It is a bit scary how people seem to genuinely be OK with violence (see this reddit thread [0]). Is just me or does it feel like the overall "temperature" has gone up.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1shugf8/firebomb_t...

Well, dropping bombs and threatening to end a civilization certainly made me think the temperature had gone up. I’m not sure I think a single attempted act against some guy is worth being worried by against that backdrop.

This is exactly the point of part one of Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, by Geoffrey Canada. Unequal or lack of access to the executive branch of government will create a culture of vigilantism and lends itself to organized crime as a replacement for the policing arm of the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist%2C_Stick%2C_Knife%2C_Gun

People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.

Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.

Not defending them or even Luigi but I would argue a lot of it is the abysmal labour institutions the USA got (lots of union busting, few modern laws against modern exploitation and classical institutions are undermined politically and legally).

And the growing class divide in the USA I think is the reason why folks are increasingly seeing violence against the upper class is seen as the only option.

Again doesn't mean it makes it right, but it explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon.

I'm not saying that violence is legal -- which is definitely not. But it is part of the "packages" and totally depends on whether the one wants to use. Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.

When people feel that law and order do not protect them, some eventually will go "the extra mile" (somehow managers always like this phrase). It's not something we can prevent. It is human nature. I guess super riches really like AI because this gives them extra protection.

Around 2014, a new political candidate entered the scene. Commenters and the news media at the time widely reported something remarkable and new about this candidate: he readily endorsed political violence and showed a continual pattern of escalation, never taking an off-ramp to lower the temperature in domestic politics. Over the years research has shown that the rhetoric of this candidate has materially contributed to political violence in the US. [0]

This candidate was later elected to office and in the time since has shown a continual pattern of endorsing violence. He has endorsed violent actions, told reactionary extremist groups to "stand back and stand by", defended state violence against protestors and immigrants, pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of political violence and an attempted insurrection, and recently started a war before threatening to destroy an entire civilization.

Yes. Yes the "temperature" has gone up. People have been talking about this WIDELY, for years now.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26940036?seq=1

These are message boards. The obvious sentiment, that firebombing attacks are awful (perhaps cut a little bit with "the perpetrator appears to be someone deeply in need of help) is boring. This is an availability bias issue: the only sentiments that actually spool out into threads are edgy. Once you learn to spot these effects, message boards make a lot more sense and are less jarring.

Silent corruption at the top causes rot at the bottom. Obvious corruption at the top causes desperation at the bottom.

What do you mean by violence? Do you consider someone building a monster of a server farm near your home and messing up with your drinking water, electricity and life in general violence? Why violence is only immediate physical one that counts?

It's due to the widening inequality. Nick Hanauer has been talking about this for over ten years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8

It used to be a little less violent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMbp6Epfz8

People are okay with violence when democratic means (if first past the post even counts) do not solve their problems.

GINI index in SF is pretty close to Brazil.

As income/wealth inequality grows expect class violence to grow until there is a revolution. We let rich people get too rich and this is the consequence.

Sam has so far lost say $100B so far, and he is compensated by already being a billionaire. You can see how this might lead to disillusionment with the system.

What do you call denying healthcare?

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2042498481743675804

Scary but also entirely predictable and expected.

- High wealth inequality

- Perceived inability (or reduced ability) to get ahead and have your voice heard

- Government seen as more corrupt and benefiting the elite. Different set of rules for them vs for everyone else

- Highly polarized population at odds with each other

Yes, the temperature has gone up. And we all know exactly who sits at the top of it all.

It's bad but this is what happens when people think they're not being heard and respected. I expect a lot more of this in the future.

I simply make the observation that the 40-hour workweek took a bunch of violence to enable. As have other forms of progress that we take for granted. Luigi Mangione is a hero to many. It's not bad that the most powerful need to consider negative outcomes in their lives. Decry violence as one, sure, but if there are none other, psychopaths have no check on them. It'd be good if maybe there were others available, eh?

Ineffectual molotov cocktails are just a cry for help.

