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Notes -
The new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy has been making the rounds. In lieu of reading it, here's an NPR interview.
At the core of this is a middle-school-cafeteria psychodrama that remains unresolved. The lived-experience of "computer nerds" is that of being instrumentally valuable to many, terminally valuable to none. As a result, anti-capitalist rhetoric that disparages money as a source of moral value is received by them as a personal attack. The computer nerd feels deep down that his earning-potential is the only thing he brings to the table in the status game; as far as he's concerned, his value on all other axes might as well be rounded off to zero.
Therefore, the computer nerds wants nothing more than to get away from all those teeming masses with their grabby hands who want to take all his stuff and leave him with nothing. If it takes moving to one of Balaji Srinivasan's seasteads, or to Elon Musk's space colony, then so be it.
Huh? Is it a zone, or the whole world? There's a big difference - but hold on. That comic is the story of nerds simpliciter, not just computer nerds. And the people most outspoken against "The Nerd Reich" are also nerds - "theater nerds" to be precise. To continue the cafeteria picture, the theater nerds are (if anything) even more autistic, more put-upon, and more bullyable than the computer nerds, while the bullies themselves (the "jocks" and "popular kids") don't even figure in to the dialectic at all. So what's going on?
I guess it comes down to the different coping mechanisms each group employs. The theater nerds find solidarity with each other at least, whereas the computer nerds have no need for each other because they have their toys to play with, which can incidentally eke them out a living independent of anyone else. But the theater nerds have no such refuge, and so, being poor in both financial and social capital, have been forced over generations to build up an elaborate alternative system of social capital which is a lot more off-putting to outsiders but seems to form much deeper personal relationships within itself than any within the computer club. This, at least, levels the playing field between the two nerd factions somewhat.
But then, if some computer nerds start getting uppity and decide to form alternative solidarity groups of their own, now this upsets the balance. I suppose the theater nerds believe there's only so much space for nerds in this world, and so any ascendancy of computer nerds will leave less for them.
Honestly, I'm really just spinning a yarn at this point. There are a lot of holes in this story that I don't know how to patch up. In particular:
But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do. But what are those true reasons?
Tech has been eating journalists and will continue to do so. Who wants to advertise in a newspaper distributed to a few million people in one place vs google, facebook (or perhaps an AI) which is queried by everyone everywhere and can track users in exacting detail?
Journalists are aware of this, this is why they don't make much money! Their prestige and wealth is going to some SWE instead.
If ever there was a class war in history, it's this. The tech industry does many bad things but there's such an insane chorus of negativity. Go to https://futurism.com/
There is scarcely a single piece of good or even neutral-valence news about technology anywhere on the entire website, certainly none about AI. Journalists hate technology and especially AI because it is destroying the business model of their companies, it directly threatens their livelihoods. The natural countermove is to whip up anti-tech sentiment, create terms like 'tech-bro' to wield social and political power against the technology sector and try to siphon some of that money back. Not unreasonable as a survival strategy but deceptive.
Given how little analysis they do, how weak their articles are compared to rare moments of real journalism or even AI queries that can directly investigate primary sources, they're right to be worried. The average journalist is pretty stupid per the incessant complaints of my friends who talk to the media. They're constantly misunderstanding and mangling quotes, abstract points and semi-rare diction escapes them.
Anyway, journalists hate people like Elon Musk in large part because he refuses to pay for PR/advertising. If Tesla paid for ads, there would be a night and day difference in how he's treated by the media.
If journalism were actually trying to save the world from AI takeover, that'd be heroic. But they've been doing this for years and years before AI, they're trying to make some money, to restore the cozy NGO/govt/advertising landscape they think they deserve.
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The tech industry is the goose that lays golden eggs. Both for the wider American economy and for me personally. Of course some people want to kill it. Lena Khan and her ilk just don't like how big the major tech companies are. How rich the founders get from their stock. How they are wealthy, but not in a way that can be punitively taxed.
I don't want the golden goose to be killed to satisfy progressives' sense of ecenomic fairness or general dislike of big business. If that makes me seem like a defender of tech billionaires, so be it.
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The Bulverist take is just the occlusion of small-d democracy-as-a-voting-thing, and large-D Democratic as a member of the Democratic Party. It's... pretty explicit in the interview:
The Tech Industry now includes any open support for The Wrong People, and that means the entire sphere is an enemy. No hidden agenda, no complex story.
The more practical take is just that it's wrong, and it's not intended to be something interacted with on a factual level. The summary of The Sovereign Individual is missing the point, the analysis of Thiel's position and logic is a parody, the Balaji 'secede' call comes from media reporting rather than the actual speech. I'm not going to speak about whether it's intentional or a mistake: I'd consider myself duty-bound to check my central claims before publishing a book or going on NPR, but that doesn't speak anything to NPR and Duran's morals or capabilities.
