Rebecca Shaw: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. But I didn't expect them to be such losers.
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw
They are desperate to be cool, it's so cringe.
I just started reading this book about Facebook and I am amazed how little they cared about how much power they had, and how oblivious they were of it.
These are companies that rule the world, but don't know what they want with it, other than for it to generate profit
This book is great! Everything you thought about Facebook (meta) is true, and worse. Highly recommended
Because it's so much better when they're charismatic assholes?
I think it's much sadder (more sad? saddest) that people fall for such absurd douche bags. If they would at least be sexy and seem smart you could understand how people could be fooled but this is just too hard to watch.
Yeah like, they have negative charisma, so it's extra baffling. I cannot imagine a world in which I'd support Donald Trump, but definitely not in this one where he routinely shits his own diaper. If he was only disgusting mentally but was a good speaker or handsome or whatever, it would make at least a little more sense
So like, if instead of musk and zuckerburg, it were a 1990s George Clooney? The smug bastard....
Propoganda fucking works, simple as that
Billionaires just buy good press and publicists to manage their image, it's so effective they believe it themselves
People will kiss anyone's ass for enough money.
A charismatic tyrant at least provides SOME excuse. People aren't necessarily monsters, they are just gullible.
When you have someone as decrepit and incompetent as trump who ALSO has a visible diaper bulge at his hips and who can't speak a coherent sentence? There is no argument other than people truly choosing hate above all else.
Yeah, I don't get this. If it was George Clooney or some other charismatic/likeable person, they'd still be fucking us over.
Yeah but at least they’d have style. Their popularity would at least make sense. It would feel a little less horrifyingly alienating.
The sad thing is that the bar is so low. If it was a once in a century charismatic leader you could say "I get how people fell for this!". But the fact it's Trump and Musk just exposes how utterly flawed human society is, and how easy it is to slide backwards. Humanity has no excuse for this one.
Agreed. Tom Brady being the football goat doesn’t make him being MAGA any more palatable.
The smug bastard....
It would make more sense.
I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.
This. This is what I feel like
I felt like this in January when this was first published and I still feel like it today. I'm not really sure what it will take for things to change but I get the feeling that powerful and wealthy people do not want things to change.
What's worse is that half the population actually voted for these losers. After the losers published a document describing exactly what they are going to do. We are surrounded by idiots.
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos-- you can tell they are insecure. They became rich and powerful and now want to stomp on people.
It's like the meme of the nerd.
Who did Zuck stomp on?
The world? Dudes done more harm than any of the other two.
He's been implicated in the recent genocide in Myanmar. Facebook cultivated the spread of the racist lies, allowed it to proliferate, spread in the region and then shorted companies operating there. If you know there's going to be ethnic cleansing in the region, causing outrage and destabilisation, business takes a hit and the options pay off massively. All it takes was the deaths of thousands, but hey Mark has the capital to burn on his AR pet project that nobody wants.
Zuckerburg and Facebook enable lies to spread because that's how he makes money.
Imagine if, when Facebook rolled out, people were just like "no thanks, I'm good" and it never took off.
I wanted to. I liked Myspace. It has character. Some of it was cringe. But you could at least customize it. Facebook seemed so bland. But I had an ex GF that insisted on it and I didn't think it was worth breaking up over. I shouldn't have been such a pushover.
I remember LiveJournal as something good. I wouldn't use it, but felt a bit like Telegram today, except without Telegram, which is a good thing.
It was, until the events of the mid-2010s when most of the science fiction fandom community quit it and went over to Facebook, presumably because that was more convenient (i.e. on it already) than going to e.g. Dreamwidth (a LJ-alike that is still going). It operated in a very similar way to FB but somehow much more focussed maybe because it never got the 'businesses having pages on there' bit. Those of my friends who were on both, often used FB more as an events calendar than all-around social media.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast.
Yeah like having to accept all cookies to read the article.
Block third-party scripts, no cookie popup.
I know it feels good to dunk on others and do so with generalities but just the last line, get revenge on the nerds.
