Jeff Bezos and the New Pharoahs

https://joebot.substack.com/p/jeff-bezos-and-the-new-pharoahs

by starkd • 5 years ago

16 36 5 years ago

joebot.substack.com

bamboozled• 5 years ago

Articles like this always make me chuckle, from a philosophical point of view it seems to ridiculous, yet it is easy to imagine the man who has everything clinging onto it for dear life.

Careful what you wish for I guess?

alpineidyll32• 5 years ago

Is the quest for immortality a solipsistic misunderstanding of evolution? -Yes. However it's substantially less stupid for bezos etc to fund science than it was to build the pyramids. If we simply made the bastard pay as much taxes as his employees I would be happy to allow him to spend his wealth as he sees fit no matter how philosophically bankrupt it may be. It's easy to envy him, but it takes 1000 data scientists and engineers to optimize people into opting out of individuality. Bezos is not an axis of evil. Evil is banal. Hes just an aging narcissist with very common and somewhat regrettable urges. If we love liberty we must even love his liberty.

Teandw3• 5 years ago

What about this makes him a narcissist? Seems a random thing to throw into the mix.

Just because people do things differently to you and make different decisions to the ones you would, doesn't automatically make them bad or a narcissist.

You spend your time commenting on websites, moaning about people doing things differently to you. You could spend the same time volunteering to help society in all manner of things.

Not paying your fair share of tax to help society as a whole and not spending your spare time to help society, are not that much different.

alpineidyll32• 5 years ago

Wanting to live forever is the essence of narcissism. It's to say: "the world never has enough of meeeee".

I'm actually a quite malicious person ...but commenting on HN doesn't rank high in my list of Antisocial behaviors :P

anonuser1234562• 5 years ago

I don’t really see a way Jeff B gets out of this w/out paying taxes outside of becoming immortal. The fed still takes 40% of your assets on death and that looks to be going up soon.

And it Amazon sells immortality as a service I don’t think reasonable people will be all that bent out of shape about him skipping a few hundred billion in taxes.

I mean… FFS that’s like 1/2 a year we couldn’t invade a country and bomb its populations. Maybe we should be giving Jeff a medal for avoiding taxes for all the bombs he’s kept from getting dropped.

civilized3• 5 years ago

I'm sure this guy could have written a whiny, scornful article at any stage of mankind's progress.

"Earth rotates around the Sun? Who is this Galileo, a Sun-worshipper??"

Lucky for him, in this timeline he survives to adulthood to write his Substack blog, rather than dying of polio, smallpox and/or the plague. He lives beyond the wildest dreams of a pharaoh and takes it utterly for granted.

New Pharaohs indeed.

madrox4• 5 years ago

The author's bio reads "A fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees."

I get the impression he unironically is asking that like a Douglas Adams character.

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."

civilized3• 5 years ago

He should take a plane to the Congo and give it a try. Maybe a sympathetic pack of chimps will take him in.

starkd• 5 years ago

I think he wrote that entirely in jest. His larger point is about the folly of mankind's idea about progress. Technology, however invigorating and useful, can easily become another false idol.

overflowing• 5 years ago

Critiquing the ideologies of the wealthy and powerful is not the same thing as rejecting the benefits of healthcare.

Bezo's achievements are not "mankind's" achievements

irjustin• 5 years ago

Bezo's achievements are not "mankind's" achievements

Why not? If we made it to Mars on Musk's ship... I'd be happy to declare it both his and our win.

anonuser1234562• 5 years ago

Lucky for him

But unlucky for us.

courtf• 5 years ago

Comparing Bezos to Galileo, what a joke.

Back then an equivalent article would have targeted the church, and its author probably would have suffered greatly for doing so, sort of like our friend Galileo... Your obsequiousness, especially pathetic in this age when the stakes are so much lower, would have spared you from facing any similar repercussions I'm sure.

civilized3• 5 years ago

Grand rhetoric! But no one is facing any repercussions for their opinion either way, and neither opinion is considered especially virtuous. I'm just saying what I think. So you can spare us the grandstanding.

Barrin923• 5 years ago

But immortality for the individual is not progress for mankind but the opposite. Stagnation.

Death is an evolutionary mechanism, it's a fundamental part of renewal of the species. Biological life dies to introduce novelty, in a cultural sense it is what gives urgency to human action, creating new life. Human immortality is the same thing as the suppression of forest fire. Fires are bad for some individuals but they're vital for the ecosystem. It's the natural version of creative destruction. If you dislike the idea of an immortal company or an immortal government you should be wary of the idea of immortal individuals. One of the longest lived species on earth is the sponge. It is no accident that they're not a very dynamic species.

Good ideas always survive, Galileo's contribution to mankind exists without Galileo, but as scientists often point out, science advances one funeral at a time. And that can be taken quite literally.

madrox4• 5 years ago

I have a hard time with these arguments...mainly because if we already lived in a world with immortality, and someone came along talking about all the great benefits to society that would happen if we instituted a global end of life program, no one would take them up on it. Consider that while thinking "good ideas always survive."

gumby2• 5 years ago

A side point, but the author says “MIT’s Technology Review” as if it is somehow connected to MIT.

