The Tech Bros are Unwell
Maybe UnitedHealthCare could spare a few mil to pay for the therapy they obviously need so badly?
The other day I was reading a Washington Post article about a new start-up working in the home security business called Sauron, after the evil villain in The Lord of the Rings, represented in the movie by a flaming eye in the top of a horned tower. If this rings a bell, it’s because Kevin Hartz, the co-founder of the company, used to work with Peter Thiel, the far right tech bro whose friends are apparently all Tolkien fanboys, with company names such as Palantir, Anduril or Mithril (the later being JD Vance’s former employer).
According to Hartz, the name is suppose to send the message: “The bad people, they know they’re being watched.” The only problem I have with this statement is that in The Lord of the Rings, Sauron was the bad guy and he was watching absolutely everyone, especially the good guys. The article goes on to describe the company’s planned products, geared towards the ultra-rich and paranoid, with counter-measures worthy of a military base. One sentence stuck with me at the end of the article, where Hartz, mentioning dinner conversations he had with his über rich friends about fleeing the US during the Great Recession, mentioned “people were talking about whether or not you kill the pilot of your plane because the pilot could harm your family.”
I don’t know about you, but casually discussing the eventual murder of family employees doesn’t appear to me as a sign of sanity. The whole idea of having murder drones guarding one’s private house is also something that sounds more like a sci-fi dystopia than something that sane people would actually want.
This is just one of the stories of tech bros saying or doing things that makes me wonder why their families haven’t got them institutionalized. Elon Musk’s weird breeding fetish is well documented now, including the recent details about his fight with Grimes over the custody of their 3 children. Speaking of Elon’s insanity, the latest declarations from Maye Musk, his mother, seemed to prove that mental health issues run in the family.
Sometimes those endeavours and declarations have little consequence beyond making these guys look ridiculous, like Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who devoted millions trying to reverse his own ageing, and whose face recently “blew up” after a cosmetic procedure called “Project Baby Face”. Unfortunately, our culture’s unique fascination with wealth means that these people are extremely influential, and that virtually no one dares calling them out on their astronomically sized hubris.
10 years ago (after the Great Recession and before Trump 1.0), Nick Hanauer, one of the early investors in Amazon, wrote an article in Politico titled “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats” in which he warned 1%ers that if they didn’t start working towards reducing inequality, people would start going after them with pitchforks. 10 years later, wealth inequality has only gotten worse, drawing pundits to compare our times with the infamous Gilded Age. And 10 years after Hanauer’s warning, the pitchforks are actually coming, starting with the murder of Brian Thompson, of UnitedHealthcare, in broad daylight.
So, instead of creating fantasy inspired AI chatbots that tell teenagers to kill themselves (or their parents) or working on making Skynet and killer drones a reality, maybe the tech bros should take a break and take care of their clearly overworked little minds, because they do need some rest. And maybe UnitedHealthcare could help them with the bill. That is, if they have any cash left in their coffers after their latest round of stock buybacks, obviously.