#socialMedia didn't invent #bigotry, but it turbocharged it

1. a bigot can be their true selves online with few consequences

2. moderation is a cost. say "freeze peach," gut the mod dept, and save $

3. "don't feed the trolls"? outrage means clicks and eyeballs, good engagement metrics. for-profit social media is incentivized to push bigotry

so fuck social media?

nope

clean it the fuck up

luddite mental gymnastics won't make social media disappear

the problem

is bigotry

I'm disagreeing with both, and making the explicit point that "tech companies" is an unclear term that hides the real point. It's not tech companies.

Because most tech companies don't act like this. It's a tiny fraction of tech companies, that just so happen to overlap with the ones run by people that write papers and blog posts like "I hate society, and my own employees, and my own children, and people I don't even know thousands of miles away in Africa, and also, you!"

Most tech companies don't do this. Most are relatively normal.

Eg Mastodon is a tech company.

Every solo Indy game dev is a tech company.

Every self-employed software engineer is a tech company.

Etc.

The distinction is important, because this extends well beyond tech companies.

There was a Dean Koontz book which had a plot revolving roughly around "Either someone you love or a random stranger has to die tomorrow: you choose which one."
So I know I'm not as nice a person as I like to pretend.
I think part of the problem is around the remoteness of consequences from actions. As a for instance, a number of people in the current US administration who view waging war as little more than a video game- the consequences don't impact them personally, therefore they don't matter.

"1) technologists, 2) that are genocidal maniacs, 3) and that allocate most of society's resources"

then maybe focus on the "genocidal maniac" part, or the "most of society's resources" part, before the technology part.

Thought experiment:
If you could press a button tomorrow, that would cause 50% of the entire population of the continent of Africa to die within 5 years, but would 50X your profits and create dozens of trillion dollar companies, and help humanity become interplanetary 10 years earlier, would you press it?

If you're on this weird little Mastodon thing reading this, then you are most likely:
1) A technologist of some sort
2) Not a genocidal maniac

So you would of course say no.

Some of you suspect that I'm going to *imply* that many VCs would say yes. But I'm not going to imply anything. I don't have to. Because many of these VCs have written papers and blog posts under their real names, celebrating the fact that they believe that it's wrong *not* to press that button.‍️

The problem with VC is neither the profit motive, nor the business structure.

The problem is that the vast majority of the funds that our entire society uses to solve hard problems, are controlled and allocated by people that believe that it is their duty to create new buttons like the one above, and then mash it repeatedly.