Please Stop Calling Tech Billionaires Stupid
(For one, they are fascists, so please make sure to specify that, it’s very important.)
Please let me explain to you why calling tech fascist billionaires, idiots, is not only idiotic in and of itself, but extremely dangerous.
One of the overwhelming responses people are having to Elon Musk taking over Twitter, and his choices there (which frighten many of us), is to say that he’s stupid, he’s dumb, thick skull, piss baby (gross), doesn’t know how to run a company, he bought it on prideful impulse without thinking and now it’s falling apart, he’s in over his head, he doesn’t know what to do, he’s hemorrhaging money, he’s ruining his platform, he’s having a tantrum, the site is going to go away because he doesn’t know how to keep a website up.
In short that he is a buffoon, a court jester. This is the same thing that people have done with all sorts of tech billionaires: Mark Zuckerberg gets this treatment, SBF is getting it, Jack Dorsey has gotten it (particularly during his spiritual retreat days, the man looked like shit), this is even the attitude of people in the industry towards venture capitalists, who insist over and over that VCs are frivolous and are picking companies in the dark even as that proves untrue again and again.
This is the same thought pattern that produces notions that crypto is a joke, is a game, is a house of cards scam soon to fall — may I remind you, that as recently as today, everyone is STILL saying that Twitter is somehow going to go away overnight… magical thinking as weeks have past without even a single disruption to the service. It is funny how many Silicon Valley projects are ridiculed as failures even AS they succeed. The cope is real.
Let me disbuse you of the notion that you are smarter than these people and that these people are unserious. You are not smarter than Elon Musk, or the people that he works closely with in various conspiracies, who are all, also, smarter than you. These are not only incredibly intelligent human beings, but they represent deep benches — companies, sectors, laboratories, schools — of intelligence; beneath every single one of these people are multiple formations of think tanks, startups, academic projects, venture capital firms, research teams, in addition to all the companies they run or invest in, each of which is absolutely full of talent. That’s it. That’s just the way it is. You actually are not smarter than the richest men in the world, and if you can’t even face the facts, how do you propose defeating them?
One person that has a reputation for being just an absurd clown fool, is Palmer Luckey. You might remember him as the kid who did a photo shoot for the cover of TIME Magazine wearing a VR headset and appearing to swim through water. (The photoshoot was brilliant, you all are soooo desperate). The guy likes to post pictures of himself as cosplay conventions, including wearing lady’s undergarments lmfao. WHO CARES.
He is thought of as, if anything, an idiot savant who is only succeeding through nepotism and privilege and dumb luck, which is ridiculous. Palmer is one of the most formidable intelligences in Silicon Valley, and I cannot begin to explain to you the DIFFICULTLY of not only creating and developing a viable commercial virtual reality system, but being able to manufacture it in such a way that it could be purchased by private individuals for an attainable price, AND globally distributed. That is an absolutely incredible feat and if you can’t even recognize what that feat is, how do you propose the man who pulled it off is an idiot compared to you? You and your, what? Mid-level management position at a FAANG? Grow up.
Palmer’s achievement with Oculus was a milestone yearned for by generations; virtual reality was the prediction, brainchild, hope, fear, warning, of scholars and philosophers and science fiction authors, of time immemorial (probably sooner than that, but whatever). You could probably even analyze Plato’s Cave wrt artificial intelligence, but the chances that you have the brainpower to pull that off, means you should probably take a seat. From the inception of Silicon Valley, this was one of the closely-held dreams and aspirations of the industry, and Palmer did it. And it’s beautiful. The Oculus is a beautiful experience. The games with the priest and the monks and the laser beat game or whatever? Priceless.
Now Palmer, who most of you are still thinking of as a frivolous dolt besides obviously being one of the greatest minds of our generation, his work is now the foundation of the “Metaverse” and what Meta desperately needed to make it happen. While *ALL OF META AND MARK ZUCKERBERG HIMSELF* are building out the details, Palmer is actually leading the entire technology industry in a bid to subsume the American military as stands, under an entirely model, to replace legacy weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon with a new, software-driven military force concentrating on autonomous warfare; re-building American defense with an entirely new mode of conflict, kitted out tech surveillance, tech AI, tech autonomous vehicles and submarines, tech drones and drone swarms, tech satellites and battlefield AI, and so on.
