It's a self fulfilling prophecy... while us commoners, or so called "activists" or ethicists ponder and debate on culture, morality, law and ethics... The powerful are just living an alternate life devoid of all these moral qualms and are have clearly distanced themselves from the mundane, have distanced themselves from the guilt or any kind of accountability. In their eyes, they are just capitalising on the human tendencies which have been always existed (the seven deadly sins), so the "absolve" themselves pretty quickly by saying that they are not creating new "sins", just leveraging, or allowing the people to go along those sins.
They think, why should they be the ones to not capitalise on them, if someone else might and will. It's a coordination problem of our society. No one wants to let go. They want to hedge, they invest in ozempic and invest in fast-food at the same time, there is no moral compass guiding them. It's for us commoners to debate and think about.
Nietzsche presented two prototypical sets of human who interface with laws and ethics. He described why those believes exists and are self-reaffirming even if they are puzzling from the other side.
This is the key. Everyone wants stability in their circumstances, but you have to go to extreme lengths to sustain an extreme lifestyle, particularly if it is based on preserving a high rate of accumulation instead of accumulation itself.
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
No one. That's the idea.
A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.
once it's no longer necessary and once they can have robot security they will decouple from the rest of society.
they would also require military grade deterrence. eventually they will either steal, buy or make nukes.
> A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
This is not merely selfish ambition; it becomes a duty. People depend on him to defend their city and owe him for the stability of their affairs. Therefore, he must dedicate himself to his principality and, by extension, his power, rather than acting morally like the common man who must navigate political reality.
What is incredible about the current state of the western world is that Andreessen Horowitz seem more like common men. They believe they can simply continue their profession, they are the prince's of are time and are the pinnacle of power in the west. They seem to think there are good guys and bad guys, viewing those who dislike them as bad, while those who accept their power are good. They believe people should never conspire against them.
Precisely because they are dedicated to a particular set of morals, they are unlike the prince. These are morals both of us dislike, yet they believe in them dare I say, naively and idealistically. They view capitalism and profit as an immutable moral truth that others must accept as righteous power.
This is a luxury only afforded in most times to the common man, who can maintain false notions of morality despite his profession depending on the political stability of some sovereign. I don't hate these people; I am just perplexed by their lack of understanding that history is littered with men who worried about politics, yet still fellto fellow members of their class, mercenaries, and scions seeking more than money.
I don't think there is much good in the common people, as bitter resentment is always their. They would do well to know that money does not protect them from it. Most of what is called morality and ethics are cheap, self-serving philosophies. The only exception is true mystagogy, a beautiful flower that cannot grow in the barren American mind. It grows only through the blood of the martyrs.
They actually don't believe in capitalism and profit, because if they did, they'd recognize that extreme concentration of wealth is actually detrimental to capitalism (the system's) performance. Ricardo, Mill, and Smith all saw this dynamic, but "capitalists" like Andreessen have shown zero interest in combatting it for the health of the capitalist system as a whole.
They also wouldn't, for example, try to use government to prevent the market from building housing near their mansions: https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
You're ascribing way, way too much intellectual consistency to these people. They have no moral system.
That is all to say that the cynical attitude of Andreesen or Thiel is what I think it's always been about. I probably sound a little Marxist or just cynical but I am not a Marxist and I do right and wrong, I do think that the modern theories of morality should be understood cynically as their purpose is primarily a political attempt to change or preserve something and in some sense when one examines them deeply we see self interest usually hidden and diffused by moralising prose and sentiments in these modern theories of morality. So techno optimism manifesto is a more brash, bold and crass version of these works of moral theory indeed a making a sort of unintentional parody. None of this is to say that political economy is only moralising (which techno optimism is).
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.
It would be pretty reasonable to hate the player who brings a machine gun to a stadium, kills every opponent to start scoring and when people complain says “Nothing in the rules says we can’t kill other players to score. If I didn’t gun everyone down, the opposing team would’ve. Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
So, you consider anyone with a job "powerful"? Personal ethics are arbitrary enough to poo-poo any job. It's just as easy to call everyone else "useful idiots".
That is not what OP said, so you may want to re-read what they said.
Investors: but surely they won't cheat me!
"I don't get it, why are they confessing? They are not confessing. They are bragging"
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
We got here by putting two of the most hated people in the country on the ballot against him, twice.
One was actively hated for decades by the ultra-powerful evangelical voting bloc and hardly loved even by her own party, then another who couldn't be more closely affiliated with the incumbent during a period of high inflation (globally) that ousted incumbents in virtually every election (globally) that year.
These are especially doomed against a completely amoral propaganda machine that's willing to say, in private, that the candidate is "a demonic force", while in public doing everything they can to get him to power (see: Tucker Carlson). Earning legitimate democratic victory against people who are quite literally and explicitly bad-faith actors is very hard.
And lastly, Roy Lee, Marc Andreessen and their ilk are nothing like the people who you're referring to. Being a low-status, cheating, amoral loser like Roy Lee is completely distinct from being a lower- or middle-income American worker.
The narrative of "oh if normal people weren't so mean calling out the awful things these voters say and do, they would have behaved otherwise" is simply not true. For them it's a matter of "winning" and "losing" and damn the consequences. Treating them nice doesn't change anything.
