Silicon Valley and ideology Part 2

If you're interested in what's brought me to think about this post and to do some of the deep diving that I explain below, take a look at Part 1.

tl;dr summary of Part 2
Silicon Valley is essentially the second pole in American power right now. You have the "Acela Corridor" of Boston (Ivy League Schools, Academia), New York (Wall St., Media), and Washington (political power) and then you have Silicon Valley. It's progress-at-all-costs technological utopianism is the subject of frequent criticism but there is another undercurrent to the culture out there. We find it both at the top of the corporate and financial structures but also permeating the internet and discourse which happen "organically" in the world most closely associated with technology. We find it in online sexual abuse culture, in libertarian leaning tech enthusiasts who police the chatrooms and social media universe, and weird places like the Seasteading movement or attempts to make the Bay Area it's own state. What I'm seeing is something which does clearly set Silicon Valley apart from everywhere else. It's a move toward what I can only describe as Oligarchical Fascism. They truly believe they are better and more capable than people everywhere else for a variety of reasons: meritocracy, genetics, work ethic are among the top. They consider their pursuits hampered by democracy and favor a political system where they are irrevocably in charge.

Dipolar America

Identifying places of outsized influence on American culture, economics, and politics is nothing new. For most of my politically aware life, I've seen america divided into red and blue states. Most often the right claims the liberal elites in the northeast and the hollywood dreamers in LA are ruining the country and then the left claims that flyover states are actually the once ruining the country. Blah blah we've heard it before.

I'd like to throw a spin on that trope and argue that the true poles of influence are the good old fashioned east coast media/culture/finance/politics establishment which which we are all familiar and the much newer The Silicon Valley / Bay area high-tech culture.

The amount of money and economic influence of the tech sector is obvious. These companies are some of the most valuable and wealth in the history of the world. The innovations driven by tech companies have created entire economies based on products they sell - the app economy is completely nuts! I think the saga of Flappy Bird is a great look at the insanity that is the app economy. Many people, myself included, find this kind of thing completely delusional as billions of dollars are spent by consumers and billions more by companies acquiring app developers but absolutely nothing of lasting value is created. Similarly, the companies themselves sit on vast war-chests of money giving them the ability to buy competitors, develop new product lines almost overnight, or do just about anything. Throughout the Great Recession, technology stocks, led by apple, grew to be some of the most owned and most heavily weighted stocks in funds world wide. At some point in 2012, as much at 25% of some indices value was attributable to APPL alone. If you have a 401k, IRA, or any other basket of funds, it is very likely that your money was largely tied up in the tech sector.

With that new and growing economic influence came political influence. Leaders of tech companies began appearing in front of congress on a regular basis testifying about issues from net neutrality to surveillance to copyright, healthcare, trade deals, and, most recently, immigration reform. Tim Cook frequents the White House and Google's founders are big supporters of the President. Obama recently used their Hangouts product to conduct a question and answer session with the public.

Silicon Valley's culture and the impact of technology appear heavily in education. Perhaps I am a bit predisposed to focus on education since I am an educator but I find the area to be a unique confluence of all these issues. Economics, culture, policy, and technology weigh heavily on the classroom. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the emergence of Massively Online Open Courses. MOOCs are off to a rocky start but they promise to revolutionize the way education happens. I've written about them before and I'm generally skeptical of their efficacy. In addition to pushing MOOCs, there's also an effort by Silicon Valley to get technology related skills into the classroom. While this isn't a bad idea, it is another example of the tremendous pull they have. Also, it could just be a tactic to flood the market with programmers and software engineers to pouch down labor costs.

The final area of influence is on our culture. Whether it's memes, youtube, social media, or deeper parts of the internet like 4chan and Silk Road, the way that technology impacts our culture is significant. And it isn't always positive. Cyberbullying of children, sexual harassment, revenge porn, and various kinds of malicious social hacking are an outgrowth of the interconnected world technology enables.

I know this section is very heavy on lists and somewhat rambling but I want to make the point that technology is a very important part of our lives and that the place most associated with it, Silicon Valley, is the second pole of cultural, economic, and political power in America.

The Deep Dive finding neo-reactionaries in Silicon Valley

I think it's no secret that there's a good degree of utopianism surrounding technology. What we don't see is it's darker side. Underneath Silicon Valley's somewhat progressive corporate PR and somewhat libertarian internet culture lurks a belief in, of all things, Monarchism and an aristocracy ruled by those who have benefited most from the digital revolution.

