Four billionaire techno-oligarchs–Are creating an alternate, autocratic reality | Hacker News Reader

Four billionaire techno-oligarchs–Are creating an alternate, autocratic reality

vanityfair.com

54 pointslaurex70 comments

Until I switched careers to tech, I didn't understand how out of touch tech is with the rest of society. But also how out of touch anyone whose means replenish their coffers to the point that any wrong decision is corrected just by the passage of a pay period. They talk with venom and vindictiveness about those not in the ivory tower. If you are not in the castle, you're looked at as sub human. The air is thin on the high horse, that's why their noses point up.

My brother went to Carnegie Mellon. He went to do biology but lived with 3 programmers and ended up getting a CS degree.

Couple internships and then straight into a FAANG. Never had any other paid work outside of a couple summer working at a greenhouse shoveling dirt for a couple months.

Complete inability to understand how a lot of folks live. Lives in a "California bubble" even though he hasn't been in SF in a decade. Definite "engineer's disease" where he's able to think through technical problems like a genius but can't challenge his own assumptions about anything else and assumes domain expertise transfers easily.

Are you aware that the Editor-in-Chief of VF lives in a $10 million Brooklyn brownstone ?

I agree that oligarchs are a problem but some of the other assumptions are wrong.

First, we are already in a very unequal world. Putting aside the oligarchs and monopolies which again are very problematic, advanced technologies have the potential to lessen inequality and raise everyone's standard of living.

I view the inequality and symptoms of that like oligarchs as a failure of societal organization and again, properly integrating high technology into society is probably the best tool we have for fighting that.

That doesn't mean that I agree with the classical technocratic vision which is quite centralized and dated.

These things fundamentally come down to a core difference in worldview. I see technology as helping to progress beyond the failures of human nature. Whereas the opposite view feels the status quo is not so bad, and just blames technology for making things worse.

Technology is an amplifier, it doesn’t fix human nature.

As you say, technology has the potential to go either way. What we see over and over is that technology is used to deepen inequality. Because those with control of the most powerful technologies benefit most from inequality. The rich have incentive to take all they can get and shape society to benefit them more, so we should consider the default reaction to new technology to be deeper inequality.

The answer is safeguards. There's no room for hope. We must build a system (of laws, most likely) that promotes equality and is robust against abuse, or we will continue to slide deeper into inequality.

Why is it so important to reduce inequality if even the worse off are better off than any other time in history?

Why not revert back to pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer societies with (presumably) maximized equality?

> Why is it so important to reduce inequality

Generally said by those who benefit from said inequality.

I'll bet you most who complain about inequality are just salty they are not the ones with the $100M yacht. And would happily claw their way to the top if given the opportunity e.g. a bloody revolution. Me, I like my $200 big screen TV, my comfy trailer, cheap gas and electricity and prefer to enjoy them in peace.

Now those who really have a case against inequality probably don't even have a voice and live invisibly in third world countries, providing the above amenities the Western "poor" take advantage of.

Wow, that is incredibly dismissive of perspectives you don't understand. This type of ignorance and close-mindedness is disappointing, yet unsurprising. Sad that there people like this in the world.

That's an easy bet to make from your comfy trailer with cheap gas, electricity, and big screen TV. As you say the majority of people in the world don't have reliable access to those luxuries and would want nothing more but to claw their way up to just that. The voices you hear probably aren't the ones who want super-yachts. Instead they see those with a real case and are lending their voices to them.

"You shouldn't be upset with the unfair treatment of someone if anyone in human history has had it worse than them" is not a particularly convincing moral argument.

I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important. We can get into all sorts of economic arguments, but at its heart it is really as simple as that.

> I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important.

The "living comfortably" metric is useful. It rules out the "hunter gatherer" argument where we're back in stone age, presumably not comfortable but as equal as can be.

If everyone had enough to live comfortably but inequality increased, would that be OK?

Pretty much, yeah, with the priviso that "comfortable" is relative to the times. These days, "comfortable" would include a place to live that is clean and fairly safe, food that is more than just enough calories, ordinary medical care, and access to the Internet.

This is a lot more than a century ago, but they're widespread and cheap enough that we can easily afford to provide it for every (Western) citizen. It's costly, but we could provide it, and the super-wealthy could still be incredibly wealthy. Shy of that, there's going to be a lot of tension.

