7 ms·

Four billionaire techno-oligarchs–Are creating an alternate, autocratic reality

54 points by laurex 3y ago

JimtheCoder 3y ago
https://archive.is/E2yVW https://archive.is/E2yVW
greenie_beans 3y ago
wait how can they not mention this guys name? he wrote the book on it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=balaji+srinivasan https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=balaji+... they need to hire me to write for them. edit: oh this is an excerpt from the book. i'm really curious to know if they covered balaji, he seems like he should be included in that topic imo. would be a mistake if they didn't at least touch on that — network state, urbit, etc.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  I haven't thought of balaji and urbit as a tuple before - from a googling he spoke at Urbit's Assembly but is there any other relationship there?
  - greenie_beans 3y ago
    i think he's a big investor? also, moldbug built monarchism into the system. the entire universe/planet/ship etc design is a hierarchy that resembles land ownership / lords and peasants. imo it's designed perfectly for somebody who wants to start a network state like balaji describes. which is unfortunate, bc it's a neat place on the internet.
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      I just decided I would come back to this thread and drop a source for anyone from the future, balaji owns some namespace yes. >> Investors: Some of the investors who hold significant Urbit address space and equity in Urbit companies: Founder’s Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinfund, Delphi Digital , Zhenfund, Thrive Capital; as well as HNWIs including early Google employees and BTC/Ethereum buyers. https://octu.urbit.online/octu-ventures/blog/urbit-ecosystem-report https://octu.urbit.online/octu-ventures/blog/urbit-ecosystem...
ilaksh 3y ago
I agree that oligarchs are a problem but some of the other assumptions are wrong. First, we are already in a very unequal world. Putting aside the oligarchs and monopolies which again are very problematic, advanced technologies have the potential to lessen inequality and raise everyone's standard of living. I view the inequality and symptoms of that like oligarchs as a failure of societal organization and again, properly integrating high technology into society is probably the best tool we have for fighting that. That doesn't mean that I agree with the classical technocratic vision which is quite centralized and dated. These things fundamentally come down to a core difference in worldview. I see technology as helping to progress beyond the failures of human nature. Whereas the opposite view feels the status quo is not so bad, and just blames technology for making things worse.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Technology is an amplifier, it doesn’t fix human nature.
- digging 3y ago
  As you say, technology has the potential to go either way. What we see over and over is that technology is used to deepen inequality. Because those with control of the most powerful technologies benefit most from inequality. The rich have incentive to take all they can get and shape society to benefit them more, so we should consider the default reaction to new technology to be deeper inequality. The answer is safeguards. There's no room for hope. We must build a system (of laws, most likely) that promotes equality and is robust against abuse, or we will continue to slide deeper into inequality.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    Why is it so important to reduce inequality if even the worse off are better off than any other time in history? Why not revert back to pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer societies with (presumably) maximized equality?
    - unsui 3y ago
fallingknife 3y ago
The author is really angry and scared about something, and I wish he would tell us what it is, because it's not what he's writing about in the article. The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying. And he seems to think he is some kind of oracle that knows exactly what the societal effects of new tech will be before it is even invented.
- csdvrx 3y ago
  > The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying. I found the whole article very bizarre, I couldn't pinpoint why, but you nailed it. What bothered me the most was that part: > I don’t think we have to wait for the Singularity to see the moral downside of the transhumanist project: the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology. This is because whatever problems we currently have with social inequality will be multiplied exponentially by the kinds of biological enhancements Thiel and others are seriously contemplating. Antibiotics, cancer drugs etc "multiply exponentially" the social inequality: some people may die sooner than others, just by being able to offer the drugs they need. Should we then ban drugs and medical research?
  - erulabs 3y ago
    This is an elaborate version of a modern zero-sum-game ideology. It’s immoral to build a shelter past absolutely bare necessity because of all the folks who have no shelter period. It’s instantly understood in this mental framework that anyone with wealth is de facto immoral and fundamentally responsible for those who do not have wealth. How a professor or anyone with access to the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can believe this is absolutely astonishing. I don’t think it’s a huge over reaction to call it “anti-liberalism”. There are other more accurate terms for this (fundamentally wrong) economic model, but saying them detracts from the actual problem.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Naming these people after the technocracy movement is sad to me, given how non technical these folks are. Zuck & Andreessen have legit background, but it's so old now. Musk & Thiel aspire to power & control with technology, but the idea was to have technologists driving, and I think it was more for the betterment of society rather than dominion & control. It seems like such a strong contradiction to me, oligarchy vs science. The technocracy movement was about opening paths for people, about bettering society. The oligarchs imposition of their will seems like such a radically different vibe, like it's maybe yes sometimes using technology for it's means, but it's not necessarily well informed or enlightened, it's not trying to open or better the world. I'm also a bit shocked to hear Musk's grandpa Joshua Haldeman was a big technocracy person! Whoa. He's mentioned briefly in the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
