Letters to the Editor: Silicon Valley edition
I DEMAND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY
In gaining the confidence to commit to this Substack, I wrote many letters to the blogger. I will publish them as it occurs to me in my experiences in discourse.
Regarding “What is it like to be a billionaire?”
“This raises a further puzzle for me. Standard economic theory would predict, I would think, that the super-rich ought to be, under current political conditions in America, vastly more concerned about promoting political stability than pursuing slightly lower marginal tax rates or slightly less intrusive government regulation of business.”
This is that libertarian political thing.
Here's the thing about contradictory behavior like “Why don’t the super-rich support centrist Dems?” : it's not that the dynamics described in analysis of our temporarily embarrassed billionaire pharaohs don't apply to the non-tech super-rich. It's that the non-tech super-rich are unaware of the irony poisoning they experience.
They are mesmerized by their screens (example of the opposite quality: I don't really watch television alone, unless I'm exercising or doing chores.) They fully rely on young relatives and interns to keep them up to date/current. They are likely prone to make cultural analogies like Columbo = Poker Face. And their kids think like influencers if they're not doing genuinely creative work - and actually learning to code or whatever other mastery seems like the kind of simultaneously self-critical and analytical behavior that would receive opprobrium among the super-rich.
This dynamic might actually be a significant part of the reason that tech has resisted monopolies. The overt psychosis that Elon Musk exhibits on a regular basis is the kind of thing that loses you your 'our thing lulz' in traditional extractive, externalize-costs-to-the-ecosystem industries (which also apply to non-extractive industries such as Walmart and Amazon, in that they emulate extractive ones).
The tech industry is fundamentally libertarian in nature (exploiting sperginess wherever it appears), in a way that can only be compared to multinational drug dealers. Except that unlike tobacco companies, or the NFL, they experience the doublethink required to hollow out the state. This is why the tech industry encourages burnout rather than fading away. Hence news cycles like 'Microsoft is doubling salaries' a month before 'Microsoft is making layoffs' (and I am NOT accountable for that second link referencing two rounds of layoffs). A company that was not philosophically vacant in its pursuit of profit, fundamentally based on r*pe culture, would believe in fading away. So humiliating to the tech sector that Jeffrey Bezos inspired motherfcuking thinkpieces for saying that Amazon was not as eternal as God.
So, yes, I encourage the usage of philosophy of mind as a tool to weed out disruptive and dependency-driven behavior that supports r*pe culture. The tech industry will not be disgraced; it will simply have its base employees burn out as the superstructure of specific companies fades away. #feminism #marxism
Here's some good woke music to keep current (the nostalgia trip from the cover will be a blast for readers of my generation, and the music lives up to it):