Technology

Thanks for letting me know about Zuck’s behaviour in Hawaii . I was unaware, and should be as a person of the pacific. What a disgusting imperialist culture destroyer and pig. As with many first nation cultures, to Polynesians land is sacred and we are a part of it , maybe guardians of it , more so than any possible ownership over it which is a ridiculous nonsensical concept. Was it not enough that he has compromised international democracy with his extremely dubious contributions to humanity. These sociopathic siliconvalley billionaires really are a scourge. This isn't exclusive to tech though.

As for your overall point, I never particularly admired any corporate characters in tech. All in all I believe the whole sector is overvalued and its importance in life is way over emphasised - the social platforms, and google particularly are overinflated advertising businesses and so of course their self importance has been trumpeted loudly..by themselves and everyone who hitched their giddy advertising budgets to the illusory service provided. Barely as effective as traditional advertising of a century ago. They’ve constructed a panopticon we have trouble looking away from - they even want us to wear goggles to shoe us banners wr cant look away from, to sell us their own useless trinkets.

I believe we should think of the so called tech industry as merely a single component in whatever sector of life it happens to provide a product or service to. Not as a single industry but as a small department of weirdos running say the plumbing (though actual plumbing is arguably more important) with a dingy office in the basement. The cEOs of these are merely the hated bloated bosses of the ones really doing the work. But we should also judge their utility objectively. Sure some aspects are useful in some specific ways. But how useful really? What has the net gain been to humanity of gadget x, or platform Y , or pseudo-sub-industry z? What real energy has it consumed in order to solve what problem(s)? What has the human cost been? They don't think in these terms but we actual humans should.

By the way I work in a tech area, in a small way. I like to think I speak from an angle of some experience with the way I’ve seen some behave, and the irreverant way some customers treat their ‘vendors’. The aura of the tech world is a cult-like bubble which each of these corporations create for themselves , and fledgling startups clamour for, and when clustered as one concept adds up to a massive bubble of hot stinking gas begging to pop.

Unfortunately concepts of value in our economy rarely match their true usefulness. The market is always correct and self corrects, apparently. I look forward to it, but the actual steps forward can be hard to appreciate with all the noise in that hype filled graph.

Also, and this isn’t exclusive to tech, corporations behave like psychopaths due to their narrow goals , profit being the main one, so the characters who float to the top of this septic system of single minded psychopathy tend to be sociopathic due to what they have needed to do to get there. Perhaps for tech this is more a late stage thing, in contrast to our memories of the romantic early days having been more about scrappy boffins soldering things in their parents garage. Now its about whipping up misconceptions in order to raise copious amounts of (mispent) capital in order to make…a smartphone app based ‘platform’ that provides solutions to problems we don't have. So long as the pitch had “A.I” in each sentence.

So yeh, that this environment has resulted in some psychos with a disproportionate amount of money (and therefore political clout) is not a surprise.

To varying degrees if we live in democracies, we are all responsible for creating these monsters. It’s our responsibility to do something about it. Such as raising awareness -as you have done, choosing alternatives, thinking about whether a tech option really is necessary in your life (e.g choosing Amazon over your local independent bookstore), in your workplace (if you have any power here: atleast expressing an alternative method, or solution to your colleagues or managers), and holding tech providers to some level of account at the least with your skepticism. And obviously boycotting what you can. Also remaining hyper aware of the scammy nature of much of the so called sector in its business practices.

I never trusted Tom from myspace as a default insta friend, but he now does seem quaint . But the tech industry is not really an industry and it definitely isn't the world.

Late stage capitalism. It's the same in every industry, it's just that it's more obvious in tech.

They were all evil shit back then... You were just innocent and information didn't travel as fast

Also, Jobs "pretty decent"? That asshole was Narciso reborn

I can't really say whether any of the people you've listed are actually more or less "evil" than one another but in terms of why they present differently, there are a couple of factors I can think of.

One is the changing state of the tech industry. Data and attention are the most valuable commodities now, so these businesses are designed to be aggressively anti-consumer. There is also less big investment now and/or companies are required to pay back their investments quicker, which has degraded the quality of their products and services. Google's big decline is heavily related to this, for example.

The other aspect is the rise of the culture war shit in the US. Most of the people you listed are American or live in the US, and people there have completely rotted their brains with that shit. It's infecting the rest of the West as well but if you want to see what a genuinely retarded nation looks like, the US is where it's at.

I suspect if you swapped these groups of people between their relative eras you'd be disappointed in how similar they turn out.

Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox to PlayStation and so on, Tom from MySpace… So many admirable people who were actually really great…

They weren't that good, just charming.

And, well, they also at least knew where their power came from. Maybe Jobs was not some genius inventor normies consider him to be (those who remember him), maybe Bill was born to a rich family, but they still knew deeply enough what they were doing and they really had visions of future (they wanted, of course, to get all the dough from those being reached, but that's a normal capitalist wish) towards which they were walking step by step for decades. They can be compared to WWI ace pilots in some sense (not about risking their lives).

Still they were doing things similar to what corps do now. Just a bit more subtly, because it required some subtlety back then.

Then their corporations overgrew them, and outlived some of them.

Elon musk, we all know about him, don’t need to really say much. Every time you think he’s doing something good for society, he proves you wrong And does the worst thing he can possibly do in that situation. It’s like he’s specifically trying to make the world the worst place possible everyday

I have a suspicion he just secretly wants to help those big corps suicide themselves to free space for something new and good.

Like, damn. What the heck happened to the world? You know? I thought the tech industry was supposed to be filled with these brilliant genius people who are really good for the world…

Everything ages and rots. The secret to still having the world nice and fresh and optimistic is waste disposal. And also removing weeds from your garden. Like those corps and politicians.

Normal well adjusted people get a few million dollars and call it a day. Only people with a mental problem get billions and keep trying to get more.

Power corrupts.