- archibaldJ 3y ago
  > Official symbol of the Technocracy movement (Technocracy Inc.). The Monad emblem signifies balance between consumption and production. oh wow they were into monad before it was cool
frank_bb 3y ago
[dead]
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Until I switched careers to tech, I didn't understand how out of touch tech is with the rest of society. But also how out of touch anyone whose means replenish their coffers to the point that any wrong decision is corrected just by the passage of a pay period. They talk with venom and vindictiveness about those not in the ivory tower. If you are not in the castle, you're looked at as sub human. The air is thin on the high horse, that's why their noses point up.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  My brother went to Carnegie Mellon. He went to do biology but lived with 3 programmers and ended up getting a CS degree. Couple internships and then straight into a FAANG. Never had any other paid work outside of a couple summer working at a greenhouse shoveling dirt for a couple months. Complete inability to understand how a lot of folks live. Lives in a "California bubble" even though he hasn't been in SF in a decade. Definite "engineer's disease" where he's able to think through technical problems like a genius but can't challenge his own assumptions about anything else and assumes domain expertise transfers easily.
  - seafoam 3y ago
    Are you aware that the Editor-in-Chief of VF lives in a $10 million Brooklyn brownstone ?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
minerva23 3y ago
Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc. Some have even suggested (with basis) that sharable ideas can be a form of transhumanism. I'm curious what the authors' true position is. They talk about the ideal being a "natural state". How "natural" are we talking about? No medicine? No farm equipment? No language? Just a bunch of primates grunting at each other ineffectively? Maybe I should be more critical of how technology is evolving our species, but attacking transhumanism as an idea is reminiscent of the luddites.
- csdvrx 3y ago
  > How "natural" are we talking about? After rereading the whole piece, I think the author must be philosophically close to Kazinsky weird philosophical position.
- xg15 3y ago
  > Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc. Come on, that's a bit of a motte/bailey argument. Yes, technically, we already have transhumanism since glasses were invented. (or you can go back even further if you like. Are wooden legs transhumanism? How about clothing? Tool use?) However, all of those are clearly a huge difference in (at least) degree to someone having brain implants, voluntarily replacing parts of their body with synthetics, changing their entire identity with the use of tech, spending significant parts of their life in virtual reality, etc. Also, I think there are different kinds of criticism you can apply to the ideas of "scifi transhumanism": There is the basic argument that humans should just not tinker with themselves, because then they "stop being humans"/stray from the life the god/nature/whoever else intended for them. I find that pretty dumb, to be honest, and often rooted in religious or cultural objections. (Ok, I'd be down to counter that argument with the point that we've always tinkered with our bodies to some extent) There are other arguments though, asking about the resulting power dynamics and the kind of society that transhumanism wants to create, which I find more interesting: First, who actually gets access to all the cool bio implants/genetic enhancement tech/etc? Are we just going to distribute access the same way we distribute wealth today - i.e. the more wealth and/or power you have, the more access you get? At the end of that road lies a world where our current problem of inequality escalates and different classes eventually become different species. This honestly doesn't sound like a good world to live in. The other question is who controls all the tech. Ok, so some ultra-altruistic billionaire devides to offer neural implants and cybernetic body enhancements for the masses, for free. Does everyone get full access to the code abd functionality of their implants? Or will they be like today's smartphones, with half of the device locked down and the other tethered to the billionaire's cloud infrastructure? A world where you don't even have practical ownership over your own body honestly sounds even more frightening. So yeah, I too would love to live in some cyberpunk world and go crazy with body enhancements. But I think until we have solved the problem of power dynamics, we can't have nice things. And Elon&co right now seem to mostly confirm the fears around this than to address them.
nvm0n2 3y ago
> Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” Where is this from? The quote marks make it sound like something one of them may have said or at least that is a well known quote, but the only references turned up by searching are this article. > These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but [not any more] This seems to be what's upset the author (a professor, what a shock). When they were progressive heros, no problem. Once they start doing things like publicly doubting the wisdom of the emeritus set, they become a Fab Four of autocrats who are single-handedly responsible for "post-truth reality". This article seems to have no real value or merit, it's just the progressive media/academic class doing a hit job on anyone it regards as an ideological traitor. It routinely descends into LLM-style gibberish hallucination, like when the author claims that interplanetary colonization is "an existential risk to the world in political, economic, and, perhaps most fundamentally, moral terms". Yep, Mars colonies are immoral. Really, who cares what some random self-proclaimed educator thinks? Just one of these four guys have done more for progress than the author and everyone like him ever will.
- DueDilligence 3y ago
  [dead]
- jhp123 3y ago
  >Where is this from? to me the quote sounds like a paraphrase of Guy Debord
  - dvaun 3y ago
    Definitely an allusion to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
- francisofascii 3y ago
  > "nothing is true and all is spectacle" I think this from the book "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a historian specializing in Eastern European and Russian history. Lesson: 10 "Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."
taylodl 3y ago
