Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
April 27, 2024 12:12 PM Subscribe
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay."
The dystopian dream continues:
The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … ” [...] Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. [...]The piece goes on to recount Srinivasan's association with such SV influencers as Tim Farriss, Lex Fridman, Alex Lieberman, and most concerningly YCombinator CEO Garry Tan, who has himself embarked on an increasingly abrasive political war for control of San Francisco -- a war the NY Times, for one, has been happy to whitewash.
In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”
Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together. [...]
“You have the A.I. Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation.... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones …” [...]
Those who try to downplay Balaji’s importance in Silicon Valley often portray him as a “clown.” But Donald Trump taught us that clowns can be dangerous, especially those with proximity to influence and power. In the nearly 11 years since his secession speech at Y Combinator, Balaji’s politics have become even more stridently authoritarian and extremist, yet he remains a celebrated figure in key circles.
Vanity Fair: Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.Politico: Is There Something More Radical than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It.
Vance’s other critical political connection — and his primary political patron — can be found 3,000 miles to the west of Washington in Los Angeles. In recent years, Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance worked for before running for Senate, has become the chief financier of the New Right ecosystem. And Thiel’s idiosyncratic brand of techno-libertarianism — which combines an abiding skepticism of liberal democracy with a belief in national restoration through utopian modes of technological innovation — has become a touchstone of intellectual discussions on the New Right.The Enigma of Peter Thiel
In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin writes, “The Thiel ideology is complicated and, in parts, self-contradictory, and will take many of the pages that follow to explore, but it combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” Let’s see, we’ve go some futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there…hmm, what does that all add up to? What a mystery this guy is! [...]Thiel and allies claim to have turned against Trump and political advocacy more broadly -- for now, to focus on such noble pursuits as an all-steroid Olympics -- but the anti-democratic impulse continues to spread through the halls of power in the Valley.
He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan. There’s really no contradiction within Peter Thiel’s politics, they are quite consistent: he’s just realized, more clearly than his opponents often, that there’s ultimately a contradiction between the rule of capital and democracy, and the way to deal with this contradiction, as far as he’s concerned, is to do away with democracy.
Ah, purists. They never learn...
posted by jim in austin at 12:29 PM on April 27
posted by jim in austin at 12:29 PM on April 27
Checking… yup, went to Stanford. Clearly, anyone who matriculates at Stanford needs… well, something.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:35 PM on April 27 [9 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:35 PM on April 27 [9 favorites]
i await the cleansing fire
Be the change you want to see in the world.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:40 PM on April 27 [25 favorites]
Be the change you want to see in the world.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:40 PM on April 27 [25 favorites]
It's a mark of the laser-like precision of Tech Bros' perspicacity that they always see themselves as the solution to all our problems, rather than as they are - a product of the festering mess, albeit a product that's become so toxic and predatory that they floated to the top of the ruins, the better to perpetuate the poison.
The amount of good we could achieve by jettisoning them is incalculable, even by their billion dollar can't-do-math AI bullshit. But here they are, pouring more pus into the collective wound, as if that's what visionary means
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 12:43 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
The amount of good we could achieve by jettisoning them is incalculable, even by their billion dollar can't-do-math AI bullshit. But here they are, pouring more pus into the collective wound, as if that's what visionary means
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 12:43 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
i await the cleansing fire
i'd be happy just making these fuckers pay their taxes
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:44 PM on April 27 [112 favorites]
i'd be happy just making these fuckers pay their taxes
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:44 PM on April 27 [112 favorites]
"Man of Indian descent, man of Chinese descent and unwillingly-outed gay man allying themselves with the extreme right in well-thought-out scheme" reads like a modern version of an old Onion headline.
posted by mhoye at 12:48 PM on April 27 [105 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 12:48 PM on April 27 [105 favorites]
i'd be happy just making these fuckers pay their taxes
That and the apocalypse would cause them roughly the same degree of alarm.
posted by Artw at 12:50 PM on April 27 [16 favorites]
That and the apocalypse would cause them roughly the same degree of alarm.
posted by Artw at 12:50 PM on April 27 [16 favorites]
this is evil and toxic in so many ways but jhmfc!!!! these people are captains of industry! gray t-shirts????? ugh.
posted by supermedusa at 12:57 PM on April 27 [10 favorites]
posted by supermedusa at 12:57 PM on April 27 [10 favorites]
Maybe they need more humanities classes at Stanford.
posted by chasing at 12:57 PM on April 27 [59 favorites]
posted by chasing at 12:57 PM on April 27 [59 favorites]
Suburban man babies that would quickly be murdered in the world they’re imagining. It’s hard to imagine US tech culture getting any more stupid.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:58 PM on April 27 [29 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 12:58 PM on April 27 [29 favorites]
South African Gentile National Socialist Movement - Wikipedia
Greyshirts or Gryshemde is the common short-form name given to the South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, a South African Nazi movement that existed during the 1930s and 1940s. Initially referring only to a paramilitary group, it soon became shorthand for the movement as a whole.posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:03 PM on April 27 [30 favorites]
It’s hard to imagine US tech culture getting any more stupid.
Oh you of poor imagination and vision! Reality will continue to relieve us all from the burden of trying to imagine how far the stupidity and malevolence can go
posted by treepour at 1:05 PM on April 27 [15 favorites]
Oh you of poor imagination and vision! Reality will continue to relieve us all from the burden of trying to imagine how far the stupidity and malevolence can go
posted by treepour at 1:05 PM on April 27 [15 favorites]
I just wonder if he wants artillery.
posted by clavdivs at 1:08 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]
posted by clavdivs at 1:08 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]
These people don't really have utopia in mind, and they don't have any particular morality or politics or ethics that are consistent or even thought-out. They just don't want to pay taxes. That's all that underlies the fascist posturing. It's so fucking pathetic.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:10 PM on April 27 [71 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:10 PM on April 27 [71 favorites]
futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there
Also stimulants. Don't forget the stimulants.
posted by credulous at 1:38 PM on April 27 [20 favorites]
Also stimulants. Don't forget the stimulants.
posted by credulous at 1:38 PM on April 27 [20 favorites]
They just don't want to pay taxes
Oh I don’t know. I expect they want to not pay for ANYTHING on top of not paying taxes, have the state back that desire with force and to be congratulated as the cleverest and most beneficial figures in world history.
Also it should be illegal to make fun of them.
posted by Artw at 1:40 PM on April 27 [42 favorites]
Oh I don’t know. I expect they want to not pay for ANYTHING on top of not paying taxes, have the state back that desire with force and to be congratulated as the cleverest and most beneficial figures in world history.
Also it should be illegal to make fun of them.
posted by Artw at 1:40 PM on April 27 [42 favorites]
Proposing a fascist paramilitary organization called the “Gray Shirts” is so on-the-nose I would almost think it’s intentional self-parody except I’m pretty sure none of these tech “geniuses” have ever read a history book in their life (and are weirdly proud of that).
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:02 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:02 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
Balaji is the extreme version of a certain kind of clownish VC behavior. But he's far from alone. Last year Anil Dash wrote a good piece on how so many of the leaders of our industry are not OK. "VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons.
posted by Nelson at 2:12 PM on April 27 [20 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 2:12 PM on April 27 [20 favorites]
Went back and re-read SSC's "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" essay from 2014. Yep it's still stupid as fuck. Tribal thinking is such mind poison.
posted by fleacircus at 2:15 PM on April 27 [9 favorites]
posted by fleacircus at 2:15 PM on April 27 [9 favorites]
This is an outgrowth and continuation of the whole awful "Dark Enlightenment" crap that's been bouncing around the tech bros for a while now.
The tl;dr on the whole thing is pretty simple: democracy sucks, bring back monarchy and aristocracy, some of them are religious and want official kings crowned by religious leaders who are then defenders of the faith.
Way back in 2017 Elizabeth Sandifer wrote "Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" and it remains timely after all these years. Balaji is nothing new, he'd doubtless be deeply offended that I say so, but he's just the latest in a long chain of rich right wing types who think that democracy sucks and it'd be so much better if only they were in charge and no one could disagree with them.
I hope he will soon fade back into obscurity as all the supposed "thought leaders" of this crap do. But one day, one of them might actually catch on and that terrifies me.
posted by sotonohito at 2:16 PM on April 27 [32 favorites]
The tl;dr on the whole thing is pretty simple: democracy sucks, bring back monarchy and aristocracy, some of them are religious and want official kings crowned by religious leaders who are then defenders of the faith.
Way back in 2017 Elizabeth Sandifer wrote "Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" and it remains timely after all these years. Balaji is nothing new, he'd doubtless be deeply offended that I say so, but he's just the latest in a long chain of rich right wing types who think that democracy sucks and it'd be so much better if only they were in charge and no one could disagree with them.
I hope he will soon fade back into obscurity as all the supposed "thought leaders" of this crap do. But one day, one of them might actually catch on and that terrifies me.
posted by sotonohito at 2:16 PM on April 27 [32 favorites]
Neal Stephenson should sue these guys for copyright infringement.
posted by adamrice at 2:27 PM on April 27 [26 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 2:27 PM on April 27 [26 favorites]
I expect they want to not pay for ANYTHING on top of not paying taxes
Even the pull quotes in this FPP refute this, as they talk about how the techbros are going to bribe cops with "extra food and jobs" to do their bidding.
They are entirely willing to pay taxes and fees, for anything they deem necessary. It's their complete selfishness that is overwhelming. They want to only pay for things that benefit THEM, and never give a dime to anyone else who isn't a member of THEM. Taxes are repugnant because a mother with children and no job might get a free meal. But bribing police to do their bidding, that's just a cost of doing business.
posted by hippybear at 2:29 PM on April 27 [21 favorites]
Even the pull quotes in this FPP refute this, as they talk about how the techbros are going to bribe cops with "extra food and jobs" to do their bidding.
They are entirely willing to pay taxes and fees, for anything they deem necessary. It's their complete selfishness that is overwhelming. They want to only pay for things that benefit THEM, and never give a dime to anyone else who isn't a member of THEM. Taxes are repugnant because a mother with children and no job might get a free meal. But bribing police to do their bidding, that's just a cost of doing business.
posted by hippybear at 2:29 PM on April 27 [21 favorites]
Bribing the cops is the city-scale version of "when I have my apocalypse-survival bunker, how will I keep my security from revolting against me?"
posted by rmd1023 at 2:38 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
posted by rmd1023 at 2:38 PM on April 27 [28 favorites]
Sure, but it's still the equivalent of being taxed to pay for law enforcement.
posted by hippybear at 3:11 PM on April 27
posted by hippybear at 3:11 PM on April 27
The self-satisfied mention of “gray pride” makes me want to throw up fists into his smug face.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 3:42 PM on April 27 [22 favorites]
posted by UltraMorgnus at 3:42 PM on April 27 [22 favorites]
You can draw a straight line from these buffoons to the ideological meltdown at OpenAI earlier this year. Someone is clearly spiking the free sodas.
posted by simra at 3:48 PM on April 27 [3 favorites]
posted by simra at 3:48 PM on April 27 [3 favorites]
“Hi, I am as successful in this one specific thing therefore I must be a visionary genius and will succeed at anything I do!”
posted by misterpatrick at 4:15 PM on April 27 [12 favorites]
posted by misterpatrick at 4:15 PM on April 27 [12 favorites]
[Strine intensifies] would you just get a fucken load of this arsehole
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:55 PM on April 27 [5 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:55 PM on April 27 [5 favorites]
Read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris. His history of Silicon Valley shows the roots of this thinking back to the 1840’s here in California.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:59 PM on April 27 [8 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 4:59 PM on April 27 [8 favorites]
My new startup is going to be crowd funding the production and distribution of guillotines.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:32 PM on April 27 [19 favorites]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:32 PM on April 27 [19 favorites]
My new startup is going to be crowd funding the production and distribution of guillotines.
If I had a dollar for every time I'd read something like that, I'd have enough money to build a guillotine.
posted by hippybear at 7:09 PM on April 27 [7 favorites]
If I had a dollar for every time I'd read something like that, I'd have enough money to build a guillotine.
posted by hippybear at 7:09 PM on April 27 [7 favorites]
I wish all these people would enter their singularity or what the fuck ever and disappear entirely. But that's the same thing as pretending I'm going to crowdfund guillotines. Like most liberals and leftists, I find them, and the other billionaires, and the godbags, and the neo-Nazis, so absolutely unbearable that I'm going to just stay the hell away from them and interact as little as possible with them. And I'm a pugnacious guy; I like to argue. But they're just so dumb and repulsive that I won't do a thing, and neither will you, and they'll get to just keep speaking their loathsome ideas.
On one level, I'll rejoice when right after things go their way, they're all murdered by even more psychopathic gangsters, but those dudes are going to get me too, so the hell with all of it.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:24 PM on April 27 [5 favorites]
On one level, I'll rejoice when right after things go their way, they're all murdered by even more psychopathic gangsters, but those dudes are going to get me too, so the hell with all of it.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:24 PM on April 27 [5 favorites]
Neal Stephenson should sue these guys for copyright infringement.
I don't know, I have a bad feeling that Neal would be first in line to volunteer to write their propaganda for them.
posted by NoMich at 7:45 PM on April 27 [14 favorites]
I don't know, I have a bad feeling that Neal would be first in line to volunteer to write their propaganda for them.
posted by NoMich at 7:45 PM on April 27 [14 favorites]
I mean hasn't he been doing just that for the past decade at least?
I finally swore off Stephenson when he wrapped up one of his literary universes by suggesting the tech being developed by one of his benefactors was going to lead us to a higher plane of existence.
posted by turbowombat at 8:02 PM on April 27 [15 favorites]
I finally swore off Stephenson when he wrapped up one of his literary universes by suggesting the tech being developed by one of his benefactors was going to lead us to a higher plane of existence.
posted by turbowombat at 8:02 PM on April 27 [15 favorites]
What, Heaven after it kills all of us?
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:56 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:56 PM on April 27 [1 favorite]
The cultural revolution wasn't great, but at least it forced the students at schools like Stanford to go do subsistence agriculture for a few years.
posted by zymil at 9:00 PM on April 27 [6 favorites]
posted by zymil at 9:00 PM on April 27 [6 favorites]
I mean that’s 100% what happens, The Card Cheat, but it’s a good thing, supposedly?
posted by turbowombat at 10:37 PM on April 27
posted by turbowombat at 10:37 PM on April 27
Sure, but it's still the equivalent of being taxed to pay for law enforcement.
Voluntary payments are in no way equivalent to taxation. You might as well argue that anyone who has paid to go to the doctor is basically paying tax for healthcare. It's nonsense.
posted by Dysk at 11:49 PM on April 27 [12 favorites]
Voluntary payments are in no way equivalent to taxation. You might as well argue that anyone who has paid to go to the doctor is basically paying tax for healthcare. It's nonsense.
posted by Dysk at 11:49 PM on April 27 [12 favorites]
The thing that makes taxes taxes is the compulsory element. Anything else is just a (potentially recurring) donation, or a wage you're paying someone. Elon Musk pays lots of money to people so that they will work for him. That doesn't mean he's effectively in favour of taxation. Bribing the police is analogous to hiring private security, not to taxation and a functioning state.
posted by Dysk at 11:53 PM on April 27 [21 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 11:53 PM on April 27 [21 favorites]
Did we get a post about the $10K robot dog with a flamethrower head? Seemed like a solution in search of a problem, and lo, here is a problem.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:18 AM on April 28 [14 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:18 AM on April 28 [14 favorites]
A spectacular podcast satire of tech manbabies devoting their life to Elon's Army
posted by avocet at 7:27 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by avocet at 7:27 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
As for police and billionaires buying them, it's essential from their POV that it not be a tax but rather a largess. The wealthy despise taxes, welfare, and really even wages because it makes the recipient feel independent. Notice the term they prefer for such things is "entitlement" which make it sound demanding and rude.
The wealthy vastly prefer donations, generosity, largess, tips, and other entirely voluntary payments because it makes the recipient directly answerable to the billionaire and makes it a constant worry for the recipient that they may not be deemed worthy and get it
They'd rather pay double the wages that cop gets in gifts and donations than pay half that in taxes ans wages.
Plus, of course, cops are 100% on board with the project of demolishing democracy, prohibiting protest, and generally being agents of a capricious totalitarian state so they get to fuck people up for fun. There's no need for the Dark Enlightenment assholes to bribe cops, they merely need unleash them.
posted by sotonohito at 7:51 AM on April 28 [25 favorites]
The wealthy vastly prefer donations, generosity, largess, tips, and other entirely voluntary payments because it makes the recipient directly answerable to the billionaire and makes it a constant worry for the recipient that they may not be deemed worthy and get it
They'd rather pay double the wages that cop gets in gifts and donations than pay half that in taxes ans wages.
Plus, of course, cops are 100% on board with the project of demolishing democracy, prohibiting protest, and generally being agents of a capricious totalitarian state so they get to fuck people up for fun. There's no need for the Dark Enlightenment assholes to bribe cops, they merely need unleash them.
posted by sotonohito at 7:51 AM on April 28 [25 favorites]
*Stares directly at the camera*
posted by ob1quixote at 9:44 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by ob1quixote at 9:44 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Unless "banquet" is some kind of euphemism, they're being pretty condescending.
posted by Selena777 at 9:49 AM on April 28
posted by Selena777 at 9:49 AM on April 28
Well I have some bright news. As someone who works in tech well below those lofty heights:
1) No one who works in the valley likes these guys. VC funders like these guys. Think piece writers like these guys. Normal folks despise them. They’re the dicks who lay people off.
2) vast majority of the folks at most tech companies are wildly liberal and live in the San Francisco area for the politics. The ones who don’t moved to Austin or Seattle.
3) Who is their muscle other than their small personal security teams? We do not have folks rolling around in Trump stickered trucks here.
