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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?
There's something to this and I've toyed around with it before. Socialists want to get rid of one hierarchy, based on the ability to create things of value, and believe that without it all hierarchies will be gone and we'll all be equals. But they ignore the social hierarchy. These two hierarchies are even fungible in some ways. You can pay Oprah to use her enormous position in the social hierarchy to sell your product and Oprah can use her social position to get people to pay to listen to her speak. Socialists are often people who are rich in the social hierarchy and poor in the material hierarchy. I think this also applies to hatred of like citizen's united and money in politics. If it's unfair that the Koch brothers can have many times the influence of an average American through funding ad campaigns then surely it's not fair that Oprah can have many times the influence of an average American because of her popularity? How can you justify muzzling the Koch's but not Oprah?
Such as who? If they are so popular, why don't they monetize that?
The social hierarchy is structured differently to the financial hierarchy. You have people that absolutely do, actors and socialites are commonly leftists. Until recently with ironically the silicone valley technology to monetize being a micro celebrity there was a really sudden cut off at the top of the social hierarchy for how many people could actually monetize their social wealth. You also have a broad kind of social middle class, people who enjoy broad warmth and social regard but not all that much compensation; your teachers, professors, media figures who's name alone doesn't sell products. These people are all reliably at least sympathetic to socialists.
There's also the non-economic categories of people who enjoy broad social approval and would find themselves supported by their peers in any financial organization, mothers, women in general, attractive and charismatic people. I think it's true that if you run all of these different categories down to the least able to reliably get sympathy from those around them you end up with something like a white anti-social male nerd.
So low status people that like to imagine they are high on an invisible status hierarchy that has no money. Sounds like psychosis. If these are the socialists it would be more accurate to say that low status people are socialists. Which seems accurate because, you know, they tend to be poor and to want hand outs. And poor people are low status.
Sounds like the CEO of a large company. Not socialist. Unless you mean people who only come off as «charismatic» to other poor people. In which case they are not charismatic at all.
So, alternative hypothesis here. Class is real and there are, roughly speaking, within class hierarchies. Since class itself is hierarchical it may be better to be somewhat low on the upper class hierarchy than high on the lower class hierarchy. Each class hierarchy has its own judgement function. Socialists judge everyone by the low class hierarchy so upper class people that entertain the lower classes stay high, then next comes the frumpy «people's community» social work professions like physicians and teachers, as well as the local bum that tells fun stories at the local «people's community» pub but doesn't have a dime to his name because he is stupid and lazy (which have an uncharismatic effect in the upper class but not the lower). Intelligence is genuinely charismatic in the upper class hierarchy but might be anti-charismatic in the lower so the socialists talk about how the obviously high IQ tech adjacent people will be thrown all the way to the bottom of the status hierarchy when they destroy the upper class and make them obey the lower class status function.
If you don't recognize that people feel more warmly and are more willing to help teachers than stock traders then I don't know what to tell you. For reasons that cannot be reduced to class when the Teacher's union endorses a candidate people who are not teachers take that as a signal that they should vote for the candidate instead of realizing that it means the candidate is more likely to transfer the voters money to the teachers.
If you think all you need to be the CEO of a large company is to be attractive and charismatic then you have a cartoon understanding of how businesses operate.
This seems totally unresponsive to what I've said. I might find your Marxist theories to be ramblings of a failed 20th century ideology but that's orthogonal to what I'm saying. Get rid of the economic class structure in your analysis, assume universally owned robots do all labor and everyone gets daily vouchers for material goods that cannot be saved or invested in any way, do you imagine there would be some kind of enduring hierarchy or not? If you think There wouldn't be then we genuinely disagree and you can present evidence for why you believe that. If you think there would be then do you think I'm wrong about the nature of that enduring hierarchy?
Am I, and people like me, not also people? Your thinking here is shady. You talk about people but obscure massive variance between individuals. You are universalizing too quickly.
Which people? How do you know it's not people who have family who are teachers? How do you know it's not people who feel like they are in the same class as teachers? I certainly don't listen to teacher's union endorsements and neither do any rich or intelligent people that I know.
I thought you were the Marxist. How am I the Marxist? Because I mentioned class? Are Jacobites Marxists? Are they 20th century?
Yes, as long as there's still human cooperation and there's not sufficient gene editing or transhumanism to actually produce equality and/or supermen. Even without money, some people are still intelligent, moral, beautiful, and clean, and others are stupid, immoral, ugly, and dirty.
Yes. People who are currently near the top would stay on top because they are by their nature better in almost every way to people who are poor. 99% of people only value money and sex (and these are linked). If someone is poor they basically just failed save some evidence of them being a genuinely religious-philosophical ascetic, which require serious spiritual and/or intellectual talent in its own right. Not the kind of person who buys in to socialism to say the least. This is why teachers' number one issue is that they always want more money. It's all they really value. And teaching is the best they could do. If we got rid of their teaching job they wouldn't float up the hierarchy into more lucrative positions, they'd float down into lower status immiseration. They literally need that pocket of socialism to even be mediocre. So in any goal oriented setting they will end up somewhere similar given similar amounts of handouts to them, they won't magically get smarter or more energetic.
What socialists actually want is to apply a downwards force onto top people to forcefully equalize them ... naturally they would like to apply harsher force to those they like less. Quite simply there is no one social status of a person, rather everyone has their own social status evaluation function, socialists would like to force theirs on the world and I have described it here. But as we saw with the USSR theirs doesn't work very well in nature.
We're talking about broad trends here, not necessarily universals, just what is sufficiently popular to be reflected in policy under a democratic system. The people on this forum are certainly not representative of the general population. Indeed, this is what I'm claiming is the formative experience of "nerds" - finding that one's own preferences are inexplicably out of step with the mainstream, and a consequent desire to place oneself as far out of reach of the "mob" as possible (which, in the present discourse, is termed "anti-democracy" or "fascism").
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Apologies, when I critiqued socialists and you responded by saying class is real and hierarchical I had assumed you were taking the common socialist position that these hierarchies were unjust. You seem to agree somewhat with Marxists that class is real but you believe it is not unjust.
This is a coherent position but I'm not sure what you're trying to say about my observation that leftists want to squish one hierarchy, economics, and leave the other, social. Is it your position that the social and economic hierarchy are identical?
It is my view that there are many possible imagined hierarchies and what you call the social hierarchy is arbitrary, imagined, and would require energy to enforce on others.
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Hollebeq talks about this, and how the sexual revolution was the social equivalent of post-Soviet shock therapy, creating oligarchs out of a few and paupers out of many.
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If you believe in mistake theory, sure.
If you don't, you'll find a lot of this is on purpose- because at the limit, the fact that they even exist in the first place (once nobody can create, or when all who may create are enslaved) will become their sole source of value. The value of actually doing anything is rightfully redistributed.
"Enslave any who creates, for a safe human existence- never threatened, never changed- is end unto itself."
Sounds like Hell to me.
I think mistake theory is the correct lens 99.99% of the time, although the author the OP is referencing may have seen past the veil and decided cynically if they indeed came to the calculation the OP is claiming. I subscribe to a Rawls veil of ignorance view to deserts but as I am better at producing than charming I have no intention of unilaterally disarming. I don't think the charmers are aware enough to even know what's going on.
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