Mike
Standard nerd.
(and that vision is “happily pissed people with empty wallets”)
Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who’d describe themselves using titles like “futurist” and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they’d have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.
Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like “Chief Visionary”. These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)
Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he’s being showered with cash and hyping for all it’s worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and… we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.
The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs… none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it’s just that people would have asked “What is this for?” and “Why is it better?”. It’s what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who’ve spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.
Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as “a startup” now has to mean $10m in seed capital and “graduating” from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.
How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.
(full disclosure: I’ve had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied “I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly” person I’ve ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)
Having read a bit about this dispute and the parties involved I think the best settlement prospect for this lawsuit is to set everybody involved on fire.
Ooh, I know! I’d not exactly call it a moral panic but there were people who were convinced that people would be driving off cliffs or getting lost in the mountains because they didn’t have the skills to read a paper map properly. Wasn’t very convincing, especially as if people are determined to be stupid enough to drive off a cliff without noticing they’re going to find a way to do that even if there’s a big sign in front of them saying “Cliff, do not drive off”.
In much of the world online mapping services still aren’t anywhere near the standard of a proper topological map and there’s really no substitute for (say) an Ordnance Survey map if you’re climbing in the Cuillins, but that’s not the fault of GPS.
how to let people know you’re not a talented writer but think you should be without telling people you’re not a talented writer but you think you should be
“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.”
Put down the Ayn Rand bong, please. I don’t think any federated network in Internet history (and I’m including Usenet) ever had a need for some hypercomplex reputation/coinage/exchange… thing. You think this would be a great idea, fine, you do you. You could even fork the software if you wanted to see if you got anywhere. But I really don’t think there’s any traction whatever in this idea.
From the comments: “Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure.”
Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don’t do that then the hygienist most certainly will…