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 a

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.)