The future of the United States is no longer decided in Washington. That ship has sailed. It’s now dictated in the bunkers, private jets, and compounds of an ideological Silicon Valley, by billionaires and wealth extremists intent on treating democracy as a nuisance that must be swatted away. These men – raised on a rabid press that mythologized their existence in their lifetimes, called them Wunderkind and treated them as something above and beyond mere mortality – have consumed a steady diet of libertarian and authoritarian fan fiction and conceived a new order, designed to elevate their lofty egos at any and all cost.
The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. It was meant to be a force that shattered hierarchies and gave power to ordinary people. Instead, it enabled the wealth extraction and avarice of a cartel of overfed, over-pampered despots who enriched themselves in the name of innovation, bled the world to the point of near-total collapse, intellectualized their power fetish and now view public institutions as the final obstacles to be dismantled in their megalomanic pursuit of More.
↫ Joan Westenberg
The US has only itself to blame. Let’s hope they don’t drag the rest of us with them.
Russia can also be blamed. They seized the opportunity when presented. Masterful stroke.
Also Clinton and his 3rd way b&llsh#t can rot in hell.
This is as nice as I can be right now.
I agree with the author, the world is really screwed up.
With traditional media everyone more or less saw the same shows, experienced a similar culture. I don’t mean to overstate it per say, but contrast that with the internet today. It has created a great social divergence with lot and lots of bubbles where people can decide what information to cherry pick without regard to facts.. Don’t want to believe something: bam, the internet lets you find millions who don’t want to believe it either. They don’t have to reconcile their views with society at large if they don’t want to.
I don’t necessarily think these shifts were intentional by tech companies, but they can certainly recognize where the money is at. Bona fide professional journalism has been on decades-long decline, the counterfactual groups that are replacing them are both popular and profitable. Extremism has the green light. Truth doesn’t matter, being respectful doesn’t matter, doing the right thing doesn’t matter, as long as the money rolls in it justifies and rewards the abandonment of journalistic integrity.
I don’t see how to make people come back to shared reality short of a war to put everything into perspective. 🙁
What was intentional, is the powerful (particularly the economically powerful) have been using government policy, to stack the deck in their favor for decades. Peter Turchin calls this a “wealth pump” – and apt description. Low wealth taxes, combined with high rents, and printed money, given directly to the already wealthy (Obama, quantitative easing) or given to people who have to pay rent, to give to the already wealth (Biden, Covid relief – essentially laundering money through the poor), or just giving it to them directly (right wing Republican tax cuts for the wealthy) – it’s all the same effect. Now the wealthy have all the economic power.
It just happens that tech-bros have the highest amount of elite economic activity, so they got most of that fresh new money. Nothing here is surprising.
CaptainN-,
The wealthy have always had that economic power, but it keeps getting more skewed as time goes on: power begets money and money begets power. Bernie Sanders is right when he says we’re turning the US into an oligarchy.
The institutions that are supposed to represent us are so corrupt that I don’t see how the lower middle classes can recover, at least not peacefully. We can’t expect the parties and individuals who take power to give it up voluntarily. Fascism is taking over, we’re not in a good place.
I’m not surprised. The economy is setup to reward the wealthy. It’s much easier for billionaires to make more billions in their lifetimes than it is for lower and middle class to buy a home and pay for their kids educations, etc.
I thought this was some bot spamming some message board, and I’ve deleted the e-mail RSS notification without thinking about it. Later in Trash when double checking I saw this is from osnews.com, and it’s not a spam. But it sure reads like one.
You mustn’t have followed OSNews over the years then. Thom is very woke (and rightly so).
>libertarian and authoritarian
These two words are by definition the complete opposite of each other.
Oh my sweet summer child…
One is the consequence of the other. Libertarians never seem to figure that out until they lose their freedom.
I am in mourning for the “old” Elon Musk. His greatest moment of glory was the first Falcon Heavy launch, specifically the moment of successful separation of both side boosters of the first stage. From that second, from that moment on, it was only worse for his ventures. And also, apparently, his mental state. I never bought a Tesla, but I truly believed the message of a bright future and a Mars colony. All of that is gone. We are screwed.
That moment of glory belongs to the engineers who did the work, not to Musk.