He switched to supporting Trump after Trump repeatedly joked about someone breaking into a San Fransisco home to attack the owners with a hammer.

So the temperature has been high for a while and he's on board with it.

To play the advocatus diaboli: Violence is always condemned the most if it happens to a member of high society directly. The members many people on this very website picture themselves to be in the future. But if you structually starve half a continent to save a few cents on the dime or fire 30.000 workers that isn't only okay, it deserves a bonus.

If you call one violence but the other is okay because there are some layers of misdirection in between you may have to reconsider your ethics.

Flip it round: if you have $999,999,999 then would it not be rational to expect random violence against oneself? I’m not saying it’s justifiable, just that it is prudent to expect to be targeted by crazies.

Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?

To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.

Crazy people have existed since the dawn of time: I see nothing at all new here about a crazy person doing something crazy.

the more you push, eventually the people will snap.

Get ready for more. If the tech bros are right and millions of people loose their jobs and healthcare, we are in for a rough couple of decades. Millions of angry people, with nothing to lose and a bunch of free time, all with one name in their heads, Sam Altman. He better start working on his robot army.

I don’t think it’s surprising - some people already consider the actions of AI execs and tech companies to be synonymous to violence. Like, comparing something like this to destroying the livelihoods of millions of people, a lot of people would consider the latter far worse.

Temperature is certainly going up, but it definitely hasn’t reached historic levels yet lol.

People are apathetic at this point. When a large amount of americans can barely afford to live while threatened with replacement while the economy booms on the backs of their claimed obsolescence, they don't care that a billionaire could've gotten hurt, especially when that billionaire is working against their interests.

I don't condone violence, but it's hardly surprising that people would resort to or support it in this case, considering that by stepping in where Anthropic refused to help the US military, sama essentially agreed that OpenAI will serve as the IT Department for Trump's secret police. Either that, or he's willing for OpenAI to endure a similar punishment when he refuses the inevitable demand to assist with domestic mass surveillance.

The wild part about that is that the r/ChatGPT sub.

Which is very AI forward.

The top comment there mentions the French Revolution.

You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?

It’s going to explode, the only question is when.

People are coming to a logical conclusions that:

- Some if not many jobs are at risk.

- AI Psychosis is actively tearing apart families and communities, after social media and opioids have already had a pass.

- Negative social outcomes are in the service of _making money_. Not money to pay taxes to fund a healthy society, but money for the people running these systems.

Humans that lack community, safety, and purpose will embrace more drastic means of exerting control over their lives at the expense of others, no?

It is probably safe to say the temperature has been firmly up for a while. And certain subsets of the population have come to trust their Dear Leader's embrace of violence as a solution, for sure.

Does causing mass poverty count as violence? Because it's kind of like violence.

The replies to your comment help make your point. These people genuinely think violence is fine, inevitable and justified.

It's gotten to the point that I walked in to some water cooler banter at work the other day, where they were discussing their favorite means of public execution.

It's not that people are accepting of violence. That doesn't just happen. Societies don't suddenly turn violent against the state. This only happens when the state has failed and become violent towards the people. If you're surprised by the rising level of violence toward the state, you haven't been paying attention to the rising violence towards the people.

The US was quite literally founded on the idea that it is an inarguable, fundamental human right to overthrow a tyrannical government. The nice and polite mechanisms for doing this have all been broken, removed, violently suppressed, or outright ignored. When there are no peaceful options left, humans will always revolt with as much violence as is necessary. History shows us this over and over. Violently oppressed societies don't tend to stay that way for long, and they certainly don't become hardline pacifists. They always eventually fight back, or they die.

The rising level of violence from the people at large is a proportional reaction to the increasing level of violence against the people. The level of tyranny has recently upgraded itself from merely an existential threat to the USA as a society, but also an existential threat to the entire damn planet. Of course the people are going to get violent. They feel there's no other choice, because all peaceful options have been exhausted and met with extreme violence.