Sounds edgy but it’s a slogan that is poor communication. It’s focused on US based tech billionaires and paints them as representatives of nerds. Look at voting data. Tech employees are leftist. People that go to school are more frequently leftist. Rhetoric like this is unintentionally anti-intellectual which promotes conservatism. And in my personal life, there sure seems to be an ocean of nerdy women in the US including in tech like bioengineering and UX and marketing design that is intertwined with today’s techno-facism. I don’t get why these pundits can’t ever stay focused on class warfare and end up resorting to social/racial/gender otherings. Why use language that is so so broad and is a term that most applies to people in your base
Also I’m at a loss at how finance/real estate/insurance/material and manufacturing billionaires have somehow managed to be overshadowed in public perceptions of evil even though they’ve consistently been at it for millenniums and are a cohort of multigenerational families of wealth built on slavery and genocide. They make up venture capital funds that give them ownership across all these companies. Tech CEOs end up owning an ever shrinking portion of a company they did or didn’t found until ownership is mostly a smattering of many large finance companies and family offices. Weirdly fetishistic of proper rich despots rather than these new tech billionaires who still have to go to JP Morgan Chase to facilitate their transactions
Also in the comments co-opting conservative rhetoric like herbivores and I guess carnivores?. That’s weird. Who actually talks like that seriously in real life? My whole life on the left we’ve been so terrible at creating insults but also terms of endearments. It’s weird how bad we are at not only labeling ourselves but also continuing to build terms into positives. Anything eventually becomes an insult towards leftist and conservative terminology is used awkwardly
For the side that places so much emphasis on the power of language, labeling, othering, etc … we’re terrible at it. The side of people with art/literature/communication/whatever degrees. Practically any college level degree is the realm of mostly leftist but in practice people well studied in communication can’t effectively and accurately communicate to people
Yup. The whole article and “we should bring back bullying” rhetoric (even used ironically) just reeks of someone who doesn’t like “uncool” people and finally found a morally valid excuse to hate on some of them.
Really, not much different from misogynists pointing at random female tiktok influencers and concluding “See? This is why women are dumb and we need sexism”.
It doesn't matter if they're nerds or not. What matters is where society is swaying to.
Ya but in discussion of the article, I don’t think it’s about the direction of society. It’s an article about people the author doesn’t like. How they classify them. And an empty call to action at the end to get revenge on nerds of which the author probably would be considered one. It’s a bad article
Purpose of the article, why does it exist and why does it have so many upvotes? Does the article help or harm the direction of society? Is it just an eloquent version of an Instagram comment dunking on people? What communication should be signal boosted that would be effective in driving action towards swaying society in a better direction
No one seems to have read Machiavelli’s stuff these days. It explains so much. Also, just history in general will tell you all about today’s happenings.
The Prince was a warning of what could happen. The Drumpf is the result of ignoring the warnings.
Huh, it's almost like people who try to destroy the world are weird and shitty. I'm mostly surprised that anyone else is surprised.
Seriously, it's like nobody else ever had to deal with a pathological narcissist or someone with BPD before in their lives.
People expect the villains to be cool, because that's how they're portrayed in movies.
It is indeed pathetic how Musk, Zuckerberg and even Trump don't actually have any friends.
zuckerberg is prefer android friends.
Why wouldn't you? Only losers seek power, and only losers could and would fuck up this badly.
Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.
I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change.
It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
Sounds to me like they crave attention more than anything, poor insecure past-neglected angsty man-agers they are. Depopulating their various platforms and reducing their viewership would be nice. Sucks that anyone at all would feel inclined to lend them their ears and eyes when there are far better alternatives out there.
Man when I think of living it up with wealth and power I think of Sal Maroni in The Dark Knight.
These guys don't need a criminal underworld to have a cigar, dress in a tailored designer suit, get a drink and a couple of girls to pretend to like you while you drown your thoughts in excessively loud music and exotic dancers on stage.
I think these elite are afraid of what they are: flawed humans. They can't get everything they demand, and they'd rather destroy humanity than admit they were wrong or made a mistake, or felt bad about something. So they have to pump the fascists up and make damn sure the people have someone other that just you to get angry about.
In general, nerds have a history of being treated badly, bullied even, by the people you are talking about.
They arent around people because people harm them more than help them.
