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Comment by AJMaxwell | Hacker News Reader

No, we really should hate the players. They are keeping the game from changing.

A small number of players set the rules of the game.

A players collectively choose that everyone must follow those rules.

No sarcasm: play a different game. If you play their game, of course you'll suffer. But if you play a game they're repulsed by, you can win a life they'll never have access to: one filled with people who love and respect you and an environment where your best self and life can emerge.

The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.

That's not what I said. I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant. Simplified: if they're going West, you go East.

The more "small time" people reject this narrative that we need a bunch of elitist white guys shoving their mediocrity down our throats, the faster we rebuild a society they're barred from accessing.

    I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant.

Can you explain how to do that without either drawing attention to them via discussions like this or leaving society altogether? I don't personally fund a16z, but my taxes do. Calls to coordinated action to stop giving them money also count as attention.

Leave Babylon behind and go build local businesses and communities in what they refer to as "flyover country." That's what I'm doing. Easy? Fuck no. But does it take their relevancy away from them? At the scale of everyone who isn't a coastal barnacle: big time.

They view the rest of this country with disdain and indifference. I'm suggesting that others quit looking at these people as lords and sages to be placed up on a pedestal. Most of them are quite incompetent, skill-less, and frankly, not cool enough to want to hang out with (why they're making "jokes" about there only being two jobs left in the world in the future: Anthropic employees and hookers for Anthropic employees [1]). I'm sorry but I'm not taking direction from a bunch of dorks who can't get laid without paying for it. And I'd take a wild guess that given the climate, the lion's share of America is with me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjrCFuEA1ds

What does flyover country have to do with the present discussion? Kalshi is just as big a problem (or bigger even) in Nebraska as New York. Taxes going to Anduril happens whether you live in Malibu or Missouri.

> What does flyover country have to do with the present discussion?

Read what I already wrote above, I made it pretty clear.

They can still buy laws that negatively affect me as long as enough others are giving them money.

What if their game is to flip the boards of everyone else’s games?

Then so be it. Hopefully they've considered all of the angles and can defend themselves against people being radicalized to the point of hunting them down.

Turns out their obsession with moats was prescient.

You can, of course, distance yourself from their world and work on things they would never see as valuable. However, you can't check out of the most grand game we're playing, the game of life and existence. Those people desperately want to toy with things that could eventually prevent you from being able to live a life where you still have food, water and shelter. You can ignore it while they're still not all-powerful, but as their wealth and influence grows, you will eventually have to confront it.

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