At the risk of borrowing from nydwracus, it's the fnords. The Bulverist take is, if any, too slow behind the power curve: the goal here is solely to produce and reinforce the belief that anyone in the Tech World not slavering at the bit over today's Everything Politics is a moral mutant, and, downstream of that, a valid target.
Why do you think "The Nerd Reich" is the title, when the book's aimed and written by people who fashion themselves as intellectuals and demonstrate themselves to be incapable of checking their own claims?
I've heard of the politician's strategy of "If you don't like the question they asked, imagine a better one and answer that instead". I didn't think journalists were supposed to do "If you don't like the speech they gave, imagine a better one and report on that instead".
Assuming that there wasn't a different speech that he's referring to, it's just straight-up lies stacked on top of uncharitable extrapolation and deceptive framing. Who wouldn't want an alternative to that?
When the journalist likes the politician in question, this is called sanewashing. When they dislike him, it's called "dog-whistle politics".
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The contemporary Left believes that wealth is valid, but only as long as you're a movie star, heir, or divorcee. Most tech billionaires are from comparatively humble beginnings, so they're declasse.
That's probably a bit stronger than I actually believe, but I think there's something to it. If you receive wealth from fitting into existing social relations, it's not something you should really criticize: status quo institutions have already discovered ways to channel and use you. If you create wealth by changing the material basis of society, you're a threat to the existing structures, and thus not just an adversary but evil. Note that even figures in traditional industries like oil barons and the Walton family receive only a small fraction of criticism as do tech billionaires, even though the tech billionaires are generally more left wing in their attitudes.
That must be an American thing.
To German leftists, inheritance is the devil.
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Aren't most of them leftist? Hollywood is pretty left wing. Divorcees are known for splashing cash indiscriminately through the NGO sphere. It's like in China - the Party is fine with wealth so long as you uphold the predominance of the Party and obey the Party line.
Tech billionaires are thought to insufficiently uphold the predominance of the Party, they didn't ban all the right, didn't stop them radicalizing people via the algorithms. Something dodgy was happening with Russia and Cambridge Analytica and they weren't doing enough. Musk is even against the Party and so draws a lot of flak.
Tech is more valuable than oil. Tech is where minds are moulded, not just little polyethylene disposables. Oil is on the way out anyway, that was the plan, the oil companies were supposed to pivot to clean energy projects or 'green hydrogen' or something. There's no replacing the technology sector!
They did, though. Or are our memories that short?
Tech billionaires like money/power/impact first and foremost, but their natural inclinations are toward Democrats. The party strategy should have been to continue and strengthen the alliance of the early and mid Obama era. Information would be controlled, every one of the various progressive causes could have gotten their handouts and more, Pax America would rule the world undisputed, and everyone would be much, much richer.
I meant 'that's what they think' in that paragraph.
Donald Trump was still on twitter until 2021! T_D was a thing. In the back of my head there's also this Arctotherium essay where he talks about the closure of the internet and, surprisingly, gives Zuckerberg a little credit for pushing back a little bit: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382
But there was a lot of banning going on, for sure. We're all the way out here after all, not banned per se but suppressed on reddit.
Is "we didn't ban the sitting / former President of the United States yet" really an appropriate example of how lax the censorship was?
Not lax in an absolute or reasonable sense but lax in proportion to what some people thought.
Kamala Harris wanted Trump banned from twitter back in 2019 and wrote a letter to twitter about it. There were earlier demands too back when he was tweeting about the size of his nuclear button with regard to Kim Jong Un. Or for inciting harassment or other such things.
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Nah, your standards are too low. Their level of support is insufficient to partisans because they at least gesture at evenhandedness and classical liberal tendencies.
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As a society, we flirted with honoring labor for a few generations, but now have returned to more traditional norms. Working for money is dishonorable. It needs to be washed through at least one parent or spouse before touching your own clean, lily-white hands.
Shame, however, that we haven't also adopted more traditional attitudes towards the role of actors in society.
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It feels pretty mean-spirited to describe tech billionares as simply "nerds". Maybe they started off as humble computer nerds, but that was a long time ago and they've done a lot of other stuff since then.Now they have a lot more in common with the richest CEOs of non-tech companies than they do with the rank-and-file engineers. And like you said, theater kids can be nerds too... what about them?
Imagine if they wrote a book talking about Hollywood celebrity culture had gone too far, and for some reason the subtitle used the word "fag." I feel like that would not go over well, even if they later clarified that "oh I didn't mean all the fags in Hollywood, just the ones who run it!" But I guess it's still normal and cool to throw out slurs against people who work with computers for a living, even though that's an increasingly large and diverse part of the population.
