I worry about American democracy. I worry about our continuing slide towards greater and greater inequality, oligarchy, plutocracy, and fascism. I worry about the climate crisis. I worry about my personal prospects for things like a reasonable retirement and long-term financial stability – or housing or healthcare, or any host of issues that are plaguing middle- and low-income Americans. If shit rolls downhill, I’m thankful to not be at the bottom, but that doesn’t make the hill any less covered in shit or this life-long hands and knees scramble up this shit encrusted hill any easier to do without getting shit in the wounds of my frequently scraped and bloodied knees.
I don’t read very much about these topics (admittedly limited mental acuity and attention span), but what I do read paints a grim picture with some not-so-kind, mustache-twirling villains pulling levers behind the scenes. Or more accurately, it paints the picture of a system (capitalism) whose history is so littered with abuse and cheating that it’s hard to be optimistic about the nature of the human soul. The historical record of men behaving badly (and yes, it’s almost always men), tyrants always finding an audience, and the crooked and inept frequently rising to power is so old, that on my more malcontent-y days, I’m convinced that were we to start the social contract over 100 different times, we would end up with the same shitty results 100 different times. Someone is always willing to violate that contract of basic decency in order to get ahead – meaning the best in human nature will always succumb to some bro who has a scheme and enough money and/or chutzpah to enact it.
On most days, I believe in humanity (or at least I want to). I believe that most people are good and want to do good. I keep a daily journal of things that make me smile, and it’s overflowing with observations about people doing nice things or just being out in the world and loving life… and dogs, it has a lot of observations about dogs. But I become considerably less optimistic about the promise of our collective fate when I watch John Oliver expose corporate fraud in the Medicaid system, or read Cory Doctorow’s writing about large corporations buying up property tax liens as a way to evict people and acquire housing on the cheap, or read articles in The New Republic about a few influential tech bro billionaires who are funneling serious money into politics in hopes of starting a new society beholden to tech (it’s called the network state).
Because these things (climate change, inequality, economic justice) will impact me and the people I care about, they hammer away at my fairness buttons with their cash-filled, fat and greedy fists. And because I usually feel powerless to do anything about it, I try not to spend too much time doing the deep dive – it can get heavy in a despondent, all humans are shitty sort of way. I bury my head in the sands of poetry and sit on benches watching people and life pass me by… because otherwise, I’ll just be miffed.
I’m a middle-aged, middle-class, white guy with modest talents that don’t pay well. I’ve had a ton of privilege and a little luck. As such, I should probably just focus my energy on my 401k and how I’m going to cruise into my golden years. On most days, that seems like the prudent and preferable option. Sure the game is rigged, and it’s rigged more in my favor compared most people… in that regard, I should probably keep my head down and my mouth shut. I should probably stop reading things that exasperate and befuddle. I should probably focus on getting out alive with the few crumbs I have thrown my way from a passing cybertruck. Except, nobody gets out of this thing alive. Life, by definition, is the one disease that is 100% fatal. So we should probably make something of it while we have it – which, for me, means sometimes getting riled up and at least thinking about all this shit rolling downhill and how I might help my unfortunate neighbors below me who can neither escape the quicksand of shit in which they’re sinking nor get upwind so they might breath air (however briefly) not fouled by this stench. It’s the triage work I gravitate towards in the nonprofit sector: handing out gas masks and air fresheners because I don’t have the power to legislate cleaner air for all of us.
I have lots of days where I want off. I want off of this hamster wheel of commerce, consumption, and competition as much, if not more so, than most people. Despite the abundance in the world, we have an extractive system and some very serious PR battles over who the makers and takers are (hint: it’s not Reagan’s welfare queens or Romney’s “taker class” who are fucking things up). Honestly, I would love to spend all of my time walking around, sitting on park benches, feeding the pigeons, reading some poetry, and writing a few crappy things of little consequence. My tombstone could read “he fed the pigeons and wrote crappy things of little consequence. He died a happy man.”
