Ironic? He's just perceptive and doesn't fool himself.
He sees what he and his friends are doing as potentially immoral and, by telling us, his conscience is asking us to stop him and his friends. At the same time, he's gloating about getting away with it and profiting handsomely. He believes he can't be stopped -- even if he tells us all about what they will do.
He won't stop by himself. It's in his self-interest. He enjoys the power and the technological challenge.
Not holding my breath though. Years from now, he and Thiel will probably be chilling in their dr. evil compounds in new zealand while the rest of us are fighting it out over scraps in apocalypto-shanty-town USA.
It seems to me he's just laughing at how absurd everything has become. He suggests as much quite directly by stating "he has become something of a conscientious objector on social media." The same is no less true of his comments on our economy. I mean what would you want the guy to do? He has donated a lot of money relative to his net worth on things that all are helping to improve society for everybody.
The only thing that seems to make people angrier than politispeak, is honesty!
I don't know about Sean, but if it just dawned on me one day that my $2.5B was dirty money, my new full-time job would be undoing the damage.
Parker is a smart guy. If he were even half-way serious about what he was saying, he would be doing something a hell of a lot more effective than tweeting "conscientiously" and donating 10% to medical research.
From this other quote and the way he delivered it, I think he is a sociopath, and the longevity quote is only half joking.
"The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."
I agree that the longevity quote is only half joking, but I didn't find it funny at all.
I disagree that he's a sociopath (sociopath wouldn't disclose this information). I think he's a geek who got so caught up with what he was working on that he lost sight that it was very immoral until much later (and perhaps too late).
A sociopath wouldn't be open about what the harm they did because they don't care to help others heal.
He talks about it because he feels guilt but knows he won't be punished.
He understood it was immoral. He still did it, because morality doesn't have the power to stop actions. Now he feels guilt for doing evil. But at least now he's ultra-rich and powerful. He understood what he was trying to achieve.