This seems like the government version of the McKinsey folks who move in and ruin good medium sized companies. “Here’s a good place, I’ll try to take it over without any understanding of how it works and start making cuts.” “Oh weird, I don’t know why it failed, but I made short term profits.”
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:53 AM on April 28 [20 favorites]
1) No one who works in the valley likes these guys. VC funders like these guys. Think piece writers like these guys. Normal folks despise them. They’re the dicks who lay people off.
2) vast majority of the folks at most tech companies are wildly liberal and live in the San Francisco area for the politics. The ones who don’t moved to Austin or Seattle.
3) Who is their muscle other than their small personal security teams? We do not have folks rolling around in Trump stickered trucks here.
This seems like the government version of the McKinsey folks who move in and ruin good medium sized companies. “Here’s a good place, I’ll try to take it over without any understanding of how it works and start making cuts.” “Oh weird, I don’t know why it failed, but I made short term profits.”
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:53 AM on April 28 [20 favorites]
What rich people want most is not to be accountable to anyone, particularly to those they view as their inferiors.
posted by Slothrup at 9:56 AM on April 28 [9 favorites]
posted by Slothrup at 9:56 AM on April 28 [9 favorites]
dorks [derogatory]
posted by General Malaise at 10:37 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by General Malaise at 10:37 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
It's very tempting to snark and reference Bob the Angry Flower: Atlas Shrugged 2 but I fear that these powerful dipshits are going to cause a lot of suffering along the way.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:45 AM on April 28 [8 favorites]
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:45 AM on April 28 [8 favorites]
When I was living in san francisco in 1999, working for a dot-com 1.0 startup, we used to make fun of this same shit. And here we are, a quarter of a century later, and still these clowns are considered captains of industry etc. The more things change, the more they fail to change, I suppose.
Venture capital has always been the ultimate combination of people winning the lottery (metaphorically*) thinking they won a game of skill, and being born on third base and thinking you're hitting home runs. The success rate of VC backed companies is astonishingly low, but the entire model just relies on having functionally infinite money from either having won a lottery, being born wealthy, or often a combination of both. The current cults of ycombinator, a11z, and musk are all - as near as I can tell - born out of this. I've got a feeling that people have told me this is the conciet of books like enders game, as well, though I'll admit to having not read that since I was a teenager, and purging much of it from my mind for being a bit crap really(tm).
What's interesting, to me, is the way they've built up this techno-liberatarian wealth cult over the past 50 or so years. I've absoluletely met my fair share of true believers, and I get it - it's a continuation of the jilted-gifted-kid narrative - "we're better, if only the world would recognize it!" is a super seductive sell for most people, and doubly so if you have one of the more common kinds of brain chemistry that attracts you to tech.
* To expand this: while you require a certain set of skills to be successful in business, and the tech business specifically, and developing these skills is work, the world is littered with people who had both the talent and did the work, but did not happen to be in the right place at the right time to, for example, be working on a web browser in 1992, nor to just happen to be talking to an SGI founder about how to financialise that. Even with stock options for peons, the difference in skill between my friends who cashed out on being early at google, and the ones who worked instead for companies that failed, is zero by all accounts - at some point.
posted by jaymzjulian at 11:00 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
Venture capital has always been the ultimate combination of people winning the lottery (metaphorically*) thinking they won a game of skill, and being born on third base and thinking you're hitting home runs. The success rate of VC backed companies is astonishingly low, but the entire model just relies on having functionally infinite money from either having won a lottery, being born wealthy, or often a combination of both. The current cults of ycombinator, a11z, and musk are all - as near as I can tell - born out of this. I've got a feeling that people have told me this is the conciet of books like enders game, as well, though I'll admit to having not read that since I was a teenager, and purging much of it from my mind for being a bit crap really(tm).
What's interesting, to me, is the way they've built up this techno-liberatarian wealth cult over the past 50 or so years. I've absoluletely met my fair share of true believers, and I get it - it's a continuation of the jilted-gifted-kid narrative - "we're better, if only the world would recognize it!" is a super seductive sell for most people, and doubly so if you have one of the more common kinds of brain chemistry that attracts you to tech.
* To expand this: while you require a certain set of skills to be successful in business, and the tech business specifically, and developing these skills is work, the world is littered with people who had both the talent and did the work, but did not happen to be in the right place at the right time to, for example, be working on a web browser in 1992, nor to just happen to be talking to an SGI founder about how to financialise that. Even with stock options for peons, the difference in skill between my friends who cashed out on being early at google, and the ones who worked instead for companies that failed, is zero by all accounts - at some point.
posted by jaymzjulian at 11:00 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
I've got a feeling that people have told me this is the conciet of books like enders game, as well, though I'll admit to having not read that since I was a teenager
(I can't figure out how this has anything to do with ender's game)
posted by advil at 11:33 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
(I can't figure out how this has anything to do with ender's game)
posted by advil at 11:33 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
>because it makes the recipient directly answerable to the billionaire
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-lawmakers-demand-major-donors-pull-funding-columbia-antisemitic-incidents
posted by torokunai at 12:20 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-lawmakers-demand-major-donors-pull-funding-columbia-antisemitic-incidents
posted by torokunai at 12:20 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
I assume the "Ender's Game" thing is where a smart kid essentially took over the world by posting on social media alongside his sister. Tech billionaires clearly see themselves as "smart kids" and probably believe that people listen to them because they're "smart" and say smart things -- and not just because they're rich or successful.
posted by Slothrup at 12:31 PM on April 28 [8 favorites]
posted by Slothrup at 12:31 PM on April 28 [8 favorites]
What kind of dystopian nightmare are they envisioning where "extra food" is an incentive? Most right wing minarchists at least pretend their policies will result in prosperity. "Keeping the troops loyal with extra rations" is realistic. I mean no one can pretend they aren't clear about wanting to be tyrants ruling over starving masses.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:39 PM on April 28 [10 favorites]
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:39 PM on April 28 [10 favorites]
Abehammerb Lincoln Re: muscle.
Drive inland for an hour or so past Sacramento and you are in Alabama where you will find all the muscle you could ever possibly want.
I'm also about 99% sure that the police make up a significant percentage of the very few San Francisco residents who vote Republicans. The right doesn't need to create brownshirts, they've got every police department in the nation on their side already.
posted by sotonohito at 2:50 PM on April 28 [10 favorites]
Drive inland for an hour or so past Sacramento and you are in Alabama where you will find all the muscle you could ever possibly want.
I'm also about 99% sure that the police make up a significant percentage of the very few San Francisco residents who vote Republicans. The right doesn't need to create brownshirts, they've got every police department in the nation on their side already.
posted by sotonohito at 2:50 PM on April 28 [10 favorites]
I'm not sure why anyone would watch it, but I found the podcast TFA doesn't seem to link to, that I could see: part 1 part 2. Or maybe it's just part 2 they watched idk. The interview was 7 months ago and riding the SF crime panic wave.
Balaji seems to be able to present a kind of reasonable worldview, but in this interview he seems to be deep in silly mode. He's among friends. He talks about how the blues spend all day every day thinking how to destroy the grays. He posits that the real problem with SF are the junkies, and they exist because the blues make them take the drugs, they are blue drugs. His proof of this is a harm mitigation billboard. TBH it's all much more stupid than it is sinister.
In another interview, Balaji says that the reason social justice language spiked out of nowhere in 2013 -- what with all the mansplaining and toxic masculinity talk in the NYT -- is that the old media was mad at tech, because tech was killing old media, and so they created it as a huge thing to counterattack tech. I feel like that's unlikely. It's a bit interesting though because Scott "Alexander" Siskind mentioned the SJW language explosion in his article on tribalism too, but he attributes it to blue attacking red. Which is also wrong I think; it was pretty dang blue on blue.
posted by fleacircus at 4:07 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
Balaji seems to be able to present a kind of reasonable worldview, but in this interview he seems to be deep in silly mode. He's among friends. He talks about how the blues spend all day every day thinking how to destroy the grays. He posits that the real problem with SF are the junkies, and they exist because the blues make them take the drugs, they are blue drugs. His proof of this is a harm mitigation billboard. TBH it's all much more stupid than it is sinister.
In another interview, Balaji says that the reason social justice language spiked out of nowhere in 2013 -- what with all the mansplaining and toxic masculinity talk in the NYT -- is that the old media was mad at tech, because tech was killing old media, and so they created it as a huge thing to counterattack tech. I feel like that's unlikely. It's a bit interesting though because Scott "Alexander" Siskind mentioned the SJW language explosion in his article on tribalism too, but he attributes it to blue attacking red. Which is also wrong I think; it was pretty dang blue on blue.
posted by fleacircus at 4:07 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
Ok apart from how they keep from getting eaten by their guards - how do they get their food? Like practically, how is that going to happen? Are they just gonna Oddworld their way into Slurg?
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 4:10 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 4:10 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
Drive inland for an hour or so past Sacramento and you are in Alabama
If they've built a hyperloop to do that journey in an hour, I'm actually kind of impressed. Maybe their revolution will succeed!
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:57 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
If they've built a hyperloop to do that journey in an hour, I'm actually kind of impressed. Maybe their revolution will succeed!
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:57 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
Everywhere outside a major metro area is Alabama.
posted by sotonohito at 5:31 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by sotonohito at 5:31 PM on April 28 [1 favorite]
That's a really reductive understanding of inland California, and Alabama, and American politics. I live an hour inland of Sacramento, in Grass Valley. Measured by the rest of California it's a bit more conservative. Measured by the rest of the US it's pretty progressive.
There's some "muscle" here in the sense of fascist-sympathetic men you could recruit to be brownshirts for the Republican revolution. The "Trump or Death" sign some yahoo put up on his highway frontage at his house still gets discussion two months after it was removed.
We had an ugly incident of thuggery in August 2020 at a local BLM protest, where a few fascist men attacked peaceful protestors. But that event stood out for its extremity and was roundly denounced and then examined. Our local sheriff Shannon Moon is far from a brownshirt, among other things she's the first openly gay or lesbian sheriff in California. She took appropriate action in the aftermath; there were arrests and prosecutions of the attackers, investigation into the police failure during the protest, and a sort of roundup of the incident a year later in the press.
Anyway, that's some of the complexity one hour inland from Sacramento in my home. Go a little south instead towards Placerville and it's more right wing. Go completely south towards Fresno and the Central Valley and it's different again, with a heavy influence of Hispanic farmers. Go two hours north and you get into bonkers MAGA land in California, Redding or Shasta County. Those politics are truly frightening but the area is too poor and sparsely populated to matter much at a California or national level.
Alabama is a whole 'nother topic, but when you discuss it please remember it's 30% African American. That makes it quite different culturally and politically from California. Also a place worth caring about, not just smugly dismissing.
Anyway, all of this is pretty far removed from Balaji S's particular fascist fantasy. His bullshit is 100% elitist tech bro nonsense, in many ways antithetical to the MAGA muscle I fear if we really do slide into civil war.
posted by Nelson at 6:54 PM on April 28 [27 favorites]
There's some "muscle" here in the sense of fascist-sympathetic men you could recruit to be brownshirts for the Republican revolution. The "Trump or Death" sign some yahoo put up on his highway frontage at his house still gets discussion two months after it was removed.
We had an ugly incident of thuggery in August 2020 at a local BLM protest, where a few fascist men attacked peaceful protestors. But that event stood out for its extremity and was roundly denounced and then examined. Our local sheriff Shannon Moon is far from a brownshirt, among other things she's the first openly gay or lesbian sheriff in California. She took appropriate action in the aftermath; there were arrests and prosecutions of the attackers, investigation into the police failure during the protest, and a sort of roundup of the incident a year later in the press.
Anyway, that's some of the complexity one hour inland from Sacramento in my home. Go a little south instead towards Placerville and it's more right wing. Go completely south towards Fresno and the Central Valley and it's different again, with a heavy influence of Hispanic farmers. Go two hours north and you get into bonkers MAGA land in California, Redding or Shasta County. Those politics are truly frightening but the area is too poor and sparsely populated to matter much at a California or national level.
Alabama is a whole 'nother topic, but when you discuss it please remember it's 30% African American. That makes it quite different culturally and politically from California. Also a place worth caring about, not just smugly dismissing.
Anyway, all of this is pretty far removed from Balaji S's particular fascist fantasy. His bullshit is 100% elitist tech bro nonsense, in many ways antithetical to the MAGA muscle I fear if we really do slide into civil war.
posted by Nelson at 6:54 PM on April 28 [27 favorites]
how do they get their food?
Antom Jfonrr is doing great work in this space with Up-Putriscope in Arizona. It's the next evolution of human culture: version 1 was the campfire; version 2 was the family dinner table; version 3 is suckling from the communal nutri-slurry truck when it rolls through your zone.
Or do you mean who will grow and process the food? StriveHives. Alicelle Kredelsin is doing great things here with StriveHive in Ecuador. Children receive instruction from guaranteed ideology-free AI as they work, and thus schools are a net positive on the community. There should be 100 StriveHives globablly by 2026.
posted by fleacircus at 8:17 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
Antom Jfonrr is doing great work in this space with Up-Putriscope in Arizona. It's the next evolution of human culture: version 1 was the campfire; version 2 was the family dinner table; version 3 is suckling from the communal nutri-slurry truck when it rolls through your zone.
Or do you mean who will grow and process the food? StriveHives. Alicelle Kredelsin is doing great things here with StriveHive in Ecuador. Children receive instruction from guaranteed ideology-free AI as they work, and thus schools are a net positive on the community. There should be 100 StriveHives globablly by 2026.
posted by fleacircus at 8:17 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
> We do not have folks rolling around in Trump stickered trucks here.
They don't advertise who they'll vote for, but there's a strange blend of libertarianism, fiscal conservatism and toxic masculinity around here (South Bay) advertised on 4WD "outfitted" pickups and Sprinters with Punisher stickers and monochrome American flags. Don't get in the way of one of those on a bicycle!
Malcom Harris's Palo Alto has me planning to flee to Boston before Biden's first term is over.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:44 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
They don't advertise who they'll vote for, but there's a strange blend of libertarianism, fiscal conservatism and toxic masculinity around here (South Bay) advertised on 4WD "outfitted" pickups and Sprinters with Punisher stickers and monochrome American flags. Don't get in the way of one of those on a bicycle!
Malcom Harris's Palo Alto has me planning to flee to Boston before Biden's first term is over.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 8:44 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
This was such a hard read. There is just so much about this that absolutely horrifies me and makes me want to scream. I think the most immediate thing is that I am really alarmed that Balaji feels okay saying this out loud and on record. It’s not just that he’s moving the Overton window, it’s that him feeling insulated from any consequences indicates that the window may be further towards the fash side of things than I though, even in this supposedly liberal bastion.
I’ve never met Balaji, we’re 2nd degree connections, but I have interacted with a bunch of the YC partners. I came out to SF ~15 years ago with stars in my eyes. I was fleeing an abusive home environment, dealing with some mental health issues, and well, for a lot of reasons I was just done with the East coast, and excited to start a new life in sunny California. I was an early hire at a YC startup, and things started to go off the rails quickly. The charismatic CEO turned out to be very much a charlatan. And like, okay, they/we all are to a degree. Every new CEO gets the talk from their investors that the job is one part Thomas Edison one part PT Barnum. But this kid was extra. He was sending out contracts for signatures, and then straight up editing the contract before countersigning. He was embezzling funds. He was blackmailing interns. That last one was the final straw for me and I hit the alarm. Met with the CTO, a kind PhD born in Russia, and soon I was in a room with Paul Graham and Sam Altman.
These were the waning days of the PG era, and Sam was being groomed to take over YC. I had started two companies at that point and read a few of PG’s essays, but after a few meetings I quickly realized that man was a buffoon. Sam was markedly sharper, with a keen mind for optimization. And while they listened to us and said some of the right things early on, it became really clear that they were pretty unconcerned about the whole blackmail thing. That was not the problem they were interested in solving. We had a bunch of crisis meetings as the CEO’s behavior became increasingly unhinged and (more importantly) legally actionable. Lots of partners were pulled in, including Garry Tam. Garry was an obsequious bootlicker for Paul and Sam; they piled the shit they didn’t want to deal with onto his plate. Eventually, when we had finally, painfully extricated the CEO, it was Garry that told us he’d like us to fire everyone left on the team, return any money left in the bank, quietly disappear, and never speak of this again. I didn’t.
I literally haven’t thought of Garry for like a decade now; it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the early-stage startup scene, and it just absolutely horrifies me that that man, with his moral character, has an one iota of influence over another human being, let alone the city, people, and government of San Francisco. This just feels like so much more of trend that has absolutely broken my heart.
I started another company soon after the YC fiasco, one of the very, very early AI/robotics ventures in the valley, way before that become hot. Almost no one was funding hardware at the time, but I managed to get into what was then a tiny accelerator (now huge) and oh my god I found my tribe. We were all dreamers, we had all tried something crazy and it had actually worked. Each team of founders was very much on a mission - we wanted to change the world, make things easier or better for people in some way, and we were true believers in the power of technology to do that. And if it worked out, we’d be filthy rich. There was definitely an element of self delusion there and in many way we were wearing blinders, but in some ways the value proposition of building hardware is in some ways more concrete than building software. With a physical thing, it has to be pretty obvious that you’re proving some utility, whereas with software it is much easier to build a thing that looks like it’s providing utility but is actually a machine that extracts value from users. And again, there was absolutely a profit motive, but I’d like to think our hearts were in the right place.
What I do know is that there’s not that many of those people left. The founders I knew who were absolutely on a mission have pretty much all been weeded out at this point. Some crashed, some grew disillusioned, many were given a good push by somebody with a MBA. I’d had a few turns in the C-suite at this point, and I swear to god with each year and with each rung up the ladder I’m able to climb, I’m running into fewer and fewer dreamers and more and more of the worst people I’ve ever met. I spent the pandemic taking psychology classes on the weekends, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how common narcissistic and BPD patterning is in the general population, and I am just running into way, way more of those types than I can explain by random chance.
