I do think there's been a shift, somewhat recently, whereby elites (I know it's kind of a silly word---but a good enough stand-in for powerful politicians and business leaders) generally don't even try to pretend to be people of character.
Mitt Romney is probably the last of that old guard. I have no idea if he is actually an especially good person or whether he treats his wife well or his children truly love him. But he at least *pretends* to care about these things. Sure, maybe deep down he is just a greedy bastard¹ but there's also a lot of evidence that he's not, and certainly he wants you to think he's not.
Compare that with, say, Elon Musk who *wants* you to know he's a terrible person who enjoys tormenting his enemies and lets you know that daily on Twitter along with a side helping of little racist and antisemitic tidbits. Dennis Muilenberg (the Boeing guy) didn't even pretend to care about the 737 victims. It's almost like his performance went the other way: he seemed to intentionally affect callousness.
In the 1950s, a leader like Bill Gates would have been desperate to stay married, even if the affairs needed some covering up. But nah, going to Lolita Island was just too enjoyable, so now one of the richest men in the country is pretty obviously a pedophile whose wife (who tolerated like three decades of blatant cheating) finally had enough.
Sure, people are gorging themselves on conspiracy theories on Facebook every day, but Zuck actually seems to *enjoy* that feature of his platform. In the old days, the CEO of such a company would at least pretend to be upset about it. Zuck very performatively revels in it.
Same with our politicians, too: there's not even a desire to gesture towards decency and decorum. Say what you will about the old WASPs (I grew up on the Main Line), they had their flaws and probably weren't fundamentally better people than Zuck or Musk, but at least they pretended to be classy, patriotic people. Two cheers for hypocrisy!
Put another way, most people are pretty lazy and most people in America have it pretty good. Our economic sphere at least is, for the most part, a pretty fair meritocracy, and it mainly discriminates against stupid people (who don't really know they're getting screwed) and lazy people (who are too lazy to do anything about it). Sure, maybe you suspect that Bill Gates was actually just kind of a manipulative asshole, but he seemed like a good business leader, too, and Microsoft is an impressive company, so it's okay that he's fantastically wealthy. But now, do we really expect the average person to go along with an economic system that rewards a pedophile with more money than their entire line of descendants could ever earn? It's hard to even maintain the illusion of meritocracy when the winners don't even bother to hide their depredations (c.f. Rome).
I really worry that, over time, having people like Musk, Zuck, Thiel, Gates etc. rub their total lack of character in the faces of the rest of population will eventually cause support for capitalism generally to decline to the point at which we kill the golden goose.
> But now, do we really expect the average person to go along with an economic system that rewards a pedophile with more money than their entire line of descendants could ever earn? It's hard to even maintain the illusion of meritocracy when the winners don't even bother to hide their depredations (c.f. Rome).
Really interesting take, glad you brought it up. I think it's kind of interesting you assume this matters, when everything points to it NOT mattering, from now on, and that's why the mask is off.
So ok, first - when have the hoi polloi ever pretended to be good people? For about a decade, in the 50's?
Then you get the 60's, then disco and cocaine, then "greed is good," and so on...and so we get to today, where the peak of the status pyramid for approximately everyone are hot amoral millionaires living lives of sybaritic luxury AND drama maximization, and these are our influencers and TV shows that everyone spends 11 hours a day staring at.
Like literally, everyone's role models are highly dramatic / amoral hot millionaires in their 20's.
And why not?? More and more people work for amoral corporations headed by amoral executives who won't be around in 3 years and have the planning horizon of gnats, and who literally don't care about however you conduct your private life at all, because that would be judgmental / racist / oppressive or whatever, and as long as you fulfill your function as cog #24601 well enough that the quarterly targets are met, who cares?
I feel like the model you're pointing to had a use in the past - in WWII our technology and actual productive capacity was so limited we literally needed all hands on deck, and this is why Rosie the Riveter and the female surge into manufacturing and traditionally male jobs happened.
