alt Hacker NewsJokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.
In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
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> or those with the resources to buy might
This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
The problem for them is that in the US, "those who get in the way" are armed.
In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.