Ryan Castellucci (they/them) :nonbinary_flag:You see them, don't you? Posing on the covers of magazines, hailed as visionaries, architects of the new economy. You think you're looking at a titan of industry. You're not. You're looking at a script kiddie who found his parent's root password to the global economy.
He doesn't know how the machine works. He has no idea. The founder, the grandparent, the one who built it all from scrap and nerve and sixty-hour weeks? They had to know the machine. They had to lay the wiring, fix the bugs, understand the physics of the thing because their own skin was on the line. The power they earned resided in them, a result of discipline, of sleepless nights spent wondering if the whole damned thing would compile.
But the heir… the heir inherits the terminal with full privileges. He doesn't write the code, he just runs the script. A script named lawyers.sh. A script named accountants.py. A script named public_relations.rb. He doesn't understand the intricate dance of supply chains or the brittle dependencies of a local economy. He just sees a user interface with a single button labeled "disrupt".
So he pushes it. Just to see what happens.
He doesn't want to build, he wants the notoriety of having built. He brute forces reality with a cheat code of inherited capital. He calls it "creative destruction", but he understands the "destruction" part about as well as a teenager with a copy of Metasploit understands the architecture of the network he's just brought to its knees.
And the consequences are the same. The script kiddie launches a DDoS attack and takes a hospital's website offline for a day. He feels a flicker of power, then gets bored and moves on, leaving others to fix the damage. The billionaire heir runs his script, "optimises" a factory out of existence to bump a stock price, and guts a town of its livelihood. He feels a flicker of validation, then gets on his jet and moves on, leaving entire communities to fix the damage.
Neither of them feels a shred of responsibility, because they never went through the discipline of learning the system they're attacking. They have no concept of the collateral damage because, to them, it's not a living, breathing system. It's just a puzzle box to be cracked for points.
Don't ever mistake them for innovators. They're not. They're the result of a security flaw - a privilege escalation vulnerability in the source code of society - and they're finding out what happens when they run every exploit they have, all at once, on the machine we happen to live inside of. Eventually it breaks.
(inspired by Ian Malcolm's speech about "inherited wealth" in Jurassic Park - I've inverted the metaphor)
OddOpinions5
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Franceska Mann
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