Eshu Marneedi

Hadas Gold, reporting for CNN:

The man who allegedly threw an incendiary device at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is facing attempted murder and attempted arson charges, authorities said Monday.

Daniel Moreno-Gama, a 20-year-old from Texas, is accused of throwing an incendiary device at Altman’s home on Friday night, before going on to strike at the glass doors of OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters with a chair while saying he wanted “to burn it down and kill anyone inside,” according to a criminal complaint filed Monday by the FBI. He was arrested outside of OpenAI’s offices the night of the incident. No one was injured…

The Department of Justice also alleged Moreno-Gama possessed a three-part document he wrote that opposed AI: The first part was entitled “Your Last Warning,” and advocated for the killing of CEOs of AI companies and their investors.

These attacks are symbolic of the level of anger normal, non-tech adjacent people have toward generative artificial intelligence. While perhaps this opinion is controversial, I believe Silicon Valley has no one but itself to blame for the attacks over the weekend. In the past few years, we have seen truly violent, disturbing rhetoric from some of the Valley’s most prominent leaders and workers. They joke that anyone who doesn’t attend a Top 20 university or work for one of the major AI labs will be relegated to a “permanent underclass.” They claim that people who are uncomfortable with the job loss around Waymo autonomous vehicles or agentic coding systems are “Luddites.” They besmirch people worried about rising electricity costs and pollution from data centers as “third-worlders.”

Eventually people will have had enough of this, and that time has come. Silicon Valley, for the last four years, has cried for nothing but sympathy from the public. It effectively blamed the Biden administration for all of the nation’s problems and claimed that the only solution to rising costs and worker tensions was drastic deregulation. Colloquially, these people are known as “tech bros” — they’re overwhelmingly highly educated white or Asian men from elite universities, who now work for venture capital companies or the big AI labs. They’re overwhelmingly Republican (yet claim to be centrist), proclaim to be “meritocratic,” and emphasize a rigid, social class-based hierarchy for society with little to no safety nets.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t fit into one or more of these descriptions. I am a highly educated, male, Asian computer science student who places a high emphasis on merit. I, like many people who work in highly educated fields, am disillusioned with the state of America: the fact that literacy rates are falling and test scores are dropping; that university admissions policies have disadvantaged students with genuine potential; and that the American population consistently votes for people who’d rather they be uneducated forever. These are some of my most profound issues with this nation.

But where I diverge from the tech bro population is that, bluntly, I don’t derive joy from my stature in society. While I am deeply fortunate to be born in a place conducive to my education, I realize many aren’t. While I have accrued — or rather am accruing — the knowledge and experience to work in a highly paid position, many have not and cannot. While I am excited about the future of artificial intelligence and look forward to how it will affect humanity, I realize many are not. This is what separates a human being from a robot — robots do not have a heart or soul. They are, without adequate training and alignment, devoid of any human emotion. They lack empathy for human beings. If a human acts in the same way as a robot, they’re either (a) on the autism spectrum, or (b) evil, deeply immoral.

It is too generous to say that Silicon Valley tech bros “don’t know” how the country feels about AI. They absolutely do know. They talk about the permanent underclass and Luddism daily. They find joy in feeling they are morally, culturally, and monetarily superior to the average American in every way. And if you observe their conversations for long enough, you’ll realize they’re intent on keeping it that way. When AGI does take people’s jobs, they’ll celebrate. Silicon Valley is not detached from the rest of America — it is intent on elevating itself to an unattainable level of supremacy and leaving everyone else to the “permanent underclass,” where there is nothing to eat and no jobs to do. “Tough luck,” they say. Altman claims monthly that AI will replace most workers.

After Friday’s attacks, this contingent of the population acted surprised. Suddenly they wish to “turn down the temperature” and reach common ground. But really, this “surprise” is a thin veil around their unmistakable violence. Nic Carter, who works at the cryptocurrency VC firm Castle Island Ventures, claims “most people are not conscious… just automata.” Eliano Younes, who works at the defense start-up Palantir, says, “These are sick people. Their echo chamber has melted their brains.” An anonymous user from France, who claims to be a vibe-coder, says, “These people are truly the bottom of the barrel.”

Normal, reasonable people do not speak like this. They would argue that the people they’re talking about are also unreasonable, but two unreasonable people do not negate each other; they multiply. For four years, Silicon Valley has set out to annihilate people’s livelihoods. Every time a new model comes out, these same people laud how quickly it’ll take everyone’s jobs. They celebrate relegating people to suffering¹. They debase normal people’s very existence — they despise normal people’s happiness. They do not, for once, exercise the human quality of introspection, thinking about what might have led people to hold such drastic opinions. As I said three paragraphs ago, these people are deeply immoral because they lack basic human empathy. Their words are the very violence they claim to decry.

Jane Manchun Wong, a blogger and security researcher whom I admire greatly, wrote something really important:

Go ahead and keep calling them “permanent underclass” and “have fun being poor”. Just be as smug as possible and wave fingers at them

I’m sure this won’t further their resentment or radicalize them, and they’ll just keep their heads down

At this point, I’d argue tech bros have rocketed past being “smug.” They actively derive joy from seeing people suffer. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the tech circle after a new model comes out knows how excitedly these people claim the newest model will take people’s jobs. “This is AGI!” they shout. “We’re so cooked,” some lament. There’s never an ounce of moral or ethical concern for the effects of technology. Normal people who can’t find themselves to be upset about a Molotov cocktail fired at one of the most well-protected members of society are not the ones in an echo chamber. The ones who say a group of journalists ethically reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world have blood on their hands — they’re the ones in the echo chamber.

The tech bros will truly blame anyone but themselves for violence, when on many occasions, Silicon Valley has proven to be the instigator of violent rhetoric. Violence begets violence, and it will only intensify in the next few years if Silicon Valley continues to hold figurative knives against people’s throats. I will never claim that violence is justified or that it will result in any material change — which is an absurd proposition — but it will undoubtedly grow as Silicon Valley declares war against the common worker.