The current crop of tech billionaires openly hate democracy, gleefully proclaim that their products are going to put everyone out of a job, and invest enormous amounts of time and energy into making sure that nobody can do anything to stop the world they’re creating, that nobody asked for or wants.
Actions have consequences. I’m sorry. Read a history book.
I’m old enough to remember that Sam Altman’s claim to fame before OpenAI, before running YC, was running a failed also-ran location-based whatever Web 2.0 scam startup thing that accomplished nothing and that no one remembers. His entire “career” is based on persuading people with money to give him more of it.
The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
This is a good example of Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Money is supposed to be a measure of value exchanged; the idea is that if you aren't receiving something actually useful in exchange for your money, you don't spend it. This assumption breaks down as the economy grows in complexity and it becomes harder to judge what you're actually receiving. It becomes increasingly easy to game the process of convincing people to give you money. People who get good at this outcompete people who don't, and there is a lot of money floating around out there without much accountability.
This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.
The problem is not that society is too complexity but extremely unequal distribution of money. Those few that have most of it usually did not earn it by providing a useful service to society and for them it becomes a random investment game without consequences which creates additional winners that also never produced something useful.
We need to start talking about people like this truthfully: they are sick. Fucked up. Broken. They do not deserve fame or fortune, they deserve a padded cell, close observation by psychologists and neurologists and try and figure out how we can stop it happening.
Horribly manipulative Smaug-likes who only care for themselves, why must the rest of us be beholden to them? To be victims to the havoc they wreak? Why do we put up with it?
In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.
If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.
I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?
This might be a little pedantic and certainly off topic, but Coke ads really aren't intended to convince you that you need one right now, they are intended to make sure they are the first drink you think of when you think of sodas. Everytime a waitress says "oh sorry will Pepsi be ok?" Coke ads have achieved their purpose even though they didn't sell any soda or change your preferences.
RC Cola exists right alongside Coca Cola, but has a marketing budget that is a tiny tiny fraction of Coke's, do you ever hear anyone ask for an RC Cola? Coke spends on marketing so they don't become RC Cola, not to convince you of anything.
> What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
A wealth tax. Higher capital gains taxes. Closing tax loopholes.
But wealth is interchangeable with power so the wealthy will just undo any fixes we create to the structural inequalities of capital. The problem might just be intrinsic to human nature.
Reminds me of Elon Musk. Grifting off of techno-futuro-optimism. Hyperloop, Boring tunnel, going to mars, self-driving cars, etc. Perhaps it's common to CEOs, lying/manipulating to people to create hype in order to convince them to give you money.
Sure, but Elon Musk had known engineering roles at various companies, and built a space company nobody, not even himself thought would succeed, into the most viable and affordable way to get things into space.
Idk if I had to be stranded on an island with either Elon or Sam, I think I'd rather be stuck with Elon.
This book doesn’t cover the UK specifically, but it does detail Russia’s well-publicized strategy of promoting reactionary media narratives to destabilize the United States and the EU. I feel like at some point, people will need to start taking this seriously, instead of continuing to act like people suddenly just started telling insane racist lies on the internet for no reason. https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...
It's pretty weird that on the one hand they don't acknowledge that propaganda actually works, yet on the other hand let ad-tech exist because "where would we be without it?"
And now you have moved the argument away from Russia. Pulling a thread off-topic like that is one of their simplest strategies. It begs for engagement.
You don't need the Steele dossier to see trump and his entourage are manipulated by Russian agents.
Fact: Michael Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador.
Fact: Flynn lied about the content of his call. Not to journalists, but to FBI agents.
Fact: Trump dismissed Comey to stop the investigations around Flynn. He said it openly, on camera.
Fact: Trump pardoned Flynn.
Fact: Trump is pushing for the prosecution of Comey - a case so weak it has already been rejected before going to trial.
Fact: FBI agents have been demoted and punished for nothing else than working on the Russian dossier. Including respected career agents currently working on e.g. Iranian operations in the USA. Their only crime has been to be assigned to the Russian dossier, something they didn't choose.
You absolutely don't need the Steele dossier to see something's wrong - except to deflect from the obvious.
Another big driver, which TFA mentions, is that outrage drives both clicks and repeat visits. There are lots and lots of people in it purely for the money, including Americans. It's nothing political, it's purely the profit motive. Then the reward functions on FB and YT direct people towards content that appalls or outrages, disturbing videos, conspiracy theories, bigotry. For FB the ideal user is one who's been sucked into a vortex of conspiracy theories and spends all their time on FB.
When I say it's apolitical I mean the con artists know exactly who to target, which is the right, because you can feed them anything and they'll keep coming back for more. It's far harder with the left, they'll say "this is all bullshit" and move on quickly, there's no money to be made there. There was a great interview a few years back with a California-based troll who said he targeted the right because that's where you got the responses: "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out".
It seems to me like a lot of the American stuff is people directly or indirectly under Russian influence or part of an international network of extreme-right politics of which Putin is the most powerful figure.
> Is Putin the most powerful figure? It seems Bibi holds the most sway over Trump this month.
Power and influence can be considered two different things.