I am really terrified that so many of these people, investors and new founders alike, really seem to be drinking the kool-aid. When you are starting or leading a tech company, you really do have to play a role. A lot of founders really do look like a monolith in many ways because we’re straight up told to be. PG wrote a disgusting essay a while back saying he’d “invest in anyone that looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” and, as a mixed Irish-Korean guy that does not look like Mark Zuckerberg, my first instinct is always “fuck you Paul” when I think about that. But he isn’t wrong, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. VCs, like record labels or movie studios, are not at all interested in taking a risk on something new or different. They are not in the business of innovation or disruption, they are managing funds, they are operating financial instruments trying to deliver returns to the limited partners that fund their war chests. There are very, very few firms that are actually making the crazy bets on things that are radically different, and those are usually very early stage funds. The big, influential funds are not predicting the future, they are pattern matching. They are looking for small variations on formulas that worked before.
A big, big part of the game in investing is evaluating risk, and specifically de-risking a venture. Consider a gamble with only two outcomes: win $1000 or lose $500, and a 50/50 chance either will happen. Who knows what any one play will net you, but if you were able to play that game infinitely, half the time you’d be winning $1000 and half the time you’d be losing $500, so the expected value of that gamble is 50%*$1000 + 50%*-$500 = $250. You can change the expected value by adjusting the outcome sizes, which is very hard to accurately determine at the early stages of a venture, or by adjusting the probabilities of the outcome, which is in many ways much easier to suss out. Every single thing in a new, unknown venture that matches something that’s worked before adds points to your success probability, anything new or different is at best ignored, but more likely it’s something that will be added to your failure probability.
So when you go out to raise money you get coached on allll the little bullshit heuristics VCs are looking for. And one of them is that you look and act like Mark Zuckerberg to some degree. VCs have a bullshit idea of what a successful tech founder looks like (informed entirely by the privilege and demographics of earlier founders), and the more you can match that the more likely you are to get success probability points in the VC’s idiot pattern matching smooth brains. When I went out to raise my first round of serious money, I was sat down by several people and told I do not look the part. I talked wrong, too slow and considered/deliberate. I dressed wrong, way too East coast / New Englandy, young tech founders do not wear collared shirts, and the way I presented meant that every VC I met would have to go through an extra “this is different, how much will that hurt?” calculation that would never, ever help me, it could at best be mitigated, and each time I risked a deal going poorly. So how much do you value being yourself? Enough to tank 10% of your fundraising opportunities (and thus lower your expected raise by at least 10%?)? 25%? When you’re working with megabucks, that’s really a lot of money. So dress like this. Talk like this. Act like this.
To maximize your chances of raising the largest war chest, investors want to see a wunderkind. They want to see a budding master of the universe, someone uniquely brilliant and larger than life. I love explaining things and sharing my understanding with other people, and I’m always super careful to be constantly identifying where I’m making assumptions and where the limits of my knowledge lies. Don’t do that. Act like you have the answers to absolutely everything. An absolute power move is if you can make an investor that considers themselves a smarty pants feel stupid in some way; then they look at you with awe. My co-founder and I referred to this as “le vise VC,” after “le vise anglais.” So ugh. Okay. I donated all my nice clothes, got rid of all my nice collared shirts and traded them in for hoodies and free promotional tech company t-shirts (free-shirts) that made me look like a shlub. I would put aside who I am, and become the bat. Everyone in my cohort did. But like, we all knew that was an act. That’s a mask you put on for public relations. When you’re in private with your co-founder(s) or around other friendly founders, you are all talking about how precarious things are, how much you don’t know, what you need to learn, who you need to hire, etc.. But that’s not what the world sees, not what investors see, not even what most of your employees see. They see the wunderkind, because that’s what you show them and that’s they want to see. They believe that personality is the kind that’s gonna get results, and when you break from that character, you often get punished in real time. But at the end of the day, that’s not you, that’s just someone you play on TV.
But each year, I’m running into more and more founders that seem to honestly believe that shit. And like, I just do not get that. I have played CEO and CTO a couple times now, and while those are leadership/management roles, they are not technical roles, and they are not innovation roles. You set goals and direction, but you, personally, do not build shit. I started my career building tons of stuff with my two hands. I loved coding, I loved working in the machine shop, I loved striking an arc and drawing a molten bead with a TIG welder, I loved the smell of flux when soldering (okay you’re not supposed to breath quite so much of that but it still smells nice). And with every year, I spent less and less time building, and more and more time in meetings, playing around with Gantt charts, and making presentations. By the time we were able to put together the $MM lights-out machining and fabrication shop of my dreams, I did not have time to touch it even once. Okay I did get to touch it one time – I was always the last one to leave the office, and every evening I’d say hello to the woman who cleaned up our mess and her 6yo daughter, who I taught how to move and jog the spindle of one of our CNC milling centers. I clamped a huge scrap of aluminum billet onto the table, chose a nearly indestructible and cheap cutting tool, set the speeds and feeds conservatively and let the little girl carve through it however she wanted and make a bunch of chips. Her mom may have freaked out a bit. So I guess I did get to use the machine shop eventually, but that little girl got to use it more. Ugh, but that’s an aside. The point is, I wasn’t the one doing the building or the inventing.
Maybe this is just me – I am decidedly a generalist; I have dabbled in a bunch of different disciplines, usually just enough to reach the point where I realize I could spend a lifetime studying a field and not have a complete understanding. Maybe it’s because of the slice of tech I was working on – today that kind of work is referred to as deep tech / frontier tech. Most all startups, especially web startups, are building jack shit that I would call “new”. If you’re making a new dating app or social media site or something, maybe you have some sort of unique sorting or paring algorithm, but fundamentally, all the problems you will ever face are solved problems. It is extremely unlikely you’re going to run across a technical problem that no one has faced before. With deep tech / frontier tech, you are specifically working on problems which no one has solved before. It is not just applied engineering, there is a very strong R&D component. And well, when you’re working on a really hard problem that no one has ever solved before, in an esoteric technical field, you really do need experts. I had ideas of what could be done, ideas for what I thought were novel approaches to the problem I was working on, but I absolutely lacked the capacity to build and test them at the level I wanted.
In a lot of ways I was smarter than the average bear, but no, I do not have a PhD, I dropped out of college the second semester of my senior year and well, a lot of the problems we were facing really required a PhD level understanding of the topic. And even if I had a PhD in one topic, robotics is a team sport, it combines a bunch of different disciplines from mechanical engineering to electrical engineering and controls engineering for circuitry and firmware, to computer vision, and software engineering at the middleware, application and cloud levels. Oh and later UI/UX for the HMI. Oh and that’s all just for prototyping, it’s a different game at production. There are probably other things too that I’ve forgotten. Even if I had a PhD in one of the required fields, there isn’t enough time in a human lifetime to get a PhD in all of the fields required for a robotics team. No man rules alone, and fuck, no one should be more vividly aware of this fact than the ruler.
When it came time to put gas on the hiring machine, I was very, very clear that I was only interested in hiring people who were smarter (more technical proficient) than me in some way. Why would I want to pay a mega salary to someone dumber? (aside: I find the terms “smart” and “dumb” extremely unhelpful. My current understanding of intelligence is that it exists along many axes, some close, some orthogonal. “Smart” smushes all those vectors into one scalar.) But long story short, a founder is absolutely, totally reliant on their generals and lieutenants to get anything done. Which is all to say, I just do not understand how you can live in that reality, get a whole bunch of people who are much smarter than you to do something, and then turn around and think “I did that.” You have a front row seat to the people who are doing the thing! You went through enormous effort to find them and spend enormous treasure to keep them. You know their value and your own limitations more than anyone else. Like yeah okay, I am smart in some ways. But there is no world in which I get to call myself a genius. I’ve worked with geniuses and I know what that looks like. I admire them intensely, and feel deeply honored that such highly developed minds would be willing to work with me.
Which is why I am just gobsmacked anytime someone like Elon brags about something like, say, anything he contributed to SpaceX. That man is not a technical genius, if he proficient in any area, it’s finance. And finding hair plugs. He has an absolute knack for using other people’s money, especially the government’s, to subsidize his risk while he captures the gains. If that man ever has any crackpot idea for what he wants SpaceX to do, he is not the one assembling a team, he is not the one writing a development plan, he is calling up Gwynne Shotwell, hat in hand, and asking her very very nicely if it can be done. I think he knows that better than anyone else.
Okay, but what about the founders and investors that do invent things? Let’s imagine for just moment that they were actually the PI or first named inventor or whatever by merit and are not just taking credit for other people’s work. Those assholes should know this too! I am again, very much a generalist, not at all expert, but it turns out my exposure to a bunch of different fields allowed me to make some lateral connections and think up ideas to solve some of the problems we faced. I’ve been able to snag a decent number of patents, and while my portfolio isn’t huge, collectively it’s well into the kilocitations range at this point. I get to see bits of my work show up in a bunch of new robotics company these days; one of the launch features in the iPhone 15 keynote was a thing I made almost 10 years ago. Many pats on the back, I must really be some kind of innovator.
No. No not at all. I don’t think I “invented” jack shit for any of those. My team had a problem, and I applied tools other, smarter people had built long ago for different purposes to solve our problem. We were working on some problems no one had ever really tackled before, and I suggested solutions that I thought were kind of blindingly obvious ways to attack them, and here and there some of those turned out to be right. I was the first person to reach that conclusion because I got to work on those problems early, so my name’s on the patent, but it is very much the IP equivalent of “first post!”. Anyone facing these problems would have stumbled on these solutions eventually, I “discovered” them as much as an early explorer discovered “new” land. That land was always there, someone was going to bump into it eventually, but some dude got there first so it’s his name on it. And like, that dude was only able to attempt to get there at all because someone financed his exploration.
For every patent with my name on it, there is a graveyard of ideas that didn’t work out, utter failures that revealed many assumptions I was making and gaps in my understanding. But I had the resources to learn and to roll the dice over and over again, so no one sees the graveyard, they see a couple success. I, however, am keenly entirely aware of the insane privilege I’ve enjoyed and how often it goes wrong. It’s like, think of video of someone doing trick shots on YouTube, throwing a pen over their shoulder into a champagne flute or something. Yes, you see the super cut of the insane trick shots that make that person look like some sort of god of aim. And then they play the B-roll of the hundreds and hundreds of misses and you all laugh together. And like, okay, if a 3rd party only saw the super cut of your successes, they might think you an ubermensch. That is a mistake anyone could make - EXCEPT THE HUMAN WITH THE MEMORIES OF THE FAILURES. There is precisely one person who does not get to think they’re an ubermensch, it is the person pretending, who knows exactly why aren’t. The guy doing the trick shots knows those are 1 in 1000 hits because he had to throw the pen 1000 times and missed 999 of them.
And maybe this also a deep tech thing, but the very few concepts I’ve been able to build on – really, pretty much any idea I’ve ever had in some ways – it’s pretty easy for me to trace its origin, and it’s never me. There have been no ideas that just burst out of my head fully formed like Athena. I have been insanely fortunate to benefit from the time and attention of brilliant, generous teachers - people who could have very well made more money in the private sector but instead chose to pass on knowledge. I’ve benefitted so deeply from the many, many books and textbooks I’ve had access to, each of which required someone, somewhere with deep knowledge to spend a bunch of time laying out their expert understanding in terms a novice could grok. I am insanely, insanely lucky Sci-Hub exists. I just, I simply do not understand how a person gains the education necessary to do research and development, and doesn’t see how everything they ever launch is off the shoulders of giants.
When I’m able to use all these tools and ideas that other minds have built long ago and gifted to me, and I’m able to make some modicum of progress, it is so intensely humbling. It’s like I’ve been passed a baton that’s been held by every generation of thinkers and makers stretching all the way back to fire, the wheel, and the inclined plane. Here and there I was able to run my bit of the leg, but where I started from, and where I got to, that is all thanks to the work and progress of so, so many minds that went before. Each of those minds ran a leg of the race, and many of them saw no recognition during their lifetimes. But in couple cases, in my leg of the race I had the insane luck of crossing a milestone. In my leg I worked just as hard, for just as many (if not far fewer) hours than any of the people that went before me, but all of their past work happened to bear fruit when my turn came, and that also aligned with opportunity, and suddenly I’m holding something that’s not at all theoretical, it’s very much real and it very much works. My immediate instinct is to thank everyone that I couldn’t have done this without. I’m intensely aware of their contributions, and it’s an insane, frankly unearned honor to be the one that gets to carry it over the finish line. But like, so so so many times I see some asshole take the generations of collective work and thinking they benefitted from over the finish line, and then say “I won the entire race alone.”
And just, AGH. This asshole tendency to carry things over the last mile and keep all the credit keeps showing up again and again and again. Good god, how much work had the University of Illinois done to create the tools, discover concepts, and provide all the faculty, support, education and other elements necessary (not to mention funding) for Marc Andreessen to carry that over the line and write a web browser? Not to mention the, like, global history of CS work that got the University of Illinois to that place in the first place? How many decades of publicly funded research went into mRNA vaccines before a few private companies carried that work over the line during the pandemic, claimed all the credit, and captured all the profits? The biggest hospital in San Francisco was paid for over decades, a lot of it by city bonds, every single dollar of which was hard won by some nameless worker along the way. But then Mark Zuckerberg rolls in, donates the final 7.35% of the cost, and now it’s not “The City and People of San Francisco General Hospital” it’s “Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.” Barf.
It’s just, ugh. These founders and VCs have more of a front row seat to how little they’re actually contributing compared to how much they’re claiming, they’ve got a better idea of that than anyone else in the world. But they are just straight up guzzling the master of the universe kool-aid at this point. You’re supposed to eat your own dogfood, not drink your own kool-aid! You never drink the kool-aid! Like, that public persona was supposed to be very much a manufactured stage image, and we were all in on the game, but to these people it’s not a game, they believe the bullshit, and they believe themselves. This terrifies me.
Many YC partners and VCs would like to believe they have the golden touch. And there’s a simple secret to having the golden touch: only touch gold. But gold is extremely rare, and realistically, you can only do this if you have constant access to an insane amount of ore. VCs are keenly aware of this. Top partners know that their actual investment decisions are in many, many ways much less important than dealflow. VCs live and die on dealflow. They are only able to pick investments from the pool of companies they are able to meet with. To have any choice, to have any chance of finding the few gems that will return the fund, it is critically important that a VC is able to meet as many companies as possible, and that the quality of the companies they do see is extremely high (or in VC terms, you want deals that someone else has paid to de-risk). If you only want to touch gold, get lots of ore, and make the ore rich.
YC is in many ways still the most prestigious early-stage accelerator; it is certainly the most well known, so they enjoy an order of magnitude more dealflow than anyone else and can be much, much pickier than some no-name accelerator or group of angel investors. They still get it wrong all the fucking time, they record their success and failure rates, they know this intimately. I think this started with PG but picked up steam under Sam Altman, but YC has done a ton of work over the years to transfer more early risk onto founders (founders today need to derisk themselves and apply having invested much more time and money into building a much more complete prototype than they used to have to, and in return for a smaller check). They’ve also worked to increase their dealflow in super sneaky ways - getting into YC used to be rather difficult, but once you made it in that was a good sign that you’d been derisked and having YC on your resume made raising additional capital that much easier. Nowadays, it is quite a bit easier to get in, the cohorts are huge, and some programs are straight up open to the public. What they don’t tell new founders who get into YC is that they while they are in the YC program and are meeting with parters each week, they have not actually received the real YC stamp of approval. What they have really signed up for is a 3 month test, where the partners are evaluating them each week, and when demo day comes the partners will choose a small handful of the batch to bestow additional funding, and that is the real mark of approval. YC tells everyone who makes it that they’re a winner, but out of that pool YC is picking the real winners. And while the companies that are not picked to get to walk the stage and called themselves a YC company which will open some doors, it is extremely negative signaling to a sophisticated investor when the YC partners that have been meeting with you once a week decide they don’t want to put good money after bad.
A16Z is definitely one of the heaviest hitters in later stage funding, and they too enjoy more dealflow than anyone else besides maybe Sequoia and a few others. And they still lose billions on the regular and pour money into Web3.0 casinos that keep falling apart. And even with all that dealflow, even with all the doors and opportunities that open up to a company when you get the stamp of approval from YC or A16Z, many, many investments don’t work out. Many are total losses, some limp along with no real hope of an exit, and then every once in a while, one investment will “return the fund” – make so much money that it makes up for all the other losses along the way. And like, if you’re so uniquely good at picking winners, why do you pick so few? If you picked 100 companies and 1 wins, you don’t get to say you knew the winner in advance. You obviously thought those 99 failures were potential winners because you invested in them. These venture capitalists know this. They can tell anyone else that they’ve got the golden touch, that they’ve got some special insight, they may be able to fool them. But I don’t think they can truly fool themselves. Or can they? Is that what’s happening now?
Ugh, this has turned into a monster post. It is getting long, rambly, and way too autobiographical. I really owe you all an editing pass or two but I’m too tired and I’ve run out of discretionary time. Apologies. I’ll stop and try to get to some conclusions directly.
1. It absolutely terrifies and sickens me that people like Sam Altman and Garry Tam have the influence they do. Out of pretty much everyone I’ve met in my career, those people are some of the absolute worst suited for the positions they now enjoy and the power over other humans that affords them. Those are not the kind of men who will do the right thing when it’s hard. Those men lack character. They have a weak moral compass.
2. It terrifies me that investors like Garry, Balaji, and Marc seem to believe their own bullshit and are okay saying what are saying out loud, on record, without fear of blowback. Those men have served in technical leadership roles and in investment roles, they know better than anyone else exactly the ways in which their personal mythos is a fiction. I could see how that might lead to some deep imposter syndrome, and perhaps coming all the way around and actually believing your own myth is the apotheosis of that.
