Maybe before making up just-so stories about why and how the left forced the Silicon Valley bros to go hard right, you could look up the bros' personal histories, their family histories, or the entire history of ultra-rich people in general
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A huge factor is CA workplace protections and wage standards. Then add high cost of living, taxes and regulations to the mix. They aren't making the profits they feel they "deserve" here in CA. Greed drives the damn bus per usual. But yeah, it's the Dems fault for not letting them run sweatshops🤦
I googled Vivek the other day to see how he made his money, maybe it’s me but it all looked like smoke and mirrors operation to me. He didn’t create anything. Just another scam artist IMO
I find this MAGA Bros stuff just Bullshit. My boys are 34 and 35. One is an attorney the other one of Licensed Professional Geologist. Both self sufficient. Granted buying a home has not been easy but they are just not spun up about every damn thing like these guys. Both married. I don't get it
My sense is they were mostly concerned about taxes on wealth and or unrealized capital gains and thus made up this story. It is right on brand with the GOP grievance platform of look what you made me do.
Tech was never going to save us and we fell for it. When the left caught that disruption means finding loopholes to pay people as little as possible and take revenue from them on then suddenly tech wants to be on the right. Twist: TECH WAS ALWAYS LIBERTARIAN
Technology is apolitical. If one political party wants to use it more, or more effectively than the other, that's an imbalance in government, not technology, and both sides absolutely looked to get tech jobs done for bottom-dollar. https://www.axios.com/2023/03/13/silicon-valley-banks-political-blame-game
I'm gonna pass on the history lessons and judge them for what they are: dipshits.
Might be hard to hear because people assume Silibros are smart and rational. Which, on average, couldn't be further from the truth when talking about people working in the tech sector.
Techbros’ affinity for libertarian values telegraphed this; people like Peter Thiel’s influence and actions should have told us everything else we needed to know
And mostly the regulations against rape and harassment in the workplace. Remember when Elon tried to pay a poor woman off with a horse because he flashed his tiny cock at her? 🤮
The hard right bros came from the post 911 Bush bonanza. Tech companies were showered with federal cash that came with clearance requirements. Clearing people was so slow that companies hired easy to clear, but unqualified new veterans. These original bros poisoned the entire Silicon Valley culture.
It’s amazing that these bros are the only people anyone has ever been “mean” (critical of) to. Especially given they are such innocent lil bunnies who were never mean, bigoted or exploitative of anyone ever. The truest tragedy.
The majority of Silicon Valley VC super rich are deluded by their perceptions that their personal hard work, superior intelligence and decision making was uniquely responsible for their success. Classic survivor bias. The big secret is that the rest of SV had always believed this as well.
Totally. Actually, it would also encourage the rich to spend which MIGHT have a drip down effect. If we tax assets, it wouldn't matter if they live in the Cayman Islands if their assets are still here.
Is this another version of 'Nazi forced to shave his head'? Is the idea that their interest is NOT served by destroying, and then getting paid to replace, state capacity?
I was born in 1971. And I've done a bit of reading about the abuses of tech within society. When controlled by the rich it's always abused to control and harm others. This is why many laws, now being undone, were passed to curtail the problem in the 20th century. Tech's never without problems.
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IMO, allowing individuals to amass the same wealth and influence normally held by a nation, is the root cause of the problem. Until we address that we'll keep ending up back here. Then there will be revolution... wash, rinse, repeat.
When you are fresh out of Stanford about to start PayPal and write a book in titled “The Diversity Myth : Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus” you don’t get to blame today’s left for your problems.
An example is the Murdoch Family history. Most out side Australia would not realise that it is not two generations of Murdoch's influencing politics. Sir Keith Murdoch had an impact on Australian politics from the early part of the 20thC. Rupert managed to extend that influence world wide.
I’m willing to bet that someday we’ll have a vaccine for narcissism which children will get just like they got the vaccine for chickenpox and eventually narcissism will be rare and America will be extremely optimistic and empathetic
explain how you are going to prevent the formation of maladaptive coping mechanisms that lead to personality disorders while simultaneously not restricting indistinguishable yet innocuous behaviors
To be clear, I’m not a doctor so I can’t break it down into molecular structures for the different types of vaccines or other ways of treating it other than counseling however, I do believe our society can be edited in someway to help decrease the possibility of this continuing.
