Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Useful context: this is a followup to this post:
The thing about being active in the hacker house scene is you are accidentally signing up for a career as a shadow politician in the Silicon Valley startup scene. This process is insidious because you’re initially just signing up for a place to live and a nice community. But given the financial and social entanglement of startup networks, you are effectively signing yourself up for a job that is way more than meets the eye, and can be horribly distracting if you are not prepared for it. If you play your cards well, you can have an absurd amount of influence in fundraising and being privy to insider industry information. If you play your cards poorly, you will be blacklisted from the Valley. There is no safety net here. If I had known what I was getting myself into in my early twenties, I wouldn’t have signed up for it. But at the time, I had no idea. I just wanted to meet other AI researchers.
I’ve mind-merged with many of the top and rising players in the Valley. I’ve met some of the most interesting and brilliant people in the world who were playing at levels leagues beyond me. I leveled up my conception of what is possible.
But the dark side is dark. The hacker house scene disproportionately benefits men compared to women. Think of frat houses without Title IX or HR departments. Your peer group is your HR department. I cannot say that everyone I have met has been good or kind.
Socially, you are in the wild west. When I joined a more structured accelerator later, I was shocked by the amount of order and structure there was in comparison.
it is just straight up fucked that there’s a hacker house scene where you’ll be so heavily indoctrinated (with sexual coercion and forced drug use to boot (please can the capitalists leave acid the fuck alone? also, please can the capitalists just leave?)) that a fucking Silicon Valley startup accelerator seems like a beacon of sanity
like, as someone who was indoctrinated into a bunch of this hacker culture bullshit as a kid (and a bunch of other cult shit from my upbringing before that), I get a fucking gross feeling inside imaging the type of grooming it takes to get someone to want to join up with a just hacker culture and AI research 24/7, abandon your family and come here house, and then stay in that fucking environment with all the monstrous shit going on because you’ve given up everything else. that shit brings me back in a bad way.
I want to tell myself that it’s probably a tiny scene of 10s to 100s, that it’s just vestigial cult mindset that what she went through is the real SV VC scene, and most of it is just the more pedestrian techbro buzzword pptx deck tedium …but even then, it’s still incredibly tragic for everyone who went through and is going through that manipulation and abuse.