Ask A Genius 1034: “Enshittification” and Contemporary Technologists
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/28
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who is the least full-of-shit technologist on the scene? We have your Musks and others.
Rick Rosner: Right. I have a lot of experience with Elon Musk since Twitter is my only social medium. He’s owned it for close to 3 years now. So he’s full of shit. He’s a big fraud. He must be good at some things. He’s good at creating and making companies successful, getting government grants of billions of dollars, and dominating the satellite industry, getting satellites into space. He’s got the dominant electric car company. So he could be better at technology, but he’s good at being an industrialist.
But he’s still full of shit, who’s been red-pilled, and overly convinced of his rightness. If he has a thought, he thinks it’s right because it’s a thought he had. He gets high, goes on Joe Rogan, they tell him some bullshit, and he believes it.
So, you can’t criticize racists on Twitter. He’s made it easier for racists and antisemites to flourish. He let all the assholes back on and let all sorts of lies flourish. You can say whatever you want, whether it’s true or not, whether it’s racist or not, within reason. You still can’t say, “Burn all the Jews,” or at least you can’t say it five times in a row. You might get in trouble for that.
Unless you criticize Musk, anything short of that is fine, and he doesn’t like that. So he’s full of crap. I don’t know much about Peter Thiel except that he’s bankrolling MAGA and has a sinister agenda. I haven’t read up on him, but he’s buddies with JD Vance, or JD Vance buddied up with him. So, he’s up to no good ideologically.
Bill Gates is a fairly good guy, within the limits of his probably being on the spectrum. His heart seems to be in the right place. He wants to use his billions of dollars to make the world a better place in many ways. He’s dedicated to wiping out malaria. He’s a little touchy, personally, but I don’t think he’s super sinister. A lot of right-wingers think he’s sinister, but those people are idiots.
I don’t know. You don’t consider Warren Buffett a technologist. He’s your garden variety billionaire, but he is a decent guy. He likes buying functional companies, like See’s Candy. He’s not one of those assholes who buys a company, strips it for parts, steals the pension, and leaves the company in ruins. He likes buying companies that he thinks do a good job. He’s another guy who’s giving away billions of dollars to try to improve the world.
Zuckerberg is probably in the middle. He’s creepy and allowed Facebook to be exploited for propaganda purposes and data mining. Putin’s people in Saint Petersburg and Cambridge Analytica could find out enough about you to hit you with targeted messaging that would drive you to the dark side, make you crazy in a way that Putin liked, create discord, and destabilize and fascistize Western countries.
Who else do you want to ask about in the tech realm? The Google guys? I don’t know much about them except that they have created very successful products, engage in a lot of anti-competitive practices, and engage in “etiquette.” Ditto for Amazon is mean to its employees. There’s no time to go to the bathroom, so you have to piss in bottles. They’re anti-competitive; if you’re trying to sell something that competes with what they’re trying to sell, they will play games with you to make you drive down your prices and make it hard for you to do business. That’s part of their “enshittification.”
Jeff Bezos. He seems personally… he’s one of those guys who built a spacecraft that looks like a giant penis. He dumped his wife for someone who looks like his wife but is way hotter. He dumped his wife for LA’s hottest weather woman. But the resemblance between his ex and his current is disquieting. These guys may be tech geniuses, but their genius does not extend to their behaviour. Is anybody else under that umbrella?
Jacobsen: How about dead technologists like Steve Jobs?
Rosner: Well, Steve Jobs wasn’t so much a technologist. He was a design guy. He knew what things should look like and how they should function, but he could have done better at making the tech work. He had other people do that. He had personal failings with his relationships and the way he handled his cancer. I forget what kind of cancer he had, pancreatic or something else. He made mistakes there. He could’ve had a longer life, but he pursued alternative therapies even before they were therapies of last resort. The theme here is that they’re good at industry but have many personal quirks.
To go back 140 years, Edison was a prick. You know how the movie industry ended up in Los Angeles because if you tried to shoot movies in New York, you had to use Edison’s cameras, or he’d have goons come and mess up your production. So, people ran away from him and ended up in Los Angeles. He manufactured his public image of a tireless genius who always works and takes 20-minute naps standing up in a closet so he doesn’t waste any time.
It’s like Oppenheimer. They made a whole movie. He was a reluctant technologist. It’s not like he came up with the idea for the nuclear bomb on his own and made it happen. He was hired to do a job, which he did very well, but he had some personal failings. As a younger guy, as a grad student at Cambridge, he tried to poison his tutor. So again, a high-powered technologist with personal quirks.
Isaac Newton was a technologist in later life, a theoretical guy as a young man with calculus and universal gravitation, and the greatest theoretical guy ever. Later in life, he ran the Royal Mint and devised the idea of putting grooves along the edge of a coin to make it apparent that someone had filed down the edge to steal the gold dust, which was a common practice. So, yes, he was a technologist with big foibles because he was a prick.
Darwin seems fairly saintly. He was not a technologist but a theoretician. He was a family guy who wanted to think about things all the time and had some disorder that caused him a huge amount of daily pain. So, you don’t have to be a prick. Einstein is kind of in the middle. He was a very smart guy, probably a nice guy, and a fun hang. But he certainly manipulated his public image. He was smart enough to know what it was and feed into it. Ditto for Feynman. Both of those guys, Feynman more than Einstein, were interested in sexual opportunities.
Feynman created a lot of sexual opportunities for himself. He was very adept at figuring out how to get laid. Einstein, on the other hand, liked getting laid. So if somebody said, “Oh, you’re so smart. Let’s have sex,” there were like five known instances where, yes, he had extracurricular affairs on that basis or some basis. That doesn’t make him a monster, nor does it make him a saint. So, personal foibles. If you want to escape technology, you could call Picasso a technologist because he developed much conceptual technology in modern art and was a womanizer. It was a relentless affair of not being particularly nice to women. Enough about him. He was probably a prick to women. So again, foibles.
James Cameron, a great director, not great with dialogue, but great at movie technology, has left a trail of broken romances. Thinking a lot makes me horny. I get frustrated, and then I want to jerk off. Maybe with all these other guys, there’s a connection between the drive to figure things out and the drive to ejaculate.
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