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pulkitsh1234 4 hours ago [-]
"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case" -- Niccolo Machiavelli
It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins.
They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
akudha 2 hours ago [-]
Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all?
No one. That's the idea.
A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.
bodge5000 15 minutes ago [-]
There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go
> There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls ... the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate. Solarians hated physical contact with others and only communicated with each other via holograms.
A.k.a Rich white man's paradise
jambalaya8 2 minutes ago [-]
I would have called BS on that before but I think now I would just call BS on the part where it was people like Bezos or whatever. It seems there is a neverending number of people who would do the same. Look at the stories about the sunflower fields that had to close down before the pandemic, or the current overrunning of cities and villages in Italy (like Lake Como). Fighting for status is as old as.... well maybe humanity. What is fairly new is money and real property.
There probably is nowhere left to go. Maybe one of those little islands in the South Pacific but you can't live there and they are all mapped too.
swat535 1 hours ago [-]
And who is going to maintain this low-population paradise of elites, if there is no one left but the elites ?
smallmancontrov 29 minutes ago [-]
Servants. Yes, robots eventually, but servants are the classical answer. The terrible truth is that palace economies are stable -- we see them in "resource-cursed" countries around the world and through time. When a single easily-owned fountain of wealth dominates the economy, a small group of people consolidate ownership and everyone else polarizes around them, forming into concentric rings of gatekeepers and masses struggling to access the only thing that matters. It's terrible but it's stable, and if you're inside the palace it doesn't feel like much of a curse at all.
bamboozled 5 minutes ago [-]
The robots would have to be intelligent enough to be fully self sufficient, at which point they don’t care about people.
prepend 50 minutes ago [-]
Robots
65 16 minutes ago [-]
And who is going to fix the robots when they break down?
how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon, nor anyone putting their retirement into a fund that buys Amazon stock? does he just plan to use force rather than money at this point?
ceejayoz 1 hours ago [-]
Why do you think they're all so into AI and robots?
willturman 55 minutes ago [-]
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
ryandrake 27 minutes ago [-]
Yea, at some point, these guys won't really need the vast majority of us to buy from them. They'll be buying from and selling to other wealthy people.
megaman821 22 minutes ago [-]
That makes litteraly no sense. All the biggest companies are driven by middle-class purchases. Rich-only companies are boutique and are order-of-magnitude smaller than mass market companies.
nancyminusone 49 minutes ago [-]
They need to? The have all the money right now already.
tshaddox 43 minutes ago [-]
The plan is that he (along with a small number of other people) will already own everything. The only reason he currently wants proles to buy things from Amazon is that he has not yet achieved what he considers sufficient ownership of the world.
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
That is in the past.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
There is no end game. Short term profits are by definition not a long-term view. The family's future will be secured if I invest in plastics and robot payment mechanisms now. I won't live forever, so I won't get to rest under the shade of the trees I plant for my family. With money and influence, they will be best set up to conquer whatever comes in the future.
tshaddox 45 minutes ago [-]
The people who advocate this expect to be part of a very small group of humans who own literally everything, so they don’t share your concern.
prepend 50 minutes ago [-]
I think the end game is to only do interesting things and automate all the mundane parts of life.
We used to have to wash clothes by hand and it took all day. Now we have a washing machine and it takes 2 hours.
People used to spend time washing clothes and now we have more members of the household working.
I think the future from scifi that I remember (eg, Star Trek) is that humans are just being creative. Usually some sort of post scarcity where there’s no more need for money.
ndiddy 15 minutes ago [-]
If everything is automated away, you won't see a Star Trek style post scarcity utopia because everyone on UBI will have lost basically all of their political power. They aren't employable so they can't threaten to withhold their labor in order to get any sort of leverage. The most they could do is withhold consumption to some extent. If you have a dependent population being managed by the same state that's already allowed wealth to accumulate to its current levels, what incentive does the state have to do any more than the bare minimum?
saghm 2 hours ago [-]
If a small group of people fully automated all production and controlled it, they wouldn't need anyone to buy anything anymore; they could live off of it indefinitely and produce whatever they needed to in order to protect themselves from the masses. I don't see any obvious reason why this outcome would be prevented by a purely capitalist economic system (assuming that this sort of automation ends up being possible), which in my mind is an argument in favor of some sort of upper bound for wealth consolidation.
teravor 2 hours ago [-]
there is nothing magically good about economic activity, it has merely been necessary thus far.
once it's no longer necessary and once they can have robot security they will decouple from the rest of society.
they would also require military grade deterrence. eventually they will either steal, buy or make nukes.
> A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
csomar 48 minutes ago [-]
No one has to buy anything for the system to work. You buy because you beneficially contributed to the system or the system gifted you some credit. Otherwise, you buying is actually "inflating" consumption for others (ie: the rich). There are billions of people in the world buying nothing and yet the "system" still work. They just want you to be lined up to them next. (or line them up next to you).
CodingJeebus 2 hours ago [-]
> what is the end game here?
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
A tale as old as time, power and control, over the means of production and (what those seeking this power and control consider lesser) humans.
If you think they're doing this for "the betterment of humanity," I would ask you strongly re-examine the evidence. "Watch what people do, not what they say."
"The wealth of the top-400 Americans surpassed 20% of GDP at the start of Trump's second term."
These guys have already all but built Elysium--just not in space.
They live their lives completely insulated and apart from the masses. They go to different events, they have other people shop for them and transport them around. They don't really interact with us at all. When was the last time you even saw a billionaire in person, let alone talked to one? They have private security to keep us away from them. They only interact with each other.
toomuchtodo 21 minutes ago [-]
Certainly, and it isn't enough, is it? It's never enough. Political spending, lobbying, etc. That's the point, the accumulated wealth and their actions are simply symptoms of the dysfunction.
"Just another billion bro." Like a food driven shark, I acknowledge the shark's existence, while wanting the strongest cage possible between us when in close proximity. Never envy, always recognizing the danger and need for self preservation from the paperclip maximizers.
24 minutes ago [-]
surgical_fire 28 minutes ago [-]
> what is the end game here?
You are asking the wrong question.
There's no end game. They just really hate life and the living. They want you to suffer.
jambalaya8 8 minutes ago [-]
that sort of crappy movie with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster that is supposedly dystopian but far more utopian than the reality would be.
wonder if the overlords will allow meat or only gruel or bug bars like that Bong Ho movie to the survivors. heh but serious.
