Probably the creation of techno-fascist state, or at least the desire to have one as outlined by Thiel and co. The excessive deference that all tech companies have had towards elected leaders instead of striving for independence under the law, and now they strive to co-opt government to achieve their goals.
The relentless disintermediation of, well, everything in society is powered by big tech. No middle class can exist anymore in the neoliberal turbocapitalist system that's trying to grow into place everywhere; there is just the little human puttering about, and a bunch of extremely rich oligarchs and tech bros taking their money.
Technology made all of this possible. From amazon (destruction of local shops) to uber (not saying the old system was good, but who needs transit concentrated into the hands of a few) to google (monopolizing and stifling search and adtech). And who knows what role large scale manipulation by stochastic propaganda parrots will play.
It feels like malpractice to leave Andreessen off the list, if only because he's such a good example of how losery and pathetic the tech moguls really are.
Imagine becoming wealthy and powerful in an age of abundance off of NCSA Mosaic and throwing it all away because you feel threatened by black people and think that government funded research is now bad. That's the level of "advanced thought" in these guys' group chats.
So Thiel and Musk have nothing to do with Trump getting elected.
Or Social networks as an easy way of spreading misinformation.
New to the club AI that delivers convincing sound, photo and video „proofs“ for any fake news they want including elaborated texts fitting to their target audience
Even if you limit yourself to billionaires, I don't see how you can possibly blame Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, and Tim Cook for the current administration's decisions to cut funding to science and basic research (among other bad decisions). The worst thing you can say about them is that some of them, after the election, essentially paid bribes to the protection racket that is the current administration. It would be more noble if they refused, but it's also sort of blaming the victim and either way had no impact on these decisions
If the richest and most powerful people in the world who stand to gain the most from a self-coup are the victims... you and I have a very different definition of "victim".
As some promiment commentator wrote (and I'll rephrase terribly), imagine if there was no Russian election meddling, then we wouldn't have those racists and "deplorables"!
> How does the US influence elections in Russia/China?
Are you claiming the CIA doesn't exist? Are you claiming there was never any stay behind organisation? Are you claiming the entire continent of south america doesn't see USA intervention every time they vote wrong?
I also don't like dictatorships, and USA propped dictators aren't any better than russian ones.
You're being disingenuous. There will be some bad actors in any large organization. That doesn't make stay-behind organizations in general a bad idea. Sometimes younger people today fail to realize that Communism once represented an existential threat to human civilization.
If your ideology is "it's ok to kill any amount of people to avoid someone I don't like to be democratically elected somewhere in the world" I don't think we will ever agree.
1. They don't just kill people you don't like, they kill randos with bombs
2. People you don't like don't deserve mass murder anyway
3. Killing communists is what nazis do. In fact they're so good at killing they killed much more people than any communist ever did. If your morals align with the nazi party, you're probably a nazi and you should REALLY REALLY REALLY do some serious thinking.
There you go again, lying and trying to put words in my mouth. Opposing communism does not equate to supporting Nazism (or any other "ism"). Nazis and communists are roughly equivalent from a moral perspective in that they both represent existential threats to humanity, and both groups should be eliminated.
Just a wild guess: The connection is uncontrolled growth, where companies evolve from a normal business to a perpetual "increasing shareholder value" grift (think the Apples, Googles, Microsofts, Metas, (Space)Xs out there...). It happened when tech incorporated "the user" as a product (as opposed to tech working to actually solve problems and elevate the status quo).
Are the use of the word fuck and the aggressiveness separate aspects?
And no, I do not know exactly why. In what universe is SpaceX a company that mostly just cares about "increasing shareholder value" and not literally pushing the boundaries of the human endeavor?
The tech industry certainly has its flaws and things to criticize, but this doesn’t seem part of it, unless I’m missing a connection somehow.