In the 1980s, being a nerd meant being a target for bullies, and we didn't fare too well. The nerd hierarchy (in which the tech nerds looked down on Trekkies and Furries) was rather brutal, and informs why the furry / otherkin moral panic is mixed in with the trans moral panic.
Eventually, every company needed an MIS and nerds showed they were useful after all. This is not the good ending.
A parallel problem came from young people having libidos that no-one was allowed to acknowledge. We were all incels before the term, and they tried to teach me math when my brain was telling me I needed to rut. Even today, society disregards horny teens, creating a wide pathway to the Alt-Right (Immortan Joe's Warboys) who respect only Alpha Males. Our Christian-centric sex-negative culture fuels the young-men-to-Nazi pipeline.
I don't have a solution for it. The common response to horny-teens-gone-white-supremacists is to say yeah, fuck those guys in total contempt, so they're going to continue to be an available and eager force of militants and voters for any charismatic strongman. They may go Herbivore (like Japanese men) once Generative AI porn gets good.
Oh god no, this has fuck all to do with being a nerd, the author's overreliance on a film reference not withstanding.
Social netwok had the right of it
Its not like they made the country antiintellectual, ppl hate when someone knows more than them and refuse to change their views, they just assume they are in the right and double down
The saying money can't unlame you still true.
This is something I observed regarding Trump in his first term, here this guy is allegedly super rich and now leader of the free world, and he still thinks he's a total loser, hence his own inability to tolerate criticism, and obsession on harming enemies and bullying people.
He has to fuck other people's wives and make John Kennedy Jr. eat McDonalds because even being President isn't enough assertion of dominance to make him feel on top.
I have a tender self esteem, myself, and have deep-running neural pathways that will drive me nearly to self harm when I mess something up (e.g. drop my coffee, or burn dinner, or thoroughly lose my wallet). I have these structures of rational self-assessment so that when I calm down I can see I'm actually alright and have some sweet talents, and friends find me useful, and when not even that, at least lovable.
Trump with all his money and power doesn't have that, and people like me can see Trump feels like a total loser propped up by hollow victories, even as POTUS, which is a fucking scary place to be. This is why cabinet meetings are a round-robin ritual of telling Trump how huge he is.
As for the tech bros, they succeeded in their careers which is exactly what we are taught manly men are supposed to do and still feel hollow (which is common when you fixate only on your career). They didn't have that (possibly essential) experience where they collapse into despair as a young person and realize they need personal integrity or spirituality to climb out. (For me it was a moment of rational self-assessment and finding I was not wanting after all; that my depression and self hatred were based on delusions.)
As for Musk, his bio on Behind the Bastards suggests it's really difficult for someone not to emerge from his upbringing without turning into a Disney / Marvel supervillain.
Thiel has his own backstory and obsession, and is perpetually feeling Death (his own mortality) chuffing hyperborean chills on the back of his neck.
So yes, these guys are desperate to cling to power, _because wealth and political transactional power are the only power they've ever known, hence J. D. Vance's obsession on forcing women into natality which is likely to turn into Lebensborn style breeding programs (which inspired Atwood to write A Handmaid's Tale. ) They are terrified of equality because then they'll just be eccentric, antisocial dorks.
(I am an eccentric, antisocial dork, with few things to offer other than listening skills, peer psychology, computer nerding and moral philosophy, and in a world where we're not all overwhelmed with bad news, that is more than enough to find friends, family and crew. But it takes some personal introspection and willingness to practice soft power to learn this.)
If they were able to step away from power, or we took it from them and forced them into peer group support, they'd eventually discover that they don't need to be captains of industry (or James Bond supervillains) to be accepted and loved (and consequently, fed and homed by the community).
And when they've given you their all
\
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
\
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall
I agree completely and I'd like to add, when we call Trump a narcissist we should remember that what you described there is what narcissism is. It's self hate manifesting as self aggrandizement.
Every major politician in the USA has major financial backers with their own agendas that they purchase through superPAC contributions and by funding re-election campaigns. It's been the ruling oligarchy my whole life and I'm middle aged. Pretending it's different or worse now is disingenuous.
It is worse now, at least the legal money side.
Citizens United removed the limits on the international money as well as the domestic money.
