The tech industry loves claiming it is building the future while apparently speedrunning past the footnotes of the past. If your worldview comes from TED talks, founder biographies and half read sci fi, maybe disrupting democracy isn’t visionary thinking: it’s just historical illiteracy with a Series C.

Relevant Existential comic: existentialcomics.com/comic/585

What I’ve said about Republicans. It’s not that they can’t read. It’s that their reading comprehension is atrocious

Ayn Rand is already a terrible choice, but the results of half-assing it? Yikes

Silicon Valley does what it needs to do to maintain and advance its material position. They’ll read, misread, invent whatever ideological tenets they need to do so.

They never learned the lesson about the Torment Nexus.

No, that’s fiction and not real. /s

Yeah, that’s the problem, we need to fix that

Great news! We’ve the created the Torment Nexus, from the hit sci-fi series “Don’t Create the Yorment Nexus”!

Literally everything zuk’s done since Facebook has been from snow crash.

And of course he didn’t give us any of YT’s toys.

Since you mention Neal Stephenson, I feel compelled to add that Cryptonomicon was about the creation of Bitcoin, a decade before someone created Bitcoin. It’s a dense read, but absolutely amazing.

No it wasn’t. It was about a group of people trying to create/design a digital currency, with an open ending that really looks more like “they decided that won’t work anyway”, or even tossing the weapon aside like Luke in Star Wars : RotJ .

I hope you can see the difference.

Neal Stephenson is a really good author in the sense of doing both, describing accurately the thrill of creation and discovery or at least being able to touch that with your mind, and also not allowing that optimism feel something to really transpire. The main characters are optimist, the author and with him the reader are not.

I disagree. They read science fiction and think “well, that wont happen in the real world.”

“1984 was an instruction manual. But it was written a long time ago, and I’m sure we can imptove on it.”

Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s.

—Catch-22, Copyright 1961

I recently commented somewhere here on Lemmy that our technology idiots keep reading classic science fiction and fail to grasp that much of it is warning about the horrific effects or uses of the technology. These people are so devoid of human decency and compassion that they think those horrors are the goal. Hell, it’s pretty clear to me that Elon Musk read some Cyberpunk and decided this was a future he wanted to create. Right down to the neuro-chips.

Musk’s obsession with an author like Heinlein, who wrote several books about a multidimensional polygamous space time sex cult with a dash of incest, makes a lot of sense.

It’s like all of the things that were written as clear warnings because they’re clearly horrifyingly bad ideas were used as inspiration instead. We used to discuss crazy future science possibilities like these and part of the discussion was always how extremely unethical they would be. I loved seeing articles about clumps of human brain cells being taught to play DOOM.

I’d no longer be shocked if 10 years from now we all start getting emails saying they’re from gramma and she’s scared and needs help because she’s trapped in hell fighting weird blotchy demons.

The BrainClump companies will insist it’s just BrainClump hallucinations, and even though the emails talk about that Christmas she got us the bike and how much we always loved her Nutroll and that she doesn’t blame us for leaving her in that nursing home all alone we’ll try to make ourselves believe them and add what’s left of grammy’s brain to our block list.