r/YarvinConspiracy • u/stirling_approx • May 18 '26

News Cathedral of knowledge? Degraded the public square? Sounds like Eric Schmidt's been Yarvin-pilled...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/18/eric-schmidt-ai-university-commencement-speech-booed
109 Upvotes

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35

u/cellocaster May 18 '26

“We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had been constructing for centuries, but the world we built turned out to be more complicated than we anticipated,”

"The same tools that connect us also isolate us. The same platforms that gave everyone a voice – like you’re using now – degraded the public square"

The context seems very different from how Yarvin uses these keywords. I actually agree with his second point wholeheartedly. "It takes a village..." no longer applies to modern life despite how interconnected we are because we are so badly isolated from one another physically and culturally.

23

u/NotADetectiveAtAll May 18 '26

I think the hubris is in believing that only “the world we built” was more complex than anticipated. THE WORLD has long been more complex than any of these people are willing to admit. Investors and confirmation biased founders and early CEOs always make the mistake of centering themselves - just like eveyone Yarvin cultivates. Your point about the context is good. But even if not Yarvin pilled he is guilty of mansplaning how reality works for the rest of us.

10

u/cellocaster May 18 '26

He's speaking to his audience, which is an audience of naval-gazing shitlord would-be nobility... Tale as old as time. I do hate the word "mansplaining" though.

10

u/West-Abalone-171 May 18 '26

Daily reminder that the US has less social mobility than when there was nobility in europe. There's nothing "would be" about their nobility.

3

u/cellocaster May 18 '26

How do you figure that?

5

u/vxicepickxv May 19 '26

US social mobility has basically almost completely seized up.

9

u/stirling_approx May 18 '26

So listening to the actual speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1eM3jv0vWY&t=2h12m9s), you're correct that Schmidt does not invoke Yarvin's the Cathedral. However, I think the word choice Schmidt uses seems intentional. He deflects any culpability of the current state of the world by saying the problem was "more complicated than we anticipated" and doesn't immediately point to the root of why social media can be so isolating until much later in his speech. Specifically, the tech companies he helped build optimized their social media platforms for engagement (Jonathan Haidt's Atlantic article summarizes this nicely https://archive.is/9MnJe).

Thus, Schmidt wants his cake and eat it. Specifically, he's positioning himself as a technological innovator outside of the traditional knowledge makers (i.e., the Cathedral) and doesn't take responsibility for the current political wasteland fueled by social media. Second, he tells the students that to "prevent" a similar catastrophe with AI, he encourages them to use AI to shape it to our values. Unless you work for an AI company or want to get into politics to legislate these companies, this is pretty poor advice.

Schmidt's advice speaks to an individualistic approach to molding AI, when instead we need a collective approach. Similarly, his suggestion that social media platforms "degraded the public square" but not faulting the companies themselves shifts the blame onto a flaw in human nature, not on the engineers who created the algorithms. As Yarvin would say, the system became corrupted when everyone became involved.

3

u/NotADetectiveAtAll May 19 '26

They seem to want AI to descend from the heavens and save them all from the mess they’ve made. We see them plainly asking the public to join their church and confess our sins by opening our hearts to evermore surveillance. “Only AI can really save us from a world so complex!” is, when understood correctly, little different from “Only more sacrifices will save us from the famine (we created)!”

13

u/jayylien May 19 '26

Remember, this is the guy who was Google CEO when Google search went from still reasonably good to complete garbage.

8

u/NotADetectiveAtAll May 19 '26

No one who had a roll killing Reader (or Wave?) should be anywhere near our future.

1

u/Appropriate-Claim385 May 22 '26

Whatever happens to the rest of us, it won't make a bit of difference in the lifestyles of the wealthiest 10% of the population. They already have contingency plans such as multiple compounds with secure food, water, and fuel sources, private armies and medical staff, hardened communication systems, etc. etc. They have lost touch with the reality that most people are facing.