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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   38653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Those who write software for the electrical grid, defence contractors, or industrial machines seem to have moved rightwards over the past decade. Those who work in industries propped up by low interest rates have all gone radically left.

Reverse causation sounds like an obvious alternative hypothesis to consider. The military and heavy industry are already right-coded, while Silicon Valley and art/creative industries are left-coded. Beyond the explicit politics, there's going to be lots of differences between working at Spotify and at an energy company. The former will probably value the use of data, changing things quickly, employee independence, creativity, new technology, etc. The latter will move slowly, do things the traditional way, have a stricter hierarchy, etc. I suspect these sorts of factors weighed more on your average classmate than did considerations such as:

Their business-model is essentially dependent on an extreme individualist philosophy. If music is an integral part of culture, something that is typically experienced live and locally, the business of making cents per thousand listens is infeasible. Spotify is built on billions of people listening to the same pool of music. No nations, no borders, just atomized consumers is a suitable ideology for such a company. Grubhub, uber, twitter and Netflix make small sums of money off vast quantities of people. In a more nationalistic world, they wouldn't be nearly as valuable. My woke friends nearly all went for a company that has millions of clients all over the world, generating tiny profits off each client. The art stemming from these companies tends to be bland and placeless. Strong collective identities such as nationalities, ethnic groups, traditions and gender roles doesn't flow well with a world consisting of users.

I doubt most of them thought this way at all, and were instead attracted to places where other employees were like them, or the workplace culture was one they appreciated, and you just didn't notice they were already like that back in college (or their preferences changed over time).

(On a side note, Spotify actively recommends new artists, has contributed to me seeing at least 1 in-person concert by pointing it out to me, and makes sharing music or playing it in social contexts extremely easy).

Those coding for the electrical company are more interested in people who are committed long term to their society. They don't need a global market, as their market doesn't extend further than the grid. Their interest is people with high skin in the game in terms of the society they live in and who are willing to make long term investments in the grid.

I admittedly have limited experience with the energy industry, but based on what I do know, it's about as global as industries get. European companies are building solar plants on American farmland, every country in the world relies on oil from a handful of major producers, etc. If every country became much more insular, you would still have an energy industry, but it would be way smaller and poorer.

The end of occupy Wall street is often viewed as the start of the great awokening, the end of the global financial crisis was the FED printing money. The great awokening occurred roughly at the same time as zero interest rates started to have a tangible effect on the economy.

I don't think these events could have happened quickly enough to explain the "awokening," which was already starting by 2014. The biggest tech companies (facebook, google, microsoft, apple) all quite predate this time frame and were successful already (facebook had a billion dollars in profit in 2012, for example; Netflix was originally a mail-service company founded back in the 90s and was profitable as early as 2003). Even twitter was founded back in 2006. Even if there was an effect, it seems unlikely that it could have happened so quickly. From the fed funds rate being lowered in 2008 to the aforementioned 2014 is only 6 years--not a lot of time to found a company, grow it, hire lots of people, and then have it become an unprofitable zombie enterprise.

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