SmirkingRevenge 2 hours ago [-]
It becomes sort of like the dystopian future imagined in William Gibson's "The Peripheral" - most of the human race has died off, but technology has advanced so that the elites can self-sustain anyhow. Big cities are haunted with holograms running scripts of people going about their day to make them feel lived in.
ModernMech 1 hours ago [-]
The end game is that we're all dead, and they live off their robot slave army in a world of abundance, no poors, and no governments to tell them no. I wish that were hyperbole, but it's what they want more than anything if you really pay close attention to what thy're doing, which as you say doesn't make sense given an end game where you and I are part of the system. When then say "everyone in the future will be rich" they don't mean that poor people will be made rich; they mean poor people will all be dead, or don't count as people, thus trivially leaving only rich people.
stackbutterflow 26 minutes ago [-]
I still can't wrap my head around it.
So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare, and there's maybe 50-100 billionaires left on the planet. Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies. They don't have children? The human race dies with them? Or they have children, somehow avoid the trap of inbreeding and their children in turn have children and in no time there's again a billion of "us".
We're talking about a level of control over the remaining humans, them and their friends, that require absolute totalitarianism. Of course billionaire A won't accept to live their life according to billionaire B so it'll be a mess in no time.
This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
ryandrake 21 minutes ago [-]
> Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies.
It's helpful to think of the world as if it were a gigantic vacation resort for about 1000 people, and the remaining 8billion of us are just the staff keeping it luxurious for them. They would be 100% fine if the resort didn't need or have any staff.
augment_me 16 minutes ago [-]
When you have everything, you want something new and different. The whole Epstein scandal is literally about this, you want to kill babies, r*pe the kids, do sacrifice rituals, etc because nothing gives you sensory satisfaction anymore. In the view of the commenters above, humanity will just be the final playtoy, let's have a little nuclear bomb in that town and film it in 4k, etc.
Daishiman 17 minutes ago [-]
> This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
It doesn't have to make sense because these are not well-reasoned theories of the future. Thiel, Yarvis and Musk, from what you hear and read on their interviews, come off as drug-addled losers who hate other human beings and anything that doesn't have to do with their hyper-optimized partial view of the world.
oezi 2 hours ago [-]
Nietzsche also described it well when noting there are those who deem themselves nobles and feel they are righteously above the laws and those who derive their identity from suffering under the same laws.
Zigurd 2 hours ago [-]
Nietzsche died broke and insane. Was that from following his own advice or failing to do so?
kodoman 2 hours ago [-]
Newton put needles in his eye's and probably suffered greatly from self inflicted lead and mercury poisoning; Why do you trust his laws of motion?
58 minutes ago [-]
oezi 2 hours ago [-]
Being successful or not in your wealth doesn't make you right or wrong about anything with the exception of maybe running the business that generated your wealth.
Nietzsche presented two prototypical sets of human who interface with laws and ethics. He described why those believes exists and are self-reaffirming even if they are puzzling from the other side.
Zigurd 1 hours ago [-]
The Ayn Rand stans say the same.
chermi 2 hours ago [-]
My uncle told me not to smoke, but he's a smoker so I didn't listen.
EGreg 1 hours ago [-]
Good, lots of other people who aren't smokers can tell you that
mr_toad 1 hours ago [-]
> Nietzsche died broke and insane
If he was alive today he’d probably have a YouTube channel and be making bank shilling dietary supplements.
kodoman 21 minutes ago [-]
Not a follow of Nietzsche and critical of him but this is just unfair the sort of pandering to the audience that is required for a popular philosophy channel on youtube is something he would never debase himself to do (or probably any serious thinker).
It's deeply embarrassing to be a whore even if it's well payed.
Zigurd 52 minutes ago [-]
You jest, but that's the point a lot of people here are missing: Nietzsche would fit right in with the YouTuber bros, right up to the ignominious downfall.
keiferski 39 minutes ago [-]
No, not really. Nietzsche was a trained philologist with a brilliant academic career, before he ended it early because of health issues. He was leaps and bounds more educated and knowledgable than 99% of people making philosophy content on YouTube. He was also a pretty meek and gentle person, even if his ideas are anything but.
Most people haven't actually read him though, and their knowledge of his work comes from poorly-researched YouTube videos.
Zigurd 31 minutes ago [-]
I tried, even in German on the theory that he was badly translated. Nietzsche was an undisciplined writer and a beefing gossip, among other infuriating characteristics.
Waterluvian 39 minutes ago [-]
Is there a name for this style of non-argument? I guess it’s an attack on credibility due to the inability to attack the content of the argument?
wgjordan 21 minutes ago [-]
ad hominem.
EGreg 1 hours ago [-]
So did Tesla and Vincent Van Gogh, but how much did he create?
Faraday was poor, etc.
Lenin deteriorated, and Marx was always poor.
Anyway...
randusername 3 hours ago [-]
> who wishes to maintain himself
This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.
mgh2 18 minutes ago [-]
Researched some companies and their founders, many are YC alumni: LendUp
W12, uBiome S14, Zenefits W13, Kalshi W19.
I think you are interpreting the quote incorrectly. It is not that the prince should be immoral, but rather that he must understand political reality is often filled with perfidious actions and motives. He must recognize that within his principality, there will be those ready to backstab him to gain power. His duty is to the continuation of his principality and the preservation of his own power.
This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.
What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.
Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.
I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
> Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
They actually don't believe in capitalism and profit, because if they did, they'd recognize that extreme concentration of wealth is actually detrimental to capitalism (the system's) performance. Ricardo, Mill, and Smith all saw this dynamic, but "capitalists" like Andreessen have shown zero interest in combatting it for the health of the capitalist system as a whole.
You're ascribing way, way too much intellectual consistency to these people. They have no moral system.
kodoman 1 hours ago [-]
I concede partially to your point about not believing in capitalism,
the issue is I think though Smith sincere I do not think that Smith's
moral positions are based on a need to ascribe moral value to the
budding industrialists and the moral scorn on the aristocracy and Tory
power. The adoption of these ideas by the British empire is that they
are the best way to exploit and the talk of free markets by empires
both British, American and Chinese? (later no doubt) is that they are
to be promoted when it is useful to do so. The best capitalists
therefore are the ones who understand subconsciously or consciously
that the ability manipulate the market by some means or to have the
market already pre-figured in your favor is the purpose of the talk of
the good of the free market. It is true how ever that free market no
doubt turns against all empires and the economic, political, military
reality shifts in a way that is outside the control of the empire.
