this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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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.
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well duh if you break down an analogy it breaks down dawg.
I think dgerard has hit upon a microcosm with this post. I’ve half joked about it elsewhere but this project of collective fun and whimsy and its fate is a crystallization of the life of liberal optimism from early 2015 onward. Hillary was predicted to win, Marvel movies hadn’t majorly fallen out of favor yet, and most people weren’t hip to the tech industry being the sociopathic behemoth that it always has been. But then, as we know, all that rosy-cute whimsy was shot to shreds like a Cincinnati gorilla.
Look where we are today. Canada and Europe are also facing the rising tide of fascism. Western governments are still by and large facilitating a genocide through Israel. That the author, probably not some scholar of geopolitics, had the wisdom in 2015 that liberal optimism was a pile of garbage should be lauded.
I still remember the outcry when Harambe was shot. Shit truly does feel like the point where everything began turning to shit.
Someone I know argued that Harambe's death led to Trump's election, and its been burned into my mind ever since:
Unironically, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk (and IIRC Kanye West) used the death of Harambe to spread conspiracy theories. They use a playbook designed by Steve Bannon:
dicks out for harambe
I understand that the ~Vibe of this thing wandering around and then getting knocked over in America was on point but I'm not sure I can connect the defacement of a little trashcan with some broad rejection of the liberal status quo. If I have to make one clear connection between now and then its that we're talking about a culture that delighted in breaking this stupid thing that wasn't hurting anybody, and then that culture elected Trump. I doubt much thought was put into it, rather the opposite of thought. "I've seen the little attention getting robot on social media and I'm going to break it now to put an end to what I see as frivolous decadence, then let smarter people come up with a post-hoc justification about why this Had To Happen that makes our personal trauma and impulses toward sociopathy into a linearly constructed causative sequence that justifies the occurance."
I also had this exact feeling about 'the world falling apart and how everyone who likes X thing are stupid sheeple', but X thing was the musical genre diminuitively referred to now as Stomp Clap Hey music. Hated the shit during its heyday. It symbolized elder millenials burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the general shit situation of the planet to reread Harry Potter books and call Trump a poo head on websites. To me it seemed to appeal to people who were formerly "free spirits" and "deep thinkers" who were reaching their mid-30s and finally able to advance in their careers and afford homes, so they were beginning to feel like their upbringings during thr financial crisis were just bad dreams. If it had been within my ability to crush "Stomp Clap Hey" music and kill the collective enjoyment of it I would have. But I realized it was just... fucking... music... I could ignore it. And whether or not it meant all those things I felt it did, ruining it for other people would have been wrong. So I stopped badmouthing it and now we call it Stomp Clap Hey and the thinkers who give a shit are thinkering over that I guess.
Well, it’s a metaphor, you see. It’s a comparison, not a direct connection.
Well, that’s just a very first order way of looking at it. I’m not saying “the US is filled with meanies, it killed a robot, of course it elected Trump!”, I’m saying: “Hitchbot was shattered and a collective fantasy was ended. This mirrors how Trump was elected, which shattered liberal fantasies about the US, the west, and the state of politics around the world in general.”
Yes, it’s funny that this happened in the US, and even funnier that it was in Philly. That has nothing to do with the metaphor. Hitchbot could have died anywhere, people would have mourned it, and it would still be an appropriate analogy. Try process that 🙂
I feel another microcosm brewing…