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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Being a megalomaniac with a cult of personality can help you get a lot done. It's practically a leadership technique of its own. Of course, it also enables you to override concerns for safety and side effects ...

> post-truth, frauds, and mass manipulation

Some of this is new and some of it isn't. The internet wrecked traditional news and helped replace it with clickbait propaganda, but papers have always been happy to participate in propaganda they liked (Daily Mail "hurrah for the blackshirts" passim). It does feel that since about 2010 it's really escalated and everyone is joining some sort of cult now.

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Besides:

> We went from Steve Jobs.. to .. cults of personality

Didn't Jobs have a cult of personality? I remember that was talked about quite a lot back then.

I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created.

It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.

Internet was going to be the ultimate democratising tool. Everybody would have access to all information at any time. Anyone could publish anything. Gone are the gatekeepers of old. But it turns out "anyone" includes scammers, manipulators, propagandists, hate-mongers, conspiracy-spreaders and other liars, and now it's become really hard for a lot of people to distinguish lies from truth.

Turns out everybody has access to all misinformation.

> I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created. It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.

We did. I know I wrestle fairly regularly with my complicity in the modern state of affairs, and I'm (by objective standards) one of the least culpable. I think our biggest mistakes were being too welcoming (so much of the early Web's optimism came from outcasts finding social support for the first time that we defaulted to no social protections) and being too passive. Too many of us were willing to sit on our hands because surely somebody would say something eventually, right? And for a lot of nerds, the social acceptance being offered overrode any of their other concerns.

> It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.

We benefit enormously from the success of the IT revolution; we also get responsibility for the problems. We also have responsibility because we can do something - if not us, than who? I feel like we are acting like bystanders watching someone get assaulted, and doing nothing.

To give an idea of the enormous power we have, I just spoke to someone who didn't know Windows and Microsoft Office collected data on users, and thought that Signal (which they learned about from me) was being taken over by TikTok. This person has post-graduate degrees and is strongly oriented toward doing the right thing for their community, but how can they act with that level of information?

> can help you get a lot done

That is survivor bias. I have worked with such people and they destroy companies and make employee life miserable. It is impossible to get anything done in the company that does not help the megalomaniac ego. And they usually sabotage efforts that benefit the company but not themselves. It looks cool in movies and from far away, up close it is a train wreck.

Isn't that narcissism? That's all about ego. I thought megalomania was more about results.

My understanding fits with the dictionary definition.

megalomania /ˌmɛɡ(ə)lə(ʊ)ˈmeɪnɪə/ noun: megalomania. obsession with the exercise of power. delusion about one's own power or importance (typically as a symptom of manic or paranoid disorder)

> Isn't that narcissism?

Excellent point in itself - I should have used that word, maybe in addition to megalomania, in the comment that started this subthread.

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