That is all to say that the cynical attitude of Andreesen or Thiel is
what I think it's always been about. I probably sound a little Marxist
or just cynical but I am not a Marxist and I do right and wrong, I do
think that the modern theories of morality should be understood
cynically as their purpose is primarily a political attempt to change
or preserve something and in some sense when one examines them deeply
we see self interest usually hidden and diffused by moralising prose
and sentiments in these modern theories of morality. So techno
optimism manifesto is a more brash, bold and crass version of these
works of moral theory indeed a making a sort of unintentional
parody. None of this is to say that political economy is only
moralising (which techno optimism is).
cindyllm 11 minutes ago [-]
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merelydev 4 hours ago [-]
TLDR: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
AJMaxwell 4 hours ago [-]
No, we really should hate the players. They are keeping the game from changing.
rglover 3 hours ago [-]
No sarcasm: play a different game. If you play their game, of course you'll suffer. But if you play a game they're repulsed by, you can win a life they'll never have access to: one filled with people who love and respect you and an environment where your best self and life can emerge.
AlotOfReading 2 hours ago [-]
The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's possible to "pick and choose" to some extent. I've found most of the bleak future stuff goes away if I turn off my phone, but since I need it to contact people in 2026, I try and give things their due, and, to the best of my ability, ignore the more unpleasant aspects of modern life. I think the landline telephone is a good example. It was fun to chit-chat with friends on the phone, but when a telemarketer called, I either hung up immediately, or said "stop calling," then hung up. It can be the same way in modern society. Weight the conversations with warm-bodied people higher, and stop scrolling as much (to put it overly-simplistically).
qwerpy 8 minutes ago [-]
It’s done wonders for my free time and mood by deleting my Reddit account and restricting HN to toilet time. Instead of reading rage bait American news I do a daily scan of BBC. All those are sources of negativity and stress that bring nothing of value to your life. I invest my newfound time and energy into my family, hobbies, and health.
AndrewKemendo 46 minutes ago [-]
You can’t ignore climate change
butlike 38 minutes ago [-]
fair
rglover 2 hours ago [-]
That's not what I said. I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant. Simplified: if they're going West, you go East.
The more "small time" people reject this narrative that we need a bunch of elitist white guys shoving their mediocrity down our throats, the faster we rebuild a society they're barred from accessing.
AlotOfReading 37 minutes ago [-]
I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant.
Can you explain how to do that without either drawing attention to them via discussions like this or leaving society altogether? I don't personally fund a16z, but my taxes do. Calls to coordinated action to stop giving them money also count as attention.
rglover 17 minutes ago [-]
Leave Babylon behind and go build local businesses and communities in what they refer to as "flyover country." That's what I'm doing. Easy? Fuck no. But does it take their relevancy away from them? At the scale of everyone who isn't a coastal barnacle: big time.
They view the rest of this country with disdain and indifference. I'm suggesting that others quit looking at these people as lords and sages to be placed up on a pedestal. Most of them are quite incompetent, skill-less, and frankly, not cool enough to want to hang out with (why they're making "jokes" about there only being two jobs left in the world in the future: Anthropic employees and hookers for Anthropic employees [1]). I'm sorry but I'm not taking direction from a bunch of dorks who can't get laid without paying for it. And I'd take a wild guess that given the climate, the lion's share of America is with me.
What if their game is to flip the boards of everyone else’s games?
genxy 3 hours ago [-]
A small number of players set the rules of the game.
cpt_sobel 3 hours ago [-]
Yes this is their reasoning, it doesn't mean we shouldn't hate the players and the game alike
merelydev 1 hours ago [-]
That is like hating a hacker who hacks into your vulnerable server that is outdated and allows ssh password login. If there is vulnerabilities in the system someone will eventually exploit them, sure not you or me but there is always someone out there that will.
bdelmas 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not the players we should hate but the ones who make the rules of the game. Specifically not the ones who make the rules for the greater good but for themselves.
latexr 4 hours ago [-]
That’s a cop-out. It’s the most powerful “players” who are making the “game” what it is, and they make the rules be whatever benefits them.
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
boelboel 2 hours ago [-]
That's what thiefs say
1 hours ago [-]
pyvpx 3 hours ago [-]
What game has David Ellison been playing? The same as yours or perhaps slightly different? Does that difference matter?
Forgeties79 4 hours ago [-]
“Also, I have no intention of acknowledging that not all people have an equal chance at winning the game, nor doing anything about it for that matter.”
sublinear 3 hours ago [-]
> The powerful are just living an alternate life...
So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".
ImPostingOnHN 3 hours ago [-]
> So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"?
That is not what OP said, so you may want to re-read what they said.
consensus1 3 hours ago [-]
"Us commoners" ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics, and then go out and buy whatever stock we think will go up without a second thought to any of that idle chatter.
ncr100 2 hours ago [-]
We commoners also requested laws and regulations to play fair, which are being superceded by those in leadership seeking only more power. Stocks aren't the problem.
vintermann 6 hours ago [-]
> Lee's stated goal was to “desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’” If you say it enough, he argues, “cheat begins to lose its meaning.” A16z praised Lee's approach as “rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality.”
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
ryandrake 17 minutes ago [-]
Y Combinator's application still asks: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." They don't actually use the word "cheat" but that's what they're asking for: Are you willing to cheat if it gives you an advantage?
cmrdporcupine 1 hours ago [-]
They just need to get out before the next fool gets in.
serial_dev 3 hours ago [-]
Some of these SV "founder mode" people do speak like sociopaths. It's probably a good base for success in the industry.
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
e40 2 hours ago [-]
They speak that way because they are.
optimalsolver 2 hours ago [-]
Cheetahs ate my face.