There's just nothing more tedious than someone explaining with tears in their eyes why they had no choice but to do the exact thing that was always in their interest
Stupidest election hot take so far -
If progressive/women had been pliant and abandoned identity politics, then the bigoted rapey dude bros would not have voted for the racist orange man who raped E. Jean Caroll.
From my experience it's the right that are obsessed with other peoples sexuality and gentiles. They also seem to be obsessed with attacking women's rights. Are you saying people should just ignore these attacks? Men don't seem to care he's a sexual predator because they don't care about women period
There they go, blaming victims again. Well, that is the media, basically. Tit for Tat. He said, she said. Don't even think, journalism. They call it journalism. There isn't much real journalism left.
They were never principled. The overwhelming majority are fiercely dedicated to making as much money as possible in whatever way at the expense of anyone and leftism got in the way of that so they took it off like an old jacket and chucked it for fascism
I've never understood how a 22-year-old KNOWS that he/she is doing worse than their parents. They haven't even started yet. Do they think their parents just started out doing "better than they'll ever do"? Their parents were broke at 22, too.
A thing I've learned in life at a still relatively young 40 is that to be ultra rich generally requires learning to be a BAST*RD/EVIL ASSH*LE in some way as requires you to be ruthless and uncaring in regards to how you make the maximum amount of profit
That they genuinily believe that people with backgrounds like "South Afrikan Aparthaid citizen" And Hedgefund billionares.... or just billionares as a whole. Were in any possible way left is fucking mind boggling holy shit.
And nobody makes anyone do anything. If they're looking for excuses to jump, it's because they want to jump. Sitting in the middle of mountains of cash and complaining about it...
So this isn’t entirely true. A lot of them masquerading as left while never actually being anything other than a Republican. They still do this today. It’s both. It really is. Thanks, Tom. The reason why they can do this is because leftists don’t actually do anything unless they’re a left leanin Dem
They were playing a character. They're still playing a character, it's just closer to their actual beliefs. But don't trust anything about their public face.
The paper trail is there, including books like Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Paulina Borsook's "Cyberselfish", and Malcolm Harris' "Palo Alto". But golly, with deadlines and all, who's got time to do background reading??
To be fair, Musk's kids are young and we don't know anything about them suffice that his wives seem to raise them. And, Musk Snr, Errol, was not and is not ultra-rich.
Hear a description of all these guys as low information voters and I agree. Tim Miller's interview with Jason Calacanis is illuminating how these guys think Kamala is dumb and they fancy themselves so smart. When obviously is the other way around and don't get me started with the "meritocracy" s***
Or why they call themselves bros in the first place ? Remember, they dropped out of Harvard before the ethics course . They think they created the tech therefore they should run the tech AKA the world
And the gender of the opponent. As Shirley Chisolm said in 1969: "But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against me because I am a woman than because I am black."
Then when they don't suck up enough to trump or he dreams they slighted him and he seizes all their stuff and money, stuck in prison or exile, who's gonna sympathize with them?
None of this is a surprise. It's only surprising if you believe the hype that billionaires are our saviours... a story produced and disseminated by billionaires.
There is this odd
grievance culture with many ( not all) in SV. Brittle, defensive w this “I know better” thinking about …everything. Manifests especially after a big exit.
Ok but counterpoint what if I was the ultra rich and from an ultra rich family and our family mythology included some warped 20th century version of noblesse oblige that I really believed in?
I don't think so. I mean I don't think it's the norm, but I think rich primer have been convincing themselves that they are the best steward of society's resources for generations. That their wealth is necessary for healthy society etc.
The noble nobility is going extinct, IMO. We can see what they are doing, and there is nothing gracious about them. The "tech bros" are psychopaths, as are their billionaire contemporaries. The power & the $ has driven them mad. They have lost/are losing their humanity.
Well I don't think any of them were ever really noble, and fascism in the upper classes has always been present. But I think some writers from wealthy families believe their own hype
And most wealthy families do not have many billions of dollars as well, that's a whole different animal. There are still rich people who pretend to be liberal.
The Silicon Valley bros are chronologically ADULTS & they want us to believe they are smart. Nobody "makes" them act a certain way. They CHOSE to do this.
