Who Is BasedBeffJezos, Leader of the 'E/Acc' Movement? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is BasedBeffJezos, Leader of the 'E/Acc' Movement?

forbes.com

27 pointsdanboarder22 comments

This picked up a lot of controversy and outrage on twitter for its peculair defense of doxxing, but I can't read this article as anything other than unrestrained self-promotion disguised as being outed by a journalist. Is forbes sites even a paid position at forbes? I don't want to libel the author by claiming the piece was planted by Beff himself, but what's more likely, this writer who mostly covers what's trending on tiktok gets a big scoop using voice recognition on a twitter space and then writes a glowing dossier? Or beff got on the phone with a publicist and conjured a big reveal with a softball interview all while namedropping his new startup?

I don't know why I care so much, it just makes me feel crazy to see someone with hundreds of followers taking his word as gospel instead of seeing through the paper thin marketing scheme.

I think Forbes runs their site somewhat like substack, where citizen-journalists/bloggers can start a newsletter sub-site on their platform.

I really want to have a strong vibrant anti-stasis tech-driven rallying point. But it's so clear that the California Ideology has been warped into endless corporate liberty to do whatever, that there's no adversarial Interoperability allowed, that it's a become an ideology around building fiefs and believing in absolute sovereignty of the lords of the data center. It's so weird to me how pervasively illiciting control over each and every device in humanity's world is just aok, better than fine. Has this ideology always been consumed by such a top down belief structure, thought that only a few need to participate and sheppard & steer & everyone else gets to follow along? Or were there moments where this was a broader more encompassing & open hope?

What's just so staggeringly obviously blind about this situation is that if you want to accelerate & get humanity moving, this is so obviously such a hideous & narrow constrained path. Innovation is so contested by IP and "criminal violation of business model" (inability to write & use our own tools without being kicked off and/or sued by online properties). And further, the extreme consumerism of this high tech system reduces us, it keeps humanity under the heel of far off lords of the cloud; we can't grow to become a technological society under these conditions. We plod along under an rigged system where we are all infantalized, baby-ed along with glossy superficial interfaces that conceal the real bases of power that pervade all these systems we are so deeply entailed in.

I have a hard time assessing whether California Ideology has always been like this, or whether it's just the notable figures and people of late associated with CI that have brought us to such a point.

When CI was coined in the mid-'90s, they were talking at length* about these dudes' predecessors doing the same things in the same ways. So no, they were never good.

* e.g., Escape Velocity by Mark Dery, Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook

The Californian ideology[1] springs eternal, regardless of how they rebrand themselves. The main thing that's new this time is the intentional use of reactionary language.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

It is just a rebranding response to the fact that it is no longer acceptable among educated people to describe yourself as a Republican.

I don't think that's it, since the Californian ideology isn't Republican to begin with.

Yeah but these guys ARE just Republicans. Once you are in bed with Andreessen, you are a Republican.

Good point!

I know we've made enough hay about OpenAI in recent weeks, but reading such a paradoxical sentence like this is still so funny and depressing:

>Verdon is part of a loud chorus in the AI community who believe that this technology should not be developed in secret at companies like OpenAI, but instead be open-sourced.

I wonder if Extropic plans to open source their chip designs though??

Nothing here yet: https://github.com/extropic-ai

A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon

A particularly creepy doxxing by Forbes...

I thought it was pretty cool to use the person's own philosophy against them.

Surely they knew voice recognition is a thing when they spoke publicly

My interpretation: e/acc is the descent of Silicon Valley venture capitalists into extremism, propelled by the threat of high interest rates.

Another factor is a more (justifiably) pulled-back approach to the tech industry, as people & govts realize the harms of letting technologists run loose and play fast with their power (social media companies are a good example).

Tech optimism (not the odd a16z variety) is great. This wave of e/acc is odd. It feels like an old guard trying to retain relevancy. The world no longer spins around venture capitalists anymore.

my interpretation of this and prosperity gospel and effective altruism: they're para social vanity beliefs that simply justify them doing what they want to do.

nothing more than a facade operating under capitalism is good.

I mean, they're neoreactionaries. Remember how Andreesen literally recommended the co-author of the original Fascist Manifesto as someone we should all be looking to. It's the same as the proto-Fascism (to speak very precisely) of the Italian Futurists: forward to an authoritarian future with technology.

Extropic Funding announcment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38517578

“Sweeping”…lol

It’s mostly that idiot Andreesen and his aged, irrelevant hangers-on that vomit the e/acc nonsense on twitter and clubhouse.

You have to admit though, BasedBeefJeebus is a great band name.

A funny thing about these articles is how punching a clock at Google for a few days becomes your identity. You are a former Google quantum AI researcher, regardless of whether you accomplished anything at all.

Who cares?

Ah, I know that guy! Looks like Startup L. Jackson is back.

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