General Discussion

Karp's a scarier dude than Thiel, imo.
None of them believe themselves to be bad guys. But they are.
Part of their banality of evil is that other oligarchs have held for a long time that de-population is needed. But not their own better behavior. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is too much for them to bother with.

Also been reading Cory Doctorow's open commons blog posts.

Doctorow says that Musk calls people NPC's -- non-player characters ...
"... when you are seeing like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things... Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are low agency...

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:..

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" – a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think: ...

Billionaires have to be ... at least selective solipsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over.
This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real. "

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

Whatever rationalizations they reveal, they are still a part of death cult capitalist fascism. There are good oligarchs and bad oligarchs, but I'm with Bernie -- humans deserve to live because they are born -- and we in America shouldn't have to be the only ones to sort them out.