The most rational thing for a human being to do to safeguard our future is to depose of these four individuals. The interesting question is whether that would be a futile effort - would someone else rise to vill the void? If that's the case then are we already doomed?
SenAnder 3y ago
This feels like a distraction. Summing the net worth, total assets, and assets under management of Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Meta, Palantir, Paypal, Tesla, and Andreessen Horowitz, one gets $729.2 billion. This is certainly an over-estimate, since by counting e.g. Meta and Zuckerberg's assets independently, we're double-counting their wealth. The famous Rothschild family is estimated to be worth around $400 billion [1,2] (oddly, the Snopes article on their wealth debunks one too-high claim of it, but doesn't replace it with any other number, except the yearly revenue of one of their businesses [3]). The top 4 asset management firms manage $26.3 trillion [4]. While this is not the same as owning those assets, it still makes them exceptionally powerful. Compared to them, the wealth of these billionaires and banking families is a rounding error. We focus on the "tech" moguls because they're the most visible, not because they're the most powerful or richest. [1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/rothschild-family-net-worth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/rothsc... [2] https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/04/18/are-the-rothschilds-the-worlds-wealthiest-family/ https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/04/18/are-the-rothschild... [3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rothschild-family-wealth/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rothschild-family-wealth/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg literally wanted to fight each other. A mere charade, to distract the rubes from their conspiracies?
- ishjoh 3y ago
  Both men are trained in martial arts and have competed in fights in the past in those disciplines. It's hard to describe the draw to someone that hasn't trained seriously or participated in that type of physical contest but it lets you understand yourself and someone else very deeply. There is a reason so many fighters will hug after a match, it's because in that moment you understand things about the other person that very few other people ever will. It started as a joke, gained some steam, and fizzled out, but I fully understand why they would want to do it.
  - kramerger 3y ago
    Or, they are just trolling the world to divert attention from something else and you buy it every time no questions asked. Or maybe not, what do I know
sebastos 3y ago
This article was designed to create the vague innuendo of a cabal without going to the trouble to substantiate anything of the sort. The four people mentioned are merely public figures that happen to have some past ties, and therefore have espoused SOME ideas that are similar. You can draw a circle around any cluster of people and then assert a conspiracy in this way. The reality is that each of the people mentioned is an individual, and none of those individuals have an evil agenda (on purpose or otherwise). Let's take them each on: - Zuck is just the dog that caught the mailman. He doesn't have an agenda. In fact, he's desperately trying to _think_ of an agenda to point his life at. What have you got, virtual reality? Sure, maybe I'll be the virtual reality guy. (Right out of the gate, the author hilariously conflates Web3 with the metaverse as if they're the same thing, which should be enough to discredit the whole article. This goes beyond failed research - a confusion of that level means you can't even begin to have an opinion.) - Elon Musk is some kind of hyper-competitive "ex-dork" with a chip on his shoulder. His ambitions are about self-aggrandizement. He's got way more technical background and understanding than most business execs. This is faint praise, but it makes him a big fish in a small pond, which he has turned into an increasingly toxic identity: the guy who doesn't care about you stupids. He wants humans to become an interplanetary species, but it's because he wants to be the guy that made us so. He doesn't have an evil agenda because somebody with an evil legacy wouldn't get statues made of them. - Marc Andreesen is just a nerd's nerd who happens to be rich. He's a techno libertarian who was in on the original internet wave, thought blockchain was really cool, and is now breathless about the promises of AI. He thinks AI risk is dumb... but if you press him on why, it's because he can hardly see the risk in these large language models, so what's the problem? See the pattern? He's just a nerd who likes to geek out over the latest thing. This is not an evil agenda, it's technophilia. The author hates some recent technology trends, so he got the two confused. - Peter Thiel is by far the most interesting of the four. I'd posit that he can be understood as a very, very bright person who grew up vaguely conservative and religious but then went to Stanford. He was so amused that people in academia automatically assume they're smarter than you solely because they buy into some garden variety progressive talking points. A born debater, he made a career out of being a contrarian, just to prove to them how smart they weren't. He's the only one on the list with an actual philosophy and agenda of any kind, but thinking carefully about what would make the world better and then acting on it doesn't make you evil. People keep writing these articles about the evil technocratic Thiel. To back it up, they cite some things he's said in scare quotes, point out that he has influence, and then assert a comically bad-faith evil agenda without even a basic attempt to understand his views. (The author uses the quote "competition is for suckers" as if it's some skeleton in the closet, which is sort of like writing a piece about Henry Ford and volunteering that he once said "history is bunk" as if this might be news to you.) This style of attack is not even the beginning of the beginning of a refutation. It's just childish good-guy-bad-guy, rabble-rousing from someone who is basically too dim to be participating in this conversation. The outrage machine's constant search for vitriolic hot-takes has wrapped the pseudo-intellectual class in such knots that they turned all the way around to hating transhumanism. Why? Well, because that's the only common thread we can draw between these 4 random Techno-Oligarchs! (The author was to proud to have coined this punchy moniker. I'm sure it'll catch on.)

