this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I vote whoever decided to hold the vote on Google Forms.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. Mastodon supports polls so what the heck?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

The author said they wanted maximum accessibility, so they didn't opt for a particular platform's voting system.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Can't even vote without a Google account.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Why is this even a contest? We all know who the "winner" is going to be.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't. Bezos and Musk are both terrible, even if I would say Bezos is worse. For just tech it would probably be Musk? But who knows, Altman and his shenanigans are also a frontrunner for me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Just tech, clearly Musk. I'd argue Peter Thiel is the worst among the others for direct political influence, but that wasn't the question and name recognition is everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I just know Thiel as an influence for major tech companies, and some of his opinions on eg monopolies. Outside of those companies I don't know any example of political influence. Do you have some?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Old news, but this is what I'm thinking of: "By February 2022, Thiel was one of the largest donors to Republican candidates in the 2022 election campaign with more than $20.4 million in contributions. He supported 16 senatorial and congressional candidates, several of whom were proponents of the falsehood that there was significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. Two of said senatorial candidates (Blake Masters and J. D. Vance) were also tech investors who had previously worked for Thiel." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Political_views_and_activities

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Worse part is the loser never changes (us)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

"After losing to Peter Thiel in last year’s contest, Elon Musk takes the title of WORST PERSON IN TECH 2023!" -- With the vote split 84.1/15.9% over Jeff Bezos, and to no great surprise (except perhaps the margin). https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/111598332906577952

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Elon shouldn't be in this chart, too easy to win, makes the championship not interesting.

Like if Vegeta super Saiyan participates in an high school karate tournament

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Elon shouldn’t be in this chart, too easy to win

One would think, but with both Thiel and Bezos in the competition this isn't as cut-and-dry as you'd assume. Thiel especially is fucking evil, he's way worse than Musk

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I live in Washington State, home of Amazon, and id wager more here hate bezos than anybody else on this list

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

@Moonrise2473 @sirdorius Well, Elon is evil by accident. Peter Thiel is evil by intention.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I dunno. Pretty sure Elon is evil intentionally, as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

@zepfhyr Elon is a person that is very susceptible for conspiracies that fit his world view and he propagates it loudly. Peter Thiel always stays in the background and acts from there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Agreed. Not saying Elon is more evil, but I don’t believe for a second his evil is accidental or situational.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

He’s also a class traitor. Should know better than fucking over workers from actual life experience in the working class. Still doesn’t give a shit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But thats just because he is the most well known (and most annoying). If you were to look at the things they have actually done, bezos and Thiel are probably much worse

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

It is difficult to quanitify the damage Musk has done lately. It isn't so clear cut as paying for sweatshop labour or stripping employment rights but he has done a great deal of difficult to define social or cultural harm by empowering fascists and using his public image to endorse fringe conspiracy theories

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Curious why people voted Altman over SBF?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Probably because SBF is going to jail anyway so the case seem "settled".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AI is the big, bad boogyman on Lemmy. Unreasonably so.

[–] sukhmel 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

It helps that a lot of people don't have a clue what they're talking about.

The way people complain about AI is the same as others complain about immigrants.

AI is both terrible and useless, and also going to take everyone's jobs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Marc Andreessen is too low there.

Musk is a clown that says vile and stupid thing. An useful idiot for others Silicon Valley VCs.

Andreessen and Thiel (and too some small extent Luckey) are in the background trying to push for far right libertarian dystopia.

Andreessen is the guy who kept pushing for web 3.0, trying to dominate it before it becomes big, so that he can monopolize / become a new digital libertarian govt, but of course it got hijacked by scammers, and states like Russia or North Korea, but he doesn't give a flying fuck.

Thiel of course is far right financier. There's a reason why they try to hide in the background.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What has Marc Anderseen done to be on this list? I must be out of that loop.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

He's a shameless crypto shill.

He also said that maybe India should let the British run them again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

That will do it.

[–] sirdorius 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

He wrote a techno optimist manifesto that reads like a proto fascist manifesto. In fact, he cites Marinetti as an inspiration, who was founder of the futurist movement, and later author of the fascist manifesto and a close supporter of Mussolini, so no surprise I guess. He enforces ideas that this century is just a bad rerun of the previous.

https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-religion-of-techno-optimism

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I remember reading this...its disgusting!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Wait where’s mark zuckerberg

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Oh! So he did. The internet is always right.

[–] ChairmanMeow 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

That seems like one that would go down to the wire. Mark Zuckerberg essentially is responsible for genocide.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't like what Peter Thiel has invested in (Stripe and Palantir). Elon Musk is ceo of a few companies that actually try to create interesting stuff, it's better than actually funding collection of data.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

He's actively platforming white supremacists, Nazis, and far right ideologues (people who have caused actual, tangible harm), normalizing their rhetoric and actions, and making it impossible for anyone on Xitter to push back or even report harassment from these kinds of hatemongers. He is literally bringing the worst parts of 4chan, Breitbart, Stormfront, etc to the mainstream and trying to make it seem normal.

He's also a natalist and a longtermist, which are just euphamisms for eugenicists. He's not trying to make anything better or interesting, he's trying to create a white supremacist world where only white cishet christian men have status, where women are just vessels for procreation, and no one else has any place. The only reason he wants to go to Mars is so he can have a white ethnostate built on the backs of slavery, where no one can do anything to stop him.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I guess it's just my interpretation of "Worse Person in Tech" are we voting them based off of their person or what they're doing to the tech industry.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I don't think you can differentiate. Who they are fundamentally affects their actions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Did you see that John Oliver piece on Musk?

https://youtu.be/Eo3zORUGCbM