MisterTea 6 minutes ago [-]
Cheaters ate my face. FTFY :-)
MattGaiser 5 hours ago [-]
Do they care? Just cheat the people in the next round!
codemog 5 hours ago [-]
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
pibaker 4 hours ago [-]
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Arodex 4 hours ago [-]
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
e40 2 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that how we got here? Making fun and ridiculing the low status, dumb people said “fuck you” with their vote for him, twice.
estearum 1 hours ago [-]
No, actually. It's a cute story but there's no evidence of it.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
triceratops 6 minutes ago [-]
> hardly loved even by her own party
But why tho? And what does that say about voters who apparently "loved" Trump, a guy who mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, more than her?
jkubicek 46 minutes ago [-]
> We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
I hate this victim-blaming. Democrats deserve heaps of criticism for how they handled the last few elections, but Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate we've had since maybe McCain in 2008? (I didn't vote for McCain, but it would be hard to argue he wasn't qualified).
You said yourself where the blame should lie:
> These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine... Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
estearum 16 minutes ago [-]
There's more to winning elections than being qualified, unfortunately.
Blame can be shared among many actors, and generally should be.
There's also special value in finding blame in yourself and your own actions where possible, not as a self-flagellation exercise, but because it will reveal if you had levers available you failed to pull for some reason.
triceratops 5 minutes ago [-]
> Making fun and ridiculing the low status
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
Arainach 1 hours ago [-]
No. Fearmongering and lying is how we got here.
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
2 hours ago [-]
iso1631 3 hours ago [-]
Compare Nixon to Trump and you see the problem with America,
kristjansson 14 minutes ago [-]
The operative part of schoolwork is … not the work part? Of course school work is bullshit, in the sense that the teacher already knows what 7x9 is or who fought at Waterloo or whatever. The point is not the work product, it’s that the student produced it and has been incrementally improved by the experience!
prolly97 5 hours ago [-]
This - though I'm not certain that the product really solves any of these identified issues of "y is bullshit"
MattGaiser 5 hours ago [-]
In America, solving something is to exempt the individual from the problem.
So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
akoboldfrying 4 hours ago [-]
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
Hizonner 52 minutes ago [-]
> How many screws in an airplane?
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system?
It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
SpicyLemonZest 29 minutes ago [-]
Yes. Lateral thinking is valuable, and the industry didn't at the time know any better ways to test it. Now we have system design questions, so we can get the same signal asking candidates for ad hoc estimates of QPS or whatever.
sscaryterry 5 hours ago [-]
I'm tired of cheats.
radarsat1 7 hours ago [-]
I know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
throwaway13337 3 hours ago [-]
Marketers have a term for this - "breaking through the noise".
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
You just nailed something for me, so I wanted to say "thank you." It's the _PAID_ advertising that's the issue. I've been struggling with hating advertising, yet having difficulties reconciling how I would know about anything I like if it wasn't advertised. But it's the PAID advertising that spurs the creation of advertisements with spectacle and cheap shit that ends up in landfills and the oceans.
bamboozled 2 minutes ago [-]
You just realised people pay for advertising ?
zby 2 hours ago [-]
Advertising has a positive function - currently we don't have better (market based) was to make it working other than via paid advertising. The first step is to find the new business models.
stephantul 7 hours ago [-]
Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
lelanthran 4 hours ago [-]
Jokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
skinfaxi 2 hours ago [-]
What makes you think that is not the intention?
3 hours ago [-]
AndrewKemendo 42 minutes ago [-]
It’s an information problem you can’t solve.
Unless you take a global census of every possible resource, as well as it’s replenishment rate, you can’t know how to rate limit it
All overconsumption is only recognized after the fact
It’s one of the most intractable problems in the universe
XorNot 5 hours ago [-]
Rather depends on the "spoils" capacity of the channel.
The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
stephantul 4 hours ago [-]
I think spoiling a commons is risky for individuals, not so much for investors. Breaking a future law is lucrative
automatic6131 6 hours ago [-]
>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
Spooky23 3 hours ago [-]
You gotta remember that people with money have money. Money doesn’t make you smart, gives you the ability to hire the smartest people.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
Macha 5 hours ago [-]
It is bad for this guys business to admit it’s unethical and probably has a time limit, so he doesn’t. There’s no big mystery there. If he’s unethical to his victims/spam targets, why would you think his marketing of all things would be honest about the tradeoffs? Even “respectable” companies feel very little qualms about lying by omission in marketing.
strelok25 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
chaseadam17 7 minutes ago [-]
On one hand, VCs that fund thousands of early-stage startups are inevitably going to fund some bad stuff, even if they try hard to avoid it.
On the other, the older I get the more I worry about the decline of spirituality in the West. Especially in tech, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a hyper rational snowglobe of people optimizing a local maxima, not even considering (and often looking down on) the possibility that there are larger, more important games to play.
tedggh 7 hours ago [-]
How come Flock is not listed? That’s the most troubling company a16z has heavily invested on and supported.
causal 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah strange how this article is almost entirely focused on consumer apps. These examples might be unhealthy for society, but mostly represent (poor) choices for consumers. Digital cigarettes.
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
moogly 5 hours ago [-]
Hard to say Flock is the worst... There's a lot of competition. I'll throw Toka into the ring.
Wow, that's an insane pairing. For those who don't click, Toka is a software company that specializes in hacking and altering security camera footage.
kristjansson 6 minutes ago [-]
It seems impossible for this to be a true statement. and yet.
What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
y-curious 3 hours ago [-]
Edot, we have footage of you stealing a car at gunpoint, then you getting out and breakdancing while turning into an elephant. Any explanation or straight to jail?
flipgimble 1 hours ago [-]
I think this is a symptom of Big Tech and VCs scraping the bottom of the barrel to extract as much capital and social control from what remains of the good will for technology as a whole. They are literally running the internet into the ground. The popular backlash is brewing. I see this in increasing opposition to flock cameras, anti data-center activism, or generally against companies that extract, exploit and control instead of contributing to the common good.
Zigurd 2 hours ago [-]
This is just one of the things turning China into a relatively less dangerous and harmful trading partner. I've often wondered aloud how the US tech industry is going to deal with losing international markets, which have historically been half their sales in mature product categories.
Investors might be attracted to the bleak future they are selling, but they are selling a shrinking share of the world economy.
