alt Hacker NewsI don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.
Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.
Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.
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I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.
I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term.
It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
> Rule of law, functioning government providing services
Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.
The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect.
It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy