the only important thing is ensuring that these weirdos don’t get status
Seems too self-centered to be the real explanation. (Most of the time, people who do things that hurt you aren’t doing it because they hate you; it’s because you’re in the way.)
As a technology reporter whose job is to cover what rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley are up to, the fact that companies your readers have heard of (DeepMind and OpenAI and Anthropic) are causally downstream of this internet ideology that no one has heard of, is itself an interesting story that the public deserves to hear about.
It is a legitimate and interesting story that the public deserves to hear about! The problem, from our perspective, is that he doesn’t accept that the object level is a relevant part of the story. He’s correct to notice the asymmetry in vibes between people at MATS trying to save the world and people at Meta trying to make money as being “a key part of the debate” as far as the psychology of the participants goes—and by writing a story about that observation, he’s done his job as a technology reporter. Simulacrum 1 isn’t in scope.
What makes you describe this as a “typical reporter perspective”? One would expect that people who write for a living are sensitive to the effects of word choices (such that, if they’re nudging readers one way or the other, it’s probably on purpose rather than on accident).