> Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.

You mean the guy who sells electric cars? I'm aware that he also bought and -- apparently deliberately -- sabotaged a social media platform that had itself been one of the main engines of this very problem for about a decade. Apart from that, what examples of his conduct are you considering?

I encourage you to listen to the 4 part series Elon Musk Unmasked [1] from Tech won't save us. His motivations are definitely not for the betterment of the average person.

[1] - https://techwontsave.us/episode/189_elon_musk_unmasked_origi...

I'll listen to that, thanks.

But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.

Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.

I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)

My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.

Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)

Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.

One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p

> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."

I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).

But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.

> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.

Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?

If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?

Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?

> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)

Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.

> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p

A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.

Yes, yes, we all know it - Elon Musk eats babies and Tesla batteries set Rome on fire.

Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.

"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.

Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.

For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).

> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil

Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.

My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.

From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.

I get your point, though to me, there's way too many babies per cubic meter of that bathwater of yours.

My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.

The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:

  total value provided to society
  ^              
  |              ....
  |             ..  ..
  |           ...    ...
  |        ....        ....
  |   .....                .....
  ------------------------------------> time

(Total value includes not just direct benefit to customers/users, but also how it enables others to build new products/science/businesses/etc. on it.)

The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.

I'd replace "business" with "capitalism".

The downvoting on this is shameful. This is exactly what has happened.

The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.

I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.

The comment was edited after the down votes started pouring in.

Elon Musk is an example of a fascist? That is outrageous nonsense.

On a spectrum he is definitely in that direction. There are many examples but a few:

a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.

b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.

c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.

>a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.

Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.

https://theweek.com/articles/462236/did-justice-department-i...

That article never says that DOJ sent protestors.

Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs

Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...

I think the word for what is about to happen is not yet invented. It will be something else, something with dire consequences but of a different kind. Something that leaves everyone but a thin elite completely behind. Some may say it has been like this a long time, but I think it will evolve/level up to something we have never seen before.

Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.

Firing federal workers and going to Mars is what fascism is?

Firing Federal workers so that ultra-rich people can do whatever they want without any oversight, while at the same time undermining the rule of law, and creating a scapegoat ("illegal immigrants") at the same time - that's literally fascism.

In 1944, before the actual universally agreed upon to be fascist powers were defeated in WW2, George Orwell wrote about how the word had been applied to just about every group imaginable and had already lost any real meaning it might have had:

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...

"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."

"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."

"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."

Try Umberto Eco's "On Fascism," it's the best definition of the term I've ever come across

What makes it the "best" in your opinion? Looking at the list, several of the points could be applied to just about every modern nation-state, several easily apply to communist states just as easily as fascist states, and there are several that don't apply to many states that most people would argue are fascist. For example, Salazar's Portugal is widely regarded as fascist but points 9, 10, 11, and 13 (and maybe more) don't really apply to it.

It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.

I said wait. Every fascist regime begins with a purge. Then it was the communists, now it might be federal workers? I guess we shall see.

By that definition, communist are also fascist?

Hmmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what it is but I suspect there are some fundamental differences between firing a bunch of bureaucrats from the federal government vs. Hitler's purge of the SA or Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps.

Musk doesn't need to do the heavy lifting himself.

He can just direct his supporters to violently attack opposition:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...

"Musk can't highlight specific examples of the federal government pissing our tax money down the drain because of how other people who see it might react."

You ever heard of a Heckler's Veto?

It is completely legitimate to argue about the use of taxpayer money.

It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.

>It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.

Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?

Except he can't be banned from TwitterX like Trump. Imagine Musk as a future Republican candidate with a social network. This DODGE thing is a political ramp for him. The other potential candidate is Zuckerberg with his fascination with ancient Rome.