Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich (2014)

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

by lbrito • 6 months ago

27 5 6 months ago

exogeny• 6 months ago

Interesting that this author was out ahead of this theme a full twelve years ago. Kudos.

It's not all that complex though, really. Just a bunch of adult children who were bullied mercilessly and now have convinced themselves, through the magic of Dunning-Kruger, that they are both eminently more suitable to run things and eminently justified in using that power to exact revenge on their (largely imagined) tormentors.

cal_dent2• 6 months ago

The Great Unwind

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889008

heymijo• 6 months ago

Balaji Srinivasan is one of those guys who I don't get. Specifics elude me but I recall his activities getting memory holed, his twitter timeline getting scrubbed, and completely new narratives being written about him.

I was also never quite sure why he was in the orbit of influence and power. He had a failed bitcoin mining hardware company and that's about all I know of, and yet he kept seeming to fail upwards.

cal_dent2• 6 months ago

The thing about a lot of this is the implicit admittance that true power always lies with national government. It feels like many governments have forgotten that but (i suspect partly as a result of Covid, partly Trump's antics) some are slowly starting to remember that.

For all tech's influence, when push comes to shove they all line up to brown nose whoever is in power when they wield the power of the nation state

Revolution1120• 6 months ago

Since the Warring States period, China has been a purely Machiavellian ideological state. The United States has clearly been influenced by the Chinese. The US has received many Chinese immigrants, and Europe has also received a significant number. What's the difference? Those who choose the US are often driven by a desire to "make a name for themselves" and "build strong power," while those who choose Europe tend to be more inclined to "enjoy a comfortable life." Before I developed a deep-seated hatred for the Illuminati and Satanism, I never intended to endorse the former; I preferred the latter. Even so, I don't want to accept Machiavellianism or the Dark Enlightenment. Darkness is merely a means to combat darkness, not truth or an end. Therefore, I prefer an Islamic ideology that "cleans out these psychologically dark and morally corrupt infidels and then returns to a simple and orderly fairy tale world," rather than some neo-Nazi Dark Enlightenment truth.

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich (2014)

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