As for holding sway over Trump: it's often generally anyone that can flatter his ego and/or put money in his pockets. (Or for his swaying himself: whatever will get the most headlines, the most people talking about him.)
>Musk repeats verbatim Russian talking points about Ukraine.
Have it crossed your mind that they're just closer to truth than what Western propaganda spreads about Ukraine conflict and why it started and keep going?
> Have it crossed your mind that they're just closer to truth than what Western propaganda spreads about Ukraine conflict and why it started and keep going?
It started because Putin wants the 'good old days' of the Soviet Union back, and he does not consider Ukrainians their own people, but just a bunch of folks that have forgotten they are really Russian/Soviet. The 'official' Rusian reason is/was because Ukraine was run by Nazis (never mind that Zelenskyy is Jewish).
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. When you start hiding your problems and blaming those who expose them, you are on a spiral which only goes down.
It doesn't matter if your enemy also wants to promote this. If you follow this line of thought, you have to support the government of China censoring the Tiananmen Square massacre. Because their enemies in the West have for decades been talking about it.
We’re talking about people making things up from whole cloth, such as asserting that Haitian immigrants steal and eat dogs from white Americans in the suburbs, among many, many such examples. San Francisco has also been a target of this kind of propaganda for the entire time I’ve lived here.
I agree that social problems should be exposed. One such social problem is widespread, entirely fabricated stories of crime and violence, accepted uncritically by people who don’t live in the supposedly affected areas, driving division and political discourse that lead to real-world harm.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that this propaganda, mainly spread through social media, is a product of a foreign government strategy to interfere in the internal politics of “enemy” nations. If this is true, it should be exposed and shut down.
We're all aware of the roadside kill peccadilloes of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's hardly cause to paint them all as a third world family.
It is unclear to me that sunlight has ever disinfected anything. Lies spread faster than the truth.
That's not to say you'll do any good by hiding problems. It's just that exposing them isn't going to fix anything, either. You do have to fix your own problems, but you also need to get some breathing room by getting people to cease lying about it.
My smart watch has become an invaluable digital prosthetic to help me backfill cognitive challenges that I’ve learned are related to ADHD.
“It dings all the time!” Yes, exactly, having a buzzer attached to my person at all times ensures I don’t miss appointments and that I leave to things on time.
Your thermostat that bothers you? It would be great if we lived in a world where energy was free, and there were no consequences for using as much energy as you want. That’s not the world we live in. And you probably don’t want to live in a world where the power company decides when you can and can’t turn on your AC. This is the compromise. I’m sorry you’re bothered by it — the consequences of other solutions to this problem are likely much worse.
It’s easy to forget that these things exist, and people buy them, to solve real problems. But writing a whole essay and just eliding that fact strikes me as lazy.
The larger point of the article is that these new devices are dependent on your continued labor to keep them running usefully. Moreover, this is a choice in how they're designed.
The article isn't saying they don't do other things, it's just not relevant.
I agree to an extent. I also have ADHD and find these things useful, but the tradeoff is that to be effective they always have to be important in a way a cell phone or smart watch is very bad at guaranteeing since their main customer isn't the consumer but the advertising firm. I wish bespoke PDAs were still a thing (or at least, an easily accessible thing)
If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.
I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com
I emailed you. You can work with us as it is a booming market in Europe and Ukraine (and probably in China too), you could expand our market into the USA. We build charging stations, big batteries (see my other posts in this thread and in my HN profile), Enernet smart grids and entire solar only neighborhoods (houses, solar, batteries, fast internet, water and sewage infrastructure) remotely, all based on 100% solar. From $40K per tiny house.
Hardly. Remembering the end of 1968, when Apollo 8 made the first manned voyage out of earth's orbit, and orbited the moon:
Newsman Walter Cronkite remembers the year of Apollo 8: "The whole 1960s really culminating in 1968 were the most terrible decade, undoubtedly, of the twentieth century and very possibly our entire history, even including the decade of the Civil War. America was divided as it never had been since the Civil War and by the Vietnam War, by the civil rights fight.
"Everything seemed to come to a head in '68. There were the assassinations of two of the leaders of the more liberal causes. Bobby Kennedy, shortly after winning that election in California that probably would have put him over the top as the presidential candidate that year, and Martin Luther King, of course, in Memphis, was a terrible blow to the entire cause of civil rights. By the summer of '68 the Democratic convention turned out to be a terrible shambles of violence and counter-violence by the Chicago police... By December the country was pretty far down."
I’m a mission-driven engineer and team leader, focusing on climate change mitigation at scale. I’ve worked in clean energy for the last decade, building complex energy analytics tools for the largest DER providers and electric utilities in the United States. I’m looking for a new role in clean energy, carbon sequestration or climate resilience. My ideal job would focus on or include working on hardware, but I am open to working with any team focused on moving the needle on climate change.
I have a track record of successfully taking complex projects from 0 to 1 as both a product manager and engineer. I am skilled at communicating directly with engineers, internal stakeholders, and customers, and finding a way to move the ball forward past any obstacle.
> If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”
Actions have consequences. I’m sorry. Read a history book.
reply