Most of us with career-track jobs use electronic deposit to an account at a bank, and keep things there. The account is "yours", and the trust is established over time--most people using most banks continue having access to their deposit of record most of the time. When that fails, you get a bank run--which is systemically undesirable, but also ends with people not having "their" money. They thought it was theirs, but it turned out not to be.

If your bank started publishing poorly-written notices about how they'd terminate accounts and retain holdings for certain customers based on arbitrary behavior, and kept changing that definition, would you leave "your" money there--even if the only alternative were to purchase precious metals and lock them up yourself?

edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.

Billionaires are modern day monarchs, divorced from the experience of hoi polloi. I don’t say this (in this present moment) out of simple complaint or sloganeering, though both are easily applied. The argument I’m making is that gaining and/or living with sufficiently ludicrous wealth—orders of magnitude beyond what most of us plebs would retire on—leads _inextricably_ to living a life that is so utterly different that people lose completely the understanding of what the majority of the population actually does with their days. It almost doesn’t matter if the person who gains this level of wealth was “good” or “bad” or whatever qualifier you want to apply.

This isn’t a new or a fresh take. It’s a tale as old as…well, I’m comparing to monarchy. But it bears restating, because the folks that are empowered to make sweeping changes to the systems that we all live under cannot actually relate to what most of those changes feel like. This is less of an individual moral failing than a structural one—though when the structure is being driven by the selfsame individuals, I guess there’s plenty of blame to go around.

It isn’t so surprising that someone raised with generational wealth would have such blinders—and in fact I find that fairly forgivable on the individual basis, though damning of the system that allows that to happen while there’s still people unhoused and unfed.

Perhaps more surprising (and maybe serving as a warning to the rest of us) is that it’s visibly possible to have and to then lose that perspective and ability to relate. This is most visible with folks whose public work precedes their extreme wealth. Jerry Seinfeld still writes comedy—but it doesn’t hit like his earlier works, since there isn’t a shared reality. Our own Paul Graham’s earlier essays have aged, but a fair number of them still ring true; his more recent works barely make a blip here, and with reason.

Marc Andreessen might be right for himself. Or he might be dead wrong. But his advice and writings are effectively useless to the rest of us either way. There’s no shared “there” there.

> The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

> As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

I find myself doing this a lot, and I’m sure even more slips without my notice.

Now let's start preparing for the next one.