I can think of one way to explain it, and it's not good: they expect global war.
tescreal 1 hours ago [-]
They're just silently waiting. No need to make a big show, just simply being the best alternative is enough of a pitch.
csomar 45 minutes ago [-]
> they expect global war
Based on the recent performance of the US and Russia, there is likely no "global" war. China might take out Taiwan and that will be that. Everyone else will just go/stay home.
Zigurd 36 minutes ago [-]
Have I fumbled the pronoun? I don't mean the Chinese are expecting global war, I mean people like Andreessen are banking on war as a means of economic reset. They are unconcerned about even medium-term consequences now.
bambax 6 hours ago [-]
Marc Andreessen is an evil man with the behavior (and appearance!) of a Bond villain.
hotelsacher 5 hours ago [-]
He's the embodiment of the banality of evil. Just can't avoid being cliché.
alex1138 4 hours ago [-]
I have you now, Mr. Bond. But instead of quickly disposing of you, I shall spend a 20 minute monologue on How We Must Build Things while you inexorably escape
guywithahat 25 minutes ago [-]
What are you talking about, he's a visionary who's greatly improved the world? He cut his teeth with Jim Clark who's central thesis was pay employees more, and Marc has carried this vision forward investing in some of the most important companies in our nations history. Even outside of startups he's risked his career to defend our nations democracy, and has been an advocate for personal freedoms. If it weren't for people like him employees may not regularly get stock options, and would certainly not make as much.
Being scared of the future doesn't mean the people building it are evil.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
I enjoy telling recruiters I won’t work for companies funded by obvious sociopaths.
the_gipsy 6 hours ago [-]
Had to google his name. Welcome to the Egghead's lair, Mr. Bond.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
And to think him and Faye Wong are virtually the same age. She, a beautiful actress singer-songwriter, and him, a rather bulbous egg-headed villain. Are we SURE what you do doesn't influence how radiant you appear to others?
6 hours ago [-]
JSR_FDED 7 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget a16z’s breathless boosterism of NFTs and Crypto.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
dabeeeenster 6 hours ago [-]
They really are the grift that keeps on giving.
vintermann 6 hours ago [-]
The grift that keeps on griefing.
abc123abc123 4 hours ago [-]
The grift that keeps on grifting.
Otterly99 2 hours ago [-]
I'm actually baffled that some of these companies are even allowed to sell their services. Especially the deepfakes and the fake doctor notes for tax reduction.
Is investing in these companies even legal?
miltonlost 1 hours ago [-]
When the DoJ is non-independent and the President is a literal crook and grifter, legality doesn't matter anymore to companies. They won't be prosecuted as long as they don't screw over the rich.
ethagnawl 38 minutes ago [-]
Right. For the most part, consequences (if any) are down the road and will be the functional equivalent of a tax or toll. Their ethos is _move quick and (maybe) ask for forgiveness later_ ... or something like that.
ape4 2 hours ago [-]
It should be possible to make money by inventing projects and services that make people's lives better.
danparsonson 2 hours ago [-]
It is possible, but sadly the alternative is easier.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
You have to have a moral compass and enough humanity to tell the difference.
He also organized/hosted a reading club for discussing Evola, the fascist/nazi occultist.
DrScientist 5 hours ago [-]
How about an AI startup up that automatically finds companies whose stated business model is to flout existing laws, and then initiates legal proceedings.
Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
MattGaiser 5 hours ago [-]
The results of startups flouting laws though have been such that even when faced with determined opposition, in the end they are defeated. Airbnb and Uber ran roughshod over the law and faced determined taxi commissions and groups that usually beat real estate developers.
The US is not the only jurisdiction - and that complexity creates an opportunity to leverage fines.
larodi 6 hours ago [-]
Humpty is a joker and a con man, and a man without vision (in his own words!).
leejongyon 34 minutes ago [-]
Great read. Nice advertising.
octocop 8 hours ago [-]
If your metric is growth I guess this is where you end up
mrtksn 7 hours ago [-]
People often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in all other things. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Western way of doing dystopia is a self-correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail and all this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
Some of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
If you think this is morally acceptable, in which case, what you're doing is essentially trying to trick the algorithm to uprank your content. But people at Facebook/X/Youtube can just update a table row and accomplish 1000x as much as you're trying to do. Their business model is selling a less powerful version of that.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
You know how sometimes you're exploring a location in a post-apocalyptic video game and find a message on a 'datapad' or scrawled on the wall in blood or something, as a world building fiction exercise to inform the player how screwed up the dystopia became in its last days before everything went totally to shit? Well, now I have some new material for you...
65 18 minutes ago [-]
It makes me question if we are starting to approach maximum entropy with software startups, and so deception and morally questionable "startups" are what's left. Software now costs nothing to build, and most of the obvious ideas have been created, and the network effects of big companies have been firmly dug into the ground.
The second law of thermodynamics applies to software, and this is what's left.
ModernMech 5 hours ago [-]
Of course, isn’t Andreessen the one who believes introspection is a waste of time, a fad from the 1900s the only outcome of which is to slow one down? Why even consider the long term consequences of your actions when they can make you billions of dollars in the short term? Introspection, like empathy, is for suckers and losers.
alex1138 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah really
How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing
consensus1 3 hours ago [-]
In this case by founding Netscape
TrackerFF 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes when I see these comically dystopian surveillance startups, I sort of wonder what the founders were thinking when they came up with the idea?
Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!"
Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals").
I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
bigfishrunning 3 hours ago [-]
In my perception, VCs don't really care about goals. They care about a convincing argument "if you give me money, I'll give you back more money". Note that it doesn't matter if that statement is true; it only needs to be true in aggregate to keep the VCs behaving the way that they do.
Yeri 4 hours ago [-]
Pure greed; and most people think it won't apply to them. It'll monitor "the others"
srameshc 24 minutes ago [-]
The founders of these starups make Mark Zuckerberg look good. I think this is how we are moving forward as a society generation after generation.
antiloper 4 hours ago [-]
This problem can be resolved easily by re-introducing ostracism.
Probably it's a random sample of AI companies. Curing cancer is the marketing slogan, AI is not capable of doing that. But it's good enough to impress bankers and lawyers who will keep inflating the bubble for the foreseeable future.
"Curing cancer" reminds me of a specific late-70s penny-stock grift, where companies promising a vaccine for cancer (but with no product or R&D) would be pumped-and-dumped.