That's the consensus I see on the street: all nonviolent options have been met with ever-increasingly extreme violence. When all peaceful options are removed, you pick the only one left.

In a historic lens, it's all very unsurprising. This is how revolutions happen. This is what humans have always done when met with tyranny and violent oppression. It's only surprising if you willfully ignore and excuse the tyranny and violence against the people.

It is scary. You know what’s also scary? Being told a robot is going to take your job and healthcare away.

There’s a lot of scary shit going on.

It’s a distinct minority. They’re convinced they’re the majority because everyone they talk to is in the same bubble, especially online. I saw the same thing with Mangione and Kirk and Pelosi.

I don't condone it, but I understand the anger.

The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.

Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.

After watching children literally be liquified in Gaza for two years, violence directed at Sam Altman doesn’t even move the needle. Our entire human rights framework what obliterated by Israel (with the blessing and support of the US and Europe).

Maybe because people got used to violence being used against them?

All this violence against the innocent in various places and levels, and you think it’s weird that people are fine with violence used against a billionaire conman?

Altman keeps on telling people he’s going to take away their jobs. He says that because it gets cred in tech circles, but in America this is an existential threat, not much different from telling someone “I’m going to break your kneecaps”. Of course some subset of people are going to respond with violence.

The sheer tone-deafness of AI marketing is going to come back to bite us very hard. This is probably just the beginning.

You're just a smidge away from asking why they can't just eat cake...

Here's the head of research at OpenAI saying "MORE. Don't stop." to the genocide of Palestinians. He still works there.

https://x.com/QudsNen/status/1806729161840476598

There was a rumor going around Silicon Valley that if ICE came to San Francisco in force that Mark Zuckerberg's house was going to go up in flames in retaliation. You will be surprised to learn that the oligarchs talked to Trump and they did not come.

I think we're going to see a lot more of it.

The job market's shit, it's nearly impossible for young people to buy houses or pay rent, well paying jobs are disappearing to AI, inflation is sky rocketing and people are getting desperate. But then we're told the economy's doing great and billionaires like Musk and Altman are rolling in money.

uh, the president of the united states just threatened to nuke a country.

What kind of weird world are you living under...

We can’t vote our way towards a better future. The corrupt MAGA and DNC institutions strangle any nascent grassroots movement in the crib. And we cannot make them relinquish their death grip on our country with only bare hands.

Seriously shocked that this is the aspect of this moment in history that you choose to focus on, and not the absurd levels of violence perpetrated by the ruling classes against common people.

I'm not saying throwing a MOlotov cocktail is ok. It's not. I think most people are analyzing the incident as being indicative of the times we're living in, particularly with the warehouse fire.

But where people are "OK with violence" is with state violence.

State violence include police violence (>1000 people are killed every year in the US by police), prison violence, violently rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, criminalizing homelessness, denying people life-saving medical care, evictions while landlords collude to raise rents, genocide, sending random people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country (ie CECOT), mass shootings, going with a firearm to a protest to instigate an incident and get a legal kill, intentionally creating the opiod crisis and so on.

For a large number of people some or all of these incidents will get a reaction somewhere between "thoughts and prayers" and "no, it's good actually".

Compare the state's reaction to one healthcare CEO being murdered and the perpetrators that are implicated in the Epstein files. Epstein himself was known to authorities since the 1990s and got an absolutely sweetheart deal in 2008.

So I'd say the real problem is what people view as violence and who's allowed to do it, seemingly without oversight or consequences of any kind most or all of the time.

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AI company marketing is pretty overwhelmingly "we're going to take away your job and leave to you starve on the streets". People concluding that the public face of this is their enemy who must be stopped is just a really unsurprising outcome.

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It absolutely has. Both the Left and the Right have seared consciences and take no issue with murder and thuggishness as long as it's "their guy" doing it to "the other guy".

The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.

There is nothing scary about being genuinely OK with violence.

I don't have a problem with violence, but I do take issue with the mass dismissal and outright hatred for AI by people who don't even understand what it is.