Byline Supplement — Demanding the End of Tech Troll Domination
My latest investigation in Byline Supplement exposes and debunks ‘The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro’
Thank you to everyone who supports my work here and at Byline Times and Byline Supplement.
As I reported yesterday in my road trippin’ with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s ‘Strongmen’ essay, ‘The fastest way to lose your life to a strongman is to publicly denounce his corruption.’
And yet, without gutsy independent investigative journalists the world would be a much darker place. Sunlight on authoritarian corruption is the way.
So when Ruth Ben-Ghiat — in a Lucid session — mentioned the cult of the ‘genius’ tech bro — I grabbed on to her words and investigated the origins of that cult, and the myths it was built on. Today, the report was published in Byline Supplement…
Here is an excerpt:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
They were treated as special — tech wunderkinds who possessed magical powers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel etc…
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appearing in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist Professor David Carroll in the film The Great Hack. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site, he said.
And it wasn’t that long ago when Elon Musk was a deified ‘star man’.
The world thought he was really special.
Then he bought Twitter, and starting posting Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references.
Many were shocked. Those who knew him from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, and the plethora of dewy deifying tech cover stories couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
But those who’d been paying closer attention saw it coming, as we did here in our report Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Truth.
The Bag Men
The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out the initial funding. As the Guardian reported in 2017:
“Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads…
To read the full report, please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement and support a small, vital team of global investigative reporters.
If you are unable to do so, please email me at bettedangerous@gmail.com as I have permission from our editorial team to share the report with Bette Dangerous and Lucid members.
As always, I am glad you are here.
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