> DURAN: In April 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy. At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about. Well, this caused a lot of outcry and criticism of Thiel, who had to go back and say, I didn't mean to say - I'm not saying that women shouldn't have the vote, etc.
> Peter Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible and suggested that women and other people getting the right to vote marked the end of freedom being a thing you can have with democracy.
This is true that Peter Thiel wrote ti
> At least, of course, as we can see for white men, he was talking about.
This is spin. He wasn't talking about white men. He was talking that as long as people are allowed to vote to take things from others to give to themselves they will.
And, it can be argued, that in the end that will end up with worse outcomes for everyone. (not saying this is true, I'm saying it can be argued that it's a possibility)
> He was talking that as long as people are allowed to vote to take things from others to give to themselves they will.
The implicit point here is that the super rich, like Peter Thiel, currently have the power to vote (through the process of lobbying) to take money from others to give to themselves and they do it regularly. It's his 'freedom' to continue to that which he feels is threatened.
IMO, what Thiel wrote is essentially that women and non-whites are beneficiaries of welfare and leaches on society, and that they therefore will vote to transfer wealth from the white men who create it (according to Thiel).
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
I believe this topic was flagged for political reasons, which constitutes an abuse of the system. This is an important topic for the tech industry. Avoiding it won't make it go away.
Alternatively, if this topic is too hot for discussion, it should be frozen but allowed to remain on the front page, because this book is newsworthy. I intend to read it.
I believe the go-to response from leadership here is that there's other places to discuss political news, and that if it doesn't encourage curious, thoughtful discussion, it shouldn't exist here. So they probably won't address the flagging system as they truly believe it's working as expected.
There are, that's why we discuss most political news elsewhere. But there's no more informed place to discuss tech news, that's why we want to discuss crossover topics here.
The painful thing is that there's a non tech related political item on the front page at least every other day, so it's very clear that certain topics are just too close to home for some people here.
I mean, Garry Tan is precisely the kind of person being criticized here. Rich tech CEOs with illiberal beliefs and limited care for the rights of other people.
I'm trying to build my own software that maybe someday people will pay for. I've also worked really hard to reduce my family's hard costs (paid off mortgage and car, grow lots of our own food, full solar+battery off-grid setup, biogas digester for cooking gas, etc).
I started the NOVC Alliance[0] for people like me that want to build software outside of the mainstream SV/VC culture. Think of it as "BPA Free" for software.
Tl;dr: anti-vc, not anti-capital. It's for those building without institutional equity capital structured around venture-scale returns, which is what tends to result in enshittification imo.
Increasingly, I find myself thinking that the right path is not to build software... It's to be good at software and then find a concrete problem and use the fact that you know software to attack it.
... But I'll admit that what those problems are I can't rightfully say.
Among others, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk talk about their disdain for democracy and desire for another form of government very openly; this isn't a secret. If you doubt this, I really recommend researching a bit for yourself.
It's not even the first time we've seen this pattern emerge. The Business Plot of the early 20th century is really something that we should be teaching in high school and we just don't.
Powerful corporations in American history have already demonstrated a willingness to back fascism when they think their their core interests are fundamentally under threat.
Nearly a decade ago I was in in all hands at Google. There was a scandal. I can't remember which one because there were about three of them back to back in a relatively short period of time. And one of the company co-founders, I'm fairly certain it was Larry but it might have been Sergey... Basically responded to a comment from an employee on the scandal with "I want to be focused on creating great things, not on this."
... And the comment put me right back on my heels because, my guy... You are helming a corporation with over 100,000 employees. I don't care what you thought you would be doing at this point in your career. If you are responsible for 100,000 of anyone? You'd best start caring about people problems.
... I think a whole generation of Silicon Valley leadership tripped backwards into becoming partially responsible for / totally enmeshed with other human beings and were utterly unprepared for it. And for all their technical smarts, when it comes to people that grasp for simple solutions. Simple and unworkable.
I agree with Larry or Sergey. Most FAANG employees want to turn every thing into dysfunctional San Francisco where 1000 special interests make all progress impossible. They join and then they each think they should be running things to their specific outlook.
The thing is, who it donates to is controlled by the company not the employees.
So I would counter argue that it is not just the employees who want that... But one of the parties in this story has the resources of a $4 trillion company at their disposal.
The simpler explanation is just that people are too stupid for democracy, and respond well to tribalist policies. Dark skin v light skin, women v men v non binary, any type of us v them rhetoric that can make one feel superior can be latched onto.
The trick is to be so vague (or incoherent) that sufficient people across the population feel superior.
I like to think even the people we think are stupid have a few brain cells rubbing together. Emotion and intelligence are not usually kicking at the same time someone speaks or types.