And yes, a lot of them have a track record & families who are this way too. Ditto rich ppl who like to pretend otherwise.
Omg yes, and it's so overwhelming. Beyond obvious ppl like Thiel and Musk: what really is 'general AI' if not an attempt to flatten and sweep away culture itself, and to generally breed creative thought out of the species? Their entire worldview is profoundly reactionary
Was chatting with a friend in SF and his take is that those most of those who backed Trump around there were conservatives from the get. 🤔 They just embraced him more openly this round.
Every tech bro I ever knew - just like their OG Wall Street bro counterparts - freaking worshipped The Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged at 21 like it was the “answer”. lol these guys were never progressively left, at least not the GenX ones that I knew.
after MeToo and BLM we had a national conversation about "what if, theoretically, even the rich and powerful could be held accountable" and the next day every techbro in management was a Trump supporter
Yes. They need women to have babies so they can have slaves. They intend to rule the world. Fortunately, they don’t understand people very well & properly won’t accomplish their goals. They do & will cause plenty of damage, though.
Silicon Valley and the Texas hydrocarbon complex acting more and more like democracy’s outgrown its usefulness. They care not a jot for what we think of them. Unfortunately, they read the 2024 electorate right and had the money to reinforce their message. The question now: will fascism take root?
Nice of you to say. The patriarchy is, of course, intended to be male-dominated. It can run the gamut from Gulf States emirs with their petrodollars, to the emerging class of billionaires in India, to the tech juggernaut in Israel. It would span public and private sectors. Motto: bitcoin before $$$.
as someone who (formerly) called myself libertarian, i am saddened that the term is associated with anarcho-capitalists rather than the meaning i originally thought it had held years ago
i mean, its not like they dont exist, more like the term i personally associated with them turned out to mean something else entirely to others. maybe i was wrong from the start and "libertarian" always referred to folks who espoused "no government" rather than "limited government"...
“No govt” is rightly called anarchists.
But Libs always claim that whatever type of govt is cramping their personal style should be abolished, so the difference is basically semantic
I blame Ayn Rand. Many are GenX and the AR Foundation encouraged all of us to read The Fountainhead for a scholarship competition. Her beliefs are coming to life.
The assumption that rich people who moved to SV to run companies would share the general political ethic and culture of the region they moved to, when everyone from there complains about tech bros not culturally integrating with their communities, is ridiculous on its face.
I'll say it again. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks (Ukraine Troll and MAGA Fundraiser), Paul Furber (QAnon Originator) and Pat Soon-Shiong (LA Times owner and Trump sycophant). All linked to Apartheid, South Africa. This is no coincidence.
And they all follow Curtis Yarvin (he of "Americans need to get over their fear of the word dictator" fame), who wants to destroy democracy and initiate a libertarian dictatorship.
Peter Theil is famous for "Democracy is incompatible with capitalism."
Exactly. All the these people were spouting this crap well over a decade ago. Even Grimes is friends with Yarvin and spoke highly of Thiel ages ago. She's also said she doesn't think democracy works.
I thought he said "freedom and democracy are no longer compatible" with "freedom" strongly implied that he means vicious capitalism with him and his buddies at the top. His Atlantic profile he even mentioned something like a monarchy based on "merit", you know, rich people
I do think the ‘establishment’ left has generally done a good bit to push the general public to the right, but it’s ridiculous when people are like “wow the billionaire was bought out in some way?” like we didn’t all know
We seem to have become a society which has free, immediate access to a ubiquitous research gateway and yet far too many of us cannot trouble themselves to use.
It’s dangerous ands little lazy to generalize. Zuck, musk etc are all from rich families. A lot of tech bros were not. They are self made. Not all were even born in the US or are white.
I see the attraction of writing them off as rich white guys. Doing so will miss what is really going on.
They were saying look into these guys’ histories AND look into the histories of the ultra rich. You’ll probably see some interesting things line up if you were to.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
At the end of the day, America chose a rapist. With an idea to put tariffs on goods from Mexico, thinking that will stop fentanyl. How fuckin dumb are these people?
I know from experience as a software engineer for 10 years and many years online. They have 100% always been that way. They don't last long if they can't keep their mouth shut in most groups. My first boss was one.
