Okay so I'm only at like the first chapter but I honestly can't tell if the stupid little bildrungsroman bit about the midwestern tech bro turned feudal lord is intended as satire.
Choice bits:
...(he) found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behaviors were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.
...while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.
Honestlt I'd assume satire but coming from what I know about Stephenson I'm really not sure.
A lot of it is :bootlicker: , some of it extreme enough where the sycophant directly says that billionaires have more life and more energy to them than the masses do. Big Yud of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" fanfiction fame said that around the time he received millions of dollars from said billionaires under pretense of "research."
As for the rest, my best guess is that it could be as lazy as Great Man Theory, unexamined, colliding with Just World Hypothesis, which leads to the assumption that the ruling class rules over the rest of us for some presumably good reason. :zizek:
Never heard of Yudkowsky before but i just spent half an hour on his rationalwiki page. And, surprise surprise, :epstein: donated to his brain genius foundation.
Vampires need minions to do the dirty work and to flatter them and to find fresh blood.