History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
digitalsalvatn 5 hours ago [-]
Curing cancer is such a lazy goal. Finding out how to make everyone smarter is a much better one.
That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
bigfishrunning 3 hours ago [-]
The smartest people aren't insufferable, but people who think they're the smartest are.
Havoc 8 hours ago [-]
Intentionally going after old people because they’re more susceptible to AI and declaring as much on record is fuckin wild.
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
georgefrowny 8 hours ago [-]
They call it "goal orientation".
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
sznio 6 hours ago [-]
SV is a paperclip optimizer, except instead of maximising paperclips, it maximises human misery.
I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.
I think the existence of the internet as a mass-market entertainment platform used by billions of non-tech users is part of it. SV from like the 1970s/1980s seemed a much more innocent place.
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
butlike 2 hours ago [-]
> But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
Schiendelman 6 hours ago [-]
What makes you think they are less evil other than absence of high-quality information?
walrus01 6 hours ago [-]
Well, for one they had less capability to execute evil plans on a worldwide Internet scale.
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
They’ve been grooming the elderly for years to fall for right wing propaganda to keep securing the ignorant elderly vote so this is just the natural progression to keep grooming them to fall for whatever narrative Horowitz wants to peddle for his GOP overlords to get one final dickover on the country as it keeps running into the ground.
zipy124 7 hours ago [-]
I mean a lot of successful new tech companies were about side-stepping legislation. Some that are missing here are airbnb which effectively side-stepped fairly strict hotel legislation (Though there is a case to be made that it simply improved short-term lodging), and uber which side-stepped strong taxi/private-hire legislation.
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
consensus1 3 hours ago [-]
And thank god they did. I'm old enough to remember the hell of the taxi cartel.
bugglebeetle 3 hours ago [-]
I’m old enough to remember the heavenly times before people repeated phrases like “the taxi cartel” as if they were original thoughts vs. cooked up by Uber’s comms team.
sznio 1 hours ago [-]
have you actually used a pre-uber taxi?
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
Y-bar 56 minutes ago [-]
Years before Uber arrived here local taxi companies already had an iPhone app with geo-location, up-front digital payment, and receipts I could directly import into the company ledger app. Taxis were regulated and forced to give cost up-front in the app and in the window of the vehicle. That is what taking a taxi was here before Uber arrived. That company changed nothing other than to dilute the meaning of worker versus contractor and Uber made it easier for registered sex offenders to become drivers because that company had less stringent requirements.
owen-hill 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
51 minutes ago [-]
wseqyrku 7 hours ago [-]
All investors do this, they don't really have an idea of "the future" they want to build. They just "find something they can throw money at". Their words, not mine.
tgv 7 hours ago [-]
Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.
mathieuh 6 hours ago [-]
As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
tgv 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.
vintermann 5 hours ago [-]
Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.
Supermancho 1 hours ago [-]
> As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
vintermann 6 hours ago [-]
One way to cope with the world going to shit is that to pretend that you want it, and thus you're somehow "winning" when the world goes to shit.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
wseqyrku 6 hours ago [-]
You think you "cope" and are being resilient, but enough people doing that actually leads to the said bleak future, at which point it doesn't matter who's to blame.
vintermann 6 hours ago [-]
I didn't say I was doing this. It's just something I think I see.
icantevenhold 6 hours ago [-]
Liminal places like 4chan are upstream to mainstream culture/sentiment.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
api 6 hours ago [-]
This needs to be taught in school. I’m shocked at how many people don’t get it. I’ve believed this forever which is why I follow the “strange” including weird cultural spaces, fringe para-stuff, whatever.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
icantevenhold 1 hours ago [-]
100%
It’s really hard to predict what becomes relevant - I would have never guessed that the “chad/stacy/virgin” archetypes are now so common place that even my grandma knows what it means.
Whereas other huge memes from back then like EFG never got popular.
api 32 minutes ago [-]
Along with 4chan back in the day (less today) I'd add pre-porn-ban Tumblr (non-mainstream due to having porn). That was the other huge one and was a point of origin for a lot of today's gender-fluid stuff and the overlap it has with fandom, anime, and also liminal and fringe subcultures like furries. (I am not dissing or judging, just pointing out that it's a thing. I don't care what people do in their bedrooms or if they like to LARP as animals. You do you.)
Today I feel like a lot of it has retreated into closed groups, which makes it harder to keep an eye on it. Frustrating for someone who likes to watch it, but also might be a good thing since it might insulate it a little from the culture vultures.
Pre-Internet it was music-drug-party culture (those three always went together), which was full of weirdos that ended up setting trends. Gay culture was big too, especially when the latter was persecuted and kept at the fringe. For example a lot of techno, house, rave, and similar electronic music came out of gay black culture, which is a minority subculture among a minority. Hip hop came out of poor urban black culture, which developed turntablism and weird ways of "creatively misusing" cheap synths because they couldn't afford expensive ones. Blues came out of the poor South, mostly among blacks, and rock came out of that. Etc.
There's a very weird paradox at work here where persecution of a minority or a subculture empowers them and vice versa. I'm not saying persecution is good. Obviously it massively sucks to be on the receiving end of it. But it forces you into a liminal space that's more creative. By "persecution" I also mean just being viewed as incredibly weird or offensive and being soft-persecuted through ostracism and deplatforming. That applies to incels, oddball 4chan autists, etc., subcultures that definitely get either mocked or reviled by a lot of people for various reasons (some valid some not).
api 6 hours ago [-]
Pretty solidly false. Some have a thesis. Some have rules about what they will not invest in.
The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.
This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”
wseqyrku 5 hours ago [-]
> Some have a thesis. Some have rules
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.
eutropia 29 minutes ago [-]
All the parasitic grifters founding these companies seem to be characterized by a uniform lack of human decency.
if the best idea you can come up with for a company is is some variation exploiting humanity, you're not a visionary or an entrepreneur.
You're just an asshole.
alex1138 8 hours ago [-]
I remember reading about Andreessen coaching Zuckerberg, having to spoon feed him answers at trial, and apparently he was one of the masterminds behind the dual class shares/proposed third class of share
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
damnesian 57 minutes ago [-]
>“They're hitting like the old person niche, which is what I think is like the best niche to hit with AI content.”
