Tech mob brainrot
Just another day in the life of a tech industry apparatchik.
Today we’re gonna tear down something I stumbled across that has the exact kind of intersection of tech and politics that I excel with: the apparent falling off of Jeff Atwood.
Now, I had no idea this happened at all and discovered it by accident after clicking home from a 2006 article about DirectX 9.0c versioning problems. I must emphasise to you that this article was more than just on-par for readership expectations – it was so concise and typical that it fit in its entirety in a single screencap despite the long screenshot embedded within. Observe:
Conversely, this is what the home page shows today:
Holy shit. Where do I even start.
I suppose the best way to give you my first impression upon seeing this horror that has nothing to do with coding is that it reminded me of a sentiment forwarded to me by a good friend about the descent into right-wing echo-chamber politics of Computing Forever. They conveyed to me this grounded confusion that only the insane dismiss: “I clicked on Computing Forever expecting videos about computing, and WTF it’s all racism now. What happened?”
That’s basically how I felt upon parsing this pile of radioactive crap at the first pass. “I clicked on Coding Horror expecting coding horror, and WTF it’s Thielian UBI evangelism. What happened?”
I had to dive into it at least a little bit to get the broad strokes because, to be absolutely clear, I have a massive personal stake in efforts in the vein of “effectively helping those most in need”. All told, it’s a layered shitshow of personal delusions, luxury beliefs and a lack of self-awareness from the author that he’s been propagandised (or potentially even brainwashed considering his proximity to the source of this nuclear hazard) into supporting political initiatives that will effectively end public political participation in America while framing it as salvation for that public.
To start off, Jeff missed the memo that most Americans right now—especially younger ones—are living in the wreckage of years of cumulative negative cashflow positions. In simpler terms, their wages haven’t been paying for shit for a good while now, so they don’t have money to donate to pet causes like Jeff does. This relative poverty goes hand-in-hand with a loss of public notoriety if they ever would have had any, so their ability to evangelise about this is also moot. All the American public can do stand by, waiting to be victimised by this. This makes me wonder, who the fuck is Jeff referring to when he addresses ‘Americans’? Is this one of those Thielian sleights-of-hand where they pretend to be talking to you when they really mean their friends?
I should have expected this shit. This is blatantly ripped off from the Carnegie playbook on how robber barons can apologise for their wealth without giving up any control of it. “Make universities and parks so you can point to them as an example of how you’re actually a Good Person as a form of gaslighting to thwart your opponents who want to stop you from funding Latin American death squads or enabling catastrophic mining accidents.”
You know we can do this ourselves, right? We don’t need billionaire middlemen to improve society. We are society. It’s literally us and everything around us. Healthy, earnest representative political participation is the solution to society’s problems because it allows concrete solutions to emerge from within instead of being imposed from above, which stifles opportunities for corruption and minimises the energy costs of actually figuring out what people need.
By the way, for what it’s worth since this often plugs into the fantasy of ‘neofeudalism’: it’s a lie implied by the structure of the proposal but never explicated. Calling their totalitarian despotism ‘neofeudalism’ implies there will be some kind of ‘deal’ with the peasantry that, however unfair, means that they can reasonably expect bread and pussy like real medieval serfs could. In reality, this new fascism is even worse than Nazi Germany, because they’re not even going to bother building the death camps to deal with the nuisance of you. The plan is more like you’ll take care of yourself by having a death of despair and normal paramedics can take your corpse away, keeping their hands clean while burying the lede of their negligence and complicity in your death. As I said on the campaign website, their future doesn’t include you.
Before we continue, I want to address the elephant in the room that is UBI, and very briefly explain why it is a giant Trojan horse in the current political context: the power brokers advancing this right now through mouthpieces like Jeff intend for it to be a replacement for the very pretense of an open and (relatively) free market economy. This should be fairly self-evident with how long they have been threatening to fire everyone forever because of AI, and then doing it anyway even though the AI doesn’t work because things are so consolidated at this point that there is no meaningful competition happening in any major sector of the economy anymore. UBI means the end of you having any ability to change your circumstances by your own free will. They will have you waiting in line, playing far more fraudulent games not so different from their phoney startup incubators, knowing all the while that the results have been rigged and their rich friends, associates and their trouser stain children were already betrothed to the grand prize. They think you’re stupid enough to fall for this and that’s why they’re doing it, hoping you’ll take the bait, falling for it again, believing that these Silly-Con Valley assholes who have been conning everyone for decades actually want to give you free fucking money because they love America so much. No, they want control. That’s all they’ve ever wanted, because billions of dollars isn’t filling the hole in their gaping black hearts so they need to surreptitiously kill everybody.
These fundraising numbers are the philanthropy equivalent of trying to solve third world poverty via immigration. It’s a total failure to appreciate the scale of effect, let alone the second order consequences, and to top it all off it’s embarrassingly ironic coming from people whose industry regards scaling as a cornerstone of their credibility.