Scott's working definition of "nerd" is something like "unusually intelligent, but lacking in social skills". Which still seems like an apt description of e.g. Mark Zuckerberg, in spite of his billions.
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I mean, it seems pretty obvious that it's because, despite all the political rhetoric to the contrary, the leftists don't hate them for being rich, they hate them for being nerds. Indeed, the leftists hate the less-rich employees at the companies a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because they're much nerdier than the CEOs. They hate random nerds in their everyday lives who are much poorer than them a lot more than they hate the CEOs, because those are also much nerdier than the CEOs. The existence of somewhat nerdy CEOs is just very flimsy cover.
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I was annoyed to read this piece on it in the national broadcaster, which, for all that it is marked 'Analysis' (not even Opinion!), just uncritically repeats the book's claims as truth.
I have not been able to read it yet - and I may not bother - but certainly the impression I get from the coverage of it is that its fundamental case is, well, that nerds are gross.
It is, as it happens, true that plenty of the people it's talking about are gross. I have said it myself. If you look at most of the people he's talking about - Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Altman, Zuckerberg, Srinivasan, etc. - they are, I think it's fair to say, kind of disconcerting. But I think you can't build a larger political argument on that. Someone presenting as anti-social is not necessarily a threat to democracy. Something is being elided here.
I was also struck by the repetition of the word 'billionaire', in a way that reminds me of attempts to use 'oligarchy' as the word of the day a while back. It's democracy versus billionaires, data centres are an intrusion of billionaire power, they found billionaire cities, and so on. Clearly the author has very negative affect around the word 'billionaire', but my sense is that Americans in general do not. As with oligarchy, it feels to me like an attempt to will a movement into existence, as if repeating "people are waking up" enough times will summon the revolution into being.
That's what it's always been. For a long time, nerds were kept in their place. Then with the dot-com boom and the rise of the FAANGs, some nerds had not only a lot of money (something always occasionally possible) but actual status. To be a software engineer at one of the top tech companies was to be someone respected. It drove the kind of people who use the word "nerd" with scorn absolutely nuts. They tried to tear it down. They mostly succeeded, but there's still those pesky execs (who liked their employees losing status) who are pretty nerdy.
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They largely don't. The modal tech worker's thoughts on political economy are essentially those of a factory worker in 1850. They're distrustful of management, and they don't adore billionaires. They worry about foreigners (H1Bs) coming in and stealing their livelihoods. The fact that Yarvin happened to be a tech worker before his writing took off is mostly a coincidence.
It's mostly illusory. It's a blob of vaguely interrelated stuff:
Wrap up all of those with cherrypicked examples and you can make a bad political book on the "threat of the nerds" it seems.
No, I don't think it is a coincidence, the tech sectgor self-selects for a kind of high functioning socially unbothered mode of thinking unafraid to explore ideas and themes that are outside the current overton window.
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Speaking just for myself & generalizing a bit too casually: a key difference is that the billionaires are content to leave me alone.
If NPR staffers run the government, I'd get taxed a bunch (boo), get more diversity trainings and scolding PSAs from NGOs (boo!), and see more of society's decisions being made via the kind of theatrical protests that theater kids are good at and I find distasteful.
If Musk/Bezos/Zuck run the government, I them to blow a bunch of investor cash on tech projects, take control of a city / town/ slice of Hawaii to run as fiefdoms, and maybe be a demanding jerk of a boss to the people who work for them.
The actual theater kid offer amounts to "give us a path to have power over everything in society so, among our many other projects, we can stop Musk/Bezos/Zuck from blowing investors cash and running their local towns like a fiefdom."
I already don't live in Hawaii or Starbase and so the upside isn't there and the downside is pretty bad. So I don't want the theater kids in power, which ends up looking like me "supporting" Zuck / Bezos / Musk despite those 3 not really being politically aligned.
This tracks. I don't hate Zuck / Bezos / Musk either, though I don't like them. Musk in particular was a massive disappointment when he let his mind go to the gutter with all the Catturd-esque right wing brainrot. Though I'd still prefer a cabal of tech oligarchs in charge over Trump or a deranged Woke-pusher, mostly by process of elimination (i.e. tech oligarchs would be the least-terrible). I'd vastly prefer Obama to any of those losers but the median primary voter hates people like that now.
Musk will forever have my deference for neutralizing Twitter, that amalgam of glowie psy-ops and something awful goon "weird twitter" the likes of which "journalists" loved to screen shot and declare it news reporting.