His vision and the vision for a tech powered super-military, “American Dynamism”, proposes the biggest changes in military that we have seen in our lifetime as the 9/11 generation: the long-feared dystopia of an autonomous military operated from afar by computer programmers. They are doing to the entire military what they did with US policing: transforming it and making it more deadly than ever before, with a dystopian hell of tech super powered weapons and total surveillance.
Call him stupid all you want, he can still blow your shit up. And that’s what it is.
This is one example of how discounting these people as stupid — especially based on Twitter posts where they are running who knows what ops — is incredibly dangerous. You are dismissing cold-blooded, serial killing, imperialist psychopaths as court jesters, which puts you completely out of the game if you actually want to stop this imperial death spiral that is pointing directly to one or multiple mass death events.
I would be remiss not to mention Marc Andreessen, as my main counterpoint to the proposition that tech billionaires are not intelligent. My main focus in my entire tech investigative career, I have been tracking him and his work for almost 10 years (here’s to 10 more!!!) and, even though I am myself a genius, if unrecognized in my time, I have absolutely 0 problem telling you that Marc is brilliant, a once-in-generation mind. He surpasses Steve Jobs in shaping the vision of a world with technology — Marc sees a chance for tech to be not just our devices, but the very context of our existence. Marc invented the fucking web browser, he has been at the forefront of every tech innovation you’ve seen since. He has invested in so many startups that have come to IPO and generated huge returns and also made huge impacts on the biggest technical achievements of our lifetime; revelations in social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Substack), housing (AirBnB), financial technology (crypto), VR (he funded Luckey thru Oculus and Anduril), and now AI and weapons production is added to his contributions.
Marc has a vast set of interests and possesses a truly impressive technical mind as well as well as business mastery. He looks at the world not as tech companies, but as changes in the course of human development, which he, with grace and dexterity, controls, and closes around the neck of the world. He is the patriarch of tech empire, everything you see in tech, has Marc inscribed somewhere in it. He reads a great deal, he is careful study of political philosophy and history; as people refer to VC’s as being in an “echo chamber”, this certainly doesn’t extend to the material he consumes. These people are far more learned on Marx than most of the Left. They trade in information, and have seen, and have access to, more of it than you ever will (this is also the information asymmetry between us and tech companies/elite, post for another time).
There is simply no plausible way to argue that these are idiots, or that you are somehow smarter than them; most of you barely have a Substack, you are, at best, a product manager, and this is a man that built and controls an empire.
Smart people, do not call these people stupid. Ever.
You are doing this to sublimate your anxieties about potentially frightening tech futures. This has nothing to do with what they are, and everything to do with how they make YOU feel, and everything to do with YOUR inability to face the facts of this situation. The image of the tech genius as being actually just a bumbling and thoughtless fool, whose success comes from some miraculous accident hatched by an echo chamber, says nothing about them, and everything about you, and the shallow nature of your understanding of what is going on.
The other major talking point is that these people are the products of privilege. People are obsessed with discussion about how Elon wouldn’t have gotten to where he is, without privilege, citing a loan from his father for an early startup. OK first of all, the size of that loan was less than what tuition is for college at MIT, CMU or one of the other top CS schools. While certainly being born in a family with some money is a head start, it simply doesn’t take you the distance from your dad giving you 200k to you being the richest man in the world.
These careers are enabled by white supremacy, but privilege as the framework gives us precious little to do something about it, it doesn’t yield us much information; sure, we need to demolish the system of privilege, but there are significant other forces here, like fascism, and an analysis of personal privilege, does little to inform us on what are we going to do about THESE SPECIFIC PEOPLE trying to take over bthe entire world, RIGHT NOW. Like calling them stupid, the privilege thing here is ultimately an argument of interpersonal matters. It reinforces calling them stupid, because certainly their qualities as a person didn’t get them to where they are; it was all privilege!! This is manifestly not the case. Other attributes such as sociopathy, narcissism, greed, sadism, the need for control and worship, the imperial appetite, the connection to the fascistic tradition of history; these are more than equal factors than that invoked by privilege.
Of course they are privileged. Noted. They’re trying to kill you, what are you going to tell them? That they need to take a moment to reflect on their personal privilege? These ideas: privileged, bumbling dummies, bulls in the china shop — they are an illusion. They are a massive cope.