3. I can’t think of a 3rd point. I’m too angry at this point. Gonna stop rambling here, make some food, and spend some time thinking about what to do about it.
posted by 1024 at 9:07 PM on April 28 [78 favorites]
I’ve never met Balaji, we’re 2nd degree connections, but I have interacted with a bunch of the YC partners. I came out to SF ~15 years ago with stars in my eyes. I was fleeing an abusive home environment, dealing with some mental health issues, and well, for a lot of reasons I was just done with the East coast, and excited to start a new life in sunny California. I was an early hire at a YC startup, and things started to go off the rails quickly. The charismatic CEO turned out to be very much a charlatan. And like, okay, they/we all are to a degree. Every new CEO gets the talk from their investors that the job is one part Thomas Edison one part PT Barnum. But this kid was extra. He was sending out contracts for signatures, and then straight up editing the contract before countersigning. He was embezzling funds. He was blackmailing interns. That last one was the final straw for me and I hit the alarm. Met with the CTO, a kind PhD born in Russia, and soon I was in a room with Paul Graham and Sam Altman.
These were the waning days of the PG era, and Sam was being groomed to take over YC. I had started two companies at that point and read a few of PG’s essays, but after a few meetings I quickly realized that man was a buffoon. Sam was markedly sharper, with a keen mind for optimization. And while they listened to us and said some of the right things early on, it became really clear that they were pretty unconcerned about the whole blackmail thing. That was not the problem they were interested in solving. We had a bunch of crisis meetings as the CEO’s behavior became increasingly unhinged and (more importantly) legally actionable. Lots of partners were pulled in, including Garry Tam. Garry was an obsequious bootlicker for Paul and Sam; they piled the shit they didn’t want to deal with onto his plate. Eventually, when we had finally, painfully extricated the CEO, it was Garry that told us he’d like us to fire everyone left on the team, return any money left in the bank, quietly disappear, and never speak of this again. I didn’t.
I literally haven’t thought of Garry for like a decade now; it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the early-stage startup scene, and it just absolutely horrifies me that that man, with his moral character, has an one iota of influence over another human being, let alone the city, people, and government of San Francisco. This just feels like so much more of trend that has absolutely broken my heart.
I started another company soon after the YC fiasco, one of the very, very early AI/robotics ventures in the valley, way before that become hot. Almost no one was funding hardware at the time, but I managed to get into what was then a tiny accelerator (now huge) and oh my god I found my tribe. We were all dreamers, we had all tried something crazy and it had actually worked. Each team of founders was very much on a mission - we wanted to change the world, make things easier or better for people in some way, and we were true believers in the power of technology to do that. And if it worked out, we’d be filthy rich. There was definitely an element of self delusion there and in many way we were wearing blinders, but in some ways the value proposition of building hardware is in some ways more concrete than building software. With a physical thing, it has to be pretty obvious that you’re proving some utility, whereas with software it is much easier to build a thing that looks like it’s providing utility but is actually a machine that extracts value from users. And again, there was absolutely a profit motive, but I’d like to think our hearts were in the right place.
What I do know is that there’s not that many of those people left. The founders I knew who were absolutely on a mission have pretty much all been weeded out at this point. Some crashed, some grew disillusioned, many were given a good push by somebody with a MBA. I’d had a few turns in the C-suite at this point, and I swear to god with each year and with each rung up the ladder I’m able to climb, I’m running into fewer and fewer dreamers and more and more of the worst people I’ve ever met. I spent the pandemic taking psychology classes on the weekends, I’ve got a pretty good idea of how common narcissistic and BPD patterning is in the general population, and I am just running into way, way more of those types than I can explain by random chance.
I am really terrified that so many of these people, investors and new founders alike, really seem to be drinking the kool-aid. When you are starting or leading a tech company, you really do have to play a role. A lot of founders really do look like a monolith in many ways because we’re straight up told to be. PG wrote a disgusting essay a while back saying he’d “invest in anyone that looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” and, as a mixed Irish-Korean guy that does not look like Mark Zuckerberg, my first instinct is always “fuck you Paul” when I think about that. But he isn’t wrong, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. VCs, like record labels or movie studios, are not at all interested in taking a risk on something new or different. They are not in the business of innovation or disruption, they are managing funds, they are operating financial instruments trying to deliver returns to the limited partners that fund their war chests. There are very, very few firms that are actually making the crazy bets on things that are radically different, and those are usually very early stage funds. The big, influential funds are not predicting the future, they are pattern matching. They are looking for small variations on formulas that worked before.
A big, big part of the game in investing is evaluating risk, and specifically de-risking a venture. Consider a gamble with only two outcomes: win $1000 or lose $500, and a 50/50 chance either will happen. Who knows what any one play will net you, but if you were able to play that game infinitely, half the time you’d be winning $1000 and half the time you’d be losing $500, so the expected value of that gamble is 50%*$1000 + 50%*-$500 = $250. You can change the expected value by adjusting the outcome sizes, which is very hard to accurately determine at the early stages of a venture, or by adjusting the probabilities of the outcome, which is in many ways much easier to suss out. Every single thing in a new, unknown venture that matches something that’s worked before adds points to your success probability, anything new or different is at best ignored, but more likely it’s something that will be added to your failure probability.
So when you go out to raise money you get coached on allll the little bullshit heuristics VCs are looking for. And one of them is that you look and act like Mark Zuckerberg to some degree. VCs have a bullshit idea of what a successful tech founder looks like (informed entirely by the privilege and demographics of earlier founders), and the more you can match that the more likely you are to get success probability points in the VC’s idiot pattern matching smooth brains. When I went out to raise my first round of serious money, I was sat down by several people and told I do not look the part. I talked wrong, too slow and considered/deliberate. I dressed wrong, way too East coast / New Englandy, young tech founders do not wear collared shirts, and the way I presented meant that every VC I met would have to go through an extra “this is different, how much will that hurt?” calculation that would never, ever help me, it could at best be mitigated, and each time I risked a deal going poorly. So how much do you value being yourself? Enough to tank 10% of your fundraising opportunities (and thus lower your expected raise by at least 10%?)? 25%? When you’re working with megabucks, that’s really a lot of money. So dress like this. Talk like this. Act like this.
To maximize your chances of raising the largest war chest, investors want to see a wunderkind. They want to see a budding master of the universe, someone uniquely brilliant and larger than life. I love explaining things and sharing my understanding with other people, and I’m always super careful to be constantly identifying where I’m making assumptions and where the limits of my knowledge lies. Don’t do that. Act like you have the answers to absolutely everything. An absolute power move is if you can make an investor that considers themselves a smarty pants feel stupid in some way; then they look at you with awe. My co-founder and I referred to this as “le vise VC,” after “le vise anglais.” So ugh. Okay. I donated all my nice clothes, got rid of all my nice collared shirts and traded them in for hoodies and free promotional tech company t-shirts (free-shirts) that made me look like a shlub. I would put aside who I am, and become the bat. Everyone in my cohort did. But like, we all knew that was an act. That’s a mask you put on for public relations. When you’re in private with your co-founder(s) or around other friendly founders, you are all talking about how precarious things are, how much you don’t know, what you need to learn, who you need to hire, etc.. But that’s not what the world sees, not what investors see, not even what most of your employees see. They see the wunderkind, because that’s what you show them and that’s they want to see. They believe that personality is the kind that’s gonna get results, and when you break from that character, you often get punished in real time. But at the end of the day, that’s not you, that’s just someone you play on TV.
But each year, I’m running into more and more founders that seem to honestly believe that shit. And like, I just do not get that. I have played CEO and CTO a couple times now, and while those are leadership/management roles, they are not technical roles, and they are not innovation roles. You set goals and direction, but you, personally, do not build shit. I started my career building tons of stuff with my two hands. I loved coding, I loved working in the machine shop, I loved striking an arc and drawing a molten bead with a TIG welder, I loved the smell of flux when soldering (okay you’re not supposed to breath quite so much of that but it still smells nice). And with every year, I spent less and less time building, and more and more time in meetings, playing around with Gantt charts, and making presentations. By the time we were able to put together the $MM lights-out machining and fabrication shop of my dreams, I did not have time to touch it even once. Okay I did get to touch it one time – I was always the last one to leave the office, and every evening I’d say hello to the woman who cleaned up our mess and her 6yo daughter, who I taught how to move and jog the spindle of one of our CNC milling centers. I clamped a huge scrap of aluminum billet onto the table, chose a nearly indestructible and cheap cutting tool, set the speeds and feeds conservatively and let the little girl carve through it however she wanted and make a bunch of chips. Her mom may have freaked out a bit. So I guess I did get to use the machine shop eventually, but that little girl got to use it more. Ugh, but that’s an aside. The point is, I wasn’t the one doing the building or the inventing.
Maybe this is just me – I am decidedly a generalist; I have dabbled in a bunch of different disciplines, usually just enough to reach the point where I realize I could spend a lifetime studying a field and not have a complete understanding. Maybe it’s because of the slice of tech I was working on – today that kind of work is referred to as deep tech / frontier tech. Most all startups, especially web startups, are building jack shit that I would call “new”. If you’re making a new dating app or social media site or something, maybe you have some sort of unique sorting or paring algorithm, but fundamentally, all the problems you will ever face are solved problems. It is extremely unlikely you’re going to run across a technical problem that no one has faced before. With deep tech / frontier tech, you are specifically working on problems which no one has solved before. It is not just applied engineering, there is a very strong R&D component. And well, when you’re working on a really hard problem that no one has ever solved before, in an esoteric technical field, you really do need experts. I had ideas of what could be done, ideas for what I thought were novel approaches to the problem I was working on, but I absolutely lacked the capacity to build and test them at the level I wanted.
In a lot of ways I was smarter than the average bear, but no, I do not have a PhD, I dropped out of college the second semester of my senior year and well, a lot of the problems we were facing really required a PhD level understanding of the topic. And even if I had a PhD in one topic, robotics is a team sport, it combines a bunch of different disciplines from mechanical engineering to electrical engineering and controls engineering for circuitry and firmware, to computer vision, and software engineering at the middleware, application and cloud levels. Oh and later UI/UX for the HMI. Oh and that’s all just for prototyping, it’s a different game at production. There are probably other things too that I’ve forgotten. Even if I had a PhD in one of the required fields, there isn’t enough time in a human lifetime to get a PhD in all of the fields required for a robotics team. No man rules alone, and fuck, no one should be more vividly aware of this fact than the ruler.
When it came time to put gas on the hiring machine, I was very, very clear that I was only interested in hiring people who were smarter (more technical proficient) than me in some way. Why would I want to pay a mega salary to someone dumber? (aside: I find the terms “smart” and “dumb” extremely unhelpful. My current understanding of intelligence is that it exists along many axes, some close, some orthogonal. “Smart” smushes all those vectors into one scalar.) But long story short, a founder is absolutely, totally reliant on their generals and lieutenants to get anything done. Which is all to say, I just do not understand how you can live in that reality, get a whole bunch of people who are much smarter than you to do something, and then turn around and think “I did that.” You have a front row seat to the people who are doing the thing! You went through enormous effort to find them and spend enormous treasure to keep them. You know their value and your own limitations more than anyone else. Like yeah okay, I am smart in some ways. But there is no world in which I get to call myself a genius. I’ve worked with geniuses and I know what that looks like. I admire them intensely, and feel deeply honored that such highly developed minds would be willing to work with me.
Which is why I am just gobsmacked anytime someone like Elon brags about something like, say, anything he contributed to SpaceX. That man is not a technical genius, if he proficient in any area, it’s finance. And finding hair plugs. He has an absolute knack for using other people’s money, especially the government’s, to subsidize his risk while he captures the gains. If that man ever has any crackpot idea for what he wants SpaceX to do, he is not the one assembling a team, he is not the one writing a development plan, he is calling up Gwynne Shotwell, hat in hand, and asking her very very nicely if it can be done. I think he knows that better than anyone else.
Okay, but what about the founders and investors that do invent things? Let’s imagine for just moment that they were actually the PI or first named inventor or whatever by merit and are not just taking credit for other people’s work. Those assholes should know this too! I am again, very much a generalist, not at all expert, but it turns out my exposure to a bunch of different fields allowed me to make some lateral connections and think up ideas to solve some of the problems we faced. I’ve been able to snag a decent number of patents, and while my portfolio isn’t huge, collectively it’s well into the kilocitations range at this point. I get to see bits of my work show up in a bunch of new robotics company these days; one of the launch features in the iPhone 15 keynote was a thing I made almost 10 years ago. Many pats on the back, I must really be some kind of innovator.
No. No not at all. I don’t think I “invented” jack shit for any of those. My team had a problem, and I applied tools other, smarter people had built long ago for different purposes to solve our problem. We were working on some problems no one had ever really tackled before, and I suggested solutions that I thought were kind of blindingly obvious ways to attack them, and here and there some of those turned out to be right. I was the first person to reach that conclusion because I got to work on those problems early, so my name’s on the patent, but it is very much the IP equivalent of “first post!”. Anyone facing these problems would have stumbled on these solutions eventually, I “discovered” them as much as an early explorer discovered “new” land. That land was always there, someone was going to bump into it eventually, but some dude got there first so it’s his name on it. And like, that dude was only able to attempt to get there at all because someone financed his exploration.
For every patent with my name on it, there is a graveyard of ideas that didn’t work out, utter failures that revealed many assumptions I was making and gaps in my understanding. But I had the resources to learn and to roll the dice over and over again, so no one sees the graveyard, they see a couple success. I, however, am keenly entirely aware of the insane privilege I’ve enjoyed and how often it goes wrong. It’s like, think of video of someone doing trick shots on YouTube, throwing a pen over their shoulder into a champagne flute or something. Yes, you see the super cut of the insane trick shots that make that person look like some sort of god of aim. And then they play the B-roll of the hundreds and hundreds of misses and you all laugh together. And like, okay, if a 3rd party only saw the super cut of your successes, they might think you an ubermensch. That is a mistake anyone could make - EXCEPT THE HUMAN WITH THE MEMORIES OF THE FAILURES. There is precisely one person who does not get to think they’re an ubermensch, it is the person pretending, who knows exactly why aren’t. The guy doing the trick shots knows those are 1 in 1000 hits because he had to throw the pen 1000 times and missed 999 of them.
And maybe this also a deep tech thing, but the very few concepts I’ve been able to build on – really, pretty much any idea I’ve ever had in some ways – it’s pretty easy for me to trace its origin, and it’s never me. There have been no ideas that just burst out of my head fully formed like Athena. I have been insanely fortunate to benefit from the time and attention of brilliant, generous teachers - people who could have very well made more money in the private sector but instead chose to pass on knowledge. I’ve benefitted so deeply from the many, many books and textbooks I’ve had access to, each of which required someone, somewhere with deep knowledge to spend a bunch of time laying out their expert understanding in terms a novice could grok. I am insanely, insanely lucky Sci-Hub exists. I just, I simply do not understand how a person gains the education necessary to do research and development, and doesn’t see how everything they ever launch is off the shoulders of giants.
When I’m able to use all these tools and ideas that other minds have built long ago and gifted to me, and I’m able to make some modicum of progress, it is so intensely humbling. It’s like I’ve been passed a baton that’s been held by every generation of thinkers and makers stretching all the way back to fire, the wheel, and the inclined plane. Here and there I was able to run my bit of the leg, but where I started from, and where I got to, that is all thanks to the work and progress of so, so many minds that went before. Each of those minds ran a leg of the race, and many of them saw no recognition during their lifetimes. But in couple cases, in my leg of the race I had the insane luck of crossing a milestone. In my leg I worked just as hard, for just as many (if not far fewer) hours than any of the people that went before me, but all of their past work happened to bear fruit when my turn came, and that also aligned with opportunity, and suddenly I’m holding something that’s not at all theoretical, it’s very much real and it very much works. My immediate instinct is to thank everyone that I couldn’t have done this without. I’m intensely aware of their contributions, and it’s an insane, frankly unearned honor to be the one that gets to carry it over the finish line. But like, so so so many times I see some asshole take the generations of collective work and thinking they benefitted from over the finish line, and then say “I won the entire race alone.”
And just, AGH. This asshole tendency to carry things over the last mile and keep all the credit keeps showing up again and again and again. Good god, how much work had the University of Illinois done to create the tools, discover concepts, and provide all the faculty, support, education and other elements necessary (not to mention funding) for Marc Andreessen to carry that over the line and write a web browser? Not to mention the, like, global history of CS work that got the University of Illinois to that place in the first place? How many decades of publicly funded research went into mRNA vaccines before a few private companies carried that work over the line during the pandemic, claimed all the credit, and captured all the profits? The biggest hospital in San Francisco was paid for over decades, a lot of it by city bonds, every single dollar of which was hard won by some nameless worker along the way. But then Mark Zuckerberg rolls in, donates the final 7.35% of the cost, and now it’s not “The City and People of San Francisco General Hospital” it’s “Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.” Barf.
It’s just, ugh. These founders and VCs have more of a front row seat to how little they’re actually contributing compared to how much they’re claiming, they’ve got a better idea of that than anyone else in the world. But they are just straight up guzzling the master of the universe kool-aid at this point. You’re supposed to eat your own dogfood, not drink your own kool-aid! You never drink the kool-aid! Like, that public persona was supposed to be very much a manufactured stage image, and we were all in on the game, but to these people it’s not a game, they believe the bullshit, and they believe themselves. This terrifies me.
Many YC partners and VCs would like to believe they have the golden touch. And there’s a simple secret to having the golden touch: only touch gold. But gold is extremely rare, and realistically, you can only do this if you have constant access to an insane amount of ore. VCs are keenly aware of this. Top partners know that their actual investment decisions are in many, many ways much less important than dealflow. VCs live and die on dealflow. They are only able to pick investments from the pool of companies they are able to meet with. To have any choice, to have any chance of finding the few gems that will return the fund, it is critically important that a VC is able to meet as many companies as possible, and that the quality of the companies they do see is extremely high (or in VC terms, you want deals that someone else has paid to de-risk). If you only want to touch gold, get lots of ore, and make the ore rich.
