When the first and most important skill for survival in a society is persuading some very wealthy, very stupid people, it completely fucks the whole incentive structure of the global economy. Certainly, it starts off fine: you just have to tune your communications to the people you're targeting a bit more, pander a little more, be a little more corporate. But that, of course, has a reinforcing effect.
In short, there are three major avenues of opposition to the tech industry: the vulgar, the horny and the threatening, mapping to attacks on the tech industry's luminaries from below, horizontally and from above. These are, the three cardinal virtues of resistance to the tech industry's evil and stupidity, and they're what I aim to examine here today.
The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people.
The last article I published was by far the most popular one I have written so far. It hass been shared far and wide, and we are currently creeping up on almost ten thousand hits, which are still niche blog numbers, but also not nothing. It was in fact so popular that I encountered performance issues, and while previously that might be something I could have ignored, the level of readership I am now getting means that those performance problems are likely starting to cause reader retention problems for me. In short, this is something of a problem.
The only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them. All other values, increasingly including even the accumulation of wealth (while this is still very much a thing that people pursue, wealth is increasingly becoming a proxy for status more than something desired in itself) are becoming subordinated to symbolic status games completely detached from anything real.