These tropes have a great deal more of humanity in them, than the cold hard reality, which is that these are 1000% killing machines brutally and expeditiously executing on a plan they’ve had for decades, and doing so with skill, dexterity, speed, and professionalism, and with an absolute commitment to excellence and accomplishment. They control so much of our futures. Calling them idiots helps you stay in denial that the technology industry, is being led, not at all by morons, but by very bright people, minds of a generation, with a lot of very real experience executing global deployment, producing technology at planet-scale, and *forcing* technology innovation and adoption to occur, as well as fixing markets and engaging in various other global-scale financial conspiracies, such as crypto. Which will be happening, by the way. We don’t make these decisions. Take a moment and get in touch with your needs to lie to yourself about what is going on here: which is, organized technofascist takeover.
Stupidity is human, accessible; psychopathy is inhuman and remote and untouchable. A nerd revenge fantasy — I was made fun of in school, now I have to be the Best no matter What, and Get Revenge — is human, is relatable, something maybe even some of us identify with. We’ve seen movies about that a hundred times. Thinking of them as buffoons, a buffoon is still a deeply human thing, and a deeply harmless thing; these are are coldblooded homocidial conquerors and imperialists and military leaders, who will destroy cities and peoples, to build an empire at any cost. Thinking of them as having deeply held insecurities, or even just too big of egos, makes them seem human. They aren’t. They are far more frightening, and this is far more urgent.
Without even realizing it, we are humanizing them with these insults, and we are normalizing them. The way we speak about them is not the way that we speak about serious things — we are speaking of them the way you make fun of a cheesy celebrity or a Jackass clip or a dumb meme or a bad take. It’s nothing but jokes and dunks and jokes and dunks, as if jokes and dunks aren’t THEIR ball in THEIR court, that THEY own, as if jokes and dunks could get us anywhere with these people. They are BUILDING A MILITARY. You’re ascribing to them backstories that don’t exist, about bullied youths and about self-confidence issues and family money. You ascribe human emotions — wanting to be cool, wanting to fit in, wanting to be popular. You ascribe failures that haven’t occurred; all of Elon’s companies, and Twitter, will be just fine from a business perspective; Twitter has plenty of other uses beyond just making money, it was not bought to create direct revenue it was bought to sway the entire political landscape of America leading up to the 2024 election. You ascribe levity and humor that is not called for. You think you’re dunking on them, but you’re not; you’re enabling them and you’re helping to make sure that we DONT get serious about any kind of resistance.
There also seems to be a belief that venture capitalists are going to respond to you calling them dumb, by changing their behavior, presumably to avoid your ridicule. Let me explain something to you. These people are hell-bent on taking over the world — they are psychopathic fascists, each one of them invests in huge weapons programs, each is actively complicit in thousands of human rights abuses, each is a knowing extractor on the people of this country, sucking out wealth and talent and innovation. They all understand the economics; they understand that their wealth is extracted from us. The very fact that they have accumulated such wealth, is a testament to the utter lack of feeling they possess — it has been at the expense of so many. No matter what you say online, each of them is surrounded by a technology cult of personality so intense that they will NEVER go a day without basking in the limelight. They look at you like insects or farm animals or lab rats, they don’t care what you think of them. At all. Their tech soldiers are loyal beyond reason, utterly tied to them financially, and are not acolytes of these folks because they have good morals. Their fandom is forever secure. They want to get rid of you, not convince you to think highly of them.
They don’t care what you say about them. You give them tons of money and tons of data and don’t fight back in any real way, you stay dunking on Twitter, that’s good enough for them. We aren’t their users, their early adopters, their subjects or their citizens — we are their wallets and their exploited labor and their data lakes, the mud at the bottom of their boot. They don’t care about you, they want the shirt off your back, that you bought from them. They think you are stupid, degenerate, backwards, dirty, unhealthy, infected, helpless, weak and pathetic. You think *you* think *they* are dumb? You should see what THEY think of YOU.
THEY DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT US. THAT IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. AT ALL. THEY DONT CARE ABOUT YOU. THEY DONT CARE IF YOU THINK THEY ARE DUMB OR STUPID. IT DOESNT CHANGE THE FUCKING REALITY OF THIS SITUATION.
Please stop calling them stupid, and start figuring out how we are going to fight them. With more than schoolyard insults. What the fuck are you thinking. We need a militia to defend this place from them. These are fascists. What you are seeing is the rise of fascism in America portended by the events of the last 10 years. They are about to step into the light, ready for the close-up. This is their coming-out party.
WHATS OUR MOVE?!?!?!