The write-up is so myopic; it’s premised like we don’t already have institutions that actually fucking handle this problem (yes, in the social dimension), like the Federal Reserve. The feckless cowards don’t want to deal with the reality that the admin just nominated Yuppie Cocksucker Extraordinaire to be in charge of that this month. No, that’s Just According to Keikaku™ to continue down the path of the controlled demolition of American governance by appointing pliant idiots to key positions who are easy to manipulate into doing their bidding on command. $50 million raised is an open insult to economists and policymakers – it’s a direct statement of contempt for them by its insinuation that the public doesn’t care about what they do, only the propaganda. They’re making taunts with millions to establishments that deal in billions, or in the case of monetary policy, in trillions. The Fed might be one of the organs that ought to do what they’re describing, but they can’t take it over and so they’ll just create their own with blackjack and hookers while trying to undermine it from within.
One of the things people forget about mafias is that they were never a unified front—quite the opposite—and the tech mafia is perfectly in line with that description. They have a long history of doing this exact sort of strategy: building their own desired thing when other stakeholders don’t give in to their demands, while engaging in protracted subterfuge to undermine the opposition into caving into them anyway. That’s precisely what Google and pals did when they created WHATWG – an initiative that was nothing more than a coup d’état of the Worldwide Web Consortium – because the mob wanted to force the entirety of computing as we know it into a web browser and the W3C wasn’t playing along. Did you know that idea didn’t begin with Google, but rather the conspicuous Marc Andreessen, who somehow has nothing directly to do with the Chrome initiative that happens to implement the very dream he espoused in the 90s with his lifting of Mosaic from the University of Chicago? Are you starting to see why it makes sense to regard these people as a mafia now?
Whaaat? Netscape Navigator was once upon a time the Big Bad? And how on earth was this predictive description of it perfectly matching what Chrome is now, not only as the browser but as the replacement for the operating system a la ChromeOS? Are these guys genies or something?
In fact, Firefox is a case study in reputational laundering and narrative management. They flipped the script for themselves for free by recasting the same product under a new company and new name, and on top of it they got to get some punches up on the big bad Billy G by being a special guest in his company’s antitrust trial. It was nothing but winning all around and somehow even as Chrome is ten times more monopolising today than Microsoft ever thought about being with IE, nobody cares. Strange how that works, isn’t it? Are you starting to see why it makes sense to regard these people as a mafia now?
Too late, Jeff. The damage is already done. But that was the point, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll take great glee in gaslighting anyone who idly complains about this heaping pile of shit you posted that you’ve already accommodated the likes of them, so they need to pipe down and quit complaining that you’ve fried your brain for Thiel’s death cult. All optics, zero truth.
In general, UBI studies are little more than meta case studies on the propensity for social studies to serve as mere reputational laundering machines for the power apparatus – much like it did in the Soviet Union, to catastrophic effect. There are fundamental questions of economics and psychology at hand here that cannot be captured for meaningful examining in a fucking study, no matter how ‘big’ you claim that study is.
This is the same playbook used with open source software, by the way: 90% of projects are either one-off resume fodder or they’re a living plea from the authors to be picked up by the same vulture capitalists that own everything, because it’s no longer practical to build anything substantive on existing computing platforms due to the immense burden of maintenance. They slap the word Open in front of everything like that makes it sanctioned by God, and subvert the people doing the work at the root so there’s never any energy to oppose this without blowing up your career. Game, set, match.
See what I’m saying? It’s all posturing, no substance. Until the tech mob switched sides this used be brutally criticised as cargo culting Science™ worship. Strange how that angle vanished somehow just in time for them to start doing it again from the right. Honestly, these websites are less examples of the virtues of open source and more case studies in just how socially inept programmer-executives can be – Discourse’s feed format being inherently scatterbrained compared to the established form of boards, forums, subforums and threads, and Stack Overflow being an implementation of democracy so naïve that it got completely captured by the users and has needed to be propped up by corporate to maintain any pretense of credibility. Yeah, these are not your star quarterbacks when it comes to openness or ‘what works’.
The only thing I really need to say about this bit is that ‘trickle up’ has no consistent difference in definition from ‘trickle down’. It’s a secondhand buzzword that still refers to trickle down economics—where you give rich people all the money and hope they share, even though they don’t have to—that they’re hoping you’re too stupid to notice because they swapped the directionality of the buzzword. Jeff is literally advocating for trickle down economics in 2026. The guy is so cooked.
I thought it was funny in a dark way that this point contains a tacit admission that they’re stakeholders in the very same organisations they’re claiming to get all this wonderful study data from. Really drives home the thesis that this is a gigantic public policy scam where they are making up basically all the inputs and outputs as they go along. Zero truth anywhere in this trash.
My God, Jeff! Why didn’t you say something sooner?