54 points by laurex 3y ago

https://archive.is/E2yVW https://archive.is/E2yVW

wait how can they not mention this guys name? he wrote the book on it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=balaji+srinivasan https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=balaji+... they need to hire me to write for them. edit: oh this is an excerpt from the book. i'm really curious to know if they covered balaji, he seems like he should be included in that topic imo. would be a mistake if they didn't at least touch on that — network state, urbit, etc.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
I haven't thought of balaji and urbit as a tuple before - from a googling he spoke at Urbit's Assembly but is there any other relationship there?
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  i think he's a big investor? also, moldbug built monarchism into the system. the entire universe/planet/ship etc design is a hierarchy that resembles land ownership / lords and peasants. imo it's designed perfectly for somebody who wants to start a network state like balaji describes. which is unfortunate, bc it's a neat place on the internet.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    I just decided I would come back to this thread and drop a source for anyone from the future, balaji owns some namespace yes. >> Investors: Some of the investors who hold significant Urbit address space and equity in Urbit companies: Founder’s Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinfund, Delphi Digital , Zhenfund, Thrive Capital; as well as HNWIs including early Google employees and BTC/Ethereum buyers. https://octu.urbit.online/octu-ventures/blog/urbit-ecosystem-report https://octu.urbit.online/octu-ventures/blog/urbit-ecosystem...

ilaksh 3y ago

I agree that oligarchs are a problem but some of the other assumptions are wrong. First, we are already in a very unequal world. Putting aside the oligarchs and monopolies which again are very problematic, advanced technologies have the potential to lessen inequality and raise everyone's standard of living. I view the inequality and symptoms of that like oligarchs as a failure of societal organization and again, properly integrating high technology into society is probably the best tool we have for fighting that. That doesn't mean that I agree with the classical technocratic vision which is quite centralized and dated. These things fundamentally come down to a core difference in worldview. I see technology as helping to progress beyond the failures of human nature. Whereas the opposite view feels the status quo is not so bad, and just blames technology for making things worse.

