I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.
“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]
He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.
[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.