Mercer County is exactly where both of my parents laid their heads from crib to college. God even willed it that I had been fated to have a political connection to it all my own, and I still stop by there on occasion to see the friends I’ve made since.
This is incredible because I’ve got a great opportunity for you that will make you feel like a kid on Christmas once you hear it. Not only am I that very salt of the earth that you’re after, but I can give you so much value for your investment in poor little me.
You’re so generous for taking it on faith that we just have to help those in need wherever they are, but I’ve got wonderful news for you about that: you won’t have to in my case. The work is already there, happening for years and just waiting to be funded. Have you ever heard of the Dynabook concept? I’m sure you’ve seen Pirates of Silicon Valley at least once. Remember how they explained that Steve and Bill had a ‘rich neighbour’ called Xerox, and they were stealing everything they could from their PARC? Well, the Dynabook was the ultimate intention of the PARC. It was so ambitious and central to their developments that Apple and Microsoft failed to steal it, though they tried.
Not only do I have the missing theory needed to realise it according to Alan Kay’s vision, I have already been productising it and downsizing the research efforts to build towards it effectively. That’s what I’ve been doing in my off hours for the bulk of 2025: Sirius DOS, and a lot of computers from the mid-1990s when PC architectures weren’t yet consolidated around x86. Mechanicalism is the secret sauce the world has been waiting for to properly realise affordable computing. I call it Anodyne.
This is the opportunity of a lifetime for you. I’m absolutely not kidding about any of this; I am dead serious about every detail and the impact it’s going to have. Fair warning, it’s going to cost ~$20 million to really get started including office leases and wages and all that, but that’s well within your reach since you raised more than double that to buy diapers for my extended relatives so I’m sure you can lead the round to success. Then I can open up shop in Washington’s Penn Quarter like I always intended, focussing like hell for the couple of years we’re going to need to get to product.
Just think about what you’ve got here. An old Appalachian boy like yourself, and the upside is already baked in from the get-go for you. You don’t have to cross your fingers that I’m going to be a wunderkind; I already am. You don’t have to hope that I’ll dream up something cool one day that will change everything for the better for all of humanity; I already did. And I’m a sitting duck right here waiting for literally anyone to take up the offer. You’re so generous to put all this money out for the hillbillies expecting so little in return; but right here you can make a far greater positive impact for humanity that’s essentially guaranteed by the fact that I already did all the hard thinking alone for free. I just need to put it into a device so people can experience it – batteries that last for weeks, monitors coupled to their graphics processors, the obsolescence of drivers and the end of software maintenance as we know it – the world wants this. The world will kill for this. And you can make it happen Jeff.
In case you still think I’m being disingenuous or playing on some level about the opportunity, let me cap it with one more earnest piece of truth: I don’t think you will do any of this in a million fucking years, because you’re completely and terminally full of shit about your angle of ‘social do-gooding’ via tech. To be clear, I could be wrong, but I rarely am, and believe me, I don’t enjoy being right at this point in the game. I just can’t stand the lies others are content to live with when things just aren’t working, with the neverending Ponzi scams and all the social ruin because guys like Thiel can’t experience love and want to make that everyone else’s problem.
You won’t lift a finger to help make any of this happen even though it matters supremely to everything you’ve ever known. Indeed, I will continue scraping by with no truth and no earnestness from an industry that has been emptied of goodwill by yuppies and out-of-touch 50-year-olds who think they worked hard but forgot how much help they had in getting their start and aren’t passing any of it on to the next generations. And finally, I will continue on my warpath to get into Congress or some place like it, because—as I’ve always said—this is the most direct path to arresting the corruption that is actually ruining life for the American people. The only thing that is unique about me in this struggle is that I am merely the first domino to fall. My suffering is the same as theirs in nature and can only be distinguished as a matter of degree. Soon, the middle classes will join me in despair at the destruction players like you are helping create.
You will dismiss or ignore the luminary who possesses the crown jewel of Xerox PARC, because you don’t have any sense of duty to humanity about your place in the tech industry or even society itself. You ape into shit like Stay Gold to lie to yourself—and the world—that you Care™ when you really really really fucking don’t. That’s where I’m putting my money, because I’ve been through this shit too many times by now and seen too many others continue to believe, including myself at times, to their own peril, that this was ever going to go any other way for us. Prove me wrong. If this really isn’t about you and you are literate enough to parse what is in front of you, you wouldn’t hesitate to. But I know you won’t. So I carry on.
I’m spelling this out because it’s the truth, and because it must be recorded for posterity. God forbid that people never learn or later forget the gross negligence committed against the Anodyne to their computing pains.
This is not for me. This is for them. Once they have it they will understand what was being withheld by the arrogance of the tech mafia, and until they do, I must carry on with it. I’m not going to let our world be subsumed into the bank accounts of the preeminent international crime syndicate and loaned back to us at interest, and you’re a giant tool for proselytising for it. You are going to hell unless you change your ways.