alt Hacker NewsWeirdness used to be a charming aspect of the tech industry. Now it's death cults, fascism, accelerationism, "monarchists," "effective altruism" and whatever other brand of curdled dark perversion haunts Silicon Valley.
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haunts Silicon Valley.
I believe that a good reason why crypto got started was precisely because most people around the world got locked out of Silicon Valley. IE. they couldn't work or invest in high flying SV startups so they gamble their money in crypto rug pulls and shill for crypto shitcoins.
If we could relegate effective altruism to the graveyard of terrible but well intentioned ideas to never rear its head ever again to haunt humanity that would be a small win.
To be fair, I find this weirdness much more interesting than the traditional "rapture will occur on X" or "I am Gods chosen fornicator". How cool would it be if there was still some fjord somewhere where they still sacrificed goats to Odin? Christianity really wiped out many the interesting cult themes, and new ones like Scientology have so far just been shameless cash grabs from the gullible and lost.
At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.
Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.
All a flavor of lust for power and influence from very bitter, angry, and jealous people.