Technology

The good ones retire or have important, but not the most profitable/public facing jobs.

The other Apple Steve, Steve Wozniak founded the EFF and was the tech guy at early Apple. Jobs was the business guy.

John Carmack is a controversial figure, but he's actually the tech wiz kid the techbros dream they are. He seems to just be interested in pushing technology and had some choice words for Meta when he left. They should have let him have his axe to carry around.

It's not just tech, but leadership positions in general.

Short answer is that the traits you need to climb the ladder have significant overlap with the traits of legit psychopathy.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mind-of-the-manager/201304/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership

It's better to assume good humans don't exist, they just haven't shown (to you) their bad side yet

$$$$

This is okay but my post about AI is not? Same as reddit 😔.

Resources and influence will always drunkard's-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.

They're going to be drawn to it, they'll fight dirtier for it, and they'll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.

Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren't massive piles of shit.

Gates was always a dirtbag.

He is one of the main reasons proprietary software is so prevalent and predatory nowadays.

Tom from MySpace really is the nicest guy on this list...he was my first friend on there! 😎

OK. Listen. These people are damn smart at what they do. Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos.

I have to deal with people every day that cannot do anything other than watch Fox News, News Max, and News Nation.

The above named people are taking advantage of people like that.

That's all i have to say.

Leaders in tech have to be good at raising money from rich investors, lenders, etc.. Most of these people aren't tech people. They're hedge fund managers, bankers, or just people with lots of money. So consider the following 2 strategies:

Strategy A: Be realistic. Explain the positives and the negatives. The tech looks promising, but the future is uncertain. It's a risky investment that could pay off massively, but it probably won't. You the CEO know a lot about the topic, but you're still just a guy, not a miracle worker.

Strategy B: Just focus on the plus side. It will succeed, and it'll succeed way more than anyone expects. Not only that, you the CEO are an unstoppable hardworking galaxy brain genius who sleeps on the factory floor. They should be so lucky to get to invest in your company.

Which of these is more likely to work with investors who don't know tech? And which is most likely to be the strategy chosen by leaders who are narcissistic and deceitful? The answer is the same.

Bill Gates admirable? Did we grow up in the 90s in the same dimension? Him and Windows were the butt of almost every IT joke, and there was his whole thing of never doing anything original or innovative except gobbling up companies and tech who were. Then the court battles. Those were a pretty big thing, even as a teen I followed the progress of it on the news. Then holding the whole web back for almost a decade as we had to deal with the monopoly of IE.

A CEO can be good. But a CEO with public shareholders has no choice.

I'm not saying that most CEOs aren't bastards but it's not necessary to be in the position or compete. But when you have public shareholders they are going to demand that you take every dollar through whatever means possible.

Copying and pasting something I said elsewhere just the other day, because it fits:

However, I do think it’s also cultural in the tech companies. The modern tech culture was borne from an attitude that was 100% rooted in “well the law says we can’t do this, so we’ll do this instead, which is different on a technical and legal level, but achieves the same end-result.”

This was heavily evident in early piracy, which went from centralized servers of Napster and Kazaa to the decentralized nature of Bittorrent entirely in response to civil suits for piracy. It was an arms race. Soon enough the copyright holders responded by hiring third parties to hide in torrent swarms to be able to log IPs and hit people “associated” with those IPs with suits for sharing trivial amounts of copyrighted data with the third party. That was responded to with private trackers, and eventually, streaming.

Each step was a technical response to an attempt by society to legally regulate them. Just find a new technical way that’s not regulated yet!

The modern tech companies never lost that ethos of giving technical responses to route around new legal regulation. Which, in itself, is further enabled by capitalism, as you astutely pointed out.

This isn't meant to be an indictment against regular ass people and internet piracy, but it's more about pointing out the leaders in the tech industry at large have always had a similar mindset to the pirates. That their response to attempted regulation of their industry has always been to ignore the spirit of the regulation and attempt to achieve the same result through technically wonkery as opposed to legal wonkery.

I mean, you don't have to look farther than Sean Parker from Napster. Guy still has oodles of money and connections from running what amounted to an illegal business model at the time. He's still heavily involved in lots of major tech groups with oodles of money.

You're just not dealing with rational or good faith actors if their response to any attempt to reign them in is to avoid the attempt to be reigned in by changing how the tech works.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life's work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I'm sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

Because money

Because tech is capitalism, and it goes hand in hand with fascism

Capitalism is the death of society and aligns the interests of people and corporations alike towards a race to the bottom for maximum exploitation.

EDIT: Death of society may sound like hyperbole, but it's me just paraphrasing one of the biggest advocates of capitalism in history: Margaret Thatcher, who famously said: "There is no such thing as society, only individuals."

When tech isn't controlled by the user: then the user is controlled by the dev, and power corrupts.

Some are born selfish and others are molded by our insistence you strive for money to survive.

Quick guess - as people become enormously successful, the values they had as individuals often fade. Executives forget what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck (assuming they didn’t have rich parents to begin with). They feel less need to hide (or even acknowledge) their flaws, because now they’re making “fuck you” money.

Our society values money over integrity. If you’re rich enough, you can literally get away with murder.

In my opinion it’s pretty simple… greed

Oh summer child

Well, buttflapper...

Capitalism filters sociopaths to the top. It's a feature, not a bug. It has always been this way. Read about Henry Ford and JD Rockefeller, John Kellog. The list goes on.

Late stage capitalism.