edgyquant 3y ago
Technology is an amplifier, it doesn’t fix human nature.
digging 3y ago
As you say, technology has the potential to go either way. What we see over and over is that technology is used to deepen inequality. Because those with control of the most powerful technologies benefit most from inequality. The rich have incentive to take all they can get and shape society to benefit them more, so we should consider the default reaction to new technology to be deeper inequality. The answer is safeguards. There's no room for hope. We must build a system (of laws, most likely) that promotes equality and is robust against abuse, or we will continue to slide deeper into inequality.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Why is it so important to reduce inequality if even the worse off are better off than any other time in history? Why not revert back to pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer societies with (presumably) maximized equality?
  - unsui 3y ago

fallingknife 3y ago

The author is really angry and scared about something, and I wish he would tell us what it is, because it's not what he's writing about in the article. The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying. And he seems to think he is some kind of oracle that knows exactly what the societal effects of new tech will be before it is even invented.

csdvrx 3y ago
> The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying. I found the whole article very bizarre, I couldn't pinpoint why, but you nailed it. What bothered me the most was that part: > I don’t think we have to wait for the Singularity to see the moral downside of the transhumanist project: the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology. This is because whatever problems we currently have with social inequality will be multiplied exponentially by the kinds of biological enhancements Thiel and others are seriously contemplating. Antibiotics, cancer drugs etc "multiply exponentially" the social inequality: some people may die sooner than others, just by being able to offer the drugs they need. Should we then ban drugs and medical research?
- erulabs 3y ago
  This is an elaborate version of a modern zero-sum-game ideology. It’s immoral to build a shelter past absolutely bare necessity because of all the folks who have no shelter period. It’s instantly understood in this mental framework that anyone with wealth is de facto immoral and fundamentally responsible for those who do not have wealth. How a professor or anyone with access to the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can believe this is absolutely astonishing. I don’t think it’s a huge over reaction to call it “anti-liberalism”. There are other more accurate terms for this (fundamentally wrong) economic model, but saying them detracts from the actual problem.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Naming these people after the technocracy movement is sad to me, given how non technical these folks are. Zuck & Andreessen have legit background, but it's so old now. Musk & Thiel aspire to power & control with technology, but the idea was to have technologists driving, and I think it was more for the betterment of society rather than dominion & control. It seems like such a strong contradiction to me, oligarchy vs science. The technocracy movement was about opening paths for people, about bettering society. The oligarchs imposition of their will seems like such a radically different vibe, like it's maybe yes sometimes using technology for it's means, but it's not necessarily well informed or enlightened, it's not trying to open or better the world. I'm also a bit shocked to hear Musk's grandpa Joshua Haldeman was a big technocracy person! Whoa. He's mentioned briefly in the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

archibaldJ 3y ago
> Official symbol of the Technocracy movement (Technocracy Inc.). The Monad emblem signifies balance between consumption and production. oh wow they were into monad before it was cool

frank_bb 3y ago

[dead]

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Until I switched careers to tech, I didn't understand how out of touch tech is with the rest of society. But also how out of touch anyone whose means replenish their coffers to the point that any wrong decision is corrected just by the passage of a pay period. They talk with venom and vindictiveness about those not in the ivory tower. If you are not in the castle, you're looked at as sub human. The air is thin on the high horse, that's why their noses point up.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
My brother went to Carnegie Mellon. He went to do biology but lived with 3 programmers and ended up getting a CS degree. Couple internships and then straight into a FAANG. Never had any other paid work outside of a couple summer working at a greenhouse shoveling dirt for a couple months. Complete inability to understand how a lot of folks live. Lives in a "California bubble" even though he hasn't been in SF in a decade. Definite "engineer's disease" where he's able to think through technical problems like a genius but can't challenge his own assumptions about anything else and assumes domain expertise transfers easily.
- seafoam 3y ago
  Are you aware that the Editor-in-Chief of VF lives in a $10 million Brooklyn brownstone ?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

minerva23 3y ago

Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc. Some have even suggested (with basis) that sharable ideas can be a form of transhumanism. I'm curious what the authors' true position is. They talk about the ideal being a "natural state". How "natural" are we talking about? No medicine? No farm equipment? No language? Just a bunch of primates grunting at each other ineffectively? Maybe I should be more critical of how technology is evolving our species, but attacking transhumanism as an idea is reminiscent of the luddites.

