Silicon Valley isn't full of fascists | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley isn't full of fascists

noahpinion.substack.com

32 pointszdw46 comments

This article tries really hard to conflate conservatism with fascism

It endorses the unfortunate habit of collapsing distinctions on both the left and the right. In truth, although conservatives have occasionally aligned with fascists for pragmatic reasons and because they do share some values, they are not the same. When fascists come to power, conservatives are usually supressed; all conservative political parties were banned in Nazi Germany, for example. Anti-Nazi conservatives were among the victims of the Night of the Long Knives. Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair provides useful insight into how conservatives of the era viewed Nazis. He died in Dachau in 1945.

The point people are miss is that Post-18th Century conservatism is a shade of liberalism in the broadest sense (not progressivism though), whereas fascism is resolutely anti-liberal. That said, right-of-center political parties contain lots of people who aren't remotely conservative: radical pro-market capitalists, libertarians, and the occasional fascist. They might all refer to themselves as conservatives, but that doesn't mean they are.

Which is perfectly understandable given how hard conservatives have worked to ingratiate themselves with fascists of various stripes, in recent years

What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn't actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they're profitable. That's it. There's no morality involved in this machine. It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative. It's how we can justify and talk up diversity while working on AI tech that can identify homeless people or ex-convicts. It's how we can condemn actions by the Trump administration while criticizing labor activism in Asia by coldly crunching the numbers to demonstrate that you can save money by putting your factory in a country that doesn't allow its people to protest.

And you know what, fine. Just keep tossing anyone who doesn't play nice to the wolves. But please just stop pretending there's morality involved. Let's accept it: we're here in pursuit of profit. Any good that we do is just a nice side effect. The sooner we understand that the sooner we can actually do something about it.

This applies to the media too, of course. I love the manic obsession with stability and morality combined with a lot of corporate and government money in a lot of US journalists' stories. You get great gems like hit pieces on privacy and encryption painted with a moral coat of paint that are better than anything the alphabet soup agencies could come up with - the Silicon Valley nazis are using Clubhouse, the pedophiles are using Signal, we must let the government monitor communications now! You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!

Finally, a sane voice! It's time that we realized that many things are simply not political in nature, no matter what social justice demagogues want to tell us. Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political. Resisting being forced to classify independent business partners as "employees" is economic, not political. The ethnicity, race, and gender of your applicant pool is economic, not political.

Politics has to do with generation-defining issues of our time, like choosing a more rational voting system at the national level and building broad support for a sensible third party that genuinely represents the interests of voters like myself, who are poorly served by the trifling squabbles of the current political "establishment." All this other stuff that certain biased parties want to paint as "political" is just the natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest, nothing more and nothing less. No use whining about cold, hard reality!!

What's "politics" anyway? I think we need to be very careful here. Economic problems can be caused by nasty politics and vice versa. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, that's just how economics work, sorry!" while ignoring the underlying political causes of why entire groups of people found themselves barely able to feed their families.

At the same time, politics are an unavoidable fact of life for a lot of people. It's hardly fair to tell somebody to just get away from political topics when it's their rights and liberties being debated on C-SPAN.

You seem to argue that politics is whatever issues where you support change and "not politics" is whatever issues where you support the status quo.

It is quite hard to not see your examples as political _but_ you don't want any of the changes currently being advocated by leftist activists.

> Selling customer data to advertisers is economic, not political

If selling customer data was forbidden, then it would not be a natural outcome of well-understood deterministic processes of economic self-interest. It seems the "natural outcome" is wholly dependent on current laws.

How are these examples not political? Yes, the entities in question might not do them for political reasons (as in for or because some kind of affiliation) but the issues are absolutely political.

"It's genuinely wonderful that ideas about inclusivity and diversity are being accepted, but it's because of the understanding that people can do great work regardless of their background or sexual orientation that it happened, and not because of some moral imperative."

I do not even believe this at all. The corps just do not want to be nagged by activists, so they use a lot of the expected words to signal that they are not to be attacked.

I remember the banking boss kneeling during BLM in front of a huge vault [1] - a pure photo-op for the media. It is the same with Google et al.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...

Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the big corporations just suddenly decided that discrimination is bad - it took centuries and centuries of activism to drive that point in. But that's still ultimately because that position became profitable. They don't give a shit in reality. It's why BLM was filled with empty gestures like that, it's why the likes of GitHub make noise about scrubbing problematic terminology and promoting inclusivity while continuing to work with ICE.

No matter how wholesome its branding appears to be, no matter how many rainbow avatars it uses on social media, no matter how many times its executives kneel for photo ops, a big corporation doesn't actually give a shit about anything besides profit.

>You get stories about reddit users in the stock market that somehow try to paint them as the alt-right while completely sidestepping any discussion of wealth inequality. Love it!

Or similarly, you get screeds accusing random bloggers of spreading "alt-right" views that completely gloss over the role of, say, Robin Hanson at George Mason University in spreading the notion that it's actually a humanitarian act to outsource manufacturing to Bangladesh.

> What I learned so far is that Silicon Valley doesn’t actually believe in anything. Ideas get adopted if they’re profitable. That’s it. There’s no morality involved in this machine.

I’d argue that is more of a characteristic of Capitalism at this point.

SV is overwhelmingly liberal in a general sense (like almost all urban, educated regions), and lacks a lot of gun rights advocates and church goers or standard conservatives, which is what Noah appears to be looking for in the piece. When people talk about fascism in tech they don't talk about a 'bum with a swastika on the arm', but what Jeffrey Herf coined 'Reactionary Modernism'[1]. An extreme belief that technology will replace liberal or democratic values altogether. And there is a substantial, and fairly hidden, adherence to this in tech. And because those people don't storm the capital and probably vote Biden they don't show up in so many surveys.

And this is very SV specific. You won't find this in the tech scene of Berlin, Zürich or New York. It's closely tied to the 'Californian Ideology', a sort of new form of futurism that is in many ways similar to its historical predecessor.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary_modernism

Sure, but on a certain level, what actually matters for real politics is that "those people" didn't storm the Capitol and probably voted for Biden. Technocracy is bad, but it's simply not the kind of "fascism" up for discussion in American mainstream media right now.

But the NYT article really put an emphasis on that Silicon Valley is far from "classic" US conservatism when it talks about Red vs Blue vs Gray tribes. There is no need to argue that most of tech elite are hardly Trump voters, especially in terms of identity politics.

But in terms of economy I think the SV discourse is maybe already much closer to what Scott Alexander had outlined in his Left Libertarianism article. [0] I feel that this ideology which combines unregulated capitalism with social safety net is very far from socialism, progressivism, social democracy etc. What I do not understand - why is it such a shame in not being a leftist for educated middle-class coastal Americans?

[0} https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-li...

I am somewhat perplexed by the headline, who in their right mind would argue that FANG are fascists or even conservative? It borders on the absurd if anything having openly right-wing opinion in tech is a good way to be excluded at work.

I wouldn't say that SV leans left either, most actions are virtue signaling to appeal to changing public opinion.

Fascism is ultranationalist, collectivist authoritarianism. Silicon Valley is definitely not ultranationalist, and for the most part not particularly collectivist. Certainly no one in silicon valley is calling for corporatist autarky, nor would you find much support for mass militarization of society or paramilitary violence.

Technosolutionism is not fascism, libertarianism is not fascism, cancel culture is not fascism, socialism is not fascism, laissez faire capitalism is not fascism, letting fascists express their opinions is not fascism, censoring fascists is not fascism.

Of course this is semantics, and when most americans talk about fascism, they are talking about something else which may or may not have some vague resemblance to fascism, but meaningful dialogue is impossible if we can't agree what it is we're discussing.

But it is full of useful idiots. Reading up on the role of German industry in the Weimar Republic, or on the how and why of Russian psy ops methods; such knowledge is often avoided in favour of simple one-liners like "limitless freedom of opinion good".

Its one of those excellent demonstrations of how one can be both intelligent and yet not at all at the same time.

The American political environment actively discourages nuance, which gets into discourse at every level unfortunately.

Who said it was?!

What is the proportion?

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