"We are told that technology is helping redistribute wealth from the common people to a small subset of extremely rich men. But, as an extremely rich man, I don't really understand why this is a bad thing? Technology seems pretty cool to me!"
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
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We are materially focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance. ... Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.
Ah yes, material abundance like living in America's most expensive ZIP code, a neighborhood with an average home price of $8mm and saying this about affordable housing:
"Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July," Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, said via an email to the mayor and city council. "They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic."
How can a billionaire use the word "we" with a straight face. I look poor standing next to this guy. The King of fucking England would look poor standing next to this guy. But we're meant to all be the same?
laura AA once came to speak to a class I was taking. she spent the entire time complaining that when you're the daughter of a billionaire and the spouse of another, people don't take you seriously, because they think you have it easy
This is a statement that just about stands tall enough as to be astride Magritte, nice
Have you ever wondered why certain facets of our society are shit? Its this, one thousand times over from a thousand different rich ass NIMBYs
I figured out this manifesto exists because somebody from the EFF posted: "Nothing depresses me like the knowledge that I am going to have to spend some of my precious workday reading a manifesto." So expect a lot of sanity damage.
(Read the opening, yep, got 1d8 from that already. I'm raising the 'the invention of letters was a mistake' flag).
@Soyweiser Has he been huffing Marinetti's exhaust fumes again?
yep, it's in there
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
He's quoting the futurists? Didn't half of them go fascist?
just making sure everyone knows who he looks up to, telling everyone who it is that inspires him! you know how people gush about their role models
Sorry I have no idea who you are talking about here. I was referring to Eva. (I saw her post and went 'wonder what that could be about' and then I saw this here and everything fell into place).
Anyway, more ontopic, I wonder if this a sign our '20th century 2.0' replay has arrived at the futurist art movement? Or if that ship has long sailed and was more started by Land in the 90's.
This time the art sucks.
(Edit: Guess you were talking about Marc)
I mean, of course he loves unfettered technology and capitalism. He's a fucking billionaire. He hit the demographic lottery.
EDIT: I just noticed his list of "techno-optimist" patrons. On the list? John Galt. LMAO. The whole list is pretty much an orgy of libertarians.
Ludwig von Mises as well, which I continue to claim was a mistake.
You helped invent a fucking web browser; get over yourself with your goddamn "manifesto." What a douche.
This is a zip bomb of sneer, holy shit.
This is all less techno-optimism and more techno-pollyannaism (Pollyantics?). Nothing about this smug, lazy, idealistic ignorance surprises me, yet I am enraged.
Thought a bit more on this. These people (Marky Marc, Stinker, every other tescreature etc.) go around saying “technology makes it better” (paraphrasing), but never perform any critical thinking to argue it successfully.
This manifesto is just a brutish barrage of buzzwords to brain you into buying into it. It’s as if you trained an LLM on Jay Shetty videos and WallStreetBets. Reading it is the equivalent of the Brawndo scene from idiocracy. You could just replace every line with “Technology! It’s what human civilisation craves!” and you’d have the same amount of intellectual content.
I mean at this point I’m more mad that this article is so shit and low effort. Marky Marc could have just written a high school level essay about what “better” means for human civilisation and how technology achieves that, and he probably wouldn’t be getting roasted on HN. Hell, even Stinker at least cherrypicks some metrics when he’s up to his pollyantics.
Why does he even include the first section that handwaves away the real and valid concerns about technology? It makes it sound like the text will discuss those issues, but he never does. I mean sure, this is supposed to be techno-optimist dogma, but right now it’s just scientismic-pollyanna dogshit.
He literally cites one of the authors of the Fascist Manifesto lmao
Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism
In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist.
...
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
I’d throw a printed copy of A Brief Primer on Technofascism attached to a brick through Marc’s window, but he’d take it as an aggressive complement
idea: cover image of the book is a stack-of-boxes of character faces layout featuring ever-so-slightly-not-theirs faces that look legally dissimilar enough to each of the relevant fash clowns
all faces generated by use of genai, of course. because if they want to argue likeness...