I can't predict what that will look like in the future, and I can't say what to do about the non-Western majority of the world who can't afford to do this. But at least for the here-and-near-future-now, it's something that would allow people to live without desperation. We now have so much unnecessary desperation, and that's what I find offensive.

We'll still be faced with problems of meaning, but at least we're avoiding the hypocrisy of wealthy people saying, "Go find your meaning by working for me, while I take the vast majority of the profits just because I'm already rich."

"Living comfortably" is obviously a subjective metric, but that is the general goal. Most people don't want equality of outcome in which everyone's life is exactly the same. Some range of wealth inequality is permissible in many people's minds, including mine.

I think the problem with your hypothetical is that increasing wealth inequality generally comes at the expense of someone. It isn't simply that the billionaires' wealth grows faster than the wealth of the poorest. Often the billionaire is a billionaire because they have taken advantage of an unequal system which has real victims.

Wealth inequality also leads to other issues of fairness that go beyond living conditions. For example, impact on the environment is one. That $100m yacht you mention will have a huge carbon cost. There is also a concern of political power in a democracy with free speech. If a billionaire can afford to plaster their political message on every TV network, radio station, and social media site, will that give them an outsized role in a democracy that is meant to grant political equality to all? This unequal distribution of political power can easily create a feedback loop that allows these billionaires to use their wealth to capture more wealth and political power.

Aren't you assuming a zero sum economy without growth? The four men in the article all created their own wealth, they didn't steal it, so this seems like a pretty poor situation to try and make the argument that wealth inequality must always create "real victims".

The economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. The easiest way to prove that is to look at a company like Tesla. Do you think their entire market cap is newly created value? For that to be the case, everyone who purchased a Tesla wouldn't have purchased any other car if Tesla didn't exist. As soon as we acknowledge that Tesla has siphoned off customers from other companies, we acknowledge that there is at least some zero-sum nature to the economy. Then you just have to start looking for other places that this partial zero-sum situation exists such as employeer-employee relationships at Musk's companies and that brings us back to wealth inequality.

I don't follow. Let's presume the rational markets hypothesis for now (dubious in the case of Tesla but it's not important here). Then the value created by Tesla is not people owning cars who previously didn't, but the increased quality or value of the cars vs what they otherwise would have had. Whilst individual purchasing decisions are zero-sum in the moment i.e. if someone spends X on a Tesla they can't then spend X on anything else, that doesn't mean Tesla siphons customers from every other company in the world (why restrict to cars?). Rather, in the long term other companies get more competitive, increasing the value of all cars, and people get "richer" because now they can drive more/better/their air is cleaner/whatever, and Tesla also get richer, so wealth has been created. An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.

>An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.

As I said, the economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. It exists somewhere in between. If you can recognize that individual microeconomic situations can be zero-sum, you should be able to recognize that some macroeconomic situations are zero-sum.

I'm not arguing that these guys didn't create any wealth. I am arguing that their wealth is not equal to the value they created. Some of their wealth is wealth they captured from other people. I think it is pretty obvious that stockholders of other automakers would have more wealth in a world without Tesla. Musk now captures that wealth for Tesla stockholders.

The same situation plays out for other people in Musk's orbit. The rest of the automakers are now producing fewer cars due to the presence of Tesla, therefore they are employing fewer people. Musk is extremely anti-union while many of his competitors have a unionized workforce. This allows him to treat his employees worse off. His wealth is therefore effectively coming from workers who are now in a worse situation than they were if Tesla didn't exist and those employees were working for another automakers.

They didn't create that wealth, they were just in a position of power that enabled them to take a portion of the wealth created by many others. The wealth actually created by the contribution of these men doesn't have much to do with how much wealth they were rewarded with. If a king sees some unworked land and orders some servants to grow food on it, does the king create the food?

This is a very "ugh capitalism" take. Of course they created that wealth, what position of power did any of these guys have when they started? Comparing these guys to kings is absurd. Zuckerberg was literally a student in a dorm room. Musk was an immigrant from South Africa who taught himself programming. Andreessen was just an ordinary programmer who interned at IBM. Thiel is the maybe the closest to this, being a finance guy who went to Stanford Law and was able to casually raise a million bucks to start a VC fund from friends and family. But losing a million bucks is easy. Thiel didn't lose it, he made it back many times over.

None of these guys had any power. They created the wealth mostly by writing useful hardware and software, but also by locating, recruiting and organizing other people who could also create useful software.

