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@nilsgilman.bsky.social @johnrobb.bsky.social

We humans tend to grant unearned authority to the performatively successful, thus becoming co-authors in our own subjugation.

They actively believe in Mudsill theory. It has plenty of earlier roots but they are firm believers.

I'm sure @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social can comment incisively on this idea.

Hopefully, we're witnessing final-stage capitalism.

No they laugh that they’re billionaires and you lot are just moaning and complaining people who’ve built nothing!

You might have better perspective, but my impression of Larry Page remains somewhat favorable, mostly from his appearances at Google TGIF over a decade ago. He's still out to protect his wealth but personally he struck me as down to earth (I could be wrong). Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Ellison: psychopaths.

I mean, they do refer to regular folks as NPCs

It’s time to show them who’s the boss, we are, the consumers.

This has never been about regular workers in the tech industry and it's always been our corporate exec overlords vs. everyone. It's disheartening when people lash out against the normal human laborers who work in these companies. Trust me, most of my coworkers are just trying to stay sane.

It's not a coincidence that the crazies really came out of the woodwork halfway through Obama's second term, and that finance/big business felt emboldened because they'd been rescued and that the tech guys made themselves into celebrities to be worshipped and followed bad confluence of events

lets have a healthy shoutout Fuck You to Andreesson and Thiel

Far longer ago than that. Read "Democracy In Chains" by Nancy MacLean.

They said straight up they wanted to disenfranchise women and people of color. They said they wanted to dismantle the federal government. And the likes of Thiel funded them for building the plans on how to do it. And _nobody cared_ when this shit was pointed out. People thought you were crazy.

Those with influence and reach who SHOULD have been raising alarms years earlier (Biden) waited until it was already too late. www.democracynow.org/2026/8/17/gi...

‼️‼️‼️ Yup and the disabled

I'm only here because the only way to make things better is by fighting to make it better, but my eye is on that slowly closing door...

Can you give an example of a tech CEO who was pushed out over this?

#boom

You might be intetested in the upcoming MCF book club event! bsky.app/profile/prod...

Don't forget the role of the Valley's cottage industry's fluffers and gatekeepers (Swisher, Mossberg, and O'Reiley) who made fortunes off of both sanewashing and selling access to them.

It's a very tempting belief for a certain kind of insecure person.

Such a cartoonish view of reality. Not to mention that tech jobs are some of the best paid and most sought-after there are.

These are people who developed their worldview by uncritically reading mid-century pulp sci-fi. The editorials in Astounding and Analog are largely indistinguishable from what Yarvin and Musk believe.

I feel like we need to call out the downright movie villain nature of the way those guys talk. They have villainous intent. They are IRL villains.

Agreed.

Correct. It’s a selection process. Because rising to the very top in tech—for people like Zuckerberg and Musk—effectively requires being a wildly selfish sociopath who cares nothing for other people and seeks only to amass monopoly power, lie about finances, and skirt laws.

I'm curious if non-tech billionaires are different. Totally doubt it.

I graduated in 97, so I entered the workforce when the Boom was…booming. Thinking back, the people I know who got into it were not the best and the brightest, it’s true. The get rich quick part of it was top of mind for *everyone*

And the thing is, we *know* how this works. And some people wonder why others think there shouldn't be any billionaires.

That's actually quite bad.

to be fair, they've been phychopath'd by... forces. all i know for sure is that McKinsey is one of those forces.

They want to do that to all who aren't them (although we know they'll start eating each others' children in a heartbeat).

I would argue that contempt for retail customers is entirely morally justified.

Can confirm.

Once again proving that every disaffected dork w/ a chip on his shoulder since Nietzsche up through Bronze Age Pervert are not exactly a RARE breed of asshole. Hell, that "I'm Better Than You, And I'll Prove It By Being A Bigger Bully To You Than You Were To Me" asshole is ME, in my darker moments.

Ooooh!!!!!!

They have more feeling and empathy for the action figures on their desks than they do for people.

* whole

Yeah, I don't want to overly venerate Carnegie but my impression was that at some point a bolt of genuine altruism did somehow strike him.

We can't. Carnegie operated under three ideas which techbros do not have. Morals grounded in some sense of religion. A clear concept of his own mortality. The need to invest in communities/the nation in order to generate wealth in the first place.

Bring back virtue. And bring back shame.

There was an opinion piece on Substack (🤮) from that vile ghoul Andreesons spouse about how ordinary regular people really needed to suffer more. Modern life has made us too soft It was repulsive drivel. But the thesis was …..eye opening. As were the hundreds of comments agreeing with her.

We win or they win. That’s it. And I’m not talking politic They’d better hope we don’t win cause it ain’t gonna be Jeffries and Schumer they’re going to deal with.

In the modern age, having extreme wealth progresses like a disease, it always turns you into the same exact type of guy.

I've said this around here before, but my wife went to Stanford at the same time as many of these ghouls. She was an assistant for some very early FB guys and she's met Theil, Andressen, Zuck, etc. and they all treated her as a non-person as soon as it was clear she wasn't a tech entrepreneur.

This also applies to the financial services industry. CEOs have nothing but contempt for their employees

Oh God, they're all Pointy Haired Bosses mixed with Ted Faro.

This is the ultimate truth about tech entrepreneurs.

100% this. The "they don't see others as human" theory is totally insufficient.

@shanley.com has been talking about this for quite a while also.

A model of wealth that produces a similar distribution is to start with a bunch of 1000$ aires. Each year flip a coin: tails you keep what you have and drop out, heads you double it. Tweak the start, flip odds, and scale factor and we get tech wealth distributions.

Per Doctorow, the most pertinent about a technology who it serves, who it uses, (oppresses, controls, punishes, and who it discards as useless, or used up. No matter what the technologies subsumed under "AI" can or can't do they want it to serve them and replace and eliminate pesky untermenschen.

Being baffled would require enough empathy to recognize we’re not just doing their preferences wrong.

And that’s the term they say in public.

NPC?

billionaires are the real NPCs since if you weren't born one there's no way you'll ever get to be one

We can now safely refer to them as the Epstein class.