So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
I call it pissing in the pool.
I hope one day we see paid advertising as immoral. Immoral acts can be defined as negative sum on society but possibly positive to the individual. A working society agrees, culturally, to think negatively on negative sum behavior.
Social animals do this too - even vampire bats ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4685829/ )
The issue with paid advertising is that it is more difficult to understand how it is a negative externality. There's also the fact that so many make their living on it these days that it's tough to get them to believe they're doing something wrong.
But imagine all the distraction and labor we could avoid if we could agree that it is not right.
Advertising is the always hungry beast that even a post scarcity society would starve feeding.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.
Which is how it should have been from the get-go.
The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
But, to paraphrase the Prussian general 2 x 2, the most dangerous person in power is a man who is both stupid and diligent. When people spend a lot of time smelling their own farts, they start believing that it’s perfume.
Investors might be attracted to the bleak future they are selling, but they are selling a shrinking share of the world economy.
I can think of one way to explain it, and it's not good: they expect global war.
Surveillance tech is the opposite: It represents freedom taken away. That is the more bleak future IMO.
https://www.techspot.com/news/113395-flock-biggest-investor-...
Is investing in these companies even legal?
They really are the gift that keeps on giving.
Funded by the fines it generates for governments.
https://www.reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966...
Also, in the UK, lost their 5 year battle about whether drivers are self-employed or workers for Uber.
https://www.taxiplus.co.uk/news/new-rules-for-uber-drivers-w...
Or AirBnB versus Barcelona - https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2026/06/10/barcelona-is-shutti...
The US is not the only jurisdiction - and that complexity creates an opportunity to leverage fines.
When I was a kid, I used to go on private WoW servers. There were always people there who would invariably try to pick a fight with admins. It always went the way you expected.
Like, were they just watching some random documentary about China, and noticed how their surveillance state works - and said to themselves "You know, that's exactly what we need here!"
Or is it just purely greed? They see some potential cash crab, and come up with some rationalization that doesn't sound that bad ("We'll catch criminals").
I just wonder what type of founder walks up to a VC, and pitches some idea with the explicit goal of robbing everyone of their privacy even a bit more.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/12/25/the-dark-world-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/business/india-lending-ap...
History doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
That's really it, isn't it. How do we make smarter people, without them getting insufferable?
How do people like him get the money to fund his little projects, it's amazing
Does SV now optimize for evilness?
I won't be surprised when "The Com"[1] will be revealed to be a project of some rich SV accelerationist.
I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.
Since when has it not ?
The microcomputer/home computer boom (1978 to let's say 1998 or so) and growth of software companies selling packaged box software you could run on your PC was in many cases not run by people who I would categorize as fundamentally evil.
Did a lot of weird cut-throat business stuff happen in the 1980s? Probably. But it all seems very cute and pales in comparison to today.
What if what happens today seems quaint in the future?
Maybe some of the early 80s tech entrepreneurs very well could have become the same sort of founders that are in this list of horrid a16z things. But the reach and scale just wasn't possible.
The whole paradigm of software development, and distributing that software product to end users was completely different than what we have today.
What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.
Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.
Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.
I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".
Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.
It'd be nice if it was limited to places like 4chan. But as I always say, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, so no surprise investment funds act like that too.
Most of the incel, anime, doomed, and bro culture that was prevalent / nascent there 15-20 years ago is now super mainstream.
What it really is is the interface. It’s where things go when they are on their way out, like discarded scientific ideas, but it’s also where new things first appear.
If you watch the fringe you know what’s coming and going.
It can be hard to tell sometimes which it is though, coming or going.
The theses and rules vary, of course, because there are many investors.
This one seems to have a thesis of “make 80s and 90s noir cyberpunk real.”
You know I didn't just come out and say that. I actually liked Ben and his character (who doesn't, right?). Let's just say I got disillusioned about all of them in the correct order.
Talk is so cheap you wouldn't believe.
(I mean that Zuckerberg apparently understood nothing. I mean when I say, 'spoon feed')
This is the same man who came out and said Snowden is a traitor. Now, I've since heard other versions on this so I'm willing to entertain the arguments. But a top VC being like he is, well, it's concerning. It's concerning he chooses what to fund
This is one of the primary reasons that tech startups flourish in America but not in Europe.
you'd pay through your fucking nose and get a long tour of the entire city to inflate your bill. at least with uber you get a refund when the driver does this bullshit.
nevermind all the crime, slashed tires and arson
These are the specific traits which allow them to reach the positions of influence or power.
For the record, I am determinist-light. It's clear that some people are just born with sociopathy or low IQ, irrespective of their life experiences. These people would benefit immensely from early intervention.
When the outcome of such a test could literally destroy your future career, you don't think people would be motivated to deceive the interviewer? We are talking about highly motivated, often highly charismatic people.
You somehow get labeled a narcissist during a job interview. What's your recourse?
Flouting the law ahead of regulators has always been a strategy in startups, only now the stakes are not "get a ride to the airport."
"I have zero introspection. As little as possible" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b6Zw50f5jJk
We can tell, Marc. It's not a good thing. It's the sort of thing oblivious villains say.
You naively thought Silicon Valley was just a funny TV show about people wanting to make money, a lot of it, but even that was an idealized version.