AmrikeeAkbar
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User ID: 1187
AmrikeeAkbar
1mo ago
To what extent does the rise of Silicon Valley represent a replacement elite?
Periodically – usually whenever I read some indignant think-piece about how Big Tech is enabling the barbarian hordes of the populist right to destroy all that is Good and Holy – I ask myself if the increasing influence of Silicon Valley and associated industries represents an incipient shift in America’s ruling class. Rage-bait aside, I think its a worthwhile question. Changes in technology, economic, and socio-political organization are usually accompanied by some sort of shift in societal elites; when enough of these changes happen rapidly, we call it a revolution. I don’t know whether future historians will describe our own era as revolutionary, but it seems possible.
To answer this question, we first have to define the established ruling class. I hope to bypass the heated debates that topic inevitably prompts by sticking to some very broad and well-documented generalities.
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From the end of the Civil War, the economic powerhouse of the country was in the North-East, [where industrial and financial capital was concentrated] (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022516/how-new-york-became-center-american-finance.asp).
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The executive bureaucracy, since approximately the Progressive Era, has been dominated by technocrats characterized by an emphasis on formal educational credentials and, often, [association with elite educational institutions] (https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2024/11/01/is-the-ivy-league-really-a-pipeline-to-political-power/).
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Ownership of the most influential nation-wide news media, whether broadcast or print, has been consolidated in the greater New York metropolitan area since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Taking those things together, I think you have a decent outline of an established American elite. Silicon Valley represents a potential challenge to all those actors. The growth of the tech sector potentially threatens established financial elites; the new media has established media practically in a full-blown panic attack, and the fear of under-credentialed STEMlord barbarians at the gate lurks in the background of practically every discussion about “institutions.”
I’m asking if anyone has actually done any real research on this topic, beyond the sort of casual “wordcels vs shape rotators” framework. How do Silicon Valley types differ educationally, demographically, ideologically? To what extent are they merging with versus competing with the current establishment? Etc I know [the Scholars Stage] (https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/) has done a little, but I’m looking for anything else anyone’s aware of, either research and analysis or just straight-up raw data.
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
Can you provide any references to the phenomena you described in your first paragraph? I've often suspected that universalist religions are a solution to the problem of scale, but I haven't dug into any literature on it.
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
I think this line of argument conflates two different propositions: a) there's such a thing as too much democracy and b) the only appropriate guarantor against too much democracy is a managerial elite with the backing of the state. Lots of people agree with the first proposition without necessarily agreeing with the second.
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
I strongly suspect that the chattering classes care a lot more about corruption than the majority of voters. Really egregious corruption can rub people the wrong way, particularly if people feel they are being shut out of opportunities that insiders have access to, but I don't think a lot of people care very much about, say, who gets appointed transportation minister. In order to be enraged about deviations from procedural norms, you have to be deeply invested in the legitimacy of those norms to start with. While the PMC may be, increasingly large numbers of voters aren't.
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
As tech advances, won't it take fewer people and less resources to "close the gap" to AI? Say Silicon Valley is on course to reach AGI in 20 years at current R&D rates. If Silicon Valley in 10 years has shrunk to half its current R&D rates, you can still hypothetically get to AGI, it would just take longer.
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
Apologies for the lateness of this reply; I go through long stretches of inactivity here. Maybe both geeks and sociopaths can be driving growth concurrently? At any given time, in any given movement, you can have participants along the whole spectrum of motives. Its probably also true that some movements have "better tech" than others; they're more likely to take root and have lasting impacts. The various Abrahamic monotheisms come to mind as movements with really strong tech. If anything, its probably that the better the underlying idea, the more status to be gained by getting in on the ground floor.
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
I don't actually know enough about the early history of Christianity to make a claim one way or another, to be honest. I'd be interested if you have an alternative set of stages. Or even if you just think there's a better word than "stages" which does sort of imply a linear progression in what is not necessarily a linear process.
Regarding your latter point, I think for me, "class interest" is basically just an emergent phenomena of people following their own personal incentives. For example, if I'm lawyer or doctor, anything lowering the barrier to entry in these fields is against my personal economic interest. Meanwhile, people with aspirations of upward mobility from non-PMC backgrounds, who can't afford or qualify for however many thousands of dollars of student debt that career path entails, would prefer that these barriers to entry be lowered."Class" is such a slippery phenomena; any given individual might be in different classes over the course of their lives, and if we use the word in the broadest sense (to include, say, religious or ethnic groups as well as socioeconomic strata), several different classes at the same time.
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
First time I've seen the rescue game, though I am familiar with John Michael Greer's writing. Generally I've found him quite insightful, though I think I probably have a fundamental disagreement with (what I understand to be) his broadly anti-growth philosophy. I was most interested to learn about the parallels to race discourse in the post-reconstruction south. Everything old is new again!
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
I think I'd concede that naturally-occurring niches may exist. I think these niches probably don't get filled without some sort of elite-aspirant recognizing an opportunity however. Oil sitting under the Arabian desert didn't do anything until someone with the resources, connections, and know-how to exploit it came along. I also think that relatively narrow niches may be artificially expanded by elites, in the same way that say, De Boers helped create the diamond market. Good point about consumer capitalism; I think its fair to say that incentive structures have a way of cropping up everywhere, however much you try to keep them out.
While I agree that most neopagans are mostly making it up, there's at least two people buried in Arlington under a Mjolnir symbol. Can't post link cuz I'm on mobile but it was a Fast Company article from around 2013 that talked about it. I also personally know an Odinist who's an Army officer, and have met others who don't describe themselves as such but certainly have an affinity for the symbols of such (with varying degrees of seriousness and understanding)
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