#resist #tech #technology #techbros #techlords #AI #singularity #SiliconValley
Sure I make use of tech sometimes. But I think it's of utmost importance that it be laughed at loudly and frequently.
#techlords
Elon Musk is microdosing ketamine and macro-posting memes—who needs stability when you have billions?
#MuskMadness #KetamineUse #CryptoCircus #DOGE #TheInternetIsCrack #TechLords
#maxstreaming #hbomax #tv #movies #mountainhead #tech #technology #techlords #techbros #AI #SiliconValley #singularity
Just watched Mountainhead on Max/HBOMax. Excellent & for verification of the reality of the thinking, u must read this excellent book by @adambecker:
#resist #democracy #tech #technology #techlords #techbros
Today's Stupid Quote:
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
~~Peter Thiel
#tech #technology #techbros #techlords
Stupid Quote of the Day:
"I don't even know why we study history...[W]hat already happened doesn't really matter...In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."
~~Anthony Levandowski, Waymo cofounder
#read #reading #books #bookstodon
#technology #tech #techbros #techlords #SiliconValley
Just finished the fantastic book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker. An amazing book; you must read it!
#atheism #tech #technology #techlords #techbros
Lol, the techlords & techbros are always saying they're atheist but have elevated that Singularity & Transhuman crap to cult levels.
#resist #tech #technology #techlords #techbros
Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous:
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream = sublime.
The techlord industry's dream of "The Dark Enlightenment" = ridiculous and shitty too.
#resist #nazi #tech #technology #techlords #techbros #fascism #altright
Don't know why I'm surprised so many young men, esp. in IT, seem to be fascist; Hitler had his youth groups after all.
#resist #fascism #tech #technology #techlords #techbros #oligarchy
Today's quote: "To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating."
~~from "The Rise of End Times Fascism" by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor, theguardian.com (https://tinyurl.com/yx3satah)
#resist #darkenlightenment #techbros #techlords #tech #technology #musk #thiel #andreessen
Wondering why techbros silly enuff 2 think Dark Enlightenment means them ruling when it really means old-school dictators like Putin still will.
#resist #tech #techlords #techbros #technology
We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good...While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
~~from You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
#resist #musk #doge #stopdoge #techlords #tech #techbros #technology #notallheroeswearcapes
The belief that "move fast & break things" would make them cool? Sad. The coolest move slow (if needed) & fix things.
#resist #techlords #technology #tech
"The cult of the entrepreneur [has] produced a group of buyout artists and savings and loan owners who [are] little better than criminals."
~~from Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
#resist #technology #techlords
"Somehow there is always room for people to dismiss concerns as 'overblown and unfounded' past the first attempted coup, and well into an authoritarian power grab."
~~Miriam Eric Suzanne @mia
Seems pretty clear at this point that the "Makers" are actually the "Takers".
Why did some of the #TechLords revolt?
"And as all this unfolded, mostly on the platforms the tech-bourg created, with the help of the sympathetic liberal bureaucracy that staffed the platforms and regulated them from the federal government, a section of the tech-lords, recoiled in horror and quickly went from being a friendly, idealistic liberal bourgeoise... to a reactionary #oligarchy intent on reasserting control."
From Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World loc 643:
To handle his anxiety, Altman got into meditation, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed and concentrating on just his breath for up to an hour at a time. Over time, he later said, he developed an increasingly diminished sense of self. “One thing I realized through meditation is that there is no self that I can identify with in any way at all,” he told the Art of Accomplishment podcast. “I’ve heard that of a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about [powerful AI] get to that in a different way too.”
To be fair, I’ve read the transcript and he doesn’t describe himself as enlightened. But he does use what I believe are real meditation experiences to construct a public image of himself as spiritually refined: from the talk about “no self”, reports that “I feel incredibly joyful all of the time” through to how you “deeply feel” “nonduality” and distinguishing himself from the strung-out non-enlightened tech bros around him. So while he doesn’t say “I believe I have achieved enlightenment” I think he is quite explicitly saying “I am spiritually refined in a way you are not”, playing off the floating signifiers like “nonduality” and “no self” to leave the extent of that refinement an open question.
And yet this man with no self (‘he can find’) spends a lot of time and money preparing for doomsday. From loc 653 in the same book:
The idea of death seemed to terrify Altman. He was a self-described prepper and spent a great deal of time and money preparing for a catastrophic global event, like a synthetic virus being released into the world or being attacked by AI. “I try not to think about it too much,” he was quoted as telling a group of start-up founders in his New Yorker profile. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
The description of Altman’s relationship with Paul Graham reminded me of what I’ve read of how Macron cultivated the backing of elderly billionaires in France. The capacity to position yourself as a dutiful discipline to powerful men is a unique skill, even if Paul Graham is younger and less wealthy than Macron’s sponsors.
The reality is that, as Olson clearly conveys in an otherwise weirdly hagiographical book, Altman positioned himself at the centre of an innovation network, at exactly the right moment, with increasing returns as his social and financial capital grew. Like a big hungry spider gobbling up the choices morsels that got caught in his web. From loc 621:
His place at the top of YC meant he was better positioned than many other venture capitalists to win jackpots like that, getting an intimate view on hundreds of companies who’d already been carefully screened, and in the middle of one of the greatest bull market runs in history. Getting pitched by all those start-ups also helped him see into the future.
This is why his self-construction is so interesting to me. The obvious parallel is Musk who, as Dave Karpf once put it, possibly constitutes the most dramatic case of survivor bias in human history. If you dimly sense that your wealth and status accrue from the accumulating gains of being at the centre of the right network at the right term (relying in Musk’s case on government contracts and interventions to a degree unparalleled amongst the 21st century class of tech lords) then there’s a psychological and strategic need to construct an image for others (and yourself) as a visionary preoccupied with lofty purposes unlike the banal fixations of the others within your class.
#bigTech #billionaires #digitalElites #elonMusk #openAI #ParmyOlson #samAltman #Supremacy #techLords
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