YC is in many ways still the most prestigious early-stage accelerator; it is certainly the most well known, so they enjoy an order of magnitude more dealflow than anyone else and can be much, much pickier than some no-name accelerator or group of angel investors. They still get it wrong all the fucking time, they record their success and failure rates, they know this intimately. I think this started with PG but picked up steam under Sam Altman, but YC has done a ton of work over the years to transfer more early risk onto founders (founders today need to derisk themselves and apply having invested much more time and money into building a much more complete prototype than they used to have to, and in return for a smaller check). They’ve also worked to increase their dealflow in super sneaky ways - getting into YC used to be rather difficult, but once you made it in that was a good sign that you’d been derisked and having YC on your resume made raising additional capital that much easier. Nowadays, it is quite a bit easier to get in, the cohorts are huge, and some programs are straight up open to the public. What they don’t tell new founders who get into YC is that they while they are in the YC program and are meeting with parters each week, they have not actually received the real YC stamp of approval. What they have really signed up for is a 3 month test, where the partners are evaluating them each week, and when demo day comes the partners will choose a small handful of the batch to bestow additional funding, and that is the real mark of approval. YC tells everyone who makes it that they’re a winner, but out of that pool YC is picking the real winners. And while the companies that are not picked to get to walk the stage and called themselves a YC company which will open some doors, it is extremely negative signaling to a sophisticated investor when the YC partners that have been meeting with you once a week decide they don’t want to put good money after bad.
A16Z is definitely one of the heaviest hitters in later stage funding, and they too enjoy more dealflow than anyone else besides maybe Sequoia and a few others. And they still lose billions on the regular and pour money into Web3.0 casinos that keep falling apart. And even with all that dealflow, even with all the doors and opportunities that open up to a company when you get the stamp of approval from YC or A16Z, many, many investments don’t work out. Many are total losses, some limp along with no real hope of an exit, and then every once in a while, one investment will “return the fund” – make so much money that it makes up for all the other losses along the way. And like, if you’re so uniquely good at picking winners, why do you pick so few? If you picked 100 companies and 1 wins, you don’t get to say you knew the winner in advance. You obviously thought those 99 failures were potential winners because you invested in them. These venture capitalists know this. They can tell anyone else that they’ve got the golden touch, that they’ve got some special insight, they may be able to fool them. But I don’t think they can truly fool themselves. Or can they? Is that what’s happening now?
Ugh, this has turned into a monster post. It is getting long, rambly, and way too autobiographical. I really owe you all an editing pass or two but I’m too tired and I’ve run out of discretionary time. Apologies. I’ll stop and try to get to some conclusions directly.
1. It absolutely terrifies and sickens me that people like Sam Altman and Garry Tam have the influence they do. Out of pretty much everyone I’ve met in my career, those people are some of the absolute worst suited for the positions they now enjoy and the power over other humans that affords them. Those are not the kind of men who will do the right thing when it’s hard. Those men lack character. They have a weak moral compass.
2. It terrifies me that investors like Garry, Balaji, and Marc seem to believe their own bullshit and are okay saying what are saying out loud, on record, without fear of blowback. Those men have served in technical leadership roles and in investment roles, they know better than anyone else exactly the ways in which their personal mythos is a fiction. I could see how that might lead to some deep imposter syndrome, and perhaps coming all the way around and actually believing your own myth is the apotheosis of that.
3. I can’t think of a 3rd point. I’m too angry at this point. Gonna stop rambling here, make some food, and spend some time thinking about what to do about it.
posted by 1024 at 9:07 PM on April 28 [78 favorites]
I mean, if you want to get a bit more terrified, there is always the new Boston Dynamics Atlas robot [40s], that doesn't use hydraulics and is both humanoid and entirely uncanny all at the same time..
posted by hippybear at 9:21 PM on April 28
posted by hippybear at 9:21 PM on April 28
Ugh, this has turned into a monster post.
Flagged as fantastic.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:39 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
Flagged as fantastic.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:39 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
Ah I just re-read this thread and I swear this is the last thing I’m gonna write here tonight; I’ve gotta get other stuff done but there were a few calls up thread that I feel I have to respond to.
Could people maybe not shit on Stanford quite so much in the way they’re doing here? I totally understand how quite a few highly visible assholes play up their Stanford degrees and how one could conclude that therefore all Stanford grads are assholes or “anyone who matriculates at Stanford needs… well, something”. But I would really invite you to consider whether this may be a case of sampling bias. Perhaps a Stanford education is indeed a uniquely monstrous assembly line that transforms innocent, bright children into the worst kind of asshole you can imagine. Stanford’s CS department is pretty highly regarded as one of the best in the world, certainly one of the most competitive to join, and maybe it is straight up sinister. But perhaps there’s also a possibility that the worst kind of assholes or people with asshole potential are being drawn to it for its prestige?
I don’t know anything about the Stanford administration, but I’ve worked with many graduates (mainly masters and PhD, but a good number of undergrads) and I know a fair number of people who teach there. I may be biased and they may be only showing one side of themselves to me, but in my experience the asshole incidence among that cohort pretty closely matches the general population, or at least the population out here in the Bay Area. And the professors? Well, some of them, a lot of them actually, they’re really good people. They are at the absolute top of their game, they could easily make more in the private sector, but instead they choose to teach and pass on knowledge to a student base that grows less and less interested in education with each year, and more and more adversarial. I keep hearing that each crop of new students is more and more focused on how much they’re going to be able to make from their Stanford degree and little else. And these professors are still, desperately trying to reach them and try to round them out where they can. Some of them have fought to introduce barebones humanities courses into their STEM degree requirements, some have even won, often at great personal or professional cost. I don’t think those people are your enemies.
Also, Stanford is not a monolith of STEM? There is an entire school of Humanities and Sciences with like 24 departments that I’m guessing are pretty damn good? And I kinda assume those departments are churning out graduates with a similar asshole distribution that matches their incoming student population. Again, maybe that’s an assumption, and this supposed institution of higher learning is run by purely profit-driven mustachio-twirling corrupters (who for some reason choose an academic’s salary). But if there’s a chance that’s not true, maybe don’t be so eager to “ [force] the students at schools like Stanford to go do subsistence agriculture for a few years.”
Honestly, invoking the cultural revolution as a way to punish hated elites en mass would kind of horrify me in any context. Like, okay, I get that’s maybe a joke. And maybe this is just my views from spending a good chunk of my life living in China and spending time talking to Chinese citizens with living memory of the cultural revolution, or the children of people who survived that (or didn’t) and are now living with inter generational trauma, but like, that was a time when intellectuals of all stripes were being rounded up, shackled, and beaten to death on stage by party cadres as stadiums full of younger cadres full of revolutionary zeal screamed for their blood. And out of all those hated intellectuals with their book learning, the ones that were especially targeted were the ones that posed a threat to the ideology of madness that was taking over at the time, the ones who dared to question the regime, and well, I kind of think those very people were the free thinkers who may been the kind of people who if they were alive today, would be your allies as well.
And like, okay, I don’t think I’d be quick to call myself an intellectual, but I’m not sure that’s kind of difference that would have really mattered to a party apparatchik during the cultural revolution. I think there’s a very good chance that if I had lived there at the time, me and many of the people I care about would have been rounded up in paddywagons and found ourselves on some stage, chained to chair, and staring at some kid with a lead pipe who is reading out our crimes and demanding we confess.
So okay, maybe you were just making a joke. Ha ha, remember when the cultural revolution hunted, tortured and massacred people like you for how you thought and then sent your orphaned children to toil in the fields, maybe we should try that again, funny joke! I mean, I guess that’s one definition of funny? To you? But it is really, really hard for me personally to find any context where I’m laughing about a time of bloodshed and madness that targeted people that think like me. And in this specific context, where we’re supposedly condemning a twisted man’s sick calls for ethnic cleansing in the Bay Area where I live, your call for ideological cleansing is kinda chilling.
Like, ugh, okay. I don’t want to be all “not ALL men!” or “not ALL Stanford grads!” There are many other groups which need defending first. But geeze, some of those people are straight up on your side. Some of those people are here on MetaFilter. When you call for blood, they hear you.
I may be taking this a bit personally. There is a woman in my life who is incredibly special to me, who happens to have a PhD in humanities field from Stanford. I’ve been an executive for a while, most people who meet me know that, and the people I meet often have extremely rigid expectations about how I’ll behave. They want to see power, dominance, and other displays of traditional masculinity that yeah, I can perform if I have to, but frankly that is not at all how I’m wired and keeping it up is damn exhausting, but my behavior is constantly being policed and if I slip from expectations I’m punished immediately. This woman has been the first person I’ve met in many years that has shown me understanding and actually appreciated the things I like most about myself. Some of the biggest things I look for in people these days are how they treat people with less power than them, and especially to whom and how they show kindness when no one else is looking and there’s no penalty for cruelty. I’ve caught her doing that over and over again. She understands the mind deeper than anyone I’ve ever met, and she doesn’t use that to stack knots at Meta, a lot of her work has been on PTSD and addiction in veterans. And teaching the next generation of people who will carry on this work. She means a lot to me, I think she’s very special, and that she’s putting good out into the world. Please don’t condemn her to die violently in a struggle session. Please don’t encourage other people to fantasize about doing the same.
I really, deeply get what people are saying about the humanities though. My early and high school education was deeply focused on the humanities, I left for college not knowing what an engineer did. I double-majored in a STEM field and a humanities field. Today, I make money partially from STEM skills, and exposure to a bunch of different STEM fields and sub-fields within them have equipped me with a bunch of extremely valuable perspectives, insights and tools which are incredibly useful for different types of problem solving and analysis, especially quantitive analysis. But the very most important things I’ve learned in my life, the real lessons I have deeply internalized that guide my behavior, rule my actions, and generally determine who I am, those all came from the humanities. The best parts of me came from:
1) Reading books, specifically fiction, anything I could get my hands on, so so so many books.
2) English, all the reading and guided discussion I did there, and especially creative writing, where I learned to refine my thoughts and communicate them with others
3) Art History, where I was introduced to the male gaze and feminism and was able to contextualize today’s culture within the greater arc of human history
4) Metafilter. I have been lurking here and reading everything I could pretty much daily for a very, very long time. Over twenty years now. I was reading the blue back in the days of “We have cameras.” Still pissed I didn’t get a camera.
I think the single biggest thing those four sources taught me was how to see the world from viewpoints that were not my own. This is so deep inside me now that I often forget that it was very much something that had to be taught to me. Kids are not at all born with that capability, and many, many adults lack it. Metafilter in particular exposed me to so many views and lived experiences that I never, ever would have otherwise encountered given my upbringing. Every single one expanded my perspectives and horizons, and bit by bit built empathy and expanded my definition of in-group, which just hasn’t stopped growing. There are so, so many voices here that I’ve benefitted from, there’s no way I could name them all. I miss LanguageHat. I’ve learned a ton from corb. I am a straight up different person because of the comments Frowner has written and the absolutely insane amount of work over many years now that they’ve put into explaining basic concepts that they shouldn’t be required to explain, its not at all their job, but nonetheless, I was listening, I was fundamentally changed, and I am so, so thankful. I think of that much younger version of me that was just getting used to using browsers after years of gopher, and how absolutely shockingly lucky he was to have the query he searched for pass through some algorithm in Palo Alto which somehow connected him to MetaFilter. It could have just as easily been Hackernews or Reddit and things may have turned out very differently.
At this point I’ve traveled the world, I’ve been to the fields and factories that subsidize our western way of life, and when I sat down to break bread and drink tea with the humans toiling there, I learned how they thought, the struggles they faced, their joys and their fears. I looked them in the eye and saw they were every bit my brother and sister as my own blood kin. I cannot unsee that, the humanities have installed a ratchet in my mind that can move in but one direction.
I’m not particularly proud of my younger self in many ways. I was raised in an extremely cloistered enclave of New England among a very privileged group of kids, the great majority of whom had parents that had done very well in the market and were deep believers in the absolute power/rightness of capitalism and market economics. Particularly in high school, I expressed some pretty abhorrent manifestations of this worldview that I’m ashamed of. I was absurdly lucky to benefit from the kindness and patience of educators, who gently engaged my curiosity, asked questions I couldn’t ignore or answer, and gradually guided me onto a path I’m traveling to this day. My parents had installed a restraining bolt on my damn mind, my teachers saw that, and they the exact tools they needed to pop that sucker right off. And they did. After that I was no longer a slave to the moisture farms and free to roam the dune sea.
So yes, I value the humanities. All of the best parts of me flowed from them. I am not sure I am 100% onboard with 100% of the curriculum – foreign languages in particular are extremely difficult for me, I’m guessing ADHD may be a factor there, and while I’m not saying they don’t have anything to teach me, in 7 years of study I was never able to reach a level of proficiency where I could learn those lessons and I think it was cruel to force me to do so. But the greater goal of introducing different perspectives and ways of thinking with the aim of creating a well-rounded human, yes I am definitely onboard with that. I work pretty much exclusively with STEM graduates, and while many are wonderful people with highly developed technical abilities that inform how they see the world, I run into some absolute gaps in the way they think much more often than I’d expect. STEM is important! Really important! So so much of the quality of life we enjoy today is due to hard work in STEM fields. But I don’t think we should be creating mentats. I don’t think the humanities should be optional. Perhaps someone on a STEM track shouldn’t have to complete every single requirement of a humanities degree, but perhaps there should be a shared core curriculum. Like, what does everyone need to know to be a minimum viable citizen. Learning that will take time, years that could have been spent on problem sets, but I really, really don’t think it should be optional. Maybe becoming an engineer takes 6-8 years. I think that would be okay.
Oh god another hour has passed. Alright gotta go.
posted by 1024 at 11:07 PM on April 28 [23 favorites]
Could people maybe not shit on Stanford quite so much in the way they’re doing here? I totally understand how quite a few highly visible assholes play up their Stanford degrees and how one could conclude that therefore all Stanford grads are assholes or “anyone who matriculates at Stanford needs… well, something”. But I would really invite you to consider whether this may be a case of sampling bias. Perhaps a Stanford education is indeed a uniquely monstrous assembly line that transforms innocent, bright children into the worst kind of asshole you can imagine. Stanford’s CS department is pretty highly regarded as one of the best in the world, certainly one of the most competitive to join, and maybe it is straight up sinister. But perhaps there’s also a possibility that the worst kind of assholes or people with asshole potential are being drawn to it for its prestige?
I don’t know anything about the Stanford administration, but I’ve worked with many graduates (mainly masters and PhD, but a good number of undergrads) and I know a fair number of people who teach there. I may be biased and they may be only showing one side of themselves to me, but in my experience the asshole incidence among that cohort pretty closely matches the general population, or at least the population out here in the Bay Area. And the professors? Well, some of them, a lot of them actually, they’re really good people. They are at the absolute top of their game, they could easily make more in the private sector, but instead they choose to teach and pass on knowledge to a student base that grows less and less interested in education with each year, and more and more adversarial. I keep hearing that each crop of new students is more and more focused on how much they’re going to be able to make from their Stanford degree and little else. And these professors are still, desperately trying to reach them and try to round them out where they can. Some of them have fought to introduce barebones humanities courses into their STEM degree requirements, some have even won, often at great personal or professional cost. I don’t think those people are your enemies.
Also, Stanford is not a monolith of STEM? There is an entire school of Humanities and Sciences with like 24 departments that I’m guessing are pretty damn good? And I kinda assume those departments are churning out graduates with a similar asshole distribution that matches their incoming student population. Again, maybe that’s an assumption, and this supposed institution of higher learning is run by purely profit-driven mustachio-twirling corrupters (who for some reason choose an academic’s salary). But if there’s a chance that’s not true, maybe don’t be so eager to “ [force] the students at schools like Stanford to go do subsistence agriculture for a few years.”
Honestly, invoking the cultural revolution as a way to punish hated elites en mass would kind of horrify me in any context. Like, okay, I get that’s maybe a joke. And maybe this is just my views from spending a good chunk of my life living in China and spending time talking to Chinese citizens with living memory of the cultural revolution, or the children of people who survived that (or didn’t) and are now living with inter generational trauma, but like, that was a time when intellectuals of all stripes were being rounded up, shackled, and beaten to death on stage by party cadres as stadiums full of younger cadres full of revolutionary zeal screamed for their blood. And out of all those hated intellectuals with their book learning, the ones that were especially targeted were the ones that posed a threat to the ideology of madness that was taking over at the time, the ones who dared to question the regime, and well, I kind of think those very people were the free thinkers who may been the kind of people who if they were alive today, would be your allies as well.
And like, okay, I don’t think I’d be quick to call myself an intellectual, but I’m not sure that’s kind of difference that would have really mattered to a party apparatchik during the cultural revolution. I think there’s a very good chance that if I had lived there at the time, me and many of the people I care about would have been rounded up in paddywagons and found ourselves on some stage, chained to chair, and staring at some kid with a lead pipe who is reading out our crimes and demanding we confess.
So okay, maybe you were just making a joke. Ha ha, remember when the cultural revolution hunted, tortured and massacred people like you for how you thought and then sent your orphaned children to toil in the fields, maybe we should try that again, funny joke! I mean, I guess that’s one definition of funny? To you? But it is really, really hard for me personally to find any context where I’m laughing about a time of bloodshed and madness that targeted people that think like me. And in this specific context, where we’re supposedly condemning a twisted man’s sick calls for ethnic cleansing in the Bay Area where I live, your call for ideological cleansing is kinda chilling.
Like, ugh, okay. I don’t want to be all “not ALL men!” or “not ALL Stanford grads!” There are many other groups which need defending first. But geeze, some of those people are straight up on your side. Some of those people are here on MetaFilter. When you call for blood, they hear you.
