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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.
People won’t accept rule from a tech techno-king and would kill someone who tried to force it. The average person thinks of Steve Jobs, the most widely respected tech person, as a weird nerd who made their phone a bit better. People would turn on him in an instant the minute he tried to be more than a friendly salesman. And the average tech person is much closer to Zuckerberg than Jobs in terms of likability and charisma, and look at how much the public respects big Z.
And no, money won’t implicitly do it. The impact that a trillionaire will have on my life is basically null except indirectly through whatever makes him a trillionaire (eg if Bezos becomes a trillionaire the biggest impact he’d have on anybody is the $1000 worth of value that Amazon brought to everyone’s life.) You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
What the masses want or like is totally inconsequential. What matters is how many competent people are ready to be the ruling class of a techno-king and if they have means of displacing the current rulers.
I wager that number is big enough already given how popular e/acc is and how unpopular the managers have become.
But respect from "people" is the bottom tier predictor of political influence, much lower than how rich you are or how many men you command.
This is either a bad larp or you need to get out of your bubble. When you show anyone outside of a tiny naval gazing tech bubble what e/acc is it induces extreme cringe, and the libertarian mechs piloted by a squad of John Galts are at least a few decades away.
Sadly, they're the ones busily instantiating the Machine God. I think that lets them punch a tad bit above their weight class.
Groups that believe they are summoning a god are usually called cults and are generally ignored or disliked. In fiction, when they're right and do manage to manifest a god, it rarely goes well for them.
Being liked or disliked isn't particularly relevant when nobody goes to the trouble of stopping them, at least not yet. I'm sure someone will eventually try.
Insert standard response to "updating from fictional evidence".
I don't claim it's necessarily going to go well, just that I expect it to be more likely than not, but e/accs are the kind of idiots who don't mind being disassembled by ASI, and some, Beff included, would consider that to be a good thing. All we agree on is that creating such an entity is possible.
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