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I feel like there's a word game being played here, roughly, "Everyone's advocating a policy, so everyone's being equally political."
The limits of that claim get obvious if we talked about state-mandated religion. Three potential stances might be:
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
The "Anti-Democratic" is true, I guess, in the sense that "Why is the government even involved in this?" is an anti-democracy stance, but not in the (much more relevant if we're throwing around words like "Fascism") sense of imposing rules on people that unpopular with the population and prevent people from doing (/not doing) things they'd otherwise want to do.
The word games continue:
In this case there's a double-meaning of "Oust and Purge." Is the proposal to "oust" democrats in the sense that Democratic Voters would be compelled to move outside of city limits and take up residence in Cupertino? If so, that's a bold and fresh proposal, but probably pretty hard to pull off.
Or is this a "Purge" in the sense of convincing a majority of the voting population to vote for someone other than the incumbents -- who'd still be allowed to live in the city, just without the authority to pass regulations? That's much less bold, and not especially "Anti-Democratic" except in-as-far as we call one party the "Democratic Party" and they'd no longer have power.
When we combine the two ideas: It's undemocratic to try to convince people to vote for Republicans (so the Democrats can't regulate you) AND it's undemocratic to try to create a new city somewhere else (so the Democrats can't regulate you) we're left with just "It's Democracy when my side wins; everything else is Fascism."
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Papa Bear said something the other day about how SV types will cry Orwellian dystopia if you propose regulating tech at the level that eggs or milk are regulated.
Maybe toy enjoyers just hate regulation so, so much more than they hate Zuckerberg and boom solidarity.
I mean, I would too. I would prefer to be able to write as much software as I want and be able to run it myself, so that puts me at a lower level of regulation than farm products.
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The idea I hear is clear and simple: the techno-fascist billionaires will use AI, Palantir, drones, Flock, … to turn the world into 1984. It will be racist and sexist to show off power and control, and because the dictators are “right wing” so they have to do everything the “left wing” hates. Ordinary tech employees don’t want this and wouldn’t benefit from it, but they don’t think about it, trudging along on isolated tasks to collect a decent paycheck (The Banality of Evil).
If they limited their ideas to Mars or some bought-out city, maybe the author is motte-and-baileying, but I see no issue. Voluntary experimentation is good, maybe they do have some improved ways of running things.
There’s something to be said about how libertarians become fascists, and cyberlibertarians become cyber-fascists. I don’t think it’s a solution: tyranny collapses on itself, as the “victors” fight and die out, and doesn’t seem interesting (of course, also the ethical issues).
Socialists demand universal control, not a plurality of ideas. The idea that a colony of Randists could happily exist in a remote mountain canyon or even on Mars is deeply offensive. All must conform.
Well, socialists believe those rich people are absconding with resources that don't belong to them. It's not just some demand that people near and far must all conform.
Indeed, it's also the murder of those people if they won't.
The earliest recorded socialist was Cain, who believed (trivially, correctly) that Abel was obtaining God's favor with resources that don't belong to him.
The first act of socialism ever practiced by humanity was redistributing Abel all over the ground.
From Cain's perspective, Abel obtaining God's favor that way was stealing (and purposefully ignores "obtaining God's favor" is the entire reason those resources were put there in the first place: "obtaining God's favor" and "being better than Cain" were one and the same for Cain, though).
Interestingly, the punishment for that was not death, but exile and divine protection from anyone else murdering him. (And the even more interesting implication is that Cain having done this doesn't seem to be stated as categorically/unequivocally evil, either.)
In what way did the resources not belong to him?
You might assert that Abel does not own his sheep in the sense that nobody can own any natural resources, because all resources, animals, plants, etc., are created by God. But Cain does not seem to have objected to Abel having a flock of sheep in the conventional, everyday sense of the term.
Moreover joking about 'redistribution' here seems like just a bad interpretation of the text? Cain's motive is not to steal any of Abel's material goods. Cain does not take Abel's sheep, nor even Abel's physical body. It's hard to read as a 'redistribution' of God's favour, because there is no reason for Cain to think that murdering Abel will somehow cause God to favour Cain. On the contrary, Cain attempts to conceal his actions from God. It looks to me like Cain (correctly) believes that God would look upon his act with disfavour.
Surely the traditional reading of this text, where Cain was motivated by envy, hatred, and pride, just makes more sense? Abel had done well, and Cain was envious, and that envy curdled into bitterness and despising. He killed Abel not as part of some strategic move to take anything that belonged to Abel, for Cain makes no attempt to take anything of Abel's. Nor does he make any suggestion that Abel committed an injustice. Cain was angry that Abel had been favoured more than he had been. That was it. That was the whole cause.
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