“Thanks, I'm 300 tokens short for rent this month.”
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
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This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store.
At least you could buy food with company script. Tech bros have really invented company script, but worse.
This is exactly how the banana massacre in Colombia took place 100 years ago. Workers were being paid in United Fruit Company bonds, which caused revolts and protests, the US government threatened to invade to protect the company's interests, so the Colombian government deployed the army to suppress the protests and murdered thousands of farmers.
This still shapes Colombian politics to this day, has appeared in A Hundred Years of Solitude, and has absolutely helped power the leftist movements in the country since. The parliament and president have constantly referenced this instance in recent years too as examples of American neocolonialism.
It's a tale as old as time.
it’s amazing what knowing even a lick of history can do, hey?
Don't worry, the Colombian right wing has done its absolute best to victim blame the farmers, or to diminish the atrocity or to claim it was a necessary sacrifice.
Meanwhile the Colombian guerrillas did their absolute best to shit on the popular movements that fueled them initially by allying themselves with drug traffickers and committing atrocities themselves against rural civilian populations.
So basically the Colombian civilians of the 20th century were sandwiched between an overzealous fascist right wing and a violent and reckless left wing.
Nowadays both sides are politically mostly rhetorical and the left wing is far less violent while the right wing is more careful about their image after losing elections and Congress seats to the left.
Just a heads up that its "scrip" not "script" :3
In this context it’s a good pun though.
That isn't lost on me but it didn't seem like an intentional one (if it was I blame my autism)
Well that's embarrassing, it's literally in the part I quoted.
but they did it from first principles and without needing to update their priors!
…..snrk
Yes, at least that company script could buy you real stuff, food etc. AI tech bros want to pay you in hot air. Anyhow, isn't that illegal even in the US? It surely is in the EU.
We didn’t have many worker protections prior to this president and they just completed the biggest deregulation in history by far gutting the few agencies that investigated violations of labor law. Thiel, Karp and Musk have been very clear about their intentions to destroy democracy and replace it with feudalism supported by big tech. The EU will follow if you don’t stop supporting fascists because these tech companies have already infiltrated your governments.
The US Tech oligarchs are certainly spending a fortune on corruption (ie lobbying) on national and EU level, however to mixed success so far. The biggest threat to us are Russia's fifth column, right (but also some left) populist autocrats. Those things are going hand in hand however. Those populists are ready to not only sell us out to Russia but to any foreign power willing to pay. Take the lead candidate of the AfD for the previous EU election. He was shown to have been bought not only by Russia but China as well. I am sure, he would have gladly worked for US tech oligarchs as well, if the AfD would not have frozen him out a bit, not for selling out to foreign powers but for getting caught red handed.
It is up to the voters to vote for or against those people. Sadly, my confidence in this regard is rather low. It is shocking how similar the 2020s are to the 1920s. I am not looking forward to the 2030s.
Are none of them offering to convert their own wealth into AI tokens to signal their support for this new amazing system? Why not?
Hopefully they run out of cash flow asap.
as I said elsewhere: I suspect this is happening because cash is becoming tighter
It really looks like this is getting to the end. Somewhat paradoxically, I am on the edge on the issue, nearly being forced to join the LLM hype. I think this is the indicator.
Gotta see what remains after bubble pops.
This just sounds like shittier crypto 2.0
Labor theory of value, but worse
watching the saltman interview (in this frame) is…so much worse
I was planning to get drunkwatch it but I haven’t really had the headspace to get that mad this week
Sorry. That's not legal tender.
@dgerard lol. GTFO
Please sir, may I have a scrap of context?
Read the Business Insider article prominently linked in the source. They are creating the pretense of oh so scarce AI tokens critical for career success of programmers to push for a modern, more useless version of company scrip. Something outlawed back in the days following the industrial revolution for a reason.
Why are people hating on / blocking dgerard?
Fill me in, I've never heard of that user.
oxy is a mastodon user who follows David so they’re most likely telling the AI startups in question to GTFO and lemmy has kindly reinterpreted that as a tag
however,
Why are people hating on / blocking dgerard?
let’s go down the list! depending on the subculture, you’re blocking dgerard because:
- you’re a Scientologist and interacting with dgerard will cost you your Operating Thetan rank
- you’re a Rationalist and have read the Lightcone Infrastructure memo about how dgerard is the devil, beating out all other contenders for most evil being on the earth
- you’re a cryptocurrency gambler and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
- you run an AI startup and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
- you’re on the far right and dgerard won’t let you edit misinformation straight into Wikipedia
there are more, we can go deeper
You're an AI addict who has been one shotted and you are deeply in denial about the technology. DGerard is calling your favourite drug "a bad thing"
@pulsewidth I have no idea. I was reacting to the shenanigans reported in the video
Well I've definitely misinterpreted.
This might be a UI issue, because I see the post as coming from 'David Gerard@awful.systems' and then I see your comment as
@dgerard gtfo. Lol
Which to me I interpreted as 'lol this is David Gerard - gtfo here'. Especially with the reply from second user, "thanks, blocked".
Mastodon just adds the username in the comment when replying to a Lemmy post or comment. It seems to be possible to remove the @-tag manually, but many people don't do that.
P.S. This also kinda illustrates how people tend to reply to the imaginary correspondent, even with rather rude language, when actually their replies go to the OP.
adding to the confusion, the shithead who replied with “thanks, blocked” is, I’m fairly certain, already banned from our instance
anyway yeah the lemmy/mastodon interop has many sharp edges
at least the federation works even with auth fetch these days. (and yeah, it's a nice jank, the very different reply styles, the way the posts + replies are handled etc.)
[x] Doubt