csdvrx 3y ago
> How "natural" are we talking about? After rereading the whole piece, I think the author must be philosophically close to Kazinsky weird philosophical position.
xg15 3y ago
> Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc. Come on, that's a bit of a motte/bailey argument. Yes, technically, we already have transhumanism since glasses were invented. (or you can go back even further if you like. Are wooden legs transhumanism? How about clothing? Tool use?) However, all of those are clearly a huge difference in (at least) degree to someone having brain implants, voluntarily replacing parts of their body with synthetics, changing their entire identity with the use of tech, spending significant parts of their life in virtual reality, etc. Also, I think there are different kinds of criticism you can apply to the ideas of "scifi transhumanism": There is the basic argument that humans should just not tinker with themselves, because then they "stop being humans"/stray from the life the god/nature/whoever else intended for them. I find that pretty dumb, to be honest, and often rooted in religious or cultural objections. (Ok, I'd be down to counter that argument with the point that we've always tinkered with our bodies to some extent) There are other arguments though, asking about the resulting power dynamics and the kind of society that transhumanism wants to create, which I find more interesting: First, who actually gets access to all the cool bio implants/genetic enhancement tech/etc? Are we just going to distribute access the same way we distribute wealth today - i.e. the more wealth and/or power you have, the more access you get? At the end of that road lies a world where our current problem of inequality escalates and different classes eventually become different species. This honestly doesn't sound like a good world to live in. The other question is who controls all the tech. Ok, so some ultra-altruistic billionaire devides to offer neural implants and cybernetic body enhancements for the masses, for free. Does everyone get full access to the code abd functionality of their implants? Or will they be like today's smartphones, with half of the device locked down and the other tethered to the billionaire's cloud infrastructure? A world where you don't even have practical ownership over your own body honestly sounds even more frightening. So yeah, I too would love to live in some cyberpunk world and go crazy with body enhancements. But I think until we have solved the problem of power dynamics, we can't have nice things. And Elon&co right now seem to mostly confirm the fears around this than to address them.

nvm0n2 3y ago

> Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” Where is this from? The quote marks make it sound like something one of them may have said or at least that is a well known quote, but the only references turned up by searching are this article. > These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but [not any more] This seems to be what's upset the author (a professor, what a shock). When they were progressive heros, no problem. Once they start doing things like publicly doubting the wisdom of the emeritus set, they become a Fab Four of autocrats who are single-handedly responsible for "post-truth reality". This article seems to have no real value or merit, it's just the progressive media/academic class doing a hit job on anyone it regards as an ideological traitor. It routinely descends into LLM-style gibberish hallucination, like when the author claims that interplanetary colonization is "an existential risk to the world in political, economic, and, perhaps most fundamentally, moral terms". Yep, Mars colonies are immoral. Really, who cares what some random self-proclaimed educator thinks? Just one of these four guys have done more for progress than the author and everyone like him ever will.

DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
jhp123 3y ago
>Where is this from? to me the quote sounds like a paraphrase of Guy Debord
- dvaun 3y ago
  Definitely an allusion to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
francisofascii 3y ago
> "nothing is true and all is spectacle" I think this from the book "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a historian specializing in Eastern European and Russian history. Lesson: 10 "Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

taylodl 3y ago

The most rational thing for a human being to do to safeguard our future is to depose of these four individuals. The interesting question is whether that would be a futile effort - would someone else rise to vill the void? If that's the case then are we already doomed?

SenAnder 3y ago

This feels like a distraction. Summing the net worth, total assets, and assets under management of Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Meta, Palantir, Paypal, Tesla, and Andreessen Horowitz, one gets $729.2 billion. This is certainly an over-estimate, since by counting e.g. Meta and Zuckerberg's assets independently, we're double-counting their wealth. The famous Rothschild family is estimated to be worth around $400 billion [1,2] (oddly, the Snopes article on their wealth debunks one too-high claim of it, but doesn't replace it with any other number, except the yearly revenue of one of their businesses [3]). The top 4 asset management firms manage $26.3 trillion [4]. While this is not the same as owning those assets, it still makes them exceptionally powerful. Compared to them, the wealth of these billionaires and banking families is a rounding error. We focus on the "tech" moguls because they're the most visible, not because they're the most powerful or richest. [1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/rothschild-family-net-worth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/rothsc... [2] https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/04/18/are-the-rothschilds-the-worlds-wealthiest-family/ https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/04/18/are-the-rothschild... [3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rothschild-family-wealth/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rothschild-family-wealth/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg literally wanted to fight each other. A mere charade, to distract the rubes from their conspiracies?

