re: #13 piratedan

you get the sense that since everyone uses it to communicate that they believe that they’re some kind of messiah. Not going to deny the power of the tools, but as inventions go, it’s just the latest iteration, you know, like toothpaste with whitening agents. Shitpotfull of people use that too and the improvements in dental health over the last decade are pretty impressive. It’s as if they’re perpetually in the now moment of Hanks building a fire on the beach after the plane wreck in Cast Away. After a while, the novelty just kind of wears off, but these guys are just riding that wave while they roll out additional shit that they believe is cool because they can exploit their users to businesses that want their data.

At this point I kind of feel like we’re watching a generation of tech people who have fully adopted the science fiction tropes about genius as a model.

They didn’t just make something that facilitated communication…a sort universal BBS…they’re now the philosophers of social connection on the internet in ways that their thoughts are now philosophically weighty in spite of their lack of training in any one the sciences they talk about. They’re not sociologists, they’re not epistemologists, they’re not political scientists…but they confidently say stuff about how the system functions that incorporates a presumption that constructing social media bestows an insight that transcends actual qualifications.

They’ve fed upon the trope that the technocrats will create the future, and decided they are those people. In normal people this would be obnoxious, but as another layer of “rich people who never have to hear the word no” it’s actually dangerous for the rest of us because they want to “guide” the rest of us w/r/t shit they barely understand and don’t have the self-awareness to assess without getting their dick involved.

(which is why techbros are once again playing in the gong pit of eugenics, and can’t conceptualize of how tech could work except as a market. They’re not dumb, they are just profoundly limited)