I have to say between nietzsche, marinetti, and God Damn Nick Land, i'm a little shocked at how openly nazi this is
My favorite manifestos are a few robotic paragraphs long with a closing “if you aren’t convinced read the (unspecified) work of these people
this is a really handy link to have for the next time someone calls my socialist writings unhinged
also, A8n H6z writes long form posts like someone who used to get yelled at for not having enough paragraph breaks and has since massively overcompensated. usually shit writing is unreadable because the paragraphs are too long — ^A.*z$ innovated by making tiny paragraphs my eyes refuse to stay focused on long enough for me to absorb anything
looking at the content briefly, that modelling seems to be intentional. they probably sell it as "different to make impact", but just like a fence the barbs are the point of it I suspect
the obtuseness trick of the cults, to make you work for it and then shortcircuit your valuation of work (so that you feel the effort you put in on this must have been worth it (and then hopefully associate the worth to the contents))
reading your comment made me wonder whether it (the manifesto) got put through chatgpt
Starts the rant with "We are being lied to." Proceeds to regurgitate capitalistic propaganda and bad assumptions which are easily disproved...
"the total human population may already be shrinking." It's not, and it's a trivial thing to check.
"Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs." There was correlation between those things... Until 1979.
Ignoring the usual anarcho-capitalist drivel in the "markets" section I think the most damning line is "We believe markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum, not zero sum... Markets are the ultimate infinite game."
Shows a complete lack of understanding of basic economic theory. In a theoretical "market economy" markets exist as a means to distribute a limited supply of goods which by definition makes it a zero sum. Calling it an "infinite game" is insanity considering the context the author is quoting was demonstrating that each transaction is a finite game. An infinite set of finite games does not change the inherit nature of the game.
For my sanity I'm going to stop there, but hopefully provide some additional insight on how poorly researched and paper thin this manifesto is and save the next person some time.
Interestingly, HN has "flagged" this submission, to the chagrin of some capitalist bootlickers who once again find their ideas unsold in the marketplace.
The important point is: if you want Andreesen's money, you echo his bad ideas.
I already liked the piece, but the cynicism on display here makes me like it better. It may have struck a nerve, which is usually a positive indicator that a set of ideas is hitting something in the zeitgeist.
I really like this comment. It's so versatile it lets you smugly brush off any criticism.
Jesus Christ, this is giving high schooler or first year college student who just read Ayn Rand for the first time and thinks he found the solution to all problems. I thought I had to go to the reddit 2013 archives to find this kind of unhinged rant, but here we are.
I guess you need some crazy if you're going to give Adam Neumann another couple hundreds of millions of dollars to make another Wework.
It's midnight and I'm procrastinating sleep. I'm goin' in. Pray for me.
"The myth of Prometheus ... haunts our nightmares" -- personally my worst nightmare involved Hamtaro. Don't ask. His nightmares sound weird too.
"We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well." -- so this is basically some sort of weird ecological death cult right?
"We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”" -- well that certainly isn't the first code I'd expect Silicon Valley to steal...
"Our enemy is… that. We aspire to be… not that." -- Poignant. I'm touched by these poetic words :')
And finally... oh god his patron saints are named BasedBeffJezos and BayesLord? Thanks I hate it.
I’ve said it before (in my bio) and I’ll say it again: Only Bayes Can Judge Me
But why is it always Bayes?
Like is it just an excuse to turn off critical thinking by pretending everything's a probability problem with knowable probabilities?
... sorry for the uncertainty above, that was certainly (heh) very human of me. I just updated my priors beep boop. There is a .86748 probability that this is a significant contributing factor alongside Yud swooning.
I think you’ve got it right. It’s a convenient tool for rationalising ideas that they don’t want to sound irrational, without having to do the requisite critical thinking.
They use Bayes to launder their feels.
Shouldn't one of those fingers have a ring on it?
Maybe it's a deep-cut inception reference, i.e., a reference to the popular fan theory that Cobb's totem is his wedding ring, not the spinning top, and if he's wearing it, it's a dream. But it is unlikely since the site author seems unironic in his idiocy.
As I've never seen Inception I wouldn't know. I have only seen the original by the guy who did Tokyo Godfathers.
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I got literal chills down my neck reading about this shit. This shit will end in blood before it is put down, mark my words.