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To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
Money translating into power has always been a transient phenomenon of immature nations, and the Marxist delusion that money and power are one and the same is instrumental to other Marxist delusions (eg: "why does Israel fight Gaza? Because colonization for natural resources!" I kid you not, have seen this take in the wild, it was even popular).
Nation states, themselves puppets to special interests groups with non-monetary primary motivations, have a non-quantitative categorical advantage over billionaires, trillionaires and whatever – they can just take your shit and use it to fund users of hard power, which they have authority over, to compel you. The army cannot be meaningfully bribed, neither can the police, neither can the police robot dogs, neither can the politruk overseeing tech lord's robot dog assembly business; indeed, the very attempt to do so means you're dead meat.
The state can only reach abolition through degeneration from within and loss of relative legitimacy in the eyes of its most relevant constituents; which it will prevent at all costs.
Sorry to burst your cyberpunk bubble: Big Tech Has No Power At All. Larry Summers is and will always be more powerful than Elon Musk. He, ontologically, belongs to a caste which can have power, and Musk does not.
Who has more power, Larry Summers, or some asshole with a rifle, the knowledge to use it correctly, and a willingness to die in the process of murdering Larry Summers?
Who has more power, the asshole or Musk?
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Larry of course. His first advantage is: he is real and nobody real cares enough to die in the process of assassinating him. (Consider that many Russians attribute the worst parts of the 90's to Chubais and indirectly Summers; yet nobody has bothered to go kill him. Granted, Westerners nowadays think we're basically a nation of limp-wristed cuckolds. But still – millions of people with "nothing to lose" over decades).
His second advantage is: he's put-together, well-known and well-connected, so even if he dies, his projects can continue, and indeed his tragic demise will possibly make him more powerful than when he was alive.
Then there's everything else people care about, like actual authority, security etc but that's a bit of an overkill.
Fun fact: https://www.writingtoiq.com/ estimates this comment to 102. I thought due to word "cuckolds" but my attempts to reword in order to increase score failed. (ps, ok, got 109 then i got lazy)
I tried 7 your comments, => 123 Hlynka's (N=7) => 111 comments Hlynka was replying to => 119 (*in case if comment Hlynka was replying to was too short, next parent comment by another person was tried)
These 7 your comments have weird distibution 91 102 119 129 137 143 143
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Yeah, this whole B can easily destroy A, therefore B is stronger than A argument really fails to hold water, even in cases where your principal objective is to destory each other. In DoTA there are often heroes which everyone agrees are severely overpowered, but get absolutely wrecked by other heroes, often those that other people agree are unplayable, e.g. Meepo vs Antimage is basically always favourable for Meepo even when Meepo is unplayable and AM is terrorising pubs. The fact that Meepo dumpsters AM doesn't mean Meepo is a stronger hero than AM overall.
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Larry Summers, for as long as he lives. Rifle guy can still only kill a dude, maybe several, if he gets lucky. Summers can reshape the reality of countless people like Rifle Guy. Possibly he can eve have men killed too, if he cares enough about it.
That, of course, doesn't mean he won't find himself shot, blown up, etc., if he pisses of enough people. There are always limits to power, but power does exist.
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