I only became of aware of Bill Gates as more than a placeholder name once he’d transitioned into the Kinder Gentler Philanthropist Gates… but my lord is this video an eye-opener.
There are interesting content-related things to think about here, but I found myself surprised how strong my gut reaction was against the man. Some large portion of my emotional response stems from familiarity with the way scorn is flaking off his face in those clips. Yes, I’ve met a number of men who don’t care to conceal how irritated they are at having to waste their far more valuable time on whatever our necessary interaction is. Yes, a number who really think they’re So Smart and so much more Important than you that they don’t have to care how they come off to you.
It’s interesting how you can feel a throughline with the Zuck’s painstakingly media-coached persona, even though his successor goes to such lengths to try to not seem that way.
Yeah, Bill Gates is a sociopath. He stole IBM contract out from under Gary Kildall and Digital Research who made the CP/M OS which Microsoft completely ripped off to create DOS.
see you’re totally right but hearing things like that has never landed with me the way seeing that and going “oh one of THOSE guys” did
Add to that, that he himself is dragging out every question. Sure, it’s an interrogation, you ought to be cautious what you say and how it’s understood, but you don’t need to put the definition of every other word into question.
“if I just say the right words the legal leprechauns won’t be able to reclaim their gold”
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He alternates between petulant child and sociopath here. His ability to rehabilitate his image, and the cult of personality that people like him and elon musk cultivate is so disgusting to me. In the 90s, he was rightfully universally despised by everyone, but now he’s seen as a philanthro-capitalist savior by being the US’s main philanthropic NGO arm for world health. Here’s a really good post from a web developer in the 90s about how terrible a company microsoft was… they singlehandedly froze browser and operating system development for several years. Another one to add to my microsoft is awful list.
Also this podcast is quite good, if you’re into that thing:
Unfortunately its too late to do anything now (not that the first anti-trust suit had any meaningful effect). The US has dropped any semblance of being “anti-trust”, and they can never get away with bringing any anti-trust lawsuits against any of the big tech or finance companies again.
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I mean… if there were political will, they certainly could revise the standards on which anti-trust regulations are enforced to meet older standards (e.g., they used to care about regional inequality within the US which meant everything was regional-scale). I think this is plausible mostly because the electorate doesn’t really understand the system we had or the system we currently have, so it’s not like we’re all super attached to it.
Paint the government as out-of-touch policy wonks who had no idea how tech and real markets worked. And above all, deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case. The plan from Gates’ army of lawyers and PR handlers seemed to be to wield his image as a software wunderkind who dropped out of Harvard to bootstrap his company and went on to become the world’s richest man. Team Gates planned to use that same domineering force of will to beat back government lawyers.
Every tech bro has adopted this tactic. It works now as opposed to Gates’ era when people, especially the tech communities, saw him for what he is. They now have social media to rally everybody from tech geeks or the average Joe before them as idols.
These days people immediate write off anything legislative because government bad, all hail the tech bros.
