The tech world has been thoroughly hijacked by people whose greatest “ability” is leveraging their privilege & personality disorders to manipulate society into handing them more money & influence than where they started out.

Trigger for this rant: Elon Musk and others are STILL promoting the IMPOSSIBLE scheme of placing data-centers in Earth orbit. They even cite sci-fi misconceptions such as “space is cold”, rather than the ACTUAL fact: vacuum is an insulator (then there’s the insane cost of lifting all the necessary hardware out of the Earth’s gravity-well, maintenance, etc.— there are countless irrational assumptions involved here).

The mainstream media, long sabotaged by corporate greed for “line go up” Wall Street pathology, their journalistic offices now lacking in expertise & experience with critical thinking, doesn’t ask useful, probing questions, per their claimed PURPOSE for existence (one of the media mega-corps is owned by Musk’s main competitor in space narcissism, because Amazon Bezos recognized that controlling media = controlling narratives).

It’s utterly infuriating that billionaires, “investors”, legislators, and the media are all so ignorant about basic physics. This ignorance is why Musk and his ilk (looking at you, LLM voodoo priests) are STILL presumed to be geniuses. They aren’t. At best, they hire smart people (there are articles by actual journalists detailing how people working for Musk have had to work AROUND him because his arrogance and ignorance made their jobs HARDER).

It’s all ego and bullshitting, but money = success, and success = merit, according to the toxic culture we’ve long sustained in the USA.

People who think they know science because they obsess over certain fantasies of science-fiction are increasingly dangerous to civilization. Credulousness & obsession are BAD bedfellows. These people are great examples of what it means when someone is “smart enough to be dangerous”, without actually being smart enough to DO THE WORK of building [a nuclear bomb or] anything on their own: they can’t do the work, but they know how to trick others into doing it for them (and getting others to pay for it, too).

They don’t have even the low-level basics correct in what they promote/fund because they do not care about actual knowledge; they care ONLY about having the APPEARANCE of expertise, and some of them are so locked into their pathologies that they don’t know this about themselves (an inevitability when privileged people are surrounded by sycophants eager to exploit opportunities to ride their coattails to wealth & privilege themselves —even legitimately smart people are vulnerable to this trap).

As a person with a wide scope of familiarity in certain areas of science & technology, I’m quick to spot bullshit & myths (part of this is that I‘ve learned to ask “can we ACTUALLY do that” when sci-fi suggests a thing, and usually the answer is NO).

This isn’t me talking myself up. It’s me expressing how incredibly frustrating (maddening, even) it is to repeatedly witness people with supposedly higher credibility & competence demonstrate knowing less than I do about some of the things for which they’re pushing/determining policy, influencing culture, and impacting civilization.

These people are setting policy on what resources get spent, which projects are funded, who gets the resources, etc. When people like THIS are making the decisions, it’s a lot more likely for resources to go toward making them RICHER while wasting resources that could have gone into doing better things for ALL OF US.

Space flight is actually valuable & useful to ALL OF US (there used to be a fantastic website called WTFNASA that gave people lists of globally-beneficial things that came out of funding NASA & human spaceflight), but this data-center nonsense is not one of them. It’s just more grifting by people who’ve been tearing apart all the socially-supportive parts of our government for their own egos and personal benefit (Musk‘s DOGE may be responsible for millions of deaths over a few years).

Space flight is good; not all people promoting space projects are in it for the good of humanity, and they’re more apt to be in it for themselves when they’re egomaniacal billionaires with a history of self-serving grandiosity, spending years of their public lives promoting myths & lies.