And yet, it was Musk who made the investment and put the engineers to work on the particular project, nobody did it before him. Not NASA, not Lockheed Martin, not Boeing, not billionaire investors such as Warren Buffet.
Engineering without management is worthless. Musk’s contribution to the world was investing in projects that others thought of as “impossible”.
I am not defending his other personality traits, just this one.
That’s probably what managers like to believe. ;-D
Commodore (where you could say, was not much management after Tramiel) showed it’s possible to bring stuff out. But would it have been better or even outstanding? Probably.
But management without engineers does nothing, No tech at all.
Minor but important correction: It’s possible to bring out stuff that’s an iterative improvement over the existing products. Anything more requires management define a product vision and allocate resources to new projects.
Yes, and? Generals without soldiers also can’t win wars, but you wouldn’t want to have soldiers without generals.
A quick fact check from Google:
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing $100 million he made from the sale of PayPal. The company nearly failed before receiving a $1.6 billion NASA contract in 2008. (source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-elon-musk)
If you think “investment” is what makes then difference, then it was clearly NASA who made the difference. That moment of glory belongs to NASA, and the engineers who made it happen.
The fun part of this knowledge, is that it was really easy to find. It’s perplexing to me, how people miss these clearly important details. Does Musk deserve some credit for trying to do something hard. Let’s not pretend he did anything alone, or that he’s even responsible for the bulk of the success.
That initial $100 million investment by Elon Musk to prove the concept works made all the difference. Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been trying all kinds of dumb ways to get to space without losing hardware (the Space Shuttle being one such dumb way, and the X-33 being an even dumber one), until Elon Musk decided to spend $100 million of his own money to try out what those companies considered “impossible”. Turns out the “impossible” was not only possible but it was also the most rational way to do it after all. But without that $100 million initial investment, we’d never have known.
The SLS system is a system from that alternative reality where everyone believes “reusable will never work out, it’s impossible”, going all-in on non-reusable.
kurkosdr,
This is a case of winners getting to redefine history, but if they hadn’t won then naturally someone else would have. There was always going to be a race with musk there or not, and the billions in tax payer subsidies that went to musk would have gone to another winner.
We see this same type of arguments everywhere: without Bill Gates and Steve Job modern computing wouldn’t exist, Henry Ford is the father of the car, etc. Again, they benefited greatly from an industry primed to grow with or without them. And it’s an open question whether we’re better off today than we’d be if someone else had won… we genuinely can’t know if another winner would have been better. I’ve long felt that despite microsoft winning those critical IBM contracts with better business ties, they weren’t actually the most innovative.
Naturally speculating alternative timelines won’t change history, but I do bring it up just to make the point that for all you know we could be better off if Musk hadn’t been there. You have absolutely no basis for claiming that events in our timeline are even better than average or not. We don’t know.
Well said, as all the achievement he took merit and had technically totally no contribution
Friendly reminder that it was the Democrats who made it “cool” to have billionaires like Mark Cuban tell the peasants how to vote and how to think, or even openly use their financial clout to force policy change (usually via NGOs but not exclusively) like the Soros family is doing. So, Democrats can’t act surprised now that Republicans have their own billionaire doing the same.
Much like it was the Democrats who made it “cool” to belittle your political opponents with schoolyard taunts such as “Romnesia”, which legitimized Trump to use the technique against his own political opponents (“Little Marco”, “Sleepy Joe” etc).
The Democratic Party is always the architect of its own demise, mainly because they have this mindset that they are the good guys in a movie script and should win no matter what (the ends justify the means etc).
Much like their current choice of not condemning the attacks on owners of Tesla vehicles will legitimize political violence and political terrorism in the US.
I normally wouldn’t mind, but they are also bringing about the demise of Western civilization as we know it.
You’re really good in rehashing MAGA nonsense. Congratulations.
kurkosdr,
You can fault Democrats for a lot and many don’t like their agendas. But blaming the Democrats for what the Republicans are doing, come on now. Let’s blame the Social Democratic Party in Germany for the Nazi concentration camps while we’re at it.
I have this theory (possibly already repeated in another reply) …
Electing a fibbing felon as one’s leader is what happens when “tax cuts!” has been the mantra for decades.
The result is generations of citizens who can’t tell fact from fiction because their public school systems were whittled down to just warehousing the children.
Those citizens are then easily led over the cliff by those who can craft the best “stories”.