No power? What do you call the ability to control what thousands of people do with their time? Ownership is power. Capital is power. Most of that wealth wouldn't exist without all the people who worked for their companies to create it. The reason they get to keep such a large portion of it is not because they create it, but because they have the power to get rid of anyone who demands a fair share. Sure, they've done a lot of hard and important work to get the companies where they are now, but that work is not worth billions. It's normal work not much different from the work employees do for these companies.

In other words, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, you would rather that the poor were poorer given that the rich were less rich.

Every documented great rise in the median wealth was accompanied by a rise in inequality. Every documented great rise in equality was accompanied by a disaster in which millions suffered.

Given this, how much suffering is equality worth?

> Given this, how much suffering is equality worth?

This is a false dichotomy because the premise isn't true.

I don't think either of us have time to dig into papers right now to explore complex relationships between different factors of economic wellbeing. Let alone by trying to compare aggregates across all of history.

Shouldn't it be obvious though that "you would rather that the poor were poorer given that the rich were less rich" is untrue slander? (and from Margaret Thatcher -- not often I see her quoted unironically.) People are explicitly asking for resources and help for the poorest. That this can only be accomplished by taking from the richest is a result of the greed of the richest who don't care about the quality of life of the poor (or don't care enough to understand how bad it is).

It should not be obvious. When measured on consumption data, the poor did indeed become richer under Thatcher.

https://iea.org.uk/blog/thatcherism-and-poverty-did-the-poor...

Second, Thatcher specifically created a lot of disruption which lead to a lot of people becoming poorer. But the trend she discussed is generally true. Starting with the Industrial Revolution (which is still spreading in third world countries) we've seen a rise in general prosperity over and over again be tied to a rise in inequity. And documented rises in equity are generally tied to large disasters that destroy wealth.

But third, my comment was a general one about psychology. Many of us respond negatively to rises in inequity. Even if it is tied to a general rise in prosperity.

Actually, I should have been more specific. I should never have discussed "inequality" - it's a counterproductive buzzword, but it's what we were using.

I don't care how much money poor people are able to spend. What I actually want is for everyone to be able to eat, sleep in a stable home, spend time with their loved ones, pursue their hobbies and dreams, and participate in their local community/government at their pleasure. To be able to protect their health from preventable disease. All of these to me are human rights, not trophies to earn through work.

The second thing I want is to take away wealth from the extremely rich or otherwise divorce their unreasonable hoards of capital from political power. But the latter is extremely difficult to envision. I don't know how it could work robustly. I'd rather just take their money since money = power is the game they want to play.

At what point does wealth created through human labor become someone else's right?

I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. It is extremely practical. We want the poor to receive houses, food, healthcare treatments, broadband, access to computers, transportation, and so on. All of these are created through human labor. Many were invented fairly recently. Some within my lifetime.

At what point does it go from new invention to a human right? And how do we as a society make that happen, and incentivize the continued creation of new inventions? And how do we continue to incentivize the continued labor needed to provide these things?

We currently do an admittedly crappy job of it. For example we should be building a ton of housing, and we don't. But what we do have, we mostly do through money. We get people to invent things. To build things. And then we tax some of it, and give to those who have not, and provide some at the bottom.

But it seems you want to get rid of wealth at the top. Take away from billionaires, who are far more generous with their money than most of us. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge for example.

And you want to provide far, far more to the bottom. Enough that I'd be happy not to work again. As well as countless others.

Many variations on your scheme were tried in the 20th century. They feature problems like mass famine, and totalitarian rule by the bureaucrats in charge.

What are your proposals to make sure we don't get those bad outcomes again?

Can you show that the inequality changes lead to the median wealth changes? I could just as easily argue that the causality flows in the opposite direction you are implying. When median wealth increases, people stop policing inequality as fervently and when median wealth decreases, they recommit to addressing inequality.

In many specific cases, yes.

The classic example is the Industrial Revolution. Which continues to spread.

When the textile industry reaches a particular area, peasant farmers move into factories. This is better paying and easier work than life in the rice paddy. And therefore is a rise in the median wealth. But the economic wins from those running the textile factories are far larger than their employees, and so also comes with a rise in inequity.

The same thing happened with assembly lines. Henry Ford's famous $5/day was a multiple of what people could be paid in other kinds of manual work. But Henry wound up with over a billion dollars. A rise in general welfare accompanied by a rise in inequity.