I may be taking this a bit personally. There is a woman in my life who is incredibly special to me, who happens to have a PhD in humanities field from Stanford. I’ve been an executive for a while, most people who meet me know that, and the people I meet often have extremely rigid expectations about how I’ll behave. They want to see power, dominance, and other displays of traditional masculinity that yeah, I can perform if I have to, but frankly that is not at all how I’m wired and keeping it up is damn exhausting, but my behavior is constantly being policed and if I slip from expectations I’m punished immediately. This woman has been the first person I’ve met in many years that has shown me understanding and actually appreciated the things I like most about myself. Some of the biggest things I look for in people these days are how they treat people with less power than them, and especially to whom and how they show kindness when no one else is looking and there’s no penalty for cruelty. I’ve caught her doing that over and over again. She understands the mind deeper than anyone I’ve ever met, and she doesn’t use that to stack knots at Meta, a lot of her work has been on PTSD and addiction in veterans. And teaching the next generation of people who will carry on this work. She means a lot to me, I think she’s very special, and that she’s putting good out into the world. Please don’t condemn her to die violently in a struggle session. Please don’t encourage other people to fantasize about doing the same.
I really, deeply get what people are saying about the humanities though. My early and high school education was deeply focused on the humanities, I left for college not knowing what an engineer did. I double-majored in a STEM field and a humanities field. Today, I make money partially from STEM skills, and exposure to a bunch of different STEM fields and sub-fields within them have equipped me with a bunch of extremely valuable perspectives, insights and tools which are incredibly useful for different types of problem solving and analysis, especially quantitive analysis. But the very most important things I’ve learned in my life, the real lessons I have deeply internalized that guide my behavior, rule my actions, and generally determine who I am, those all came from the humanities. The best parts of me came from:
1) Reading books, specifically fiction, anything I could get my hands on, so so so many books.
2) English, all the reading and guided discussion I did there, and especially creative writing, where I learned to refine my thoughts and communicate them with others
3) Art History, where I was introduced to the male gaze and feminism and was able to contextualize today’s culture within the greater arc of human history
4) Metafilter. I have been lurking here and reading everything I could pretty much daily for a very, very long time. Over twenty years now. I was reading the blue back in the days of “We have cameras.” Still pissed I didn’t get a camera.
I think the single biggest thing those four sources taught me was how to see the world from viewpoints that were not my own. This is so deep inside me now that I often forget that it was very much something that had to be taught to me. Kids are not at all born with that capability, and many, many adults lack it. Metafilter in particular exposed me to so many views and lived experiences that I never, ever would have otherwise encountered given my upbringing. Every single one expanded my perspectives and horizons, and bit by bit built empathy and expanded my definition of in-group, which just hasn’t stopped growing. There are so, so many voices here that I’ve benefitted from, there’s no way I could name them all. I miss LanguageHat. I’ve learned a ton from corb. I am a straight up different person because of the comments Frowner has written and the absolutely insane amount of work over many years now that they’ve put into explaining basic concepts that they shouldn’t be required to explain, its not at all their job, but nonetheless, I was listening, I was fundamentally changed, and I am so, so thankful. I think of that much younger version of me that was just getting used to using browsers after years of gopher, and how absolutely shockingly lucky he was to have the query he searched for pass through some algorithm in Palo Alto which somehow connected him to MetaFilter. It could have just as easily been Hackernews or Reddit and things may have turned out very differently.
At this point I’ve traveled the world, I’ve been to the fields and factories that subsidize our western way of life, and when I sat down to break bread and drink tea with the humans toiling there, I learned how they thought, the struggles they faced, their joys and their fears. I looked them in the eye and saw they were every bit my brother and sister as my own blood kin. I cannot unsee that, the humanities have installed a ratchet in my mind that can move in but one direction.
I’m not particularly proud of my younger self in many ways. I was raised in an extremely cloistered enclave of New England among a very privileged group of kids, the great majority of whom had parents that had done very well in the market and were deep believers in the absolute power/rightness of capitalism and market economics. Particularly in high school, I expressed some pretty abhorrent manifestations of this worldview that I’m ashamed of. I was absurdly lucky to benefit from the kindness and patience of educators, who gently engaged my curiosity, asked questions I couldn’t ignore or answer, and gradually guided me onto a path I’m traveling to this day. My parents had installed a restraining bolt on my damn mind, my teachers saw that, and they the exact tools they needed to pop that sucker right off. And they did. After that I was no longer a slave to the moisture farms and free to roam the dune sea.
So yes, I value the humanities. All of the best parts of me flowed from them. I am not sure I am 100% onboard with 100% of the curriculum – foreign languages in particular are extremely difficult for me, I’m guessing ADHD may be a factor there, and while I’m not saying they don’t have anything to teach me, in 7 years of study I was never able to reach a level of proficiency where I could learn those lessons and I think it was cruel to force me to do so. But the greater goal of introducing different perspectives and ways of thinking with the aim of creating a well-rounded human, yes I am definitely onboard with that. I work pretty much exclusively with STEM graduates, and while many are wonderful people with highly developed technical abilities that inform how they see the world, I run into some absolute gaps in the way they think much more often than I’d expect. STEM is important! Really important! So so much of the quality of life we enjoy today is due to hard work in STEM fields. But I don’t think we should be creating mentats. I don’t think the humanities should be optional. Perhaps someone on a STEM track shouldn’t have to complete every single requirement of a humanities degree, but perhaps there should be a shared core curriculum. Like, what does everyone need to know to be a minimum viable citizen. Learning that will take time, years that could have been spent on problem sets, but I really, really don’t think it should be optional. Maybe becoming an engineer takes 6-8 years. I think that would be okay.
Oh god another hour has passed. Alright gotta go.
posted by 1024 at 11:07 PM on April 28 [23 favorites]
I keep hearing that each crop of new students is more and more focused on how much they’re going to be able to make from their Stanford degree and little else.
This is not a very strong argument againstt painting Stanford grads with a broad and unflattering brush.
posted by Dysk at 12:25 AM on April 29 [8 favorites]
This is not a very strong argument againstt painting Stanford grads with a broad and unflattering brush.
posted by Dysk at 12:25 AM on April 29 [8 favorites]
I mean, that is not just a uniquely Stanford thing, I apologize if I gave that impression. It is happening at every single elite institution I’ve been able to talk to educators at, some of which completely lack STEM fields? Not just in the US, the profs I know in the UK and EU in completely non-STEM fields have been complaining about this for a while and are all getting out as well. I hear and understand that you are interested in “painting Stanford grads with a broad and unflattering brush”. I guess that is your right. I’ve done that a bunch of times myself for different group, especially when I was much, much younger, less mature, and had enjoyed the easy confidence and simplicity that came with a dramatically less nuanced understanding of the world, along with the ease of moving through the world unburdened by quite as much empathy or curiosity, especially for groups I considered “other” or “bad” in some way. Especially when those groups had power. I’ve been there.
But in my experience, I was wrong every time. I have yet to encounter any grouping of humans that is actually a monolith that can be fairly painted with a broad and unflattering brush without doing a great disservice to my own understanding of that group, inhibiting my abilities to communicate or engage with that group, and alienating/abandoning potential allies within it. Similarly, I have yet to encounter any form of binary or discrete categorization that isn’t better explained by a spectrum or distribution. In fact, every single time I’ve reduced all the texture, diversity, and differences among any group of humans I’ve ever encountered to their membership in some group, no matter how homogenous they’ve looked to me from the outside, well, in hindsight I was being enormously shitty in a way that hurt everyone, myself included. I’ve personally experienced having the various facets of the various dimensions of who I am as a human reduced to some single value, specifically my membership in some cohort that someone else felt fair to paint with a broad and unflattering brush. Growing up in New England, that was often being Asian. Maybe you’ve had similar experiences? Did they help?
But again, that is just my experience! I could definitely be wrong about this. Maybe yours is different and we can learn from each other! Perhaps every human that attends Stanford does suck, they are all the same or at leas same enough, and we should paint them with a broad and unflattering brush. I’m confused about what evidence you’re drawing this conclusion from and would like to know more about where you’re coming from, and especially why humans that graduated from Stanford in particular deserve to be pained with a broad and unflattering brush more than any other institution. I also have some purely functional and utilitarian questions – assuming that’s a valid approach, exactly how are we better served by painting every single human that attends Stanford with a broad and unflattering brush than we are by acknowledging the diversity of a group of humans? It definitely seems simpler and a lot easier, but I’d really like to think that through and see if the benefit outweighs the cost. It would really help my understanding if you had any other parallels where this was true. What other groups of humans is it okay to paint with a broad and unflattering brush? I’m personally having a really hard time thinking up examples, all that comes to mind is the ways that goes horribly and disgustingly wrong, and that while it is easy and very appealing to look at a group I dislike or disagree with and say “fuck em all,” especially when they enjoyed power, especially when some had used that power to hurt me, I can’t actually think of an incidence where that was the really the best move in hindsight. My instinct says that we can do better, that we can be better, and that we really owe it to ourselves and each other to try.
posted by 1024 at 1:11 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
But in my experience, I was wrong every time. I have yet to encounter any grouping of humans that is actually a monolith that can be fairly painted with a broad and unflattering brush without doing a great disservice to my own understanding of that group, inhibiting my abilities to communicate or engage with that group, and alienating/abandoning potential allies within it. Similarly, I have yet to encounter any form of binary or discrete categorization that isn’t better explained by a spectrum or distribution. In fact, every single time I’ve reduced all the texture, diversity, and differences among any group of humans I’ve ever encountered to their membership in some group, no matter how homogenous they’ve looked to me from the outside, well, in hindsight I was being enormously shitty in a way that hurt everyone, myself included. I’ve personally experienced having the various facets of the various dimensions of who I am as a human reduced to some single value, specifically my membership in some cohort that someone else felt fair to paint with a broad and unflattering brush. Growing up in New England, that was often being Asian. Maybe you’ve had similar experiences? Did they help?
But again, that is just my experience! I could definitely be wrong about this. Maybe yours is different and we can learn from each other! Perhaps every human that attends Stanford does suck, they are all the same or at leas same enough, and we should paint them with a broad and unflattering brush. I’m confused about what evidence you’re drawing this conclusion from and would like to know more about where you’re coming from, and especially why humans that graduated from Stanford in particular deserve to be pained with a broad and unflattering brush more than any other institution. I also have some purely functional and utilitarian questions – assuming that’s a valid approach, exactly how are we better served by painting every single human that attends Stanford with a broad and unflattering brush than we are by acknowledging the diversity of a group of humans? It definitely seems simpler and a lot easier, but I’d really like to think that through and see if the benefit outweighs the cost. It would really help my understanding if you had any other parallels where this was true. What other groups of humans is it okay to paint with a broad and unflattering brush? I’m personally having a really hard time thinking up examples, all that comes to mind is the ways that goes horribly and disgustingly wrong, and that while it is easy and very appealing to look at a group I dislike or disagree with and say “fuck em all,” especially when they enjoyed power, especially when some had used that power to hurt me, I can’t actually think of an incidence where that was the really the best move in hindsight. My instinct says that we can do better, that we can be better, and that we really owe it to ourselves and each other to try.
posted by 1024 at 1:11 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
The rich always ruin Cosplaying Shadowrun by failing to add Elves, Dwarves and Orcs.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:01 AM on April 29 [4 favorites]
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:01 AM on April 29 [4 favorites]
Stop saying things like "cosplay". They know exactly what they are and they are telling you directly, not as confessing but as bragging.
“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”
Not only do they know what they are, they are incredibly lucid on who is on their side and will support their fascist plans. We need to be equally clear about who is not on our side.
Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the [too-bright and illegal "X"] sign off of Elon’s building?”
Stop laughing at how dumb they are. They're winning while we're overthinking. Decades of "can you believe this?" shrugging on the Daily Show only succeeded at bringing us to our current situation.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:30 AM on April 29 [13 favorites]
“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”
Not only do they know what they are, they are incredibly lucid on who is on their side and will support their fascist plans. We need to be equally clear about who is not on our side.
Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the [too-bright and illegal "X"] sign off of Elon’s building?”
Stop laughing at how dumb they are. They're winning while we're overthinking. Decades of "can you believe this?" shrugging on the Daily Show only succeeded at bringing us to our current situation.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:30 AM on April 29 [13 favorites]
It is happening at every single elite institution I’ve been able to talk to educators at
My inherent mistrust does indeed extent to all "elite" institutions. I'm not saying they are a monolith, but I am definitely saying that I'm more sceptical and slower to trust people from that particular kind of privileged background. I've suffered enough abuse at the hands of them as bosses to have learned that lesson the hard way. That is painting with a broad brush. Not writing every individual off, but saying that as a group, they exhibit these tendencies, these characteristics.
posted by Dysk at 7:40 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
My inherent mistrust does indeed extent to all "elite" institutions. I'm not saying they are a monolith, but I am definitely saying that I'm more sceptical and slower to trust people from that particular kind of privileged background. I've suffered enough abuse at the hands of them as bosses to have learned that lesson the hard way. That is painting with a broad brush. Not writing every individual off, but saying that as a group, they exhibit these tendencies, these characteristics.
posted by Dysk at 7:40 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
exactly how are we better served by painting every single human that attends Stanford with a broad and unflattering brush
I agree that we shouldn't generalize about people who attend or work at Stanford. But as someone in higher ed whose research is CS/AI-adjacent, I do think there's some very worrying cultural elements that seem (to some degree uniquely) present at Stanford, especially in (let's say) the last 10 years, and students in tech-adjacent majors are going to get exposed to them. Part of this is about long-standing connections to the very VC elements that are under discussion in this thread, based on both history and sheer location; these are all known facts and so this leads people interested in this life to target stanford, and people who don't, to be more wary (I see this even at the graduate level in non-CS programs). And of course there is quite a lot of money in it for Stanford, which has certainly tried to maintain these connections; and there is institutional pressure for research to align with "disruption" ethics (or lack thereof) rather than any better options. Other elite institutions, one of which I work for, definitely also want this money, but can't really get at it in quite the same way because they lack the location/history; the structural factors aren't absent but arguably don't dominate in the same way. I think these structural factors, and the resulting worldview that is to some degree part of Stanford training (+ what is needed to get tenure, etc), are really what people are very imprecisely talking about.
posted by advil at 7:59 AM on April 29 [12 favorites]
I agree that we shouldn't generalize about people who attend or work at Stanford. But as someone in higher ed whose research is CS/AI-adjacent, I do think there's some very worrying cultural elements that seem (to some degree uniquely) present at Stanford, especially in (let's say) the last 10 years, and students in tech-adjacent majors are going to get exposed to them. Part of this is about long-standing connections to the very VC elements that are under discussion in this thread, based on both history and sheer location; these are all known facts and so this leads people interested in this life to target stanford, and people who don't, to be more wary (I see this even at the graduate level in non-CS programs). And of course there is quite a lot of money in it for Stanford, which has certainly tried to maintain these connections; and there is institutional pressure for research to align with "disruption" ethics (or lack thereof) rather than any better options. Other elite institutions, one of which I work for, definitely also want this money, but can't really get at it in quite the same way because they lack the location/history; the structural factors aren't absent but arguably don't dominate in the same way. I think these structural factors, and the resulting worldview that is to some degree part of Stanford training (+ what is needed to get tenure, etc), are really what people are very imprecisely talking about.
posted by advil at 7:59 AM on April 29 [12 favorites]
The other thing here is that Stanford grads are gonna be fuckin fine regardless of what done dickhead like me might say about them on mefi. The handwringing about those poor Stanford guys getting judged unfairly is entirely misplaced.
posted by Dysk at 8:11 AM on April 29 [12 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 8:11 AM on April 29 [12 favorites]
Apologies for the scattered comment, but this evil person and the whole techbro network are atrocious tools. They are staggeringly moronic in their arrogance. They think they're getting Orban, Ergdogan, or maybe even Mussolini (albeit an orange, demented, incompetent, and pliant one). They are just as likely, if not more so, to get Putin or Xi. Defenestration or disappearances preference Mr. Balaji?
And if things break the way us pessimists think they will (climate change caused mega-crises, depression era misery for most of the globe, truly gigantic waves of migrants that even Greg Abbott's wet dreams of machine guns on the border won't prevent), they're probably getting Hitler, Stalin or Mao. No way all these asshole techies survive the last two. Even their extended families, acquaintance, and casual contacts go to the gulags or camps (although there is something schadenfreude-y about the thought of these hyper-pampered tech fucks cleaning gulag latrines).
Re the Hitler scenario maybe they'll Van Pappen or IG Farben here, but Thiel is completely fucked - no WAY they accept the LGBTQ+ community members.
Might want to read a fucking history book you narcissistic sociopaths...
Slightly more confusing is the wholehearted desire of the political media to handmaiden the destruction of our very imperfect democracy into a mindbogglingly corrupt oligarchic autocracy. Why? IMO from a much more concise bluesky commentator was on point (something like) with a future NYT special opinion piece "The hangings have begun. Here's why we stand by our work". Cause if there is anything the fascists hate more than the unhoused, undocumented, minorities, and people on the left, it's journalists. They might be the highest ones on the proscription lists.
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:24 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
And if things break the way us pessimists think they will (climate change caused mega-crises, depression era misery for most of the globe, truly gigantic waves of migrants that even Greg Abbott's wet dreams of machine guns on the border won't prevent), they're probably getting Hitler, Stalin or Mao. No way all these asshole techies survive the last two. Even their extended families, acquaintance, and casual contacts go to the gulags or camps (although there is something schadenfreude-y about the thought of these hyper-pampered tech fucks cleaning gulag latrines).
Re the Hitler scenario maybe they'll Van Pappen or IG Farben here, but Thiel is completely fucked - no WAY they accept the LGBTQ+ community members.
Might want to read a fucking history book you narcissistic sociopaths...
Slightly more confusing is the wholehearted desire of the political media to handmaiden the destruction of our very imperfect democracy into a mindbogglingly corrupt oligarchic autocracy. Why? IMO from a much more concise bluesky commentator was on point (something like) with a future NYT special opinion piece "The hangings have begun. Here's why we stand by our work". Cause if there is anything the fascists hate more than the unhoused, undocumented, minorities, and people on the left, it's journalists. They might be the highest ones on the proscription lists.
