Silicon Valley and political ideology: Part 1

Before I jump into the meat of my post, I'd like to share a few things I've read recently which sort of lead me to this point. I'll follow that by a tl;dr summary and then the content will be in Part 2.

Provoked thoughts:
1. Venture Capitalist Tom Perkins is in the news again this week. You may recall that he got a lot of flack for comparing Campus Censorship to Kristallnacht in a letter to the editor. Moreover, he chalked this censorship up to progressive attacks on the 1%. Two days ago he went on record in an interview with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky as being in favor of giving votes only to taxpayers and that more taxes paid = more votes to cast. Although this is obviously a tactic for getting the "right" kind of publicity, there are a number of people who probably do believe in this kind of governance.

2. I posted to Google+ a few weeks back about an article in Pando Daily. Basically, tech firms have a wonderful, decade long history of conspiring to artificially depress wages of software engineers and others. What also stood out to me was +Alex Sharenko's comment on my post:

it's much worse even than this really, Bill Gates or one of his buddies is in front of congress every 6 months dicsussing the doom the US economy will suffer if the number of H1B visas isn't expanded when really Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. just want to import more engineers that will work for less, further depressing wages.

He reminds me that tech companies like very much to pretend that they're different from the big evil banks and blue chip companies who've captured so much of the Washington regulatory and legislative apparatus. They make hay about net neutrality and governmental surveillance - they're totally on the side of the little guy! They support transparency and open societies and mildly populist ideas! While, in reality, they are playing the same games as every other company. Silicon Valley is the same as Wall St.

3. The Great Stagnation, as explained by the term's originator, Tyler Cowen, is the predicted future whereby technology makes some workers incredibly productive and most workers obsolete. He argues that the easy technological challenges, education innovations, and labor improvements have been figured out and only the difficult tasks remain. One characteristic of solving difficult problems is inequality. The conversation about inequality and technological change is certainly not new but has been getting some really strong coverage recently. I liked yesterday's OpEd by Joe Nocera if you're looking for more reading. A taste:

Is digital technology destroying middle-class jobs? Does it exacerbate income inequality? Does it boost economic growth and productivity — without creating the jobs that ought to come with economic growth?Last month I gave space to a book titled “Who Owns the Future?” by the computer scientist Jaron Lanier. His answer was an unequivocal yes. He tellingly compared the great photography company of the analog age, Kodak, with the hot photography company of the moment, Instagram. At its peak, Kodak employed 140,000 people; Instagram had only 13 employeeswhen it was bought by Facebook (for $1 billion!) in 2012.

4. The Economist ran a review of two books/studies about Social Mobility, a close corollary to inequality. Indeed, I'd argue that a society will tolerate a good amount of inequality if social mobility is sufficiently high. I found the reviewed book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility to be very interesting. Here's the gist of it:

Mr Clark draws upon research that uses surnames to track status over centuries. The academics he follows have mined sources as varied as the Domesday Book, the Royal Society’s records, even membership of the American Medical Association, in order to find surnames that are over-represented in elite positions. Researchers then track how long it takes those monied surnames to lose their wealth-predicting power.With surprising consistency across countries and eras, mobility is found to be painfully slow. Birth has predicted more than 50% of one’s income or education status, Mr Clark reckons. Erasing the legacy of past prosperity takes 10-15 generations rather than the three or four implied by sunnier estimates. So the shadow of 18th-century wealth still darkens income distributions today.That is the most unexpected finding. Efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility, leading Mr Clark to conclude that mobility is strongly linked to underlying social competence—an “inescapable inherited” trait. Only the intermarriage of people who are more prosperous and educated with those less fortunate will dilute the genetic resources of well-off families, slowly pushing them back towards the average and preventing the rise of a permanent overclass.Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.

While I don't know much about the credibility of his methods in social scientific circles, it's certainly an interesting point. I firmly believe that events far in the past have lasting effects. American slavery and the decimation of the South after the Civil War are two prime examples. I'm also of the opinion that an aristocracy still exists under the cover of a meritocratic myth. As I noted above, societies which are sufficient mobile will tolerate a good deal of inequality. The myth of meritocracy in America is that most, if not all, people have access to the same opportunities; therefore, those who succeed are those who made the most of their opportunities. Pay no mind to the fact that it's the same sorts of people succeeding generation after generation - at least it's not strictly hereditary! Anyone paying attention, of course, realizes that opportunities are not distributed equally and that a wide variety of factors influence success. The Son Also Rises indicated that the myth of meritocracy has roots hundreds of years in the past. It also provides the necessary transition to the next part of my thinking.

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 (see no. 1 and 2 above) 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.

So yeah, that's what I'll be arguing in Part 2.