Why is the countey tearing itself apart? Because the foreign money has interest in weakening, stealing, amd profiteering from the USA.
Conversely, the domestic money wants to keep the domestic part from falling completely apart; at least until the real estate, votes, and grant money for the revitalization project are all lined up.
Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you've got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people's lives. What you don't got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don't give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it's going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.
Politicians aren't selling a business plan, they're selling a legislative agenda. They don't have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.
He's such a fucking dork.
This movie hasn't aged well, for anyone who hasn't seen it.
It was cringe when it released - it's dated cringe now...
The electric violin scene was cool, tho.
Little Dick Energy. That's what I think every single time I see any of these folks in the news. But apparently there are enough weird little aspirants out there that they do alright?
Fuck 90% of this species. 👍
We really gotta stop shaming people with little dicks like this. They’ve done nothing to deserve to be compared to these clowns.
Most people with little dicks are decent people and aren't sadistic and evil cunts, so the little dick isn't the issue.
Well we know elons is really small, every kids been IVF
Not just small. Mutilated because of lengthening surgery gone wrong, allegedly.
Can’t they wear suits at least?
Come on, who wouldn't want this?
The pic won't embed, weird.
Embedding that pic would be a crime.
Everyone around him must hate him so much, to allow him to go out in public looking like that.
And put it in the article as the lead photo.
I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight... It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
And there's the rub. I was there, and we still have the nerd-to-nazi pipeline pumping vast numbers of boys into the alt-right. And to this day, no-one wants to deal with them.
Curiously, Japan is entirely dissatisfied with herbivore men who just want to be left alone in their life with their waifu, but that doesn't produce the next batch of cheap labor and soldiers for industrialists to exploit.
Yes, I'm bitter, and righteously so. Treat our kids better; acknowledge they have sexuality. Teach consent and human intercourse in public school. (We're not going to do these things. We hold great contempt for our fifteen-year olds, whether men or women, and just can't help ourselves.)
I read the first chapter of Careless People last night and I never thought these people were such large dorks, but here we are.
If they were posh people with "breeding" that wouldn't make being the direct or indirect victim of their destruction any better, unless you're an upper middle class Briton who has bern btought up with 19th century notions of "born to rule elites" such as most columnists for The Guardian.
I get it that people here derive a little enjoyment out of taking the piss of the character flaws of these wankers, but were they are coming from is not were this columnist is coming from.
Great to find a like minded tribe. How about getting decentralised ?
Why was Altman missing in the story? The next ruler of the world....
Stupid and ugly af too...
Zuck can piss off
They all have nice shaped heads.
Would look great off their shoulders!
This is why they are businessmen and not politicians or influencers
cringe = cringeworthy for anyone who needs an easy search-and-replace
Awesome discussion.
I mean, it's kind of a prerequisite.
She's got a point I bet they were all bullied in school.
We all were, they're not special
Someone attempted bully me once and I beat then half to death with a primary school chair, ironically their parents came round to my place complaining to my parents despite them being the class bully.
I wasn't the bully I'm quite shy but I just wasn't having it, they tried to bully me and got wrecked for the attempt and quite a few others then followed that pattern.
Trump needs to confess who is behind this I think Putin but anyone else needs serious prison time.
Heh. They tried to bully me, and when I resisted, I was the one who was asked to leave the school. Gotta protect those bullies because they are part of the catholic school system....
Speak for yourself I just asked chatgpt about me and it started listing thing I did online in my teen years. Which to be honest is worrying but still kind of nice it knows me and things I felt where long forgotten.
The thing they all share is that they are deeply unloved. Trump, musk, bezos, zuck, none of them have healthy loving families. They have noons they can genuinely connect with. And they all think by having more money and being more popular will fulfill that human need. But it never does, so they just keep going not realizing the path they chose doesn't end anywhere near what they desire. Money will never buy love and peace.
If that was all it was, then I'd feel sorry for them. No, they're trying to fulfill that need by being Great Men of History with Mighty Plans, but their Mighty Plans are all terrible, because they're horrible people.
Yeah, I think it's a mistake to imagine that these are good people who just need a little love. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who aren't getting enough love for proper human flourishing and it's not like that turned them all into fascists. The kind of evil exhibited by these people must be attributed to a fundamental enjoyment of the suffering of others.
