It's the other way around. Billionaires lack something: the sense of working to get things. True sense of value. I want billionaires to acquire this precious feeling.
(Ok, a more cynical speculation is that he's the one who has changed due to his enormous wealth, and he no longer actually aligns with the Democratic party of 20 years ago; but he'd never consider, let alone admit, such a thing.)
For a Very Online person like Altman (or me, for that matter), it's easy to assume everyone knows.
He's referring to the (very modest) Democratic turn against Silicon Valley. It started with the demonization of Meta and Twitter during Covid, and it's what caused Zuckerberg, A16z, and a lot of other newly-right tech people to become Republicans too.
For the record, I think Altman is deeply out of touch with normal people and it's always frustrating to hear billionaires cry about being bullied, but he does have a point that Democrats are no longer tech optimists in general.
Anecdotally, I've found recently it's more often than not the doomers who need the ice water thrown on them. That's usually where I'm hearing the incoherent zealot ranting style takes, and even in relatively "normal" circles like the art world there are many that basically want to shut the entire project down and are blind to the benefits.
I'm a systems thinker, and a system is perfectly tuned to get the outcomes it does. If you want the outcome changed, you have to change the system. There's too much rent seeking, and too much power centered around woefully too few fools to keep one another from dicking around too extravagantly with it.
More parties in the US would be great, but right now it doesn't look feasible. Maybe we can convince enough people to support a new party, or shrink government, if the alternative gets us too close to Civil War or governance is too unpredictable, which mutually hurts all Americans (and benefits China).
tareqak•7mo ago
PaulHoule•7mo ago
Billionaires have to face up to taking an L once in a while. When you suppress the left to the extent that (in Germany) the SPD says “we can’t afford the welfare state” pretty soon the AfD is saying “… we can if we get rid of the migrants.”
Mandami is terrifying to those people because he’s a plain spoken person who talks to ordinary people about issues that they care about and doesn’t use weird words that scare away minorities and working class people. Guess what, billionaires can pay a little more tax and still… live their lives.