and facial expression on everything. please just use ms paint to shoddily squiggle a matchstick man, at least it will have personality.
Why is pipeline being used for everything now? This is progression. Not pipeline.
Devil's advocate here, it could be metaphorically, pipeline implies that it is an unavoidable sequence, rather than a progression, which it is.
edit, I agree with the below that it is more of a replacement
Tech bruh
IDK what this meme is trying to say. Its making some leaps.
TIL there were no tech bros before 2014.
I feel like most of tech had already sold out by 2014. Really by the late aughts it seemed to be all gone; that was when apple and its philosophy had taken hold. Not that apple was the only force in that direction, it just felt like the apotheosis of the greedy and controlling mentality. MS had plenty of greed, but they were willing (in some circumstances) to play ball. Google seemed to love interoperability in the early-to-mid aughts, but look at it now.
Even by the 90's, it was already accepted that being good with computers could be a great career path to make money. When I went to university in early 00's, people who were on an engineering track commonly went into computers because the salaries were better than other engineering fields.
There were some people who loved the tech, but a lot of them made the choice due to financial reasons.
Am I stupid? Idk what the hell this is trying to say
It's not something that's unique to tech, but I read it as a joke about enshittification due to greed.
Lots of start-up companies start out all idealistic and positive, then don't stay true to that mission as the founders age and want more (or sell out to a bigger company).
Also as an aside, if stock points cripples your integrity then you never had any to begin with
The feeling of power that being in the technology sector brings changes a man.
Rich billionaire assholes are ruining every industry. It's not just the tech sector.
Fuck, monetizing empathy. Is that even a fucking option? Can we just buy our way out of this shithole timeline? Can Gates just write a check for 97 billion and we go back to not performing genocide bring us back out of the Jim Crow and misogynist era?
This kinda follows the same pipeline that everyone else went down on Facebook and Twitter. At one point, the internet was all about Anonymous and Zeitgeist and revolution.
Then one Arab Spring and a couple of years later, we all went from Anonymous and Zeitgeist to thinking that billionaires and businessmen are the answers to all of our problems.
I don't know that it was ever as much like that--I think the earlier adopters of those technologies were more like that, and as the general public gained interest and increased usage, the trend swung the other way. Remember in 2005 when owning a mac device basically initiated you into a cult? Apple stores were set up like sanctuaries where people came to worship.
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
I think only a handful of people could remain principled in spite of having attained wealth, power and status. And it is not that power makes one greedy, I think a person who attains success becomes surrounded by sycophants and yes-men who like to gain access to the successful person for the sycophants' own use.
If anything, this is more how money corrupts tech folks.
What tech are we talking about here, theres a billion different pieces of software out there all doing drastically different things.
I like the other one better.
monetizing empathy
You Cave Johnsons...!
Yeah, by 2014 that mentality was being phased out, they just couldn't do it overnight.
This is why I always tell employers up front to never put me in, nor consider me for, management tracks. “I like to work in the trenches.” I have no desire to be among these corporate people.
You're smarter than I am. I took the promotions, and ended up miserable.
I learned the hard way that higher leveld don't mean more decision-making power. It means more of your time is spent in endless meetings trying to convince people to agree to the obviously right decision. It's a never ending exercise in frustrating stupidity.
I was lucky enough to witness managers deal with this ahead of time. Plus, I just know myself and I know that I shouldn’t be managing other people. I have ADHD and my executive dysfunction makes me a terrible decision maker. I learned my limits and stuck to them.
I work with these fucking yuppies every day and I hate them so fucking much.
I'm that, but in reverse, a bro tech
This is just a meme, but it does touch on something important. There's a journalist by the name of Douglas Rushkoff. He put out a book last year titled, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaire Elite, and he was invited by a group of 5 anonymous tech oligarchs out to the desert to talk about surviving what they call "The Event", or when the consequences of their actions finally catch up to them.
He also says at the core of their desire to escape it is rooted in something he calls "The Mindset", which is belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods, and transcend the calamities and tribulations that befall us mere mortals.
"The Mindset" is rooted in empirical science, that human beings are nothing more than the sum total of their chemical components, and that's it, and only the "truly superior" (Billionaire Tech Broligarchs) understand that.
I feel like all the people who were into tech to improve people's lives did that and got bought out by people who then went on to try and make money off of it.
