• phil@lymme.dynv6.net
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    11 hours ago

    Looks more and more like a vulgar Ponzi scheme. Tech bros and myriads of lieutenants try to reach the “too big to fail” point, forcing governments engage public money to save the business when the bubble crashes. Brilliant.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 hour ago

      forcing governments engage public money

      We live in a time when it’s hard to force governments.

      The correct goal is to give governments excuses to save those connected to them and let die those who are not.

      USSR’s breakup and the dotcom bubble started a new era. Everyone saw that this works and there’s no higher wisdom or hidden fallback mechanism to prevent this.

      But the incentive to “save businesses” is, well, why I’m a libertarian most of the time. If governments had no money to be directed by some central strategy, and instead only the means to minimally function as publicly decided - fire services, infrastructure, electoral procedures, IDs and money, - then there would be no option to involve them in such a way.

      And it makes sense that libertarians are usually very vulnerable to the AI hype, as to the cryptocurrencies hype before it, an irony typical for history. That means that they’ll be those hit the most.

      It’s an intended minefield. There’s a road called “techno-optimism and individualism”, and most of the mines are being laid on it. Similar to the KGB “rotten herring” thing and such. To discredit an idea. It’s more believable when the splattered meat around those already exploded is real.

      Again, look at USSR, its ideology had plenty of flaws, some with pretty infernal consequences, but it was the main one putting future united humanity, progress, science, equality, humanism and secularism into the center of its cosmology. It offered pretty dubious tools, but that’s irrelevant. When it failed, all those things listed also got a hit. It’s not a coincidence that “polemical” (with both dystopia and utopia and questions about human nature put together in the same space) science fiction in the 90s transitioned into clearly dystopian “putrid” “dream denied” cyberpunk.