As http://www.paulgraham.com/richnow.html shows, this is a general trend today. Most of the current great fortunes are based on people who created new wealth. Most becomes part of our general lives getting better. Of that which goes to the new company, some goes to employees, some to investors, and some to those who built the company. The division varies. But the result is increased wealth and inequity both.

>When the textile industry reaches a particular area, peasant farmers move into factories. This is better paying and easier work than life in the rice paddy. And therefore is a rise in the median wealth. But the economic wins from those running the textile factories are far larger than their employees, and so also comes with a rise in inequity.

I don't know how you can state this as a definitive argument because it relies on assigning an arbitrary monetary value to something that is impossible to measure. For example, how can we say that life as a subsistence farmer on some aristocrats land is inherently a worse life than working 12 hours a day in sweatshop and going home to a slum and a room shared with dozens of other random people? Yes, the subsistence farmer might technically own nothing and the factory worker has a wage, that doesn't mean the factory worker has a better life.

Also the PG argument is flawed as it seems to suggest that a company's value is all new value. The economy is more complicated than that. There are some zero-sum interactions in the economy. PG's Airbnb wealth didn't just come from people renting out their spare bedroom. It came at the expense of hotels. It came at the expense of housekeeping workers at those hotels who were no longer needed due to reduced demand. It can at the expense of people who were priced out of their neighborhood because people were buying real estate to rent on Airbnb. It is easy to miss the consolidation of wealth if you think that any new fortune is from entirely new value.

Where the textile industry goes, you find people moving from farms to cities to get those jobs. Often sending money back home. And then better factories move in to take advantage of the new workforce, and textiles move on to a new place where people can be found who are desperate enough to take the worst factory jobs.

This pattern has been going on for over a century. I base "this job is better" not on an arbitrary monetary standard, but by the fact that people show their preference by voting with their feet. Over and over again. Over decades, and across many countries.

You are once again establishing a causal link that isn't nearly as definitive as you imply. The industrial revolution didn't only happen in factories. It happened on farms too. Many people left farms because their agricultural labor was no longer as valuable. Many had no choice but to move to cities. That is part of why they were sending money back to their family on the farm, the family needed it.

Wealth inequality reduces social cohesion and increases unrest.

You can preach all you want about how envy is a sin, but banning envy would probably be just as successful as banning premarital sex.

What do I care about inequality? If someone invents some new tech and makes a trillion dollars how am I worse off?

In your hypothetical scenario where a trillion dollars spring into being without any other consequences: you’re not.

If you want to sprinkle some consequences into the scenario, how about you lose your job, and the supply of positions for said job decreases to a third.

Because children can't eat correct, even in the western countries (and while US and UK are the worst offenders, this isn't limited to them).

That's also why I'm quite cross with the 'you should have children' crowd. No. Please don't. I've heard of a 14 yo girl prostitute herself in the toilets to guys her age (from her class even). A quick BJ for two meals. And I've seen her cry after that. Imagine the reputation she had in her highschool (this was circa 2010, so social networks already existed but no smartphone in the area).

If we cannot take care of our children half-decently, everybody, even those with atrophic empathy, should care.

The fact that we do not is a stain on humanity.

The newly-minted trillionaire could use their wealth to monopolize positional goods: social status, housing, politicians' attention. This could worsen your standard of living if you compete with them for the same positional goods.

You define "standard of living" positionally, which is not how it is usually defined, but does make a lot of sense given the prevalence of envy. By that definition, yes, inequality does absolutely worsen standard of living. Points for being honest about your motivations, unlike every other person who rails against inequality.

Do you like centralized power? Would you like to live in a dictatorship? Because that's what inequality taken to the extreme is. So unless you do like those things, you should care about inequality.

> properly integrating high technology into society

High tech is major expensive. Who owns it at the start? Won't this be like a trickle-down effect before it becomes broadly available? And when that happens isn't the cutting edge already far ahead and with the increasing wealth inequality even more in the hands of the few?

Naming these people after the technocracy movement is sad to me, given how non technical these folks are. Zuck & Andreessen have legit background, but it's so old now. Musk & Thiel aspire to power & control with technology, but the idea was to have technologists driving, and I think it was more for the betterment of society rather than dominion & control.