Actually the name of the rag is “MIT Technology Review”; it’s a private effort that licenses the name from the Alumni association. I guess they pay some cash, and also agree to send every alum a copy of the magazine with an alumni news section bound into the back. I was able to cancel the paper copy but I assume they still do this.

It’s historically been such a terrible magazine (a friend calls it “the magazine of things guaranteed never to happen”) that I’m surprised the Institute hasn’t shut it down. People do get the impression that it is somehow the opinion of MIT (whatever that would mean)

eCa• 5 years ago

As an outsider, I certainly assumed (and expected) that the magazine is published by MIT.

I really don’t understand why a reputable institution would sell their name that way, unless strapped for cash.

gumby2• 5 years ago

MIT isn’t selling their name, the association of alumni of MIT (basically just some other private entity) is selling the name. Obviously in reality the institute benefits from the association (it helps MIT get donations) and vice versa. A symbiotic relationship.

I am a paying member of the alumni association (well, the Northern California chapter) so I suppose I am marginally complicit in this fraud. Sorry!

stickfigure• 5 years ago

I am tired of "why you should be angry at some rich guy" articles. Partly because the subject is banal, partly because the excuses are so flimsy.

Rich guys want to live longer. Yawn.

CobrastanJorji2• 5 years ago

Bezos inadvertently reveals an abiding fear of oblivion.

This is a universal human fear for the entire recorded history of everything and is one of the fundamental drives behind everything people do. The author is clearly familiar with the Pharoahs, did he think that at some point between then and today that the fear of death stopped being a motivator? Did the author feel like it also applying to Jeff Bezos is some sort of big tell? Is the next piece going to be "man admits to requiring oxygen?"

Barrin923• 5 years ago

I'm going to tell you, my grandfather and grandmother, simple people growing up on farmland seemed to harbor no such feelings of dread, accepted their death with dignity, in fact always saw it as a vital part of life (probably not unrelated to their lived experience as farmers, and when they died, they did so without much grief or terror.

What they definitely didn't do was build a Ziggurat to cryofreeze their corpses in or put their heads in jars. I don't think the kind of ego that is required to engage in these immortality ventures is that common, that's just yet another thing that Bezos et al tell themselves

dbtc• 5 years ago

Your grandparents sound like awesome people. Do you know what their beliefs were about post-death / after-life?

CobrastanJorji2• 5 years ago

Accepting an inevitable death with dignity and grace is great and a blessing, but when we've got other options, we take them. I go to the doctor when I'm sick, I get vaccinated when there's a plague, I'll let surgeons cut me open if something is going very wrong inside, and if there were a magic "stop aging" pill, I'd take it, and I suspect you'd find nearly everyone else would indeed have that kind of ego.

Chris2048• 5 years ago

What they definitely didn't do was build a Ziggurat to cryofreeze their corpses

was that an option? what you attribute to lack of ego, could also be lack of funds.

hodgesrm• 5 years ago

It's not the fear of death that is the tell. It's the attempt to fix it through money and technology.

What I have read of Jeff Bezos reminds me somewhat of the fictional Walter Faber, the main character in the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch. [1] Walter starts an affair with a much younger woman partly in an effort to recapture his youth. Controlling the world through technology is a leitmotiv in the story. To the extent his motivations are similar, Jeff Bezos is certainly far from the only real character to express this idea.

p.s., I recommend Homo Faber very highly. Along with Faust by Goethe it is invaluable reading for anyone interested in technology and the human condition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Faber_(novel)

systemsignal• 5 years ago

Seems like figuring out how to live longer is good for everyone, don’t see why you would complain about it

Teandw3• 5 years ago

In fairness, living longer has both positive and negative effects. So it's understandable why some people would complain about it.

techdragon• 5 years ago

The Bezos half feels like its being shoehorned into an existing worldview, while the Milner half feels like its just flat out misunderstood.

Bezos is Bezos I'm not going to comment on that, but I definitely get the impression that the author has done zero research into Milner's other efforts.

Yuri genuinely thinks science can push humanity forward, he's putting a pile of money into science projects with little expectation of clear success and his manifesto just comes across as earnest and "humanist" if a little naive if you ask me (the universal story is a natively humanist concept that implicitly paves over the details by way of trying to build a single view of everything when many topics contain two diametrically opposed views that may not be reconcilable)...

It feels like the author has some decent points about Bezos and an axe to grind, and will level that axe at anyone that associates with him.

TriNetra• 5 years ago

Immortality isn't possible for this physical body – even the universe isn't eternal so how can the body, which is made up of the same elements can be? But, the idea and quest for eternity – if it's there in us – it must have come from somewhere. There must be something eternal within us which we have an intuitive awareness about so we develop a desire for that. In India, many human beings since ancient times have given their lives for realizing this essence and many did achieve a state of super consciousness while living; that is, fully united with this eternal essence within. This is what Buddha had achieved, so as Krishna, Rama and many others. Then there's no fear of death; there's no coming or going; a yogi doesn't die helplessly. She leaves this mortal coil by her own will when it's no longer useful to serve.

Jeff Bezos and the New Pharoahs

Related Stories