Hacker News Reader

Comment by 65827 | Hacker News Reader

We're really moving into the strange cyberpunk dystopian future when CEOs start writing bizarre manifestos about how they want to reshape the world like this. Really just a few years out from private corporate armies I think (Zuckerberg already has a small private army protecting him with heavy weaponry) and cyber wars and espionage and open defiance of governments.

Like we all knew this was an option of where we were going but to see it actually happening is kind of surreal.

View on HN

It's not new, though. The phenomenon of business leaders wanting to build cloistered utopias is at least a hundred years old. Henry Ford had "Fordlandia" in Brazil, and Walt Disney was planning to make EPCOT, before the company canned the project after his death.

Private armies for the wealthy aren't new either: see the Pinkerton Agency.

Note that Fordlandia fell apart and the Pinkertons were outlawed when people realized what a terrible idea that was. But I guess those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it.

For those interested, the NYT just published a story about Fordlandia: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/americas/deep-in-bra...

Musk and Bezos both have access to the rocketry tech necessary to produce ballistic missiles, along with autonomous machines which are starting to rival the sort of things usually produced by DARPA. Meanwhile, Facebook is tinkering with the best ways to influence masses of people and journalism/propaganda channels.

So I'm not necessarily saying that we're living out a mashup between Shadowrun and that Simpsons episode where Homer starts working for a supervillain, but I'm also not ruling it out.

DARPA is a funding agency, the only thing they produce are power points. They fund labs and companies that make things. The people that own those labs have this same power too but since they're not as cool as Bezos I guess we don't talk about them?

If they loose DARPA funding they go away or re-organise e.g. innumerable research Depts at universities they constantly have to hustle for funding and follow the grant money, Musk and Bezos are independent, their income streams are not going away.

Oh, Hacker News. Don't ever change.

This is not a new phenomenon. Wes Bush (who?) literally makes long-range strategic bombers. The industrial capacity at Musk's or Bezos's disposal only acquires a sinister Shadowrun tint when the institutional structures constraining their ability to act begin to dissolve. If we slide into a cyberpunk dystopia, the catalyst will be political, not technological.

> (Zuckerberg already has a small private army protecting him with heavy weaponry)

Source? I agree with your ideas overall but I'm genuinely interested in this aspect.

There's some details here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/facebook-...

I think calling four full time guards a "small private army" is a little hyperbolic, but it is safe to say he is heavily protected.

Kinda BS, to be honest. The CEO of Canada Goose Jackets has full time protection. If you're worth a lot of money you need to be careful with your security.

Maybe most of the time King Zuck only has 4 people guarding him personally, but if you think that facebook security staff that he controls is just those 4 guys, you're crazy.

Very wealthy individuals hire private security to protect themselves because they are targets for a class of crime (kidnapping, extortion, etc) that average people have a negligible chance of being targeted for. Private army is a stretch of the terms but technically accurate.

I'm already expecting Facebook to announce their Metal Gear project.

Just wait until those private armies start to fight each other.

>Really just a few years out from private corporate armies

This has been a thing for over a decade now. Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The guy who founded this company (and got the US kicked out of Iraq), is our Education Secretary's brother. He is being consulted to provide extra security for Trump outside of the Secret Service.

Well, like Crassus said in the first century BC, "You're not rich unless you can afford your own army."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com