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Recently quite a lot has been made of the tech world’s involvement in politics — from accusations that social media sites such asFacebook are politically biased, to questions over certain Silicon Valley leaders’ endorsements, to wondering whether VP picks could sway these very influential donors and public figures to one candidate or another. Some figures on the right bemoan that Silicon Valley tends to go blue. However, Silicon Valley boasts a unique culture that emerges from an environment of competition, innovation, and collaboration. As my guest Greg Ferenstein has written, these “hippies who dig capitalism and science” – many of them millennials – are hard to label as Democrat or Republican. They go with the public policies that make their ventures possible.
So what is the “political philosophy” of Silicon Valley? And what do these tech leaders want from public policy? Here to discuss is Greg Ferenstein, a California based writer, editor of the Ferenstein Wire, and author of The Age Of Optimists, a free book on Silicon Valley’s political endgame, available on Medium.
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Rich capitalists who spurned traditional social values and wanted close ties with government are what made Mussolini and Hitler possible.
Beneath the libertarian veneer Silicon Valley is something more like an evolving ruling class in the Servile State. The facile manipulation of information and social media technology, the rigid enforcement of PC fashions (e.g., the ruthless purge of Brendan Eich to the instant removal of anti-climate alarmist content in Wikipedia) and the sneering contempt for flyover country Americans provide a well-funded red carpet for a new Führer, il Duce or other Lightworker.
Not exactly enlightening. The voting record of the Bay Area contradicts most of the bloviating in the interview.
Meh. Arrogant and condescending…
I have to agree with SteveSc that Mr. Ferenstein did come off as arrogant, although I imagine he was trying to seem jocular, but it was pretty off-putting.
Most interesting part: Silicon valley is NOT pro-liberty, so they aren’t able to get on the conservative bus, and they are NOT pro-equality, so they can’t get on the liberal bus. Does that seem odd to anyone? Wait, so they’re Americans who couldn’t care less about liberty or equality?
Sorry, but I find this “Optimist” stuff utterly utopian. Take a realistic assessment of human nature and of the millions of ordinary American on the left half of the bell curve. No amount of government scheming in the education system can mold them into the hyperproductive, risk-taking creators the Optimists imagine. This is dreamily disconnected from life on the ground. These are the kind of platitudes you hear from the Belmont-bred, who have little to no experience working and living alongside the people of Fishtown and cannot begin to imagine the dynamics of dysfunction and the inertia to overcome.
Yet there it is. Fishtown sinks ever further, and the condundrum for lovers of liberty in the “leave me alone” tradition is, what do we have to offer them?
I’m afraid we don’t have a sufficiently salable answer. Bernie Sanders offers redistribution, a $15/hr minimum wage and support for unions. Trump promises tariffs. Ferenstein’s Optimists talk vaguely of “investment” in education (as if the U.S. were the cheap nation when it comes to education funding!) and utopian crackpot notions of “automated luxury communism.”
That the “leave me alone” philosophy isn’t selling in Silicon Valley doesn’t worry me too much. More worrying to me is how it’s not selling in Fishtown. And Trump’s popularity in those parts suggest it was probably never a real winner in the first place. This is a bigger problem than selling libertarianism to Silicon Valley.
Informative interview. The challenge in finding common political ground with the New Class requires some serious readjusted politics.
I think we conservatives have gotten lazy in that it was often enough just to spout some generic anti-statist rhetoric and point to the sheer awfulness of the other side to get to 51%. We have not really articulated a clear, detailed, complete alternative vision of government since we started resisting the encroachments of the New deal.
The election of Reagan and Gingrich’s Contract With America seemed like turnarounds but were really just timeouts in the socialistic march.
The Tea Party, Trump (and Sanders) should make it clear that the GOP half of the current political dance of the status quo needs to become an entirely new vision. What goes, what stays, what gets changed program-by-program. What is and is not the role of government and at which level…
They probably live several miles away from where poor people live. Greg Ferenstein seemed surprised that humans who weren’t lazy were depressed and uninterested in developing their human (or even artistic) capital. He genuinely seemed surprised that unemployed people weren’t taking the Great Courses and reading Shakespeare.
Freakonomics episode about the guaranteed basic income was a much more realistic assessment of what might happen.
So who is for genetic engineering to increase the IQ on the left end of the bell curve.?
I don’t want to confuse the author with the apparent arrogance of Silicon Valley culture. His offers useful insights on their worldview, even if it is peppered with ridiculous straw men about how the Republican Party wants to tell you “who to have sex with.”
That asinine remark aside, I am troubled more so by the inch-thin political pondering of a wealthy class who say they are “optimists,” are “pro-knowledge,” and throw around the term socialism thinking it just a fancy word describing cooperation.
Silicon Valley has such creative minds that are completely vapid in their political thought. If you dig beneath the surface of Ferenstien’s summary, Silicon Valley’s political philosophy is a modern version of the progressive corporatists of the 20s and 30s: if we use the government correctly, we can engineer the right solution. Yes, government does get in the way, but that is because the wrong people are running it.
If this class was as nuanced as Ferenstein indicated, they would support an occasional Republican or Libertarian, and California wouldn’t be a fiscal basket case.
Still, at least this podcast gave me hope that their philosophy derives from ignorance rather than a full-throated embrace of leftism.
Thanks Jim … for finding an entertaining way to demonstrate that the political “philosophy” of the computer geeks is vapid and delusional. These geniuses have no notion of the direct correlation between voting Democrat and the economic and social conditions that exist inside the American inner-city ghetto.
Did Mr. Ferenstein actually articulate a platform which would be pro-business, pro-education, anti-union for … Hilary Clinton?
When did Democrats become pro-business? Pro-Education the way that high tech companies would really like to see education improve? Did I hear him advocate for … private schools? Against Labor Unions? (How about the Teachers Unions?)
Of conservatives, he said, “We don’t understand you at all!”
Would it behoove the entitled spokesperson for Silicon Valley to try his hand at a little research?
All you need to know about this interview is that, per Ferenstein, Silicon Valley embraces the concept of robots doing most of the work, with almost everyone getting checks from the government financed by super-high taxes on the few that do work. Left completely unaddressed (sorry Jim, but you dropped the ball), is the fundamental question of why anyone would join the ranks of those few who do work if most of your earnings are then hoovered up by the government so they can be given to someone else.
Combined with the laughable beliefs that you can be for big government but anti-regulation (the scorpion has to sting) and that Clinton is somehow pro-business (this is a woman who is on record saying that the Federal government needs more money because it makes better decisions about how to spend it than private people), the only conclusion is that Ferenstein and/or the people he claims to be describing have not actually thought about these issues, but rather have created a patina of reasoning to overlay on a pre-determined conclusion: Democrats good; Republicans bad.
I am unable to find the Rand Paul video, mentioned in the podcast by Greg Ferenstein, where the Silicon Valley audience response to Rand Paul’s “who here wants to be left alone” was a pregnant silence. Did such an event really happen?
Two videos I did find, including a face-to-face interview btwn Greg Ferenstein and Rand Paul, lacking pregnant silences were:
FWIIW, I have been working in high-tech since 1980s. Will claim that Rand Paul’s message of “leave people alone” does resonate, especially here in Silicon Valley, where I have lived since 2004.