It seems like such a strong contradiction to me, oligarchy vs science. The technocracy movement was about opening paths for people, about bettering society. The oligarchs imposition of their will seems like such a radically different vibe, like it's maybe yes sometimes using technology for it's means, but it's not necessarily well informed or enlightened, it's not trying to open or better the world.

I'm also a bit shocked to hear Musk's grandpa Joshua Haldeman was a big technocracy person! Whoa. He's mentioned briefly in the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

> Official symbol of the Technocracy movement (Technocracy Inc.). The Monad emblem signifies balance between consumption and production.

oh wow they were into monad before it was cool

wait how can they not mention this guys name? he wrote the book on it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=balaji+...

they need to hire me to write for them.

edit: oh this is an excerpt from the book. i'm really curious to know if they covered balaji, he seems like he should be included in that topic imo. would be a mistake if they didn't at least touch on that — network state, urbit, etc.

I haven't thought of balaji and urbit as a tuple before - from a googling he spoke at Urbit's Assembly but is there any other relationship there?

i think he's a big investor?

also, moldbug built monarchism into the system. the entire universe/planet/ship etc design is a hierarchy that resembles land ownership / lords and peasants. imo it's designed perfectly for somebody who wants to start a network state like balaji describes.

which is unfortunate, bc it's a neat place on the internet.

I just decided I would come back to this thread and drop a source for anyone from the future, balaji owns some namespace yes.

>> Investors: Some of the investors who hold significant Urbit address space and equity in Urbit companies: Founder’s Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Tim Draper, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinfund, Delphi Digital , Zhenfund, Thrive Capital; as well as HNWIs including early Google employees and BTC/Ethereum buyers.

https://octu.urbit.online/octu-ventures/blog/urbit-ecosystem...

Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc. Some have even suggested (with basis) that sharable ideas can be a form of transhumanism.

I'm curious what the authors' true position is. They talk about the ideal being a "natural state". How "natural" are we talking about? No medicine? No farm equipment? No language? Just a bunch of primates grunting at each other ineffectively?

Maybe I should be more critical of how technology is evolving our species, but attacking transhumanism as an idea is reminiscent of the luddites.

> How "natural" are we talking about?

After rereading the whole piece, I think the author must be philosophically close to Kazinsky weird philosophical position.

> Transhumanism applies to basic everyday things like glasses, crutches, chairs, cars, etc.

Come on, that's a bit of a motte/bailey argument. Yes, technically, we already have transhumanism since glasses were invented. (or you can go back even further if you like. Are wooden legs transhumanism? How about clothing? Tool use?)

However, all of those are clearly a huge difference in (at least) degree to someone having brain implants, voluntarily replacing parts of their body with synthetics, changing their entire identity with the use of tech, spending significant parts of their life in virtual reality, etc.

Also, I think there are different kinds of criticism you can apply to the ideas of "scifi transhumanism": There is the basic argument that humans should just not tinker with themselves, because then they "stop being humans"/stray from the life the god/nature/whoever else intended for them. I find that pretty dumb, to be honest, and often rooted in religious or cultural objections. (Ok, I'd be down to counter that argument with the point that we've always tinkered with our bodies to some extent)

There are other arguments though, asking about the resulting power dynamics and the kind of society that transhumanism wants to create, which I find more interesting:

First, who actually gets access to all the cool bio implants/genetic enhancement tech/etc? Are we just going to distribute access the same way we distribute wealth today - i.e. the more wealth and/or power you have, the more access you get? At the end of that road lies a world where our current problem of inequality escalates and different classes eventually become different species. This honestly doesn't sound like a good world to live in.

The other question is who controls all the tech. Ok, so some ultra-altruistic billionaire devides to offer neural implants and cybernetic body enhancements for the masses, for free. Does everyone get full access to the code abd functionality of their implants? Or will they be like today's smartphones, with half of the device locked down and the other tethered to the billionaire's cloud infrastructure? A world where you don't even have practical ownership over your own body honestly sounds even more frightening.

So yeah, I too would love to live in some cyberpunk world and go crazy with body enhancements. But I think until we have solved the problem of power dynamics, we can't have nice things.

And Elon&co right now seem to mostly confirm the fears around this than to address them.

> Are we just going to distribute access the same way we distribute wealth today - i.e. the more wealth and/or power you have, the more access [to cool bio implants] you get?

