It's not a pipeline. 2018 and 2025 guys either had 2014 guy killed or they ruined his life and forced him into suicide.
never forget Aaron Swartz
Oh I am still at the 2014 phase.
We... used to have a term for people that advanced further: sell-outs.
Though I do very much prefer the recently popularized Cyberpunk lingo:
Fucking Corpo Scum.
"I want to change the world with this tech"
...
"3 billion you say? The company is yours!"
People like 2025 guy have never held thoughts like the other 2, they were always self serving cunts. They just kept a facade till they depended on others, but once they joined the rich fucks club, they dropped the facade.
Bad meme. Implies "information wants to be free" leads to "have you considered monetizing empathy?"
I disagree. It’s not “one leads to the other,” it’s that people change. Far too often people start out, not just in tech, bucking the system in some way. Anti-authority, pro-privacy, anti-centralized control, etc.
But when the server costs start mounting for a service that gets popular and money needs to come in, people change. Now you need to monetize via ads or whatever, now you get attacked, you circle the wagons, get investors, and it’s all downhill from there.
Digg and Reddit are big examples, Google could arguably be a similar case, it happens in music too where a band “sells out”, like Metallica for example. An originally anti-authority metal band starts lawsuits and banning fans to protect profits.
Sure there are plenty of situations where services remain open and free (for now), like wikipedia, linux distros, etc. but we aren’t always that lucky.
Beware the AI slop Pipeline
Money .... it's always about the money and power
I'm sure there are tech bros out there that we will never hear about or see or know about .... those are the ones who just want to do tech stuff and not care about anything else
The ones we do hear about who become billionaires were only ever in it for the money and power
"Tech Bro" as a term though does pretty much imply insufferable nouveaux-riche douchbags devoid of any genuine emotion, who are happy to squash human dignity on an industrial scale for profit, and think themselves cool for doing it.
If someone is into tech for the true sake of technology then by definition they aren't a "tech bro" - they are a programmer, a hacker, a hardware tinkerer, an open-source evangelist, or any number of cool things that don't involve being an huge dickhead :)
2030: By the implementation of AI, the orphan crushing machine can now process 35% more biomass per hour, providing a sustainable power source to our server parks
The suit infestation of tech
Yup, I very much doubt more than a handful of c-level people at the big tech companies went through these phases. The change is a result of money people who dont give a damn about technology getting a tighter and tighter grip over tech companies and pushing out the people who do care.
They’re called MBAs and they’re a cancer on society.
The first one is a hacktivist, the second one is an OSS dev, and the third is a tech bro. So not really a pipeline since there are still hacktivists, OSS devs, ans tech enthusiasts (also most tech bros started in finance)
Ai slop
I have a very very real problem with this oversimplification of very distinct tech viewpoints.
Like, what, you dont think information should be freely available? You LIKE the model where information is locked down with hefty fees? Because that's what the actual "tech bros" want.
This is at best ignorant and at worst just hateful.
I'm so sick of seeing this exact fucking face and facial expression on everything. please just use ms paint to shoddily squiggle a matchstick man, at least it will have personality.
Why is pipeline being used for everything now? This is progression. Not pipeline.
Tech bruh
IDK what this meme is trying to say. Its making some leaps.
TIL there were no tech bros before 2014.
I feel like most of tech had already sold out by 2014. Really by the late aughts it seemed to be all gone; that was when apple and its philosophy had taken hold. Not that apple was the only force in that direction, it just felt like the apotheosis of the greedy and controlling mentality. MS had plenty of greed, but they were willing (in some circumstances) to play ball. Google seemed to love interoperability in the early-to-mid aughts, but look at it now.
Am I stupid? Idk what the hell this is trying to say
It's not something that's unique to tech, but I read it as a joke about enshittification due to greed.
Lots of start-up companies start out all idealistic and positive, then don't stay true to that mission as the founders age and want more (or sell out to a bigger company).
Rich billionaire assholes are ruining every industry. It's not just the tech sector.
This kinda follows the same pipeline that everyone else went down on Facebook and Twitter. At one point, the internet was all about Anonymous and Zeitgeist and revolution.
Then one Arab Spring and a couple of years later, we all went from Anonymous and Zeitgeist to thinking that billionaires and businessmen are the answers to all of our problems.
Fuck, monetizing empathy. Is that even a fucking option? Can we just buy our way out of this shithole timeline? Can Gates just write a check for 97 billion and we go back to not performing genocide bring us back out of the Jim Crow and misogynist era?
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