ishjoh 3y ago
Both men are trained in martial arts and have competed in fights in the past in those disciplines. It's hard to describe the draw to someone that hasn't trained seriously or participated in that type of physical contest but it lets you understand yourself and someone else very deeply. There is a reason so many fighters will hug after a match, it's because in that moment you understand things about the other person that very few other people ever will. It started as a joke, gained some steam, and fizzled out, but I fully understand why they would want to do it.
- kramerger 3y ago
  Or, they are just trolling the world to divert attention from something else and you buy it every time no questions asked. Or maybe not, what do I know

sebastos 3y ago

This article was designed to create the vague innuendo of a cabal without going to the trouble to substantiate anything of the sort. The four people mentioned are merely public figures that happen to have some past ties, and therefore have espoused SOME ideas that are similar. You can draw a circle around any cluster of people and then assert a conspiracy in this way. The reality is that each of the people mentioned is an individual, and none of those individuals have an evil agenda (on purpose or otherwise). Let's take them each on: - Zuck is just the dog that caught the mailman. He doesn't have an agenda. In fact, he's desperately trying to _think_ of an agenda to point his life at. What have you got, virtual reality? Sure, maybe I'll be the virtual reality guy. (Right out of the gate, the author hilariously conflates Web3 with the metaverse as if they're the same thing, which should be enough to discredit the whole article. This goes beyond failed research - a confusion of that level means you can't even begin to have an opinion.) - Elon Musk is some kind of hyper-competitive "ex-dork" with a chip on his shoulder. His ambitions are about self-aggrandizement. He's got way more technical background and understanding than most business execs. This is faint praise, but it makes him a big fish in a small pond, which he has turned into an increasingly toxic identity: the guy who doesn't care about you stupids. He wants humans to become an interplanetary species, but it's because he wants to be the guy that made us so. He doesn't have an evil agenda because somebody with an evil legacy wouldn't get statues made of them. - Marc Andreesen is just a nerd's nerd who happens to be rich. He's a techno libertarian who was in on the original internet wave, thought blockchain was really cool, and is now breathless about the promises of AI. He thinks AI risk is dumb... but if you press him on why, it's because he can hardly see the risk in these large language models, so what's the problem? See the pattern? He's just a nerd who likes to geek out over the latest thing. This is not an evil agenda, it's technophilia. The author hates some recent technology trends, so he got the two confused. - Peter Thiel is by far the most interesting of the four. I'd posit that he can be understood as a very, very bright person who grew up vaguely conservative and religious but then went to Stanford. He was so amused that people in academia automatically assume they're smarter than you solely because they buy into some garden variety progressive talking points. A born debater, he made a career out of being a contrarian, just to prove to them how smart they weren't. He's the only one on the list with an actual philosophy and agenda of any kind, but thinking carefully about what would make the world better and then acting on it doesn't make you evil. People keep writing these articles about the evil technocratic Thiel. To back it up, they cite some things he's said in scare quotes, point out that he has influence, and then assert a comically bad-faith evil agenda without even a basic attempt to understand his views. (The author uses the quote "competition is for suckers" as if it's some skeleton in the closet, which is sort of like writing a piece about Henry Ford and volunteering that he once said "history is bunk" as if this might be news to you.) This style of attack is not even the beginning of the beginning of a refutation. It's just childish good-guy-bad-guy, rabble-rousing from someone who is basically too dim to be participating in this conversation. The outrage machine's constant search for vitriolic hot-takes has wrapped the pseudo-intellectual class in such knots that they turned all the way around to hating transhumanism. Why? Well, because that's the only common thread we can draw between these 4 random Techno-Oligarchs! (The author was to proud to have coined this punchy moniker. I'm sure it'll catch on.)