Wealth is (to an economist) all the goods and services in the world that we provide to each other. So to them this would be a sort of circular question. Yes it'd be distributed the same way as we distribute wealth, because cool bio implants are wealth, along with every other aspect of healthcare. And then they'd point out that wealth isn't distributed zero-sum, wealth is created by the act of trading. So if I buy a cool implant from you, then the act of engaging in this trade is in some sense creating the wealth at that very moment. As after all, if you build widgets nobody cares about and they rot in a warehouse unloved and unwanted, you didn't really increase the wealth of society.

> motte/bailey argument

If you say so. The point was that the transhumanism is just a fact: technology changes us. The people attacking transhumanism are generally more pro status quo than they are anti-technology, whether they realize it or not.

The author is really angry and scared about something, and I wish he would tell us what it is, because it's not what he's writing about in the article. The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying. And he seems to think he is some kind of oracle that knows exactly what the societal effects of new tech will be before it is even invented.

> The whole thing is incoherent rambling where he simultaneously considers these grand conspiracies of tech billionaires to be far fetched and completely impossible, and simultaneously inevitable and terrifying.

I found the whole article very bizarre, I couldn't pinpoint why, but you nailed it.

What bothered me the most was that part:

> I don’t think we have to wait for the Singularity to see the moral downside of the transhumanist project: the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology. This is because whatever problems we currently have with social inequality will be multiplied exponentially by the kinds of biological enhancements Thiel and others are seriously contemplating.

Antibiotics, cancer drugs etc "multiply exponentially" the social inequality: some people may die sooner than others, just by being able to offer the drugs they need.

Should we then ban drugs and medical research?

This is an elaborate version of a modern zero-sum-game ideology. It’s immoral to build a shelter past absolutely bare necessity because of all the folks who have no shelter period. It’s instantly understood in this mental framework that anyone with wealth is de facto immoral and fundamentally responsible for those who do not have wealth.

How a professor or anyone with access to the history of the 19th and 20th centuries can believe this is absolutely astonishing. I don’t think it’s a huge over reaction to call it “anti-liberalism”. There are other more accurate terms for this (fundamentally wrong) economic model, but saying them detracts from the actual problem.

> Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.”

Where is this from? The quote marks make it sound like something one of them may have said or at least that is a well known quote, but the only references turned up by searching are this article.

> These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but [not any more]

This seems to be what's upset the author (a professor, what a shock). When they were progressive heros, no problem. Once they start doing things like publicly doubting the wisdom of the emeritus set, they become a Fab Four of autocrats who are single-handedly responsible for "post-truth reality".

This article seems to have no real value or merit, it's just the progressive media/academic class doing a hit job on anyone it regards as an ideological traitor. It routinely descends into LLM-style gibberish hallucination, like when the author claims that interplanetary colonization is "an existential risk to the world in political, economic, and, perhaps most fundamentally, moral terms". Yep, Mars colonies are immoral.

Really, who cares what some random self-proclaimed educator thinks? Just one of these four guys have done more for progress than the author and everyone like him ever will.

>Where is this from?

to me the quote sounds like a paraphrase of Guy Debord

Definitely an allusion to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

> "nothing is true and all is spectacle"

I think this from the book "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a historian specializing in Eastern European and Russian history.

Lesson: 10 "Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” ― Timothy Snyder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder

Thanks! That sounds like it must be it.

This feels like a distraction. Summing the net worth, total assets, and assets under management of Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Meta, Palantir, Paypal, Tesla, and Andreessen Horowitz, one gets $729.2 billion. This is certainly an over-estimate, since by counting e.g. Meta and Zuckerberg's assets independently, we're double-counting their wealth.

The famous Rothschild family is estimated to be worth around $400 billion [1,2] (oddly, the Snopes article on their wealth debunks one too-high claim of it, but doesn't replace it with any other number, except the yearly revenue of one of their businesses [3]).

The top 4 asset management firms manage $26.3 trillion [4]. While this is not the same as owning those assets, it still makes them exceptionally powerful. Compared to them, the wealth of these billionaires and banking families is a rounding error. We focus on the "tech" moguls because they're the most visible, not because they're the most powerful or richest.

[1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/rothsc...

[2] https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/04/18/are-the-rothschild...

[3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rothschild-family-wealth/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms

https://archive.is/E2yVW

The most rational thing for a human being to do to safeguard our future is to depose of these four individuals. The interesting question is whether that would be a futile effort - would someone else rise to vill the void? If that's the case then are we already doomed?

