> [they] have filled their skulls with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority - that because they have succeeded at work, they understand society better than others, and can only perceive the world through that lens of privilege
When was the last time you saw Craig Silverstein or Steve Wozniak or Urs Hoelzle or David Cheriton or Jan Koum or Jawed Karim in the news? You don't, because they don't seek fame. At most you might see them on the donor list of local museums or cultural attractions (which they are, abundantly). Even Marissa Mayer, who was very much seeking the spotlight until she got the Yahoo CEO job, has basically fucked off to the sunset and now just runs some extravagant haunted houses in Palo Alto and helps fund the Junior Museum.
There's plenty of tech wealth that's very quiet, basically keeps to itself, and limits itself to some quiet local philanthropy. But by definition, you don't hear about quiet wealth.
They have the money and power, but tech people in particualr lack the social graces and awareness that previous generations of rich people needed to operate. They think very highly of themselves, but all that "intelligence" doesn't prevent them from acting stupidly.
They just didn’t all have instantaneous global reach while sitting on the crapper, like Henry Ford with a Twitter account.
Even the Hearst type ones usually had time and human machinery between the formation of idiotic notions and it reaching other people.
I'm not saying they were great. I'm just saying they probably spent more of their formative years interacting with real people than messing around with machines, so the tech lords are probably even worse.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.
The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.
I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.
And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me. Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.
[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]
angry young men will vote to abolish democracy -- and have, in Europe circa 1930s -- if you can convince them it'll benefit them.
step 1 is to start speaking to them in ways they connect with.
put another way, with the boomers dying rapidly, the largest source of MAGA is young men...
There is no place for a young man who views masculinity through a traditional lens on the left.
Worrying about "woke", "no place for a young man", trans anything... none of these are actual problems, just 4chan/ultra-right boogeymen.
It's simple. I think a large percentage of the population (maybe even most) are truly, innately bad. By "bad" I mean that they would always choose to benefit themselves over the wellbeing of others. Social constructs and the need for social acceptance keeps most of those tendencies at bay, but when a person gets enough money and power, they're able to express/project all of that badness and with little consequence to boot. There are endless examples of this throughout history. Right now, tech is giving a small percentage of the population outsized power and influence. We shouldn't be surprised with the result. Humanity is what it is.
But many of the wealthiest people I have known were also the least happy, driven by an insatiable urge to be great, and despite achieving vast success, were never able to feel or accept that they had already achieved it. It was never enough.
Remember how a few years back, all these billionaires and corporations were all talking about DEI and taking the knee and George Floyd, and (insincerely) shoving it all down everyone's throats?
It just became socially more acceptable for them to show their true colors.
It seems for Elon, the point he went right happened as follows:
> On August 5, 2021, Biden signed an Executive Order targeting that half of cars sold in 2030 should be electric.[254] General Motors CEO Mary Barra was in attendance.[254] Musk commented, "seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited."[255] Barra said in 2024 Musk never forgave not being invited.[256][257] In 2025, former vice president Kamala Harris said that she believed that not inviting Musk was a "big mistake."[258][259] In September 2021, Musk criticized Biden as "not the friendliest administration."[258] In December 2021, Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
He literally switched sides for something so trivial, but went deeper and deeper till he went full retard.
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
This is just because the latest people to have gotten crazy-rich came from tech. IMHO, the same can be said of all people who became emperors in a minute. (which is a whole new thing)
We are all just humans, and none of us are evolved for this. This could happen to anyone of us... could it not?
I think many of us have seen the changes that occur when this happens. Again, we are just not evolved for this. How could we be? The number of people that this happens to is a tiny fraction of the species, and so those who experience this, get really weird.
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
I am good at solving X and Y, and have deep knowledge in those areas, therefore I'm good at solving problems everywhere.
it's like how people says scientists should run the world but have never seen how utterly tribal and often brutal researchers can be.
I can't imagine many aerospace manufacturers turning down a contract with SpaceX because Elon said something politically incorrect. James Damore, on the other hand...
This isn't hate towards these rich guys (I think everyone should be able to say shit like this), just pointing out that we as a society hold them to different standards than we do regular people.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
We’re at the point where Musk (and others) are regurgitating literal Klansman rhetoric, in addition to the usual anti-democratic stuff. This is extremely far from normal.
And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
"Tech bro" is finance bro.
Most of the "tech" CEO people we're admiring? as movers and shakers... very few of them actually come from an engineering background.
They're mostly just people attracted to the tech industry as a focus of dynamic high profit capitalism. The technology is only the background buzz.
Many of these businesses (Shopify especially!) -- in particular SaaS businesses -- actually have very weak "tech" innovation, it's really just the deployment of pre-existing engineering solutions (solved by other people usually) at scale in order to run a commercial business that just happens to use a lot of computers.
all I see is "scam, BS, slop"
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
You don't get to shift it without raising questions about your motives.