You can critique the CEOs without alienating the regular tech workers, that's the issue with some rhetoric. The broad majority of tech workers are still strongly liberal but there's no point in alienating them with blanket rhetoric.
It's not hard. There's usually a connection. How did these generationally fortunate (really almost always) dudes (come on now, are you named Horatio Alger) get to that position in the first place?
It was always in there as a hard-libertarian strand of thinking. Same people, same tropes. Encoded into tech culture and compatible with open source ethos.
Cathedral and the Bazaar is an inflection point. Engelbart, Knuth, Brooks, even a diva like Ted Nelson, are anchored by a duty to human possibility. That’s still there in the infrastructure and the culture—if endangered, now, because you can’t sell ads on it.
Agreed. One of the popular myths about the silicon Valley is that it is a liberal haven. No, generally speaking it's a conservative area. However on personal choice issues, they're not so much liberal as just not having time to give a rats rear end, as long as it doesn't affect the company.
Thinking that Peter Thiel/Elon Musk/Larry Elison weren't very, very far right anti-democratic sorts... you're kidding yourself. Maybe Page/Benioff/Gates are more classically centrist, but it's a very mixed bag and the guys really exerting a lot of pressure are on our culture are very right wing
So much of nerd culture back in the nineties (and now to an extent) was dorky computer obsessed outcasts who still had an internalised set of essentially frat boy like sensibilities, it is no shock to anyone who moved in those circles that money has only made that worse as time has gone on.
Any pretence of counterculture or hippie ideals was window dressing after the Leary era Well types made way for younger people who had dollar signs in their eyes.
Tech bros are incels that consume far right podcasts where they talk about how white people "built civilization" and using women like livestock to breed a white future 🙄🤡🤮
Besides their pedigree, they are neo-nazis in political philosophy. They want dominion over us because they feel superior.
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https://www.axios.com/2023/03/13/silicon-valley-banks-political-blame-game
Might be hard to hear because people assume Silibros are smart and rational. Which, on average, couldn't be further from the truth when talking about people working in the tech sector.
I’m liking that ending.
Uh-huh
I’m so convinced….smh
Something you'll never hear uttered inside a gleaming office building on Sand Hill Road ...
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I'm not sure how to prevent the issue, though.
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If progressive/women had been pliant and abandoned identity politics, then the bigoted rapey dude bros would not have voted for the racist orange man who raped E. Jean Caroll.
They were never principled. The overwhelming majority are fiercely dedicated to making as much money as possible in whatever way at the expense of anyone and leftism got in the way of that so they took it off like an old jacket and chucked it for fascism
And so apparently did their mothers.
Broke 18-29 bros: “Nah.”
Pauline Borsook wrote “Cyberselfish/a critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high-tech”, in 2000. This interview is 2015.
https://networkcultures.org/blog/2015/01/29/paulina-borsook-cyberselfish-15-years-after-part-1/
grievance culture with many ( not all) in SV. Brittle, defensive w this “I know better” thinking about …everything. Manifests especially after a big exit.
And yes, a lot of them have a track record & families who are this way too. Ditto rich ppl who like to pretend otherwise.
https://youtu.be/MLizYdfQT-Y?si=BkV2LjaifjInxRFX
https://youtu.be/mfXbyQ9KFdg?si=aamDKhEXpB7SAJx2
Step two: fuck everyone else
Their longer-term objective: establish a #GlobalPatriarchy.
But Libs always claim that whatever type of govt is cramping their personal style should be abolished, so the difference is basically semantic
In defence of South Africans, I'd just like to stress that a lot of us hate these fucking cunts.
Peter Theil is famous for "Democracy is incompatible with capitalism."
Maybe that's just part of the mix.
Look up the the film The Damned directed by Luchino Visconti.
I see the attraction of writing them off as rich white guys. Doing so will miss what is really going on.
They were saying look into these guys’ histories AND look into the histories of the ultra rich. You’ll probably see some interesting things line up if you were to.
I also think there is a common motivation. We need to listen to find out or we will have a Jdv president next time.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
THIS TIME the rich have our best interests in mind.
Besides their pedigree, they are neo-nazis in political philosophy. They want dominion over us because they feel superior.