Why Do Tech Billionaires Love Star Trek? SCRIPT
Added 2025-08-15 21:26:32 +0000 UTCHey all, here's a script for a new video! I'm g
Comments
Amazing work! I haven't read the full script but am impressed and grateful for all your research and connections. Re. more wealth "lifting all boats," the central justification of "traditional"* neoliberalism, it is, of course, BS. To the extent it has an empirical basis, it is probably the Kuznets curve (which I don't think you mentioned?), the inverted "U" curve that suggests that early industrialization worsens inequality (ex. 1820s England), but as more wealth allows more infrastructure, more schools, more cleaner tech, etc., inequality lessens (ex. 1950s England). The environmental Kuznets curve is similar: early industrialization pollutes, later innovations stem pollution. But more recent research shows a curve that is not an inverted "U" but an "N." After a period of reduced inequality/pollution, the growth imperative's demand for ever-increasing exploitation and extraction intensifies inequality/environmental degradation again. Experientially, 99% of us feel the truth of that at this point. Also, the Kuznets curve itself predates neoliberalism and was assuming a more traditionally liberal, Keynsian economy with actual public investment, not privatization of everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve * I say "traditional" (ex. Reagan) because current techbro discourse seems to be less "all boats will be lifted" than "who cares as long as I get to be more and more elite."
Arwen Spicer
2025-08-16 17:15:17 +0000 UTCI've always likened capitalists to dragons, but after reading this wonderful work of yours I'm realizing the tech billionaires are liches; sacrificing all life and light around them to try and be preserved in some, any form of unholy existence. They may love science fiction, but they don't understand science enough to realize that there's no coming back out of those bunkers to anything they'd be able to rule the way they do now, even if they did survive.
Lydia Nelson
2025-08-16 02:58:54 +0000 UTC