We actually needed societal alignment and us all being on the same team to pull together and achieve things at back then. This is also where every man got a wife (85%+!) and where the old manosphere saw of "if average men don't get wives, they'll *rise up* and then your civilization will crumble!" might have at least brushed glancingly against the truth.
But NOW! Now that doesn't matter - median men (and women) literally matter not at all for economic and technological growth, all of that is driven by top-decile-or-better people, and correspondingly, if they don't get wives (and they don't! 62%+ of women opt out of marriage to the median and below today), literally nobody cares and it's going to have zero societal / economic effects.
We don't need societal alignment, except in the sense of getting out of the way and not literally shooting us in the foot / productive capacity with dumb laws, which can be neatly achieved with polarization and gridlock.
As AI capabilities build, soon we won't need greater and greater chunks of even baccalaureate-and-better people.
Okay, so the regular people don't care about morals and all idolize hot drama queen millionaires. We don't need regular people for economic or technological growth, and soon won't even need them for jobs - why NOT just go totally naked and full-viz scumbag? What is the cost at this point? And there is an upside!
The upside is it makes better content, and everyone (certainly Elon and Zuck and many more) has been literally operant conditioned into being higher drama and more polarizing than necessary because that gets more clicks and views and builds your social reach, and also gets you talked about in the circles you personally care about more.
Like I get where you're coming from - trust and reputation is important and pleasant in real life, right? Having loved ones and friends and business partners who have your back is literally invaluable and a key to a life well lived. I've done six figure handshake deals on stuff multiple times, and I try to be pretty careful to only be friends with or biz partners with people who I trust to do the right thing / not be narcissistic psychopaths - but I think basically none of that matters in a lot of the systems and social circles of the world today.
Do corporations care? No, for the most part, they're culturally forbidden from caring, they care if you do the job you're hired for. Do regular people care? Nope, they're all amoral idiots who watch richer, younger, hotter amoral idiots do optimized-for-drama, aka immoral, stuff 10 hours a day. So who cares??
Only a tiny slice of those people closest to you, and only if you've strongly selected and exerted a lot of effort to get there.
And I think if you look at what a lot of people are saying, they're not achieving that filtering and it's definitely no longer the norm.
The argument has "the tech elites are evil attention-stealing bastards" has struck me as massive copium. I personally do face some issues with akrasia and distractibility, but guess what - I take matters into my own hands. I installed blockers like FocusMe and Cold Turkey Blocker. I also installed distraction eliminators like Unhook for YouTube and ReVanced mods for apps like YouTube and Instagram, so that on an off-chance that I need to use a distracting app or a website I am disinclined to use it past the point of diminishing returns. And guess what - these days you don't even need to be particularly technical to set up your phone and laptop like I did, because LLMs will hold your hands step-by-step, all you need is a few prompts and at most one hour of focus and attention, and LLMs gladly provide you with a generous free tier. And a bulk of these are the tools that Big Tech companies host on platforms that they own, like Github or Chrome Web Store, again, all for free.
The fact that none of the people who complain about tech CEO do this points to this being a vaguely plausible but an extremely self serving excuse for status envy.
> all you need is a few prompts and at most one hour of focus and attention, and LLMs gladly provide you with a generous free tier. And a bulk of these are the tools that Big Tech companies host on platforms that they own, like Github or Chrome Web Store, again, all for free.
Exactly! This is a great point, too, thanks for bringing it up. Not only do they give you the best possible stuff, for free, they also give you all the tools and affordances you need to cope with it or structure your time and attention to still get things done!
All it requires is literally the smallest amount of effort and intent on your part, the one hour of focus and attention you're calling out. And people are pretending that this is simply impossible, oh, woe is me, I'm completely at the mercy of the Tik Tok algorithm!
Guess I have no other choice but to stare at it 3-9 hours a day, right? Those dastardly oligarchs!
I do think there's been a shift, somewhat recently, whereby elites (I know it's kind of a silly word---but a good enough stand-in for powerful politicians and business leaders) generally don't even try to pretend to be people of character.