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:24 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
exactly how are we better served by painting every single human that attends Stanford with a broad and unflattering brush
Stanford is a cultural hub, and young people are impressionable. It's worth considering to what degree students are indoctrinated, when VC funders effectively direct the ideological climate at the school by way of donations and endowment assets.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:59 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
Stanford is a cultural hub, and young people are impressionable. It's worth considering to what degree students are indoctrinated, when VC funders effectively direct the ideological climate at the school by way of donations and endowment assets.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:59 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
>What rich people want most is not to be accountable to anyone, particularly to those they view as their inferiors.
Which is weird because they are the lowest people on Earth, the ones who will be least missed, and whose deaths will allow for more greater goods to spring up once their efforts are forced to stop. You can almost measure you're worth as a person by how much money you have, the more you have, the less you are a person, the less anyone should care about you, and the more everyone should do to stop you. I would trade all the world's murderers for all the world's rich in a heartbeat. Murderers have such a limited ability to kill and they can just get caught and got to jail, whereas when rich "people" kill many others, they get no punishment, more likely to be rewarded and have taxpayers footing the bill.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:32 AM on April 29 [4 favorites]
Which is weird because they are the lowest people on Earth, the ones who will be least missed, and whose deaths will allow for more greater goods to spring up once their efforts are forced to stop. You can almost measure you're worth as a person by how much money you have, the more you have, the less you are a person, the less anyone should care about you, and the more everyone should do to stop you. I would trade all the world's murderers for all the world's rich in a heartbeat. Murderers have such a limited ability to kill and they can just get caught and got to jail, whereas when rich "people" kill many others, they get no punishment, more likely to be rewarded and have taxpayers footing the bill.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:32 AM on April 29 [4 favorites]
I am really sorry for the abuse you suffered, Dysk. I can absolutely see how that would engender mistrust and skepticism, thank you for your perspective. I’ve only had to suffer under one truly horrible boss in my professional life and it almost broke me; it took years to build back the confidence, self esteem, and self worth that man intentionally eroded. That was just one experience and it really shook me, it is fucking horrible that you went through that multiple times, I don’t know if I’d be able to manage that.
Thank you too advil, I really appreciate your perspective as someone in higher ed. I am a total outsider here, and any indicators I might ever get to notice are going to be lagging and secondhand. While I am in touch with a few profs, I haven’t been on the Stanford campus for over a decade now, and most of the graduates I know received their diplomas at least 15 years ago. The information I have is largely filtered through them, and my understanding is informed through the experiences they’ve shared with me. I have worked and interacted with some more recent grads here and there, but at this point my direct exposure to junior talent is often limited. There’s usually a layer of management between us, and even if there wasn’t, to them, I am an old. I’m unlikely to enjoy access to their interior world, especially when there are structural incentives for them to act a certain way around me. I haven’t had to interact with that student body directly for a long, long time now, and I’m sure my mental model is woefully outdated. I was definitely aware that VC money was flowing into the campus, but my experience with that 10-15 years ago was a bit of a lighter touch. The idea of VC capture leading to VC values being institutionalized, omfg, I see the hazard.
I um, I don’t want to be some sort of Stanford crusader here? I don’t have some specific love for Stanford in my heart. I didn’t attend, I don’t know it. But the grads I’ve known have come in many many stripes. Some are absolutely wonderful people, like, truly good humans who I have seen make personal sacrifices to do the right thing and live their beliefs. Others have been absolutely rank assholes. One Stanford CS graduate in particular comes to mind – I gave the guy a job, worked closely with him for years and trusted him deeply, but when the time came, he lied to my face, stabbed me in the back, stole an absolutely enormous amount of money from me and ran off with years of my work. But I didn’t then draw the conclusion that therefore all Stanford grads are assholes. He was also white, and male, and Jewish, and I didn’t infer any causation there either, those categories seemed equally relevant as his alma mater. Agh, this feels like I’m defending Stanford again, I’m not trying to, seriously. I didn’t go there! I’m from New England, to my eyes that campus looks like a tacky oversized restaurant, I don’t have any specific love for it apart from whatever baseline love I have for the humanity of all the humans there. What I was reacting to was not at all about Stanford specifically. We could have been talking about Oberlin and I would have reacted the same. Any group of humans of any scale is going to have nuance and diversity, and I was alarmed by people squishing the texture of all those humans into “other” and dogpiling. And like, geeze, dogpiling on higher ed and invoking the cultural revolution is not a good look.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. Again, I am not specifically trying to defend Stanford here, I don’t have any specific love for that institution. And I’m not trying to center the discussion on Stanford grads or place their needs higher than anyone else’s. Every person on that campus has summited Mt. Privilege, and yes, they will be 100% fine if everyone on mefi decides to shit on them every day for the rest of their lives. I am not handwringing about those poor Stanford grads being judged. As I said in my previous comment, there are many other groups which need defending first. But this isn’t about them. This is about us. I don’t want metafilter to be the kind of place where we reduce a diverse population to a single category and then shit on them. And maybe Stanford in particular does have some specific issues (again, thank you advil for the “what people are very imprecisely talking about” insight and perspective, I don’t think I was at all catching that, and I am just so thankful for the perspectives here which are not my own and help paint each pane of my Johari window). But if that’s the case, can we please target those issues specifically? Like, in any encounter with a group we don’t like, maybe there are many many assholes on whatever red team we’re facing, but like, in any large diverse group there are always going to be many innocents and many many more people just trying to get by. Like, while there are many many assholes living in Alabama – I would even go so far as to hazard a guess that most Alabamans are assholes, that if you were to sample a random Alabaman you’d pick an asshole, or at least that the asshole incidence is higher than what you’d find in a blue state – we generally recognize that hey, there are a ton of non-assholes living in Alabama too, so in general, it’s not cool to go around chanting “Fuck Alabama”. That is a diverse population of humans. And yes, there are hateful people living there, and those people have captured many of the levers of power, and are using them to enact hate. We still do them and ourselves a disservice by treating that population as a monolith. For a moment, ignore the plight of every innocent or ally we condemn when we paint a diverse population with a broad brush. All appeals to empathy and humanity aside, and just putting on my mercenary public policy / game theory hat, it’s bad strategy. If we simplify the dimensionality of a group we are trying to change, we are denying ourselves knowledge and understanding that we would otherwise be able to leverage.
This is hard. I don’t have a right answer, I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do and I don’t have some roadmap as to how to proceed. I just, I have this feeling that things aren’t going to get easier. All the shit happening right now, everything is heating up, the stakes are getting realer and realer for more and more people, and there is a ton of hurt and anger sloshing around. For good fucking reason. But mefi might be the only place left on the open internet where we can actually have nuanced discussion on complicated topics. And I don’t want to lose that.
posted by 1024 at 10:44 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
Thank you too advil, I really appreciate your perspective as someone in higher ed. I am a total outsider here, and any indicators I might ever get to notice are going to be lagging and secondhand. While I am in touch with a few profs, I haven’t been on the Stanford campus for over a decade now, and most of the graduates I know received their diplomas at least 15 years ago. The information I have is largely filtered through them, and my understanding is informed through the experiences they’ve shared with me. I have worked and interacted with some more recent grads here and there, but at this point my direct exposure to junior talent is often limited. There’s usually a layer of management between us, and even if there wasn’t, to them, I am an old. I’m unlikely to enjoy access to their interior world, especially when there are structural incentives for them to act a certain way around me. I haven’t had to interact with that student body directly for a long, long time now, and I’m sure my mental model is woefully outdated. I was definitely aware that VC money was flowing into the campus, but my experience with that 10-15 years ago was a bit of a lighter touch. The idea of VC capture leading to VC values being institutionalized, omfg, I see the hazard.
I um, I don’t want to be some sort of Stanford crusader here? I don’t have some specific love for Stanford in my heart. I didn’t attend, I don’t know it. But the grads I’ve known have come in many many stripes. Some are absolutely wonderful people, like, truly good humans who I have seen make personal sacrifices to do the right thing and live their beliefs. Others have been absolutely rank assholes. One Stanford CS graduate in particular comes to mind – I gave the guy a job, worked closely with him for years and trusted him deeply, but when the time came, he lied to my face, stabbed me in the back, stole an absolutely enormous amount of money from me and ran off with years of my work. But I didn’t then draw the conclusion that therefore all Stanford grads are assholes. He was also white, and male, and Jewish, and I didn’t infer any causation there either, those categories seemed equally relevant as his alma mater. Agh, this feels like I’m defending Stanford again, I’m not trying to, seriously. I didn’t go there! I’m from New England, to my eyes that campus looks like a tacky oversized restaurant, I don’t have any specific love for it apart from whatever baseline love I have for the humanity of all the humans there. What I was reacting to was not at all about Stanford specifically. We could have been talking about Oberlin and I would have reacted the same. Any group of humans of any scale is going to have nuance and diversity, and I was alarmed by people squishing the texture of all those humans into “other” and dogpiling. And like, geeze, dogpiling on higher ed and invoking the cultural revolution is not a good look.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. Again, I am not specifically trying to defend Stanford here, I don’t have any specific love for that institution. And I’m not trying to center the discussion on Stanford grads or place their needs higher than anyone else’s. Every person on that campus has summited Mt. Privilege, and yes, they will be 100% fine if everyone on mefi decides to shit on them every day for the rest of their lives. I am not handwringing about those poor Stanford grads being judged. As I said in my previous comment, there are many other groups which need defending first. But this isn’t about them. This is about us. I don’t want metafilter to be the kind of place where we reduce a diverse population to a single category and then shit on them. And maybe Stanford in particular does have some specific issues (again, thank you advil for the “what people are very imprecisely talking about” insight and perspective, I don’t think I was at all catching that, and I am just so thankful for the perspectives here which are not my own and help paint each pane of my Johari window). But if that’s the case, can we please target those issues specifically? Like, in any encounter with a group we don’t like, maybe there are many many assholes on whatever red team we’re facing, but like, in any large diverse group there are always going to be many innocents and many many more people just trying to get by. Like, while there are many many assholes living in Alabama – I would even go so far as to hazard a guess that most Alabamans are assholes, that if you were to sample a random Alabaman you’d pick an asshole, or at least that the asshole incidence is higher than what you’d find in a blue state – we generally recognize that hey, there are a ton of non-assholes living in Alabama too, so in general, it’s not cool to go around chanting “Fuck Alabama”. That is a diverse population of humans. And yes, there are hateful people living there, and those people have captured many of the levers of power, and are using them to enact hate. We still do them and ourselves a disservice by treating that population as a monolith. For a moment, ignore the plight of every innocent or ally we condemn when we paint a diverse population with a broad brush. All appeals to empathy and humanity aside, and just putting on my mercenary public policy / game theory hat, it’s bad strategy. If we simplify the dimensionality of a group we are trying to change, we are denying ourselves knowledge and understanding that we would otherwise be able to leverage.
This is hard. I don’t have a right answer, I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do and I don’t have some roadmap as to how to proceed. I just, I have this feeling that things aren’t going to get easier. All the shit happening right now, everything is heating up, the stakes are getting realer and realer for more and more people, and there is a ton of hurt and anger sloshing around. For good fucking reason. But mefi might be the only place left on the open internet where we can actually have nuanced discussion on complicated topics. And I don’t want to lose that.
posted by 1024 at 10:44 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
What I do know is that there’s not that many of those people left.
Get out of SFO. Quit thinking the only way to build a company is VC funding.
posted by kjs3 at 11:20 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Get out of SFO. Quit thinking the only way to build a company is VC funding.
posted by kjs3 at 11:20 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Marc Andreessen Is a Maniac
posted by Nelson at 11:35 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
It's never been clearer that the VC founder's whole outlook on life revolves around how great it is to be rich and how shameful it is to be anything elseBTW I share 1024's distate for the Stanford-shitting. Because like the Alabama comment above, it's reductive. Stanford still has a really excellent university with a terrific liberal arts curriculum. It also still has its Country Club School reputation, the kind of place that's harder to get into (and pay for) as an undergrad than to graduate from. And on top of that it has its association with VCs and Silicon Valley, something Stanford itself leans into heavily in their marketing. There's a certain Stanford techbro mindset that should be called out. It's not really the same as Balaji Srinivasan's or Marc Andreessen's awfulness though, they are in a class by themselves.
posted by Nelson at 11:35 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
The handwringing about those poor Stanford guys getting judged unfairly is entirely misplaced.
People are literally wishing death on them simply because of the school they're going to (a decision most of them made as teenagers). I get that's totally cool on The Blue because they are each one deemed "bad people", but since I have a niece at Stanford (in AE), I'm going to wring my hands a little regardless of your condescension. And that's 'niece'...shock to you I know but not everyone at Stanford is a guy. Or in CS/AI/MBA. By by all means, unfair judging is perfectly placed when you don't like the people you're doing it to and the majority of the people in the thread agree with you, amiright!
posted by kjs3 at 11:42 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
People are literally wishing death on them simply because of the school they're going to (a decision most of them made as teenagers). I get that's totally cool on The Blue because they are each one deemed "bad people", but since I have a niece at Stanford (in AE), I'm going to wring my hands a little regardless of your condescension. And that's 'niece'...shock to you I know but not everyone at Stanford is a guy. Or in CS/AI/MBA. By by all means, unfair judging is perfectly placed when you don't like the people you're doing it to and the majority of the people in the thread agree with you, amiright!
posted by kjs3 at 11:42 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
People are literally wishing death on them simply because of the school they're going to
Uh, unless something's been deleted, that's simply not happening here; the criticism of Stanford per se that I can find in this thread (my comment aside perhaps) appears unbelievably anodyne in proportion to the response it's gotten.
posted by advil at 1:10 PM on April 29 [7 favorites]
Uh, unless something's been deleted, that's simply not happening here; the criticism of Stanford per se that I can find in this thread (my comment aside perhaps) appears unbelievably anodyne in proportion to the response it's gotten.
posted by advil at 1:10 PM on April 29 [7 favorites]
Maybe I'm missing something, as well, as I didn't see anyone wish death on Stanford students. Was a comment deleted?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:33 PM on April 29 [4 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:33 PM on April 29 [4 favorites]
People paint Stanford grads with a broad brush all the time, people with far now authority than me. That's why they can talk about how much they'll earn - employers paint them with a broad and overwhelmingly positive brush. Little old poor, unemployed me with no authority, heck, I don't even begin to approach balancing that out. But sure, let's pretend that they're actually in mortal danger, not privileged as fuck.
posted by Dysk at 2:19 PM on April 29 [7 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 2:19 PM on April 29 [7 favorites]
I think the confusion may be my fault? I was responding to a couple “fuck all Stanford students” comments collectively, but the specific comment that moved me to post was
The cultural revolution wasn't great, but at least it forced the students at schools like Stanford to go do subsistence agriculture for a few years.
Which is not exactly a direct call for death, perhaps even less so if you’re inclined to read it as a joke or are absorbing it from a purely western context, in which the cultural revolution is some far off thing that happened in some far off place at some far off time to some far off people somewhere on the other side of the world that don’t look like you or speak your language.
But if you read that statement from a context where those deaths are are in living memory of people you know personally, that the people targeted for killing in the cultural revolution were very much exactly people just like you, and you hear people who you assume are allies casually rolling out that horror of the past and aiming its sights on “students at schools like Stanford,” where people you personally know and love attended, well, it hits a bit differently. Perhaps this is the source of confusion?
Records were not a big priority during the cultural revolution, but most estimates put the death toll between 1M-2M. I’ve seen estimates that 1.5M teachers alone were tortured and beaten to death by their own students. I doubt I’ll see an accurate or trustworthy count in my lifetime, China is not big on truth and reconciliation.
I do understand that 1.5M academic humans tortured and beaten to death in Asia during the cultural revolution could be seen as a quantitatively lesser atrocity than 6M Jewish humans brutally exterminated in Europe during the Holocaust. That was definitely the greater tragedy, and I think everyone here would be pretty quick to universally condemn a statement that started with
The Holocaust wasn't great, but at least it forced…
I think most of us would agree that there’s really no acceptable way to land a statement you start off that way. And while it too is not a direct call for death, you could probably reasonably forgive a Jewish person for hearing a statement like that and hearing that the person who said it wishes them death.
So yeah, no, I don’t think there was a direct call for the death of Stanford students that got deleted. But I definitely heard a coded one, and maybe I overreacted to that. But other mefites are saying that’s what they’re hearing too. No, Stanford students are not in immediate moral peril, but yes, when you invoke the cultural revolution, it really does sound an awful lot like you are wishing death on them.
I see gaps in STEM thinking all the time, but uh, there are some huge ones in humanities thinking as well. A really common one is knowledge of non-European history and culture. It’s not that you can’t get that! It’s just not at all part of the core curriculum.
posted by 1024 at 2:46 PM on April 29 [4 favorites]
The cultural revolution wasn't great, but at least it forced the students at schools like Stanford to go do subsistence agriculture for a few years.
Which is not exactly a direct call for death, perhaps even less so if you’re inclined to read it as a joke or are absorbing it from a purely western context, in which the cultural revolution is some far off thing that happened in some far off place at some far off time to some far off people somewhere on the other side of the world that don’t look like you or speak your language.
But if you read that statement from a context where those deaths are are in living memory of people you know personally, that the people targeted for killing in the cultural revolution were very much exactly people just like you, and you hear people who you assume are allies casually rolling out that horror of the past and aiming its sights on “students at schools like Stanford,” where people you personally know and love attended, well, it hits a bit differently. Perhaps this is the source of confusion?
Records were not a big priority during the cultural revolution, but most estimates put the death toll between 1M-2M. I’ve seen estimates that 1.5M teachers alone were tortured and beaten to death by their own students. I doubt I’ll see an accurate or trustworthy count in my lifetime, China is not big on truth and reconciliation.