Andreeson et al should have their asses RICOd.
kristjansson 35 minutes ago [-]
“Passive Income? Bro, I need MASSIVE INCOME” as the tagline of a sports gambling operation … I guess “your desperation is our opportunity, give us your money you illiterate innumerate peasant rube fuck you” didn’t fit on the billboards?
And here I thought I was being scrupulously ethical in 2023 when I was yelled at by HN for making a much milder proof of concept, the first project I ever did in AI:
For me it's insane, how in this day and age, we don't conduct DSM-V / ICD tests (interviews) that screen for Cluster B personality disorders on everyone, and bar, at least those with anti-social PD, psychopathy, or extreme forms of narcissism, to work in positions of influence or power over others.
pingou 4 hours ago [-]
Why would they answer honestly on that test? It's quite obvious what the "wrong" answers would be.
pulkitsh1234 4 hours ago [-]
Well... you would be surprised on how many "successful" people, i.e. people with immense wealth, fall into these categories.
These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
Supermancho 1 hours ago [-]
> These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
Those are the winners ofc, while there are innumerable losers along the way.
inference-god 5 hours ago [-]
How do you get that implemented where they are the very types that run the show?
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
It seems we are successfully screening for people that do.
Gareth321 5 hours ago [-]
People don't like to entertain the idea that determinism could exist. Specifically, the idea that some people are just born bad, mean, or unintelligent. When people commit crimes there is endless hand-wringing about how "society" failed them. They blame it on poverty, or abuse, or inequality, or racism, or anything which absolves the individual of their agency.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
akoboldfrying 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but this is such an unhelpful knee-jerk reaction.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
xienze 5 hours ago [-]
Well that's predicated on those tests being infallible, not open to personal interpretation, and not subject to sabotage ("hey Mr. Psychiatrist evaluating Person X, we at <competitor> think X is a total sociopath, perhaps you might be convinced to see it our way"). And that's not even getting into how what the DSM labels certain things as being "mental illness" or the like is subject to change over time.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
vrganj 5 hours ago [-]
The guy that quoted some of the early fascists in his reactionary manifesto that included a list of enemies wants to build a bleak future? Say it ain't so!
We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
andrewstuart 4 hours ago [-]
“Ethics” and “Silicon Valley” like oil and water.
cineticdaffodil 5 hours ago [-]
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remoroid 4 hours ago [-]
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conartist6 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pythonic_hell 8 hours ago [-]
Ghouls. Sucking the life out of society.
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
By now the FDA should recognise the only thing that’s still safe to eat is the rich.
utopiah 5 hours ago [-]
So... nothing new? /s
You naively thought Silicon Valley was just a funny TV show about people wanting to make money, a lot of it, but even that was an idealized version.
Hikikomori 7 hours ago [-]
They're also part of the same group of christian tech feudalists as Thiel and supports trump/project 2025. Seems like they all went insane because the government can still say no to them.
moogly 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
picafrost 4 hours ago [-]
The US consumer economy must grow. Regulating anything that has the potential to continue its growth is simply not a priority for the current US administration, and investors won't miss out on big tech exits as they grow more scarce. Let the gamblers gamble, let socially harmful uses of AI proliferate, let the surveillance state spread, as long as they generate revenues that do not collapse* the economy. If they produce individuals harmful to society, well, indignants can be Flocked, fined, and, if necessary, imprisoned.
Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."
It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins.
They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
No one. That's the idea.
A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.
> There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls ... the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate. Solarians hated physical contact with others and only communicated with each other via holograms.
A.k.a Rich white man's paradise
There probably is nowhere left to go. Maybe one of those little islands in the South Pacific but you can't live there and they are all mapped too.
We used to have to wash clothes by hand and it took all day. Now we have a washing machine and it takes 2 hours.
People used to spend time washing clothes and now we have more members of the household working.
I think the future from scifi that I remember (eg, Star Trek) is that humans are just being creative. Usually some sort of post scarcity where there’s no more need for money.
once it's no longer necessary and once they can have robot security they will decouple from the rest of society.
they would also require military grade deterrence. eventually they will either steal, buy or make nukes.
> A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)
A tale as old as time, power and control, over the means of production and (what those seeking this power and control consider lesser) humans.
If you think they're doing this for "the betterment of humanity," I would ask you strongly re-examine the evidence. "Watch what people do, not what they say."
"The wealth of the top-400 Americans surpassed 20% of GDP at the start of Trump's second term."
https://www.ft.com/content/2472ef5a-798d-4e7b-b4be-020855cf3... | https://archive.today/8X9dw
They live their lives completely insulated and apart from the masses. They go to different events, they have other people shop for them and transport them around. They don't really interact with us at all. When was the last time you even saw a billionaire in person, let alone talked to one? They have private security to keep us away from them. They only interact with each other.
"Just another billion bro." Like a food driven shark, I acknowledge the shark's existence, while wanting the strongest cage possible between us when in close proximity. Never envy, always recognizing the danger and need for self preservation from the paperclip maximizers.
You are asking the wrong question.
There's no end game. They just really hate life and the living. They want you to suffer.
wonder if the overlords will allow meat or only gruel or bug bars like that Bong Ho movie to the survivors. heh but serious.
So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare, and there's maybe 50-100 billionaires left on the planet. Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies. They don't have children? The human race dies with them? Or they have children, somehow avoid the trap of inbreeding and their children in turn have children and in no time there's again a billion of "us".
We're talking about a level of control over the remaining humans, them and their friends, that require absolute totalitarianism. Of course billionaire A won't accept to live their life according to billionaire B so it'll be a mess in no time.
This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
It's helpful to think of the world as if it were a gigantic vacation resort for about 1000 people, and the remaining 8billion of us are just the staff keeping it luxurious for them. They would be 100% fine if the resort didn't need or have any staff.
It doesn't have to make sense because these are not well-reasoned theories of the future. Thiel, Yarvis and Musk, from what you hear and read on their interviews, come off as drug-addled losers who hate other human beings and anything that doesn't have to do with their hyper-optimized partial view of the world.
Nietzsche presented two prototypical sets of human who interface with laws and ethics. He described why those believes exists and are self-reaffirming even if they are puzzling from the other side.
If he was alive today he’d probably have a YouTube channel and be making bank shilling dietary supplements.
It's deeply embarrassing to be a whore even if it's well payed.