That's a tired stereotype. Powerful people are unloved because they don't need to be loved. They are psychopaths, they have all the love they need, they are bored with the world and have nothing more to want.
People around you are unloved because they have problems.
Also money can buy you a cottage surrounded by nice trees near a river, healthy food, more house animals than you could want, a fast PC, jasmine and lilac bushes outside your window.
I think it can go a long way.
My irritation from this stereotype is because it kinda says the opposite of what it says. It feels like sublimated envy, expressed by saying that you don't envy them. Why talk about their money at all then.
I wouldn't envy anyone's money if that's all the difference between us, unfortunately money buys power and power is used to impose one's will upon me, and that I very much care about.
But your typical young Trotskyists in the Interwebs write whole articles consisting of Marxist vibes (a strong thing, especially in spring, but not enough) and envy to those having more. LOL, someone having more money is not our problem. Our problem is someone attacking us with it.
People not accepting that other people got a easier time doing certain things than others is certainly a problem, but too much blaming isn't good as well.
While this is a fresh perspective of the trope, there is very significant evidence that becoming rich is a predictor of early death and depression, presumably due to how hard it becomes to connect to people. Normal people need money to eat and live, and handle it like the privilege it is. It is synonymous with survival for most people. It's no wonder at all to me why the oligarchs has been naturally selected to be psychopaths. All other people die. A select few give it away and devote themselves to reintegrate back to humanity but those are very few and far between.
I wouldn't challenge this view for Musk, Bezos, Trump. But Zuck gives me more of a "reformed (now married) incel that comes from an otherwise normal family environment vibe". His marriage seems at least typical, likely loving etc.
His product happens to be the most harmful for democracy and I consider him equal for worst of the bunch as a result, but I think it's explained by corporate/personal greed and being out of touch with reality.
He wants to be Augustus Caesar. That’s not “normal loving relationship” behavior.
"The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends."
This is Zuckerberg, claiming it's normal not just to have only 3 friends, but fewer than 3. This is telling on yourself even more than "Women's orgasms aren't real because no woman I've ever been with has had an orgasm."
If he counts his wife in that list of "fewer than 3 friends", how many friends does he actually have? I get that being ultra rich means that often you can't be sure who's actually your friend, and who's just there for the money. But, still, he should at least be able to count a handful of friends. I've known my 2 best friends since before I was 5 years old. Surely if Zuck had a normal childhood, he should have people who were his friends long before he got rich, who he can be sure aren't just there for his money. If he doesn't, it strongly suggests he was either a pretty awful kid, or he led a really weird life growing up and was isolated from anybody who could have become a friend.
I read some books by Alice Miller that discussed some childhoods of authoritarian rulers and they were all of unloved. They had not one adult stick up for them, be their advocate or helper, during their childhood years.
Many of us as children have been unwanted or unloved by our caregivers. Most of us had at least one adult: an uncle, grandmother, teacher etc, who truly tried to help at least once.
What the monsters in history had in common is an absence of evidence of even that happening for them. And their revenge as adults was terrible.
Man, I should have became an authoritarian ruler.
Instead I became isolated and I haven’t had a visitor in over a decade.
Fuck it. Vote for theangryseal!
For real though, maybe if I hadn’t ever used drugs haha. I had a lot of “friends” when I was living in that world. Might have stopped me. :p
No amount of money and power will ever scratch their itch
It'll end where they deserve though. Alone, despised and empty. No amount of money or stupid blue checkmarks will ever change that.
It might end with them realizing the truth, but it'll be as they're surrounded by the ashes of our civilizations and bodies.
True enough.
But, in the broken psyches of the ones you've mentioned, it buys perfectly serviceable alternatives which they can convince themselves actually does make them happy.
They are so broken that broken solutions actually work for them...
🤷♂️ 🤡 🖕
Looks like autocorrect did ya dirty.
No one >> noons
Don't try and downplay the affect of connecting with noons on the human psyche. They are an evil scourge and should be eradicated. This is exactly the kind of thing a noon would post.
What’s wrong with Zuck’s family?