I first learned about its existence from Arnold Kling, a libertarian blogger who found himself at odds with some of these neo-reactionary precepts. Indeed, his label of this line of thought as neo-reactionary has become something of an accepted term for this kind of thinking. For some reason the link is his post is broken so I dug up the original. It hails from the American Spectator, a conservative publication. Angelo Codevilla, the author, argues along lines I have often argued myself. He rejects the influence of industry insiders and revolving door regulators on our political process. Codevilla bemoans the lack of real political representation for the majority of voters and seems to see our democracy as a failed project. I don't necessarily disagree though his invocation of a "ruling class" and a "country class" smacks of Sara Palin's "real America" comment. There's some petty straw man stuff about progressives being a self serving elite which seeks to contain "the rest of Americans [who] are retrograde and racist". Typical of right wing invective, the progressives are out to create economic dependence on the state and to destroy families and religion. His solution is to promote the values and policies of the country class:

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend. Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Again, there's a lot to find attractive, especially in the closing of the second paragraph but the article as a whole is very typical of right wing rhetoric. If we'd just return to the state of affairs which supposedly existed in the white-bread suburban 1950s, all of our country's problems would be solved. So far, there's not much going on to link this to the culture of technology.

Returning to the imaginary 1950s is not the only solution offered to the problem of the farcical kleptocratic state. Writing in another conservative publication, The Week, Matt Lewis wonders what's gone wrong with American Conservatives. He begins:

Something weird is happening on the American Right. Over at Politico Magazine, Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has penned a column titled "America Needs a King."

Had Auslin's strange desire not come on the heels of Pat Buchanan's paean to Vladimir Putin, or an anti-democracy movement being championed by tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, one might see this as merely an example of an academic being intellectually provocative. In other words, "trolling" us.

But this isn't mere trolling. It's a trend.

Now, there has always been an element of the Catholic Right with monarchical tendencies. But, for a variety of reasons, this fringe idea seems to be gaining some mainstream traction.

Auslin's fundamental proposal is to create a position above the presidency, to which he assigns the rather Orwellian title "our First Citizen." This would be a symbolic post meant to unite Americans around something they have in common, even as public opinion is split over our more partisan political officials. "Let America's presidents be politicians — slinging mud, cutting deals, and knifing others in the back," he writes. "Just don’t let them pretend they represent all of us."

Now, I don't agree that this is a new trend in conservatism. Just watch an episode of Downton Abbey and you'll see that being a monarchist has a fairly long tradition in conservative circles. Perhaps it is the recent addition of fairly liberal values to American conservatism which "weird". Lewis' mention of Peter Thiel indicates the connection to Silicon Valley. Thiel is famous for saying that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He's also famous for wanting to create an underwater city called Rapture  floating enclaves free from national laws and regulations. If we put the reactionary views of Codevilla together with the Monarchist views of Auslin and the "going Galt" preferences of Thiel then we get the neo-reactionary movement.

The connection to Silicon Valley is somewhat tenuous at this point in the post. Perhaps now is a good time to point out that I am painting with a rather broad brush. I don't know how many people involved in the tech industry are actually in the neo-reactionary camp but, as I continue explaining their worldview below, pay attention to how familiar much of the rhetoric seems. It's not just language on the fringe right or the Ron Paul libertarians. Many fairly normal people express aspects of these views.

Neo-reactionaries hold that democracy can't ultimately provide a high degree of freedom for its citizens. Any time freedoms do exist under democracy, it's a temporary state of affairs at best. Indeed, the old adage, often misattributed to Tocqueville, that democracy will survive until the people discover they can vote themselves money is a great summation of the neo-reactionary view of democracy. At some point either the lords of finance and industry or the masses will compromise the ability of the government to secure broad freedoms and begin seeking to use the state for their own purposes rather than for freedom. The way they (whether corrupt corporations or the corrupt masses) do this is through taxing the wealthy and the productive members of society. Now we begin to hear the libertarian strains of thought reemerge. 