The problem with my grand plan to spend my life on a sunny park bench in a seaside town blissed out on beauty is that it plays into the hands of those people who are often tripping on power and stumbling over the overstuffed bags of money cluttering up their palatial foyers. I’m not kidding – shipping all of the peace-loving hippies off to some beach while the ballers, grinders, hackers, and cos-play fascists become the foot soldiers loyal to the billionaire class is a serious proposal being floated by some of these bros – and they have a small but influential audience. The billionaire technocrat class is not terribly concerned about the rest of us. In fact, they seem to have contempt for us. When asked about the people in middle America, one such billionaire (Marc Andreessen – founder of Netscape) is reported to have said: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” They seem to think the world would function better with fewer of us. This is where Balaji Srinivasan comes in. Balaji had been pushing a vision for a “networked state.” Andreessen is a supporter. And it’s in Balaji’s vision on how to fix society (or at least San Francisco) that he proposes getting rid of “blues” (liberals): “Blue sympathetic people, the true key nodes, pay them to go and sit on a beach somewhere, right? You can use whatever tactic you want. Just get Blue leadership out of the city.”
While this sounds like farce with bond-like villains in cliff-side castles building laser death rays, sadly, it isn’t. The other day, despite knowing better, I fell down the rabbit hole of reading Cory Doctorow’s blog and a Blog called Parallel Mirror written by Gil Duran, the author of the piece in The New Republic. Living in the Bay Area, it’s hard not to get swept up into news about tech and wealth (which are almost synonymous). At least once a week – there’s some story about a tech executive trying to disrupt an existing market, or buy up a part of the city, or leaving the city for greener pastures. The area is obsessed with these stories – which creates a self-reinforcing narrative around tech. I don’t know if tech and wealth control everything out here or if it just seems that way, but on most days, those two subjects can suck up a lot of the air in our local news rooms – which, in the reinforcing narrative, fits well with stroking the egos of billionaires and tech executives who, with every news story, become more convinced that their brilliance, and their brilliance alone, is what’s going to save humanity (as they dump a few more tons of CO2 into the atmosphere on a 9-minute flight from San Francisco to San Jose).
What’s not being covered (by many major news outlets) are the fringe-ier ideas being backed by the ultra-rich bros or some of the absolutely awful ways big tech and big money are trying to reshape the world to their liking. It seems as though some of our wealthiest citizens are not only obsessed with power and control, but they’ve taken a multi-pronged approach to becoming the (unelected) ruling class.
Doctorow does a great job of explaining the tech playbook from a business perspective – steal ideas from a competitor, gain market share by locking in all constituents, gain even more market share by buying up competition, solidify market share by suing upstarts who try to steal your ideas (ahem, Mr. Kettle? A Mr. Pot is on the phone – he’d like to discuss color choices), and then extract wealth by screwing over your already locked-in customers and advertisers because, at this point, what are they going to do, leave? Where are they going to go?
But this desire to leverage their wealth goes beyond Doctorow’s theory of enshittification. While the technocrats actively degrade our systems for profit, they’re also leveraging their exorbitant wealth in pursing plans to remake society. Knowing that the world is going to shit they seem to be pursuing multiple strategies – some of which seem like escape hatches for when life as we know it becomes unsustainable: building bunkers, spaceships, yachts, and towns (and when they can’t build a town, they buy it).
The ego-driven vision (like most of their thinking) seems to be centered on disruption. If it’s not working (and they’ve made clear that, for them, democracy isn’t working), they’ll build it. These egos have gotten so large and they’ve garnered so much media attention that the “genius disruptor” has almost become a caricature perhaps best personified by that muppet elmo husk. They call themselves geniuses and their legions of acolytes salivate over their every move… while the reality is (as Doctorow has been pointing out) much of what they build turns to shit (Twitter is a great example of “genius” at work). Meanwhile, some of us are thinking: “Oh… you put a rocket in to the lowest reaches of space? Cool bro, the government did that like sixty years ago, but let’s talk some more about what a visionary disruptor you are.” Making things only slightly worse (in a hypocritical sort of way), is that quite often the geniuses tend to show up on Joe Rogan’s show where they smoke pot and spout off libertarian anti-government philosophy while behind the scenes collecting billions in government subsidies. So… cool, you’re going to reorder society to your liking (for your and your friends), and taxpayers are going to fund it through government grants that you then use to free up money for stock buybacks. This is a grift on the largest scale.
When you sift through some of their thinking, it would be easy to suggest that these are unserious people floating fringe ideas that will never take hold in American democracy. It would be easy to dismiss some of them as ego-maniacs with a Christ complex who think they’re pushing humanity to some new enlightened cyborg state of being. But before writing them off, it would be good to keep in mind that we elected an ego-maniac of a president who thinks he’s the second coming, has said grab them by the pussy, mocked the disabled, routinely threatened (and threatens) violence, and incited an insurrection. Fringe ideas gain traction when