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Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich (2014)

27 points by lbrito

by heymijo

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Balaji Srinivasan is one of those guys who I don't get. Specifics elude me but I recall his activities getting memory holed, his twitter timeline getting scrubbed, and completely new narratives being written about him.
I was also never quite sure why he was in the orbit of influence and power. He had a failed bitcoin mining hardware company and that's about all I know of, and yet he kept seeming to fail upwards.

by cal_dent

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Related
The Great Unwind
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889008

by cal_dent

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The thing about a lot of this is the implicit admittance that true power always lies with national government. It feels like many governments have forgotten that but (i suspect partly as a result of Covid, partly Trump's antics) some are slowly starting to remember that.
For all tech's influence, when push comes to shove they all line up to brown nose whoever is in power when they wield the power of the nation state

by exogeny

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Interesting that this author was out ahead of this theme a full twelve years ago. Kudos.
It's not all that complex though, really. Just a bunch of adult children who were bullied mercilessly and now have convinced themselves, through the magic of Dunning-Kruger, that they are both eminently more suitable to run things and eminently justified in using that power to exact revenge on their (largely imagined) tormentors.