An unsexy version of Mad Max
No high-speed chases
No glistening hot desert
No spontaneity
No leather
No fightback
No steampunk retrofuturistic mechanical machines
Docile Max
Trying to dominate his peers professionally
Climb the old corporate ladder
Get a mortgage
Avert the old gaze when the bombs drop
Busy on his phone
Max invests heavily in "beating death", too!
While living the most unsexy
Death-drive-focused
Life
(Ever?)
Headline: Zombie Beats Death!
The builders of our dystopia
Are not:
Fat Power-mad Greedy Scheming Cackling Tyrannical Kings
They are, in fact:
Software Engineers
One question we must answer:
Who better embodies the "Patrick Bateman" of software
The likes of Samuel Harris Altman, or William Henry Gates III
Or your average Big Tech Coder?
For me, the viciousness of S. Altman and Willy G3 is too broad
Dare I even say - complex.
While the BTC has no vision to speak of
The BTC attends Agile meetings and Scrums and writes Features
The BTC gets very worked up about types
The BTC loses it on HN when a new language doesn't have an example on its home page
The BTC either (i) jumped on corpo-LLMs with vigor, or (ii) with a heavy heart
The BTC has a blog where they write about how they set up their blog
If the BTC is allowed to procreate, before adulthood arrives their child won't be let within fifteen feet of an internet-capable device unless they've personally set up DNS blocking on a Pi-Hole or something similar. Their child has a boombox and CDs, and picks DVDs for movie night in the library. No streaming, no social media, no scrolling, no porn, no ads, no apps, no phone in the first place, thousands and thousands of websites perma-banned, impossible to access through the firewall...
These people know what they made (often)
But the money goes tinkle tinkle in their pockets
So loud
They simply can't hear other people's children scream
And society comes asunder
At the seams
As the distance between us grows