I do understand that 1.5M academic humans tortured and beaten to death in Asia during the cultural revolution could be seen as a quantitatively lesser atrocity than 6M Jewish humans brutally exterminated in Europe during the Holocaust. That was definitely the greater tragedy, and I think everyone here would be pretty quick to universally condemn a statement that started with
The Holocaust wasn't great, but at least it forced…
I think most of us would agree that there’s really no acceptable way to land a statement you start off that way. And while it too is not a direct call for death, you could probably reasonably forgive a Jewish person for hearing a statement like that and hearing that the person who said it wishes them death.
So yeah, no, I don’t think there was a direct call for the death of Stanford students that got deleted. But I definitely heard a coded one, and maybe I overreacted to that. But other mefites are saying that’s what they’re hearing too. No, Stanford students are not in immediate moral peril, but yes, when you invoke the cultural revolution, it really does sound an awful lot like you are wishing death on them.
I see gaps in STEM thinking all the time, but uh, there are some huge ones in humanities thinking as well. A really common one is knowledge of non-European history and culture. It’s not that you can’t get that! It’s just not at all part of the core curriculum.
posted by 1024 at 2:46 PM on April 29 [4 favorites]
People paint Stanford grads with a broad brush all the time
People paint grouping, ethnicities, religions and sexualities with a broad brush all the time. And those people think the same thing you do: "no, it's okay when we do it to them, that's different, and anyway, they deserve it". And they don't even think it's hypocrisy.
posted by kjs3 at 3:00 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]
People paint grouping, ethnicities, religions and sexualities with a broad brush all the time. And those people think the same thing you do: "no, it's okay when we do it to them, that's different, and anyway, they deserve it". And they don't even think it's hypocrisy.
posted by kjs3 at 3:00 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]
And those people think the same thing you do: "no, it's okay when we do it to them, that's different, and anyway, they deserve it". And they don't even think it's hypocrisy.
Did you even read the rest of my comment? Nobody is complaining that HR guys stereotype based on the particular institution someone's degree is from. No, it's only okay when it's positive discrimination (which is another way of saying negative discrimination against everyone else) and even then, only if it's an already privileged group.
But hey, complain at an utterly powerless and inconsequential mefite, not at the entire structure of hiring practices, that sure seems proportionate.
Lots of people defend the grossly unjust status quo, but just like you they think "well I'm doing it for the right reasons". They don't even think it's hypocrisy.
posted by Dysk at 3:07 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
Did you even read the rest of my comment? Nobody is complaining that HR guys stereotype based on the particular institution someone's degree is from. No, it's only okay when it's positive discrimination (which is another way of saying negative discrimination against everyone else) and even then, only if it's an already privileged group.
But hey, complain at an utterly powerless and inconsequential mefite, not at the entire structure of hiring practices, that sure seems proportionate.
Lots of people defend the grossly unjust status quo, but just like you they think "well I'm doing it for the right reasons". They don't even think it's hypocrisy.
posted by Dysk at 3:07 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
If there’s a chance to break the circular firing squad formation and maybe set our sights on our real enemies, I’d love to bring things back to the assholes in TFA. How did I miss that Tim Ferriss is podcasting now and interviewed Balaji? Of course that shitbag would.
I read the 4-Hour Work Week when it came out. It had maybe one or two good ideas in it, the rest was filler about how great Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week life was and how you too could set up a drop shipped supplements company and run AdWords to sell fake E-Books or something. That was uh, not the kind of entrepreneurship I was interested in, and to this day it is impossible for me to take anyone seriously if they ever mention Tim Ferriss. So much of his entire shtick is just so bush league, and I kinda despair for the people it appeals to. It was laser targeted at mediocrity; this is business for someone who doesn’t want to work and isn’t good at business. Lifestyle business. And thinking about it, I see a lot in common with those early Tim Ferris lifestyle business devotees and the increasingly swivel-eyed lifestyle founders popping up in the valley.
One day I was listening to some show where Tim was being interviewed and taking callers or something; I don’t clearly remember the context, but I do remember him talking to a cabbie who had read the book, laid out his financial situation, responsibilities, and constraints, and asked Tim for help, because he couldn’t see how to make it work. I don’t remember the exact exact exchange, I’m sure this is on the internet some where, but I’m pretty sure Tim took a bit of a pause, and said something to the effect of “This book isn’t for you.”
My jaw just dropped with the douchebaggery. Which was some feat! I had seen a frat bro on campus earlier wearing three layers of popped collars, each a different color, the outermost of which had his phone number embroidered in pink, and Tim topped that.
In all my years since, I’ve never actually heard of a single real human who has pulled off a 4-Hour Work Week using Tim Ferriss’ book. I would think they would never stop bragging? That’s what Tim does? But at some point, I realized the trick.
A 4-Hour Work Week is entirely possible! It is actually remarkably straightforward. All you have to do is write a book in which you convince 2m other mooks that they can have a 4-Hour Work Week too, by buying your book.
posted by 1024 at 3:14 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
I read the 4-Hour Work Week when it came out. It had maybe one or two good ideas in it, the rest was filler about how great Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week life was and how you too could set up a drop shipped supplements company and run AdWords to sell fake E-Books or something. That was uh, not the kind of entrepreneurship I was interested in, and to this day it is impossible for me to take anyone seriously if they ever mention Tim Ferriss. So much of his entire shtick is just so bush league, and I kinda despair for the people it appeals to. It was laser targeted at mediocrity; this is business for someone who doesn’t want to work and isn’t good at business. Lifestyle business. And thinking about it, I see a lot in common with those early Tim Ferris lifestyle business devotees and the increasingly swivel-eyed lifestyle founders popping up in the valley.
One day I was listening to some show where Tim was being interviewed and taking callers or something; I don’t clearly remember the context, but I do remember him talking to a cabbie who had read the book, laid out his financial situation, responsibilities, and constraints, and asked Tim for help, because he couldn’t see how to make it work. I don’t remember the exact exact exchange, I’m sure this is on the internet some where, but I’m pretty sure Tim took a bit of a pause, and said something to the effect of “This book isn’t for you.”
My jaw just dropped with the douchebaggery. Which was some feat! I had seen a frat bro on campus earlier wearing three layers of popped collars, each a different color, the outermost of which had his phone number embroidered in pink, and Tim topped that.
In all my years since, I’ve never actually heard of a single real human who has pulled off a 4-Hour Work Week using Tim Ferriss’ book. I would think they would never stop bragging? That’s what Tim does? But at some point, I realized the trick.
A 4-Hour Work Week is entirely possible! It is actually remarkably straightforward. All you have to do is write a book in which you convince 2m other mooks that they can have a 4-Hour Work Week too, by buying your book.
posted by 1024 at 3:14 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
People paint grouping, ethnicities, religions and sexualities with a broad brush all the time.
Also lol at suggesting that having gone to Stanford means you are part of a disadvantaged group or have a protected characteristic at all equivalent to ethnicity or sexuality. Yes, having graduated Stanford is basically like being queer or trans or subject to racism. It'd be offensive as fuck if it weren't so laughable.
This thread is just full of people wanting to cry
"reverse sexism" but for bloody Stanford graduates. Come off it.
posted by Dysk at 3:17 PM on April 29 [11 favorites]
Also lol at suggesting that having gone to Stanford means you are part of a disadvantaged group or have a protected characteristic at all equivalent to ethnicity or sexuality. Yes, having graduated Stanford is basically like being queer or trans or subject to racism. It'd be offensive as fuck if it weren't so laughable.
This thread is just full of people wanting to cry
"reverse sexism" but for bloody Stanford graduates. Come off it.
posted by Dysk at 3:17 PM on April 29 [11 favorites]
You, Marc Andreessen, and a Stanford grad are standing around a plate with 10 cookies on it. Marc grabs 9 cookies, unhinges his egghead and gobbles them all up. Then he turns to the Stanford grad and says, “That fucker is trying to take your cookie.”
I emerged from >20 years of lurking a few days ago because I saw a post on the blue titled “Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.” I knew immediately that that was Marc Andreessen. I read the article and just, ugh, that man is the perfect embodiment of the exact opposite of every quality I was a taught a leader should have. So for whatever reason, I broke omertà and shared a little scene from my first run-in with Marc, and just paint a little picture of what a gross person he is. One and done I thought, back to work, maybe post again next year.
And then I read this fucking post the very next day (thank you Rhaomi) and it’s full of some of the most grotesque VCs that I have personally met but haven’t thought of in years, and now they’re openly, on record, cheering on that fucking lunatic Balaji, who also has real power, and is using it right now to call for legislative capture leading to ETHNIC CLEANSING in my city. Alright, fuck, seems a second post is in order.
Reading TFA, I felt like I did when I saw the brown shirts march on Charlottesville, proudly chanting and hoisting torches. On that day, the cartoon Nazis I had imagined in my youth stopped being imaginary, they jumped out of the history books and they were here in force – they had been all along, but now they didn’t care that people knew, there would be no consequences after the night of the long knives. And now that’s happening here too. I’ve met some of these people, they are horrible fuckers, utterly devoid of responsibility or moral fiber, and they’re openly calling to massacre people I love.
I didn’t know things had gotten this bad here. I’ve had my head down in work for good while now, blissfully insulated from the VC dog and pony show, that had very much been a deliberate career move. But fuck. While I had squirreled myself away in a lab to work with other adults and actual professionals, the fucking children took over, they chose lord of the flies, and now they’re calling me and everyone I care about piggy.
Like so many other people in this city, I fled to SF because my childhood home was very suddenly not an option. And we found each other together in this city of orphans, we somehow survived, and over time formed families of choice. I know many people who were hunted and hounded out of their hometowns for their identities, others who saw the signs that that was going to happen soon and got out beforehand. They came to the Bay Area because this was supposed to be the last, highest ground in a rising sea of hate, a final pocket of safety, the last bastion to fall. But the fucking hate is coming from inside the house, these fuckers are right here, and capital is openly calling to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE people I love.
I am so, so sorry I got us off topic with a completely irrelevant Stanford issue. I let myself get twigged by a casual mention of the cultural revolution and took everyone’s eyes off of that boiled egg Marc and that gremlin Balaji who are in the goddamn TFA openly calling for ETHNIC CLEANSING. And when we could have been working our way down all the other atrocities Rhaomi documented below the line, we’re what? We’re not talking about Peter Thiel, that’s what. He’s hiding his horcruxes somewhere. I lost sight of the greater goal and the greater enemy. It is hard for me to find a functional difference between taking everyone’s focus away from evil, and hiding or providing cover for evil directly. Fuck. And now what, how many days have past? How many future eyes will drop off before reading anything we get to learn from this now that we’re 90 comments down?
I am sorry I squandered the group’s attention and energy and distracted us from the assholes who took 9 cookies. I’ve always been an observer here, happy to watch and learn; my voice is nowhere near the most important. It has been a very long time since I’ve participated in any sort of public discussion like this; usually if I’m saying anything publicly, it’s PR. And woah, metafilter is different when you’re a participant. I’m going to try to learn as much as I can from what I did poorly in this thread so I don’t repeat myself n the future.
Ever since my first post in this thread, I’ve been thinking about next actions. I can’t be the only one this angry and alarmed who wants to fight back directly. These people are coming for us, they’re targeting us, they’re saying what they plan to do to us. But I know they have soft spots where we can shove sharp things. I think there really may be quite a few more than they realize. These dipshits overestimate everything about themselves – their intelligence, their impact, their merit, their prestige, their accomplishments – I wonder if that extends to their untouchability as well.
I’m guessing the blue isn’t the place for that kind of activism. I guess I’m not really sure where is. It’s probably time for me to sit down and listen again, it seems I’ve got a lot more to learn.
posted by 1024 at 12:12 AM on April 30 [10 favorites]
I emerged from >20 years of lurking a few days ago because I saw a post on the blue titled “Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.” I knew immediately that that was Marc Andreessen. I read the article and just, ugh, that man is the perfect embodiment of the exact opposite of every quality I was a taught a leader should have. So for whatever reason, I broke omertà and shared a little scene from my first run-in with Marc, and just paint a little picture of what a gross person he is. One and done I thought, back to work, maybe post again next year.
And then I read this fucking post the very next day (thank you Rhaomi) and it’s full of some of the most grotesque VCs that I have personally met but haven’t thought of in years, and now they’re openly, on record, cheering on that fucking lunatic Balaji, who also has real power, and is using it right now to call for legislative capture leading to ETHNIC CLEANSING in my city. Alright, fuck, seems a second post is in order.
Reading TFA, I felt like I did when I saw the brown shirts march on Charlottesville, proudly chanting and hoisting torches. On that day, the cartoon Nazis I had imagined in my youth stopped being imaginary, they jumped out of the history books and they were here in force – they had been all along, but now they didn’t care that people knew, there would be no consequences after the night of the long knives. And now that’s happening here too. I’ve met some of these people, they are horrible fuckers, utterly devoid of responsibility or moral fiber, and they’re openly calling to massacre people I love.
I didn’t know things had gotten this bad here. I’ve had my head down in work for good while now, blissfully insulated from the VC dog and pony show, that had very much been a deliberate career move. But fuck. While I had squirreled myself away in a lab to work with other adults and actual professionals, the fucking children took over, they chose lord of the flies, and now they’re calling me and everyone I care about piggy.
Like so many other people in this city, I fled to SF because my childhood home was very suddenly not an option. And we found each other together in this city of orphans, we somehow survived, and over time formed families of choice. I know many people who were hunted and hounded out of their hometowns for their identities, others who saw the signs that that was going to happen soon and got out beforehand. They came to the Bay Area because this was supposed to be the last, highest ground in a rising sea of hate, a final pocket of safety, the last bastion to fall. But the fucking hate is coming from inside the house, these fuckers are right here, and capital is openly calling to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE people I love.
I am so, so sorry I got us off topic with a completely irrelevant Stanford issue. I let myself get twigged by a casual mention of the cultural revolution and took everyone’s eyes off of that boiled egg Marc and that gremlin Balaji who are in the goddamn TFA openly calling for ETHNIC CLEANSING. And when we could have been working our way down all the other atrocities Rhaomi documented below the line, we’re what? We’re not talking about Peter Thiel, that’s what. He’s hiding his horcruxes somewhere. I lost sight of the greater goal and the greater enemy. It is hard for me to find a functional difference between taking everyone’s focus away from evil, and hiding or providing cover for evil directly. Fuck. And now what, how many days have past? How many future eyes will drop off before reading anything we get to learn from this now that we’re 90 comments down?
I am sorry I squandered the group’s attention and energy and distracted us from the assholes who took 9 cookies. I’ve always been an observer here, happy to watch and learn; my voice is nowhere near the most important. It has been a very long time since I’ve participated in any sort of public discussion like this; usually if I’m saying anything publicly, it’s PR. And woah, metafilter is different when you’re a participant. I’m going to try to learn as much as I can from what I did poorly in this thread so I don’t repeat myself n the future.
Ever since my first post in this thread, I’ve been thinking about next actions. I can’t be the only one this angry and alarmed who wants to fight back directly. These people are coming for us, they’re targeting us, they’re saying what they plan to do to us. But I know they have soft spots where we can shove sharp things. I think there really may be quite a few more than they realize. These dipshits overestimate everything about themselves – their intelligence, their impact, their merit, their prestige, their accomplishments – I wonder if that extends to their untouchability as well.
I’m guessing the blue isn’t the place for that kind of activism. I guess I’m not really sure where is. It’s probably time for me to sit down and listen again, it seems I’ve got a lot more to learn.
posted by 1024 at 12:12 AM on April 30 [10 favorites]
> 1024: "I let myself get twigged by a casual mention of the cultural revolution and took everyone’s eyes off of that boiled egg Marc and that gremlin Balaji who are in the goddamn TFA openly calling for ETHNIC CLEANSING"
You aren't the first and probably won't be the last to get tripped up by something like this, so it's perhaps worth reflecting on how/why one could have let this kind of comment slide. I would suggest that a basic analysis of power -- the routes towards and exercise thereof -- should indicate that an off-hand comment on an obscure message board like this one is not likely to usher in the second coming of Mao. As repugnant as the idea of such a purge being re-enacted is, surely one can understand that we are pretty far from being anywhere near such an idea being actually a thing in the real world. If anything, the current attacks on academia and academics (far too many to name) are not coming from a Maoist left hungry for agricultural collectivization but from the actually-existing and ascendant forces of the reactionary right, including some of these SV VC dipwads. And, imho, it doesn't really look much like a Cultural Revolution 2.0 but more like the implementation of a McKinsey slide deck, death by a thousand re-orgs and "modernizations" as they starve departments & schools of resources and emplace profit-maximizing bureaucrats in administrations & boards of regents.
tl;dr: focus on power, who has it and what they're doing with it
posted by mhum at 5:23 PM on April 30 [8 favorites]
You aren't the first and probably won't be the last to get tripped up by something like this, so it's perhaps worth reflecting on how/why one could have let this kind of comment slide. I would suggest that a basic analysis of power -- the routes towards and exercise thereof -- should indicate that an off-hand comment on an obscure message board like this one is not likely to usher in the second coming of Mao. As repugnant as the idea of such a purge being re-enacted is, surely one can understand that we are pretty far from being anywhere near such an idea being actually a thing in the real world. If anything, the current attacks on academia and academics (far too many to name) are not coming from a Maoist left hungry for agricultural collectivization but from the actually-existing and ascendant forces of the reactionary right, including some of these SV VC dipwads. And, imho, it doesn't really look much like a Cultural Revolution 2.0 but more like the implementation of a McKinsey slide deck, death by a thousand re-orgs and "modernizations" as they starve departments & schools of resources and emplace profit-maximizing bureaucrats in administrations & boards of regents.
tl;dr: focus on power, who has it and what they're doing with it
posted by mhum at 5:23 PM on April 30 [8 favorites]
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