this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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re that dough Adams thing: how are they all so media illiterate? Like I'm a massive dork, I speak to machines more than other humans, I love to tinker, I frequently escape into fiction.
So obviously because I have a fucking brain in my head I look into who writes the stories I enjoy, why, what is and is not represented etc with the same sort of delight I examine a door handle or a speaker with.
How are these people, who's whole fucking life is owning the means of manufacture of machines, who all say they're inspired by scifi so... uninterested in the SciFi they say is awesome?
the short answer: this sort of nerd loves signifiers but loathes depth
See also: Zuck and Snow Crash.
The number of people that don't understand a significant part of snow crash is a farce shocks me.
you are introduced to hiro protagonist driving pizzas for the Mafia on pain on death. Fiat currency flutters uselessly in the gutters. It's the ultimate "wow cool future" media literacy test.
Don’t try to rationalise it, it’s CEO speak :
He’s not making a comparison to Hitchhikers, he’s trying to attract attention.
I think this would be a safe bet with 99% of tech ceos. but in the tech won't save us series on musk there's an audio clip of him talking about hitchhiker's. and it seems pretty clear that
1 he did read it
2 he does admire it and think of it as informing his goals
3 his understanding of the book is that it's haha funny but on a deeper level it's saying we should do things like build giant planet sized computers. also something about weed
i mean he clearly read the Culture books too but somehow compared himself to the Minds and not to Joiler Veppers
The culture is when cool sex and ships with funny names. Ignore all the communism
This is the kind of car that Hitchhiker would drive
@dgerard he jumps in, shouts "Hitchhike!" out the window, and drives away at top speed
I think Hitchhiker is a pretty cool guy. Eh hitchhikes and doesn’t afraid of anything
My favorite part was when he said "it's hitchhiking time" and totally hitchhiked all around the galaxy
There I go again, assuming when people speak it has meaning rather than just being distracting sounds that come out of a hole in their face.
That’s you making the mistake of applying good faith
N.B.: I am a few drinks into writing this, apologies in advance if it comes out unintelligible.
It’s going to be impossible to answer that in a single comment. I think whatever it is, it’s related to why nerd humour/culture is so cringeworthy.
I think for the majority of cases of people making cool things, they are well read and are able to call upon a breadth and depth of knowledge from their domain. As you move away from creator to consumer, that level of knowledge is less and less common. Plus, generally, if a creative work is trying to crystallise a range of ideas and make them understandable for the consumer, then they are actively allowing the consumer to be able to not engage with the source material for those ideas.
So then you have these well-read creatives making interesting, beloved works of art that hold a lot of social capital. You have people consuming these works at all kinds of levels of engagement. In many cases, especially within nerdy circles, works become exalted, and even if you don’t engage with those works at all, you are still expected to revere those works, lest you draw the ire of the nerds above you who love these works.
So IMO, and as you have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that there’s any real influence from Adams on the output of these bots. They namedrop him to hopefully garner more social capital. It’s the same reason why I learned how to play “Still Alive” on guitar to impress nerds at my university. It’s the same reason I used to read wikipedia plot summaries for marvel movies while I was working at a small search company.
Anyway the better answer to all this would be to say: watch the “Darmok” episode of star trek TNG. Which I have not seen (lmfao). But I have listened to the official star trek podcast episode (guested by Reza Aslan, notable linguist) that discusses it, and my understanding is that it better encapsulates some of why this is all so fucked.
intoxicated or not, this is a very good overview of why corporations assimilate art and culture. musk has done this so many times — one of my earliest memories of white-hot rage towards musk was when he declared himself a socialist because he was also (claiming to be) a Culture fan. the first example I know of corporations butchering nerd culture was Google turning April Fools pranks into deeply unfunny corporatized marketing opportunities, but I’m sure it’s been happening much longer than that
what’s interesting, and you touched on this in your post, is the degree to which nerd culture itself interacts with a thin facade that substitutes for the artistic work it claims to exalt. in college I volunteered at a couple of conventions, and two things were obvious:
in short, fuck nerds
Perhaps the reason they fetishize AI so much is because they consume culture and art the way an AI would- purely as a stream of signifiers, tokens and easter eggs, with no cognition of the ideas living inside of it.
Absolutely. TLJ vs ROSk is a microcosm of this.
TLJ: “Forget the Jedi texts. What’s important is the present. Also, you aren’t from one of the magic families Lucas made up in the 70’s, but you don’t have to be someone special to be significant.”
ROSk: “Oh sorry we offended you last time because we dared to deviate from your nostalgia. Alright. So now it’s really important that everything is Skywalker or Palpatine related. We even put “Skywalker” in the title! And made a Palpatine cloning machine! Phew, ok. Now that we’ve placated you, here’s 5000 new funko-pop ready characters.”