Mitt Romney is probably the last of that old guard. I have no idea if he is actually an especially good person or whether he treats his wife well or his children truly love him. But he at least *pretends* to care about these things. Sure, maybe deep down he is just a greedy bastard¹ but there's also a lot of evidence that he's not, and certainly he wants you to think he's not.
Compare that with, say, Elon Musk who *wants* you to know he's a terrible person who enjoys tormenting his enemies and lets you know that daily on Twitter along with a side helping of little racist and antisemitic tidbits. Dennis Muilenberg (the Boeing guy) didn't even pretend to care about the 737 victims. It's almost like his performance went the other way: he seemed to intentionally affect callousness.
In the 1950s, a leader like Bill Gates would have been desperate to stay married, even if the affairs needed some covering up. But nah, going to Lolita Island was just too enjoyable, so now one of the richest men in the country is pretty obviously a pedophile whose wife (who tolerated like three decades of blatant cheating) finally had enough.
Sure, people are gorging themselves on conspiracy theories on Facebook every day, but Zuck actually seems to *enjoy* that feature of his platform. In the old days, the CEO of such a company would at least pretend to be upset about it. Zuck very performatively revels in it.
Same with our politicians, too: there's not even a desire to gesture towards decency and decorum. Say what you will about the old WASPs (I grew up on the Main Line), they had their flaws and probably weren't fundamentally better people than Zuck or Musk, but at least they pretended to be classy, patriotic people. Two cheers for hypocrisy!
Put another way, most people are pretty lazy and most people in America have it pretty good. Our economic sphere at least is, for the most part, a pretty fair meritocracy, and it mainly discriminates against stupid people (who don't really know they're getting screwed) and lazy people (who are too lazy to do anything about it). Sure, maybe you suspect that Bill Gates was actually just kind of a manipulative asshole, but he seemed like a good business leader, too, and Microsoft is an impressive company, so it's okay that he's fantastically wealthy. But now, do we really expect the average person to go along with an economic system that rewards a pedophile with more money than their entire line of descendants could ever earn? It's hard to even maintain the illusion of meritocracy when the winners don't even bother to hide their depredations (c.f. Rome).
I really worry that, over time, having people like Musk, Zuck, Thiel, Gates etc. rub their total lack of character in the faces of the rest of population will eventually cause support for capitalism generally to decline to the point at which we kill the golden goose.
And that will suck.
¹https://kagi.com/proxy/-1x-1.webp?c=Wp0oS8D_tsr4gB5qJpBPRHfpn82qJKeGw4R57orSiyStdHkLQHE6N4InCnd0xn-0QbgogLZYmzmY7-Idv2D_3RsT4Qqx3g0xMF5wuD-NsYP1Nv2Lt0Fl4ReuSyrNwN_r
> But now, do we really expect the average person to go along with an economic system that rewards a pedophile with more money than their entire line of descendants could ever earn? It's hard to even maintain the illusion of meritocracy when the winners don't even bother to hide their depredations (c.f. Rome).
Really interesting take, glad you brought it up. I think it's kind of interesting you assume this matters, when everything points to it NOT mattering, from now on, and that's why the mask is off.
So ok, first - when have the hoi polloi ever pretended to be good people? For about a decade, in the 50's?
Then you get the 60's, then disco and cocaine, then "greed is good," and so on...and so we get to today, where the peak of the status pyramid for approximately everyone are hot amoral millionaires living lives of sybaritic luxury AND drama maximization, and these are our influencers and TV shows that everyone spends 11 hours a day staring at.
Like literally, everyone's role models are highly dramatic / amoral hot millionaires in their 20's.
And why not?? More and more people work for amoral corporations headed by amoral executives who won't be around in 3 years and have the planning horizon of gnats, and who literally don't care about however you conduct your private life at all, because that would be judgmental / racist / oppressive or whatever, and as long as you fulfill your function as cog #24601 well enough that the quarterly targets are met, who cares?