I've been in this field for 15 years and it's about as far left as any industry can get. We were doing land acknowledgments at product demos a few years ago.
I've been in this industry for 34, and it's always been full of people who are at heart authoritarians, who believe that they would do a better job than anyone else, and are seriously lacking in self-awareness.
> California’s Civil Rights Department, which sued Tesla in February 2022 after a three-year investigation, documented specific language in its complaint: the n-word, “porch monkey,” “monkey toes,” “boy,” “hood rats,” “go back to Africa,” plus the Spanish-language slurs “mayate” and “negrita.” One worker told investigators he heard slurs 50 to 100 times a day.
The agency also alleged the factory was effectively segregated, with an area where Black workers were concentrated known internally as the “porch monkey station.” Workers reported coworkers displaying Confederate flag tattoos to intimidate them.
The EEOC’s own federal complaint, filed in September 2023 in the Northern District of California, adds graffiti: swastikas, threats, and nooses scrawled around the facility, going back to at least 2015. Then-EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows called it “shameful racial bigotry.”
Among more than 200 worker declarations gathered in the state case, about two-thirds said they saw anti-Black graffiti. Dozens said complaining got them retaliated against, including fired.
At the employee level, there is generally widespread support for liberal social ideas (though often not liberal economic ideas).
At the leadership level there are a ton of illiberal people who think that things like democracy are bad and spend huge sums of money to push these belief.
Thiel, Musk, Zuckenberg, Ellison, Karp, Yarwin ... like common. Among leaders, there are kind of fascists and ... no one at all, maybe Gates? Industries that are left dont have sieg heiling leaders. Or, you know, have those counteracted by other kind of leaders.
Even the billionaires were mostly donating to Kamala. Yes Elon was a giant blast of cash but his rightward shift is not representive of the industry.
And are we forgetting that Stephen Miller kicked him out anyway?
Tech religiously believes in science, education, immigration. The values are fundamentally incompatible with the right.
But for whatever reason the left has decided that we failed some purity test or simply wants to pick on "the nerds". I don't know what the strategy is here, but it doesn't seem like a good one.
The “nurture” explanation that I’m more inclined to, which is more optimistic, is that our culture changed, that people became risk-averse; science became feminized, bureaucratic, and regulated
... The Boomer kids were weaned off violent childhood literature like Tintin and the Hardy Boys and fed a diet of Dr. Seuss.
One specific change that would accelerate drug development would be getting rid of the need for double-blind studies. If a drug is safe, you would just let people use it and not slow things down massively with a double-blind study.
Same link. Theres another interview with him - I can't remember which - where he proposes to test new Alzheimer drugs directly on patients because (paraphrased) they die anyway.
I think that's why it's a bit of a shock to many to see leadership tilt so hard towards fascism.
Personally, I think the gap is between the leadership and the rank and file software engineers - the heady days of the post dotcom boom and bust where there was heavy overlap between those two categories are over, and a lot of Silicon Valley looks like traditional business now - an owner class that is setting the pace and the tone and the direction without much input and an employed class that is doing the work and lacks the raw mobility we saw at the height of the boom and bust (i.e. the perpetual capacity to walk off the job immediately into a new one).
Plus, I strongly suspect that some of it is reaction. These companies are based in the US. When the people of the United States have elected Donald Trump twice, one does start to wonder if the correct business decision is to follow the populism. Perhaps skepticism of the efficacy of democracy is justified when this is what democracy has yielded.
Simply not true. There was huge Trump support from VCs before elections and after Trump won he instantly got direct support from most of US tech sector. All the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses were not supporting him before because of optics.
Yes, but the leaders that are spending time and money pushing their political beliefs are the fashy ones. People like Thiel and Musk. Garry Tan and Sergey Brin. Ellison and Andreesen. Even Bezos (although less fashy) reshaped the Post editorial staff into a reactionary place.
The rank-and-file are just too ignorant and racist to realize they’re fascists — eg, their erasure of Japanese culture and arson attacks by masked paramilitaries against Asian small businesses in 2020.
If you think calling yourself an “anti fascist” while burning minority businesses is opposing fascism, you probably also think North Korea is a democratic republic.
You’re assuming the land acknowledgements are supporting their nominal values, rather than the friendly pink sweater of modern fascism.
You can look at how, eg, “woke” values (ie, that “left wing” ideology) is directly driving the erasure of Japanese culture by self-appointed white people who Know Better (TM). When their major export is colonialist erasure of other cultures, I don’t take the performative-but-useless land acknowledgments as anything but metaphoric white hoods.
They happily burned many Asian small businesses while chanting “Black Lives Matter!” those same years.
Erasure of Japanese culture? Wow, that must've been the topic of non-stop public discussion in Japan if that was even remotely true. Point us to an NHK article discussing this non-existent event.
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