What happened to nerds?

Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.

Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.

Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.

“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.

Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.

Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.

So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.

Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.

Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.

Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times, and despite him being a genuine mathematical genuis, the thing that impressed me so much was how humble he was, how anti-braggadocious. He was like this in person, privately, and also in public. Moler was an early post-WW2 engineer, his cohort is a shrinking class, and I'm worried about those who are taking their place, and then what happens when my generation and the younger replace them.

If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech.

This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.

Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.

One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire.

The message was received.

We now only have the Zuckerberg type.

I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.

Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).

Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).

Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.

Those are the people who are doing all the talking.

It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’

Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361

Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.

It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated.

We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.

The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.

If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.

Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.

Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."

[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.

Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.

Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.

But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.

What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.

The money and power corrupted them.

This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.

So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".

I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.

Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.

We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.

I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.

(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)

Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment

Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.

The whole problem with opening Pandora's box is that you don't get to close it if you don't like what came out.

Why would things eventually get better? Especially on a time scale that matters to anyone who is currently alive?

Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.

It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.

Steve Jobs was brilliant and complicated with many down sides, but he also seemed to have good taste and to care about user experience as well as good design, and his era at Apple produced exceptional products that redefined their categories: Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. Even Jobs' failures were interesting: NeXT, Mac G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi. Well, except for the hockey puck mouse which seems like an obviously bad idea.

Links to the first two episodes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP80Jrf2xrk

People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.

It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).

It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.

We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches.

We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.

Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.

Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.

I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.

Most CEOs are completely private.

Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either.

Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.

Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest.

I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech.

The founders in garage era was more 70s/80s vibe.

  1) Incredibly large amounts of money

  2) Gamergate

When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.

But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".

We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.

Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.

Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.

There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.

Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”

> Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable.

> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.

This pops out at me for a few reasons.

1. The grift era started long before 2015.

2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty.

3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?

What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.

Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.

On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...

  > Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant

  > Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth

I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.

Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.

(There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)

I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...

I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.

As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here.

Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum.

Did anyone read this article?

"There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it."

Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself.

There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.

I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.

There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.

Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.

The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.

This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.

Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.

And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.

This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.

(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)

because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.

It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)

As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.

With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.

So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.

BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more

For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...

So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)

You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!

did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord

They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.

Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.

The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.

Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.

I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.

They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.

The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.

'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.

They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.

Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.

Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat.

So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.

Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.

It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.

i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.

it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.

so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.

does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.

They've done it to every other space already.

People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.

Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.

come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.

that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...

I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.

The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).

If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?

So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.

Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.

Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.

This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion.

Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically.

Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views.

The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared.

This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.

Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.

In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.

Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.

In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.

Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.

Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.

I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?

So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.

There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.

To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)

Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.

Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).

Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time.

I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN

ps. Great post aside from this

There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.

> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon

Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.

Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.

“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”

Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.

Ohhhh yes. Here it comes

“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”

Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.

Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?

Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.

This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.

Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.

Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.

Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.

Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.

Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4

So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.