One primary goal of abandoning democracy is to establish a more stable society in which productive people are free from both the threat of tyrannical taxation and from economic collapses. One core belief is that a sufficiently good monarch or aristocracy would lead to a stable economy. More importantly, though, economic growth and stability isn't the end goal. Putting, well, all of history aside for the moment, let's see what the neo-reactionaries have to say. Michael Anissimov, glad recipient of the neo-reactionary label, wrote recently:

Traditional monarchy is not totalitarian. It would be less totalitarian than our current republican state. The republican state consumes 40% of GDP, whereas an incipient monarchy would more likely consume around 20% of GDP, lowering to 5% or less in the longer term, once it had built up some capital.

As I’ve stated previously, I do not think it is likely that the United States as a whole could ever become a monarchy, nor would I want it to become one. More likely than not, a monarchy would be revived in some European country that is compelled to make a desperate move. Perhaps Greece or Romania.

The primary motivation behind establishing a new monarchy would be for a cultural aesthetic and nativist benefits, not economic maximization.

Don't let the seemingly self contradictory title fool you. Anissimov and others wholeheartedly that traditional monarchies are not inherently totalitarian. A monarchic state should be small, technologically advanced enough to ensure safety and some degree of economic prosperity (defined in a classically liberal sense I guess, it's not very clear to me). Social order and peace are more important than, say, self determination or free speech. Essential to this project is the ability of people to move freely from one small monarchy to another. Similar to "voting with your feet" or a self-regulating free market where inferior products are not purchased, people not sufficiently happy in on monarchy would move to a different one. They promise that no monarch would stop the flow of people. Actually, no. They don't promise that. I'm not sure what the guarantor for free movement would be.

Who runs this society? Who is the monarch? Who are the aristocrats? In the past, classical monarchies the Divine Right of Kings could be invoked. Kings were Kings because God made them that way! Religion is not necessarily a part of the neo-reactionary vision so who gets the be head honcho? If you guessed Peter Thiel, you are on the right track. It's not him exactly but it may well be people who look and sound a lot like him. Neo-reactionaries are big into natural order (no, silly not Natural Law, though the effect is largely the same). Those who are smarter, more productive, and more able to unite a community behind them will inevitably rise to the top. Under democracy this makes them a target of the rest. Under a neo-reactionary model, this man becomes king and his followers become the aristocracy. The models vary from advocate to advocate but the overall gist is the same.

Similarly, Mencius Moldbug (a pseudonym), the godfather of this whole neo-reactionary movement argues that just about every problem in the world is an engineering problem, especially problems of governance. So who better to run the world than engineers? Here he Godwins himself:

Hitler, for instance. We may not have Hitler. We may not be Hitler. But we could cloneHitler! (And if the Russians have lost that skull fragment, we can back-breed a new race of Hitlers. Indeed, this has already been done - with cows.) Without any field-testing at all, with only one try to get it right, can we satisfy ourselves that the result of the Procedure will be actual sane government - and not Hitler?

Indeed we can. But not through hope, good thoughts and the power of positive thinking. There is only one dark, half-magical art that can produce reliable quality on the first try. It uses no newt blood at all. It is called engineering.

The Reaction is Hitler-free because its engineers the Hitler-phenomenon understand precisely, and to avoid it take precautions effective and redundant. Unlike Wernher von Braun, we at UR care where the rockets come down.

Rocket science is a perfect analogy. Every time NASA fires off some colossal shoulder of techno-pork to some random, godforsaken interplanetary destination, it ships one or two hundred custom widgets, each of which is designed to work perfectly on the first try. Often, all do. Sometimes, one or two fail. Then backups take over, and work a little less well.

Political engineering is rocket science, too. It demands no less cogency and care. In particular, romantic illusions are as misplaced in the political engineer's cubicle as a topless calendar in the gynecologist's office. The reactionary takes the biped as she is. Reality alone - bleak, elegant, mindless reality - is the null device on her black flag. Anyone who tells the truth, who believes her own lying eyes, who knows whereof the fsck she speaks, is in that moment as bitter and uncompromising a reactionary as ever put foot on the earth. 

When Moldbug writes about The Reaction, he is referring to the moment when a society decided to undo it's democratic structure and turn toward a monarchy. So yeah, avoiding having a Hitler as your king is merely a feat of political engineering no different than launching a rocket. The engineers, therefore, are the ones who run the show, they organize The Reaction and establish the post-democratic state which will be perfectly engineered to avoid bad outcomes. There's a lot more to his posts but I don't have room here. If you really want to, go read them. 

