They built a wall too.

The internet had always been full of those gun boner guys fantasizing about taking up arms against threats to freedom. Younger me had no clue they were the tyranny themselves.

There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.

I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.

One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.

I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.

My family mellowed out a lot after the parents of the baby boomers died. The boomer generation gets a lot of flak online but for us it was the prior generations who were problematic.

Just like 3D film and television. The VR stuff surfaces periodically with another iteration of the tech.

I don’t think it’s really uncomfortable to say but whatever.

There used to be a digital social contract that we were all stewarding a global information database. That was before the era of “inflluencers” and information arbitrage. In other words people deriving monetized content from other content. Why would anyone want to do the leg work for some random jerk to take all for personal gain.

The whole proposition is a negative spiral. The paradigm changed from stewardship to something shit. This scroll zombie thing or whatever. We have the few users who are the “creators”. Everyone else are consuming whatever is fed to them. It has discouraged people from thinking for themselves and maybe even adding something to the pot.

One thing I’ve noticed the git repo snipers. People will camp on forks looking at your work. If you don’t submit to upstream then someone else will copy your patch(es) and make a pull request.

Also more generally things I do that I don’t publish to posts/blogs is liable to be sniped. So might as well keep it to myself unless I’m will to go the full mile making a big show of staking ownership.