I feel like the model you're pointing to had a use in the past - in WWII our technology and actual productive capacity was so limited we literally needed all hands on deck, and this is why Rosie the Riveter and the female surge into manufacturing and traditionally male jobs happened.
We actually needed societal alignment and us all being on the same team to pull together and achieve things at back then. This is also where every man got a wife (85%+!) and where the old manosphere saw of "if average men don't get wives, they'll *rise up* and then your civilization will crumble!" might have at least brushed glancingly against the truth.
But NOW! Now that doesn't matter - median men (and women) literally matter not at all for economic and technological growth, all of that is driven by top-decile-or-better people, and correspondingly, if they don't get wives (and they don't! 62%+ of women opt out of marriage to the median and below today), literally nobody cares and it's going to have zero societal / economic effects.
We don't need societal alignment, except in the sense of getting out of the way and not literally shooting us in the foot / productive capacity with dumb laws, which can be neatly achieved with polarization and gridlock.
As AI capabilities build, soon we won't need greater and greater chunks of even baccalaureate-and-better people.
Okay, so the regular people don't care about morals and all idolize hot drama queen millionaires. We don't need regular people for economic or technological growth, and soon won't even need them for jobs - why NOT just go totally naked and full-viz scumbag? What is the cost at this point? And there is an upside!
The upside is it makes better content, and everyone (certainly Elon and Zuck and many more) has been literally operant conditioned into being higher drama and more polarizing than necessary because that gets more clicks and views and builds your social reach, and also gets you talked about in the circles you personally care about more.
Like I get where you're coming from - trust and reputation is important and pleasant in real life, right? Having loved ones and friends and business partners who have your back is literally invaluable and a key to a life well lived. I've done six figure handshake deals on stuff multiple times, and I try to be pretty careful to only be friends with or biz partners with people who I trust to do the right thing / not be narcissistic psychopaths - but I think basically none of that matters in a lot of the systems and social circles of the world today.
Do corporations care? No, for the most part, they're culturally forbidden from caring, they care if you do the job you're hired for. Do regular people care? Nope, they're all amoral idiots who watch richer, younger, hotter amoral idiots do optimized-for-drama, aka immoral, stuff 10 hours a day. So who cares??
Only a tiny slice of those people closest to you, and only if you've strongly selected and exerted a lot of effort to get there.
And I think if you look at what a lot of people are saying, they're not achieving that filtering and it's definitely no longer the norm.
The argument has "the tech elites are evil attention-stealing bastards" has struck me as massive copium. I personally do face some issues with akrasia and distractibility, but guess what - I take matters into my own hands. I installed blockers like FocusMe and Cold Turkey Blocker. I also installed distraction eliminators like Unhook for YouTube and ReVanced mods for apps like YouTube and Instagram, so that on an off-chance that I need to use a distracting app or a website I am disinclined to use it past the point of diminishing returns. And guess what - these days you don't even need to be particularly technical to set up your phone and laptop like I did, because LLMs will hold your hands step-by-step, all you need is a few prompts and at most one hour of focus and attention, and LLMs gladly provide you with a generous free tier. And a bulk of these are the tools that Big Tech companies host on platforms that they own, like Github or Chrome Web Store, again, all for free.
The fact that none of the people who complain about tech CEO do this points to this being a vaguely plausible but an extremely self serving excuse for status envy.
Yeah, 100%.
> all you need is a few prompts and at most one hour of focus and attention, and LLMs gladly provide you with a generous free tier. And a bulk of these are the tools that Big Tech companies host on platforms that they own, like Github or Chrome Web Store, again, all for free.
Exactly! This is a great point, too, thanks for bringing it up. Not only do they give you the best possible stuff, for free, they also give you all the tools and affordances you need to cope with it or structure your time and attention to still get things done!
All it requires is literally the smallest amount of effort and intent on your part, the one hour of focus and attention you're calling out. And people are pretending that this is simply impossible, oh, woe is me, I'm completely at the mercy of the Tik Tok algorithm!
Guess I have no other choice but to stare at it 3-9 hours a day, right? Those dastardly oligarchs!