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg literally wanted to fight each other. A mere charade, to distract the rubes from their conspiracies?

Both men are trained in martial arts and have competed in fights in the past in those disciplines. It's hard to describe the draw to someone that hasn't trained seriously or participated in that type of physical contest but it lets you understand yourself and someone else very deeply. There is a reason so many fighters will hug after a match, it's because in that moment you understand things about the other person that very few other people ever will. It started as a joke, gained some steam, and fizzled out, but I fully understand why they would want to do it.

Or, they are just trolling the world to divert attention from something else and you buy it every time no questions asked.

Or maybe not, what do I know

This article was designed to create the vague innuendo of a cabal without going to the trouble to substantiate anything of the sort. The four people mentioned are merely public figures that happen to have some past ties, and therefore have espoused SOME ideas that are similar. You can draw a circle around any cluster of people and then assert a conspiracy in this way.

The reality is that each of the people mentioned is an individual, and none of those individuals have an evil agenda (on purpose or otherwise). Let's take them each on:

- Zuck is just the dog that caught the mailman. He doesn't have an agenda. In fact, he's desperately trying to _think_ of an agenda to point his life at. What have you got, virtual reality? Sure, maybe I'll be the virtual reality guy. (Right out of the gate, the author hilariously conflates Web3 with the metaverse as if they're the same thing, which should be enough to discredit the whole article. This goes beyond failed research - a confusion of that level means you can't even begin to have an opinion.)

- Elon Musk is some kind of hyper-competitive "ex-dork" with a chip on his shoulder. His ambitions are about self-aggrandizement. He's got way more technical background and understanding than most business execs. This is faint praise, but it makes him a big fish in a small pond, which he has turned into an increasingly toxic identity: the guy who doesn't care about you stupids. He wants humans to become an interplanetary species, but it's because he wants to be the guy that made us so. He doesn't have an evil agenda because somebody with an evil legacy wouldn't get statues made of them.

- Marc Andreesen is just a nerd's nerd who happens to be rich. He's a techno libertarian who was in on the original internet wave, thought blockchain was really cool, and is now breathless about the promises of AI. He thinks AI risk is dumb... but if you press him on why, it's because he can hardly see the risk in these large language models, so what's the problem? See the pattern? He's just a nerd who likes to geek out over the latest thing. This is not an evil agenda, it's technophilia. The author hates some recent technology trends, so he got the two confused.

- Peter Thiel is by far the most interesting of the four. I'd posit that he can be understood as a very, very bright person who grew up vaguely conservative and religious but then went to Stanford. He was so amused that people in academia automatically assume they're smarter than you solely because they buy into some garden variety progressive talking points. A born debater, he made a career out of being a contrarian, just to prove to them how smart they weren't. He's the only one on the list with an actual philosophy and agenda of any kind, but thinking carefully about what would make the world better and then acting on it doesn't make you evil. People keep writing these articles about the evil technocratic Thiel. To back it up, they cite some things he's said in scare quotes, point out that he has influence, and then assert a comically bad-faith evil agenda without even a basic attempt to understand his views. (The author uses the quote "competition is for suckers" as if it's some skeleton in the closet, which is sort of like writing a piece about Henry Ford and volunteering that he once said "history is bunk" as if this might be news to you.) This style of attack is not even the beginning of the beginning of a refutation. It's just childish good-guy-bad-guy, rabble-rousing from someone who is basically too dim to be participating in this conversation.

The outrage machine's constant search for vitriolic hot-takes has wrapped the pseudo-intellectual class in such knots that they turned all the way around to hating transhumanism. Why? Well, because that's the only common thread we can draw between these 4 random Techno-Oligarchs! (The author was to proud to have coined this punchy moniker. I'm sure it'll catch on.)

Excellent comment, thanks. You nailed who these guys are perfectly.

I don't know a lot about Thiel, for the others this rings fairly true. I would possibly suggest that Musk might not be about self-aggrandizement for the sake of wanting to 'be the guy who did it' or statues. I always thought that his problem was he was trying to assert that he wasn't worthless. This is all armchair psych so grain-of-salt and all that, but it seemed to me most of his issues come from overreacting to criticism.

I enjoyed your astute characterisation of this supposed techno-tetrarchy. It rings true, and is more interesting and readable than the referenced article.

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