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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?
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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