I will take this opportunity to post a link to the Geeks for Monarchy post at TechCrunch from last November. The article is a brief primer on neo-reactionaries and it contains a link to numerous resources both supporting and critical of neo-reactionaries. If you are at all interested, it's a great place to start. 

Masculinity, Neo-reactionaries, and Internet Culture

Weirdly, there's a big gender role push wrapped up in the neo-reactionary movement. Among the Five Principles of Reactionary Thought listed by Anissimov we get this:

4.  Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea. 

It’s tiresome to go into this one, since the feminists are so rabid about it, but reactionaries basically approve of traditional sex roles.  In traditional societies, women did in fact take on some jobs and roles that might be considered careers by today’s standards. They were not all stay-at-home wives, and even if they were, many were extremely industrious. I’m not sure why staying at home, making clothing, cooking, gardening, and raising children is any less empowering or worthwhile than male activities like digging ditches, welding, or sitting at an office desk on a computer all day.

Conversely, if a man chooses to stay home and raise children, many other men will think less of him. No amount of progressive propaganda and reeducation camps will change this, because it’s hard-coded into our brains through millions of years of evolution. Men respect other men who go out into the world and do masculine things. Similarly, the pressure to conform to gender norms is stronger in all-girl schools than in mixed schools, exploding the myth that it is men who instigate and police gender norms, to the detriment of women. People can and do create bizarro-world bubbles where these roles are turned upside-down, but they are not very stable.

In my mind, focus on gender roles is the link between the fairly classic conservative preference for monarchy and centralized power and the decentralized, anonymous nature of internet culture. We've seen over the years an almost rabid anti-feminist and anti-woman trend in various online forums. Recently, the online threats of rape and sexual violence have spilled over into the real world. Women are harassed at conventions and in the workplaces of large tech companies. Twitter meekly tries to cut down on threats with a report button. Police flat out decline to track down individuals behind posts which threaten rape and murder. Assessing these issues, Ross Douthat writes: 

Cases like Watson’s [the woman harassed at a Skeptic's conference]  suggest that there’s a chauvinist attitude in play here, a kind of crypto-ideology of sex and gender, that doesn’t map neatly onto what we usually think of as culture-war divides. This attitude is “liberal”  in that it regards sexual license as an unalloyed good, and treats any kind of social or religious conservatism as a dead letter. But at the same time it wants to rebel and lash out against the strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male liberty, male rights. 

Now compare that with neo-reactionaries concept of The Cathedral (a term coined by Moldbug):

Neoreactionaries believe “The Cathedral,” is a meta-institution that consists largely of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times and various civil servants. Anissimov calls it a “self-organizing consensus.” Sometimes the term is used synonymously with political correctness. The fundamental idea is that the Cathedral regulates our discussions enforces a set of norms as to what sorts of ideas are acceptable and how we view history — it controls the Overton window, in other words.

That's practically the same persecution complex we see explained by those defending the online misogyny as free speech. Nobody wants to be told their views are wrong so they attack the whole system as political correctness and "thought police". Additionally, neo-reactionaries dismiss the traditional left-right divide and consider elites of both parties to be part of the problem.

Really though, just like rape, this argument is all about making an individual feel powerful. The people who harass and attack women online are attempting to exercise power over them. They want to make them uncomfortable or even fearful because it's an exercise of power. Just as the rapist seeks to overpower his victims, the neo-reactionary insistence on traditional gender roles is an exercise of power over all women. Rather than address counterarguments on their merit, neo-reactionaries attack their critics as part of The Cathedral.

Given the seemingly vast culture of misogyny on the internet, I wonder how widespread this ideology could become. We see criticism of the internet and the companies behind it as being excessively male. We see the tendency of those in these companies toward utopian thinking and toward various forms of "gong Galt". I don't think this strain of thought is going to live on the fringes much longer.

There are many issues relating to neo-reactionaries that I didn't cover here which I find interesting. For example, neo-reactionaries often justify the superiority of the monarch and aristocracy using poorly understood genetics - basically that the people who rise to power are genetically superior to everyone else. I encourage you to take a look at the various linked resources and see what comes up. Neo-reactionism is quite a rabbit hole but I think it sits at a unique moment in our culture and nation. It's rhetoric is attractive and it shares much with anti-Wall St. populism and anti-government libertarianism. This isn't the last we've heard from these guys.