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> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eli
by smsm42 5mo ago
> Those principles tend to attract the kind of people associated with counterculture and anarchists
And Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt... you get the idea.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-burning-man https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceos-founders-attended-...
- mschuster91 5mo agoEither of the mentioned was at one point of their career someone who would have been considered at least belonging to "counterculture". Unfortunately, money and power corrupts, and lo and behold, one day you wake up to find you have become the very thing you once swore to destroy.
- 47282847 5mo agoAll of the people mentioned have been in millionaire to billionaire families since birth, so based on that alone I am not sure I work with the same definition of “counterculture” as you are.
- tt24 5mo agoMillionaire is not some ultra privileged status in the United States, an upper middle class family with a paid off house in a somewhat decent area will have a net worth in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
- 47282847 5mo agoNumber of millionaires in the US: 23,831,00. Yet again, different idea of “privilege”, I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_millionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
- tt24 5mo agoNot sure how this relates to my comment
- 47282847 5mo agoBeing part of the upper <10% in your own country is “privilege“ for me. Being part of the upper <2% worldwide is “privilege” for me. Not seeing that as “privileged” is a sign of privilege for me. Not understanding what I referred to is privilege for me. And not “counter-culture”.
- eastbound 5mo agoMaybe wisdom gives another perspective on the ideals we had in our youth?
- RobotToaster 5mo agoPower doesn't corrupt, it reveals.
- smsm42 5mo agoMaybe, some of them were poor young iconoclasts some day. That's not when they joined the fashionable trend of Burning Man though. When they joined their trend, they were well into their power (or at least, in the case of somebody like Holmes, pretense of it). Because that's what is fashionable, of course, and they couldn't afford not to be part of "counter-culture" - it's so gauche not to be part of it!
- tt24 5mo agoAre you trying to imply that these people aren’t counterculture? Really difficult for me to name anyone who’s caused more impact / disruption than the list of names here.
- SlimyHog 5mo agoAre you trying to imply that Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg are counterculture in some way? What?
- almostdeadguy 5mo agoThese people in fact are some of the principal figures dictating the dominant culture and status quo.
- tt24 5mo agoIn what way? The dominant culture hates them.
- smsm42 5mo agoNo it doesn't. Fashionable people pretending to be counter-cultural love to talk about hating them, but look how many people are on Facebook, how many are using Amazon, how many are using Google products. Consider that "google" is now a verb and literally everyone knows what it means. The part of dominant culture is to show one's "independence" and "free-mindedness" by saying some words about how all those people are oh so awful - and then go and consume the products they make, exactly in the way the want you to use them, and pay a lot of money for it. That's no more "counter-culture" than a multi-millionaire Hollywood actor dressing in a six-figure dress and showing up at a six-figure-per-ticket gala to protest "the elites" is "counter-culture". It's just the elites' LARPing.
- BurningFrog 5mo agoNone of those people are your average citizen. The idea that rich people are all right wing conformist republicans does not survive getting to know a few of them.
- compass_copium 5mo agoThey may not be right wing conformist republicans but they are certainly not opposed to any aspect of current power structures in any meaningful way (unless, perhaps, it is restraining them).
- smsm42 5mo agoNot sure how did you read "right wing conformist republicans" into my comment that had literally nothing about partisan politics.