They are desperate to be cool, it’s so cringe.
I know it feels good to dunk on others and do so with generalities but just the last line, get revenge on the nerds.
Sounds edgy but it’s a slogan that is poor communication. It’s focused on US based tech billionaires and paints them as representatives of nerds. Look at voting data. Tech employees are leftist. People that go to school are more frequently leftist. Rhetoric like this is unintentionally anti-intellectual which promotes conservatism. And in my personal life, there sure seems to be an ocean of nerdy women in the US including in tech like bioengineering and UX and marketing design that is intertwined with today’s techno-facism. I don’t get why these pundits can’t ever stay focused on class warfare and end up resorting to social/racial/gender otherings. Why use language that is so so broad and is a term that most applies to people in your base
Also I’m at a loss at how finance/real estate/insurance/material and manufacturing billionaires have somehow managed to be overshadowed in public perceptions of evil even though they’ve consistently been at it for millenniums and are a cohort of multigenerational families of wealth built on slavery and genocide. They make up venture capital funds that give them ownership across all these companies. Tech CEOs end up owning an ever shrinking portion of a company they did or didn’t found until ownership is mostly a smattering of many large finance companies and family offices. Weirdly fetishistic of proper rich despots rather than these new tech billionaires who still have to go to JP Morgan Chase to facilitate their transactions
Also in the comments co-opting conservative rhetoric like herbivores and I guess carnivores?. That’s weird. Who actually talks like that seriously in real life? My whole life on the left we’ve been so terrible at creating insults but also terms of endearments. It’s weird how bad we are at not only labeling ourselves but also continuing to build terms into positives. Anything eventually becomes an insult towards leftist and conservative terminology is used awkwardly
For the side that places so much emphasis on the power of language, labeling, othering, etc … we’re terrible at it. The side of people with art/literature/communication/whatever degrees. Practically any college level degree is the realm of mostly leftist but in practice people well studied in communication can’t effectively and accurately communicate to people
It doesn’t matter if they’re nerds or not. What matters is where society is swaying to.
Ya but in discussion of the article, I don’t think it’s about the direction of society. It’s an article about people the author doesn’t like. How they classify them. And an empty call to action at the end to get revenge on nerds of which the author probably would be considered one. It’s a bad article
Purpose of the article, why does it exist and why does it have so many upvotes? Does the article help or harm the direction of society? Is it just an eloquent version of an Instagram comment dunking on people? What communication should be signal boosted that would be effective in driving action towards swaying society in a better direction
I think many people wouldn’t like to live under a “Nerd Reich”, so it’s only natural that there is a mainstream article against that. I’m assuming people who don’t understand anything about the technology that keeps their attention most of the time are concerned about the possibility. Society losing grip over itself, that is, language (social skills) not being the primary characteristic of the successful anymore. That is a blow conventional people won’t take easily.
Every major politician in the USA has major financial backers with their own agendas that they purchase through superPAC contributions and by funding re-election campaigns. It’s been the ruling oligarchy my whole life and I’m middle aged. Pretending it’s different or worse now is disingenuous.
Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you’ve got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people’s lives. What you don’t got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don’t give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it’s going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.
Politicians aren’t selling a business plan, they’re selling a legislative agenda. They don’t have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.
It is worse now, at least the legal money side.
Citizens United removed the limits on the international money as well as the domestic money.
Why is the countey tearing itself apart? Because the foreign money has interest in weakening, stealing, amd profiteering from the USA.
Conversely, the domestic money wants to keep the domestic part from falling completely apart; at least until the real estate, votes, and grant money for the revitalization project are all lined up.
Zuck can piss off
I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.
This. This is what I feel like
I felt like this in January when this was first published and I still feel like it today. I’m not really sure what it will take for things to change but I get the feeling that powerful and wealthy people do not want things to change.
What’s worse is that half the population actually voted for these losers. After the losers published a document describing exactly what they are going to do. We are surrounded by idiots.
Little Dick Energy. That’s what I think every single time I see any of these folks in the news. But apparently there are enough weird little aspirants out there that they do alright?
Fuck 90% of this species. 👍
Most people with little dicks are decent people and aren’t sadistic and evil cunts, so the little dick isn’t the issue.
Well we know elons is really small, every kids been IVF
Not just small. Mutilated because of lengthening surgery gone wrong, allegedly.
We really gotta stop shaming people with little dicks like this. They’ve done nothing to deserve to be compared to these clowns.
He’s such a fucking dork.
I mean, it’s kind of a prerequisite.
I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight… It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
And there’s the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.
Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn’t produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.
Yes, I’m bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We’re not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can’t help ourselves.)
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos-- you can tell they are insecure. They became rich and powerful and now want to stomp on people.
It’s like the meme of the nerd.
Who did Zuck stomp on?
Zuckerburg and Facebook enable lies to spread because that’s how he makes money.
deleted by creator
You’re right. Meet me at The Old Ship Saloon in SF ive got a business propsition for ya
He’s been implicated in the recent genocide in Myanmar. Facebook cultivated the spread of the racist lies, allowed it to proliferate, spread in the region and then shorted companies operating there. If you know there’s going to be ethnic cleansing in the region, causing outrage and destabilisation, business takes a hit and the options pay off massively. All it takes was the deaths of thousands, but hey Mark has the capital to burn on his AR pet project that nobody wants.
The world? Dudes done more harm than any of the other two.
Why was Altman missing in the story? The next ruler of the world…
They all have nice shaped heads.
Would look great off their shoulders!
The saying money can’t unlame you still true.
This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he’s a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.
He has to fuck other people’s wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn’t enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.
I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I’m actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.
Trump with all his money and power doesn’t have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.
As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn’t have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)
As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it’s really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.
Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.
So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they’ve ever known, hence J. D. Vance’s obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid’s Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they’ll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.
(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we’re not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)
If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they’d eventually discover that they don’t need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wallWhy wouldn’t you? Only losers seek power, and only losers could and would fuck up this badly.
If they were posh people with “breeding” that wouldn’t make being the direct or indirect victim of their destruction any better, unless you’re an upper middle class Briton who has bern btought up with 19th century notions of “born to rule elites” such as most columnists for The Guardian.
I get it that people here derive a little enjoyment out of taking the piss of the character flaws of these wankers, but were they are coming from is not were this columnist is coming from.
