Discussion
This one perplexes me as well. Even if the tech CEOs and crypto VCs thought Trump would be president for life, the guy is 80. It wouldn’t have lasted that long and a reckoning was inevitable.
Their thinking has been so short-sighted on this, much like their treatment of workers as they pivot to AI.
The OP mentions introspection and self-reflection, but he's talking about the techbros, most of whom are narcissists or otherwise sociopathic. They lack the ability to introspect because that requires humility, something narcissists lack. They already know they are the best that can possibly be! They simply lurch from one thing to the next. They don't care about the future, they care about now. This is also why they can deny things like climate change.
@carnage4life I'm not sure. Musk spent about 0.05% of his estimated wealth on the midterms. I suspect if they really thought that with a little more push they'd be able to abandon democracy for generations, versus a real possibility of legislation overruling Citizens United, don't you think they'd try bit harder? Yeah they've taken off the mask but I don't think they really went all in on Trump.
RE: https://gruene.social/@weddige/117483606729170966
@carnage4life this links to a thought I had a while ago: No one wants to be Hitler, but too many can imagine being Friedrich Flick.
Flick was an industrialist who became rich during the Nazi rule. He went to prison for it for a couple of years but retained his fortune and remained one of the richest people in Germany.
@carnage4life It's simple: they are faschists themselves.
@carnage4life isn’t it all short sighted though, crazy tech schemes that generate huge stock prices based on flimsy evidence. Live now, pay later taken to the extreme.
I wonder how many of them got caught up in small get-rich-quick scheme that blew up much bigger than they expected and now they can’t get out.
@carnage4life the intense fervor in the Silicon Valley set for *immortality* of some sort, whether through medical intervention or some sort of "virtual" immortality maintained on a computer, may help explain their inability to reckon with the general ageing of their whole set. Not just Trump but all of them ... Elon Musk is the world's oldest kid. they seem to think they're on the verge of annihilating Death itself somehow, erasing the distinction between past and present and future
@carnage4life Had it not been for the gerrymandering, Democrats would have a lot more seats than they have.
Have you not seen the last decade of gerrymandering, antivoting right SCOTUS cases and industrial scale radicalization of media (online and traditional)?
Of course they thought there would never be free and fair elections. The GOP, techbros and crypto VCs have been actively destroying every part of the system.
And don't kid yourself about how free and fair 2026 was. A huge % are still gerrymandered, purged from rolls and/or caught in disinfo bubbles.
@carnage4life what wpuld explain it is the cynical belief that voting doesn't really change anything.
Tech bros grew up and lived in an era of always-growing corporatism. Why would they expect change?
@carnage4life it's in part described in The Nerd Reich book. How the tech elite turns right. It is described to be more or less Peter Theil driving it through... Corona lock down is also described as part of the story. Unclear how exactly though.
@carnage4life a lot has to do with the invincible founder myth. These self-described geniuses create hugely valuable companies, get used to the world fawning over them, are lured by fascism’s promise of permanent power, and go all in.