> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.

Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy

I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.

I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term.

It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.

I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.

> Rule of law, functioning government providing services

Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.

Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.

Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.

The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect.

It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.

This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.

If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.

We've let the government get bloated, inefficient and corrupt by allowing private enterprise to have an outsized effect on it. Private enterprise can hire people to live next to DC and spend every waking minute pushing their agenda on politicians. Private enterprise can funnel huge amounts of money into campaigns for their preferred candidates. It only benefits the corporations when we have ancient, technically illiterate politicians jockeying their favorite hobbyhorse policies while throwing up their hands at how "the other side" is blocking them. It's a designed deadlock.

> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.

I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.

Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.

In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.

This doesn't make me anti-government.

I see the need for it & I want it work well.

But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.

I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.

It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.

We believe it because it’s true. I think it’s actually way more common for people to have your opinion that governments are not bloated or inefficient as a general rule. And you always criticize the private industry and not the government when it’s the government who has this power in the first place. That’s like over feeding your cat and then blaming the cat.

There's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?

I don’t really understand this perspective? I’m not a small government guy, I think the government ought to play an important role in providing a good regulatory framework and a strong social net. But if someone’s going to have direct power over my life, I’d much prefer a business owner or boss I can freely choose in principle rather than a government official who may not view me as part of their winning coalition.

If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.

Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.

What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.

> the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization

Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?

I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.

The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.

Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.

They take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.

> Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.

They took most of us employees to see Ready Player One in the cinema when it came out (sometime after the Oculus acquisition, but before "the metaverse")

Haha it would make sense they're not even sci-fi ball-knowers.

Zuckerberg style the idea from snow crash

Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.

So you're saying it's improved.

(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")

Did you also get hold of a billion dollars at some point? For some reason, those of us who work for a living seem less inclined to such psychosis

I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.

Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.

So, a cool shortcut is that you can go to a website and press "Ctrl-F", which will let you search for a given string on the page.

It's okay that you didn't know that! https://xkcd.com/1053/

But the answer is, no, it doesn't. I would say that Becker covered a lot of the same ground, and does it better.

I think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club".

Every worse, they -- like pretty much all of us -- tend to think that most people are just like them, so they think not only that they understand normal people, but that they are normal people. And the ones that don't either tend to think that their will should be imposed on the rest of us because we're too stupid to understand what's good for us and/or just view us as resources to be mined.

> Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities

other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class.

that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You don't keep your money if you dont have any concept of risk.

Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.

There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.

You also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work.

I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting.

If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.

>but above all fiction has to be entertaining

As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that is an artifact of modern mass media. In the Abrahamic traditions idolatry and an aversion to imagery exists exactly for this reason, because it leads to a culture in which people cease to be able to distinguish how something appears from what it's supposed to point to.

They aren't unrelated at all. People like Musk or Zuckerberg are the way they are, because they grew up in an environment that disregards the moral, intellectual, religious and even aesthetic dimensions of fiction (or non-fiction) and are effectively overgrown toddlers as a result, and in that they're just like most people now, except with more power.