Most people haven't actually read him though, and their knowledge of his work comes from poorly-researched YouTube videos.
Faraday was poor, etc.
Lenin deteriorated, and Marx was always poor.
Anyway...
This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.
The halo effect is real: https://medium.com/@trendguardian/rigged-networks-1d5ad5c6f8...
This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.
What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.
Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.
I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.
They actually don't believe in capitalism and profit, because if they did, they'd recognize that extreme concentration of wealth is actually detrimental to capitalism (the system's) performance. Ricardo, Mill, and Smith all saw this dynamic, but "capitalists" like Andreessen have shown zero interest in combatting it for the health of the capitalist system as a whole.
They also wouldn't, for example, try to use government to prevent the market from building housing near their mansions: https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
You're ascribing way, way too much intellectual consistency to these people. They have no moral system.
That is all to say that the cynical attitude of Andreesen or Thiel is what I think it's always been about. I probably sound a little Marxist or just cynical but I am not a Marxist and I do right and wrong, I do think that the modern theories of morality should be understood cynically as their purpose is primarily a political attempt to change or preserve something and in some sense when one examines them deeply we see self interest usually hidden and diffused by moralising prose and sentiments in these modern theories of morality. So techno optimism manifesto is a more brash, bold and crass version of these works of moral theory indeed a making a sort of unintentional parody. None of this is to say that political economy is only moralising (which techno optimism is).
The more "small time" people reject this narrative that we need a bunch of elitist white guys shoving their mediocrity down our throats, the faster we rebuild a society they're barred from accessing.
They view the rest of this country with disdain and indifference. I'm suggesting that others quit looking at these people as lords and sages to be placed up on a pedestal. Most of them are quite incompetent, skill-less, and frankly, not cool enough to want to hang out with (why they're making "jokes" about there only being two jobs left in the world in the future: Anthropic employees and hookers for Anthropic employees [1]). I'm sorry but I'm not taking direction from a bunch of dorks who can't get laid without paying for it. And I'd take a wild guess that given the climate, the lion's share of America is with me.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjrCFuEA1ds
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".
That is not what OP said, so you may want to re-read what they said.
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
But why tho? And what does that say about voters who apparently "loved" Trump, a guy who mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally, more than her?
I hate this victim-blaming. Democrats deserve heaps of criticism for how they handled the last few elections, but Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate we've had since maybe McCain in 2008? (I didn't vote for McCain, but it would be hard to argue he wasn't qualified).
You said yourself where the blame should lie:
> These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine... Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
Blame can be shared among many actors, and generally should be.
There's also special value in finding blame in yourself and your own actions where possible, not as a self-flagellation exercise, but because it will reveal if you had levers available you failed to pull for some reason.
You mean like how Trump mocked a disabled reporter at one of his early campaign rallies?
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
Unless you take a global census of every possible resource, as well as it’s replenishment rate, you can’t know how to rate limit it
All overconsumption is only recognized after the fact
It’s one of the most intractable problems in the universe
The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
On the other, the older I get the more I worry about the decline of spirituality in the West. Especially in tech, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a hyper rational snowglobe of people optimizing a local maxima, not even considering (and often looking down on) the possibility that there are larger, more important games to play.
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
What’s next? $20m series B in ByBy, a horizontally integrated trash disposal, concrete shoe manufacture, lye bath, and pig farm operation?
Investors might be attracted to the bleak future they are selling, but they are selling a shrinking share of the world economy.
I can think of one way to explain it, and it's not good: they expect global war.
Based on the recent performance of the US and Russia, there is likely no "global" war. China might take out Taiwan and that will be that. Everyone else will just go/stay home.
Being scared of the future doesn't mean the people building it are evil.
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Is investing in these companies even legal?
Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966...
Also, in the UK, lost their 5 year battle about whether drivers are self-employed or workers for Uber.
https://www.taxiplus.co.uk/news/new-rules-for-uber-drivers-w...
Or AirBnB versus Barcelona - https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/06/10/barcelona-is-shutti...
The US is not the only jurisdiction - and that complexity creates an opportunity to leverage fines.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-ap...
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
The second law of thermodynamics applies to software, and this is what's left.
How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing
Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!"
Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals").
I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com
Since when has it not ?
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056765
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
It’s really hard to predict what becomes relevant - I would have never guessed that the “chad/stacy/virgin” archetypes are now so common place that even my grandma knows what it means.
Whereas other huge memes from back then like EFG never got popular.
Today I feel like a lot of it has retreated into closed groups, which makes it harder to keep an eye on it. Frustrating for someone who likes to watch it, but also might be a good thing since it might insulate it a little from the culture vultures.
Pre-Internet it was music-drug-party culture (those three always went together), which was full of weirdos that ended up setting trends. Gay culture was big too, especially when the latter was persecuted and kept at the fringe. For example a lot of techno, house, rave, and similar electronic music came out of gay black culture, which is a minority subculture among a minority. Hip hop came out of poor urban black culture, which developed turntablism and weird ways of "creatively misusing" cheap synths because they couldn't afford expensive ones. Blues came out of the poor South, mostly among blacks, and rock came out of that. Etc.
There's a very weird paradox at work here where persecution of a minority or a subculture empowers them and vice versa. I'm not saying persecution is good. Obviously it massively sucks to be on the receiving end of it. But it forces you into a liminal space that's more creative. By "persecution" I also mean just being viewed as incredibly weird or offensive and being soft-persecuted through ostracism and deplatforming. That applies to incels, oddball 4chan autists, etc., subcultures that definitely get either mocked or reviled by a lot of people for various reasons (some valid some not).
The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.
This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.
if the best idea you can come up with for a company is is some variation exploiting humanity, you're not a visionary or an entrepreneur.
You're just an asshole.
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
Andreeson et al should have their asses RICOd.
https://xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2033989507213889615
A16Z invested $1M in them?
And here I thought I was being scrupulously ethical in 2023 when I was yelled at by HN for making a much milder proof of concept, the first project I ever did in AI:
https://engageusers.ai/
These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
Those are the winners ofc, while there are innumerable losers along the way.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
"I have zero introspection. As little as possible" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk
We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
You naively thought Silicon Valley was just a funny TV show about people wanting to make money, a lot of it, but even that was an idealized version.
Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."