I read a wonderful short story once about mankind venturing into the stars where they become a symbol of hope, friendliness, and community across all physical and psychological barriers. They would be the ones you turn to in times of crisis, to deliver aid and make repairs, to mediate in times of conflict and to bring joy in times of celebration.
However, occasionally, the humans would see one of their own ships adrift in the sea of stars, and they would stop at nothing to destroy it. The abrupt and merciless hostility would always shock onlookers and associates. “Why” they always ask. The answer was always the same; “when the earth was suffering, they used up our resources and left us behind.”
“If the billionaires are so determined on quitting humanity, perhaps it would be best to give them what they want and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them.”
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Perhaps they don’t have human rights now? Means unaliving them would be legal and their weath is ours for the taking.
Let them be cake
Always have been
Always will
We should abandon them, by expropriating their wealth!
Have they not learned from Mario’s brother?
Well, no one else has been executed. I’m sure a couple more would rattle some people.
The Billionaires are a bunch of Degenerate Morons who diddle children, much as the ruling class has always been. They’re funneling the world’s wealth upwards thinking capital will insulate them from the coming climate crisis they’re exasperating. How I wish I could be there when they realize that it won’t.
Reagan and Thatcher were politically successful, remaking even their center-left opponents such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair into celebrants of streamlined government. But this political success has not in fact solved the problem of stagnation, which remains as severe, by Thiel’s account, as it has ever been. Thiel and his cohorts have gotten everything they want politically, but that has still failed to solve the key problem of our time. The fact that he still advocates a failed economic program suggests the deeper stagnation is in his own mind.
Since politics has failed, Thiel and the other plutocrats are also toying with another solution: secession from society and the human species. Thiel has long been an advocate of various post-human technological solutions that will allow him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to overcome death), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and artificial intelligence.
I’m all for it. Send them to Mars and make sure they don’t come back!
One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.
They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.
And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.
So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.
Sea steading, BioShock here we come…
But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it’s still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.
Anyone who says that is pretty stupid, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who actually held that position
I will say that working to colonize Mars will teach us to fix the Earth… But it would be real nice if we stopped fucking up the Earth in the first place
Personally, I would prefer Venus. I want these bastards to melt.
Nah, Mars sounds great. A tiny prison of their own making, as the corners they cut slowly come back to bite them? That’s poetic
A human’s humanity is inversely proportional to the amount of money they have. After a billion, you stop being human and turn into a lizard person. We are quickly approaching the day when a lizard person will evolve into something even weirder once they hit a trillion.
It’s because they become an avatar for their money
Every tweet Elon makes affects his horde. Every single one - and usually it’s just a few hundred thousand and balances out- but occasionally it’s hundreds of millions in the red
And Elon can’t help himself. Most of them can
They can only be themselves in locations with tight information control, which is generally resorts with other billionaires. Who seem to be consistently in a pissing match with each other about their wealth and influence
And that’s why they’re fucking inhuman dragons
I can guarantee you, they turn into a lizard person way before a billion. I’d set it at $20 million even.
Money amplifies who you are. There are actually a number of quiet rich people living good lives, though that doesn’t justify the bad ones regardless of their wealth.
A second time.
The first time was stealing from everybody to become billionaires in the first place.
well yeah, it seems to be a karmic thing. the pattern repeats life after life, age after age, until it splits off the main-stream and becomes its own thing, independent, permanent.
Thiel has worried that Western civilization had entered a period of long-term stagnation in the 1970s which will continue unless there is a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: lower economic growth, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a general cultural malaise.
Imagine looking back at the proud of time where there was literally the most advances in the wildest technology and thinking it’s stagnation. It was from a time period where people remembered refrigeration as new and exciting to the time where your phone has more computing power than the ones that put people on the moon, and it’s in your freaking pocket, and say that technology stagnated.
As for the lower economic growth and the “stagnating” culture, that’s squarely on the shoulders of corporations, and therefore, billionaires.
interestingly, i get the sentiment that the economy has stalled since the 1970s from a surprising number of people, and i figured out that it’s probably because blue-collar jobs have stagnated since the 1970s, and that’s what most people feel. That sentiment coming from Thiel, who invests in software, is very weird though.
The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.
You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.
On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.
Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.
man who hoarded and centralized wealth from software companies concerned about decay of entrepreneurship
pika pika
pika-chuu
They never had any humanity to begin with. It is the only way to become a Billionaire.
and there i was standing on the crossroads of destiny, choosing to keep either my enterpreneurial spirit, or my humanity …
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
If every piece of MAGA trash you know isn’t afraid of you, you’re a coward and a failure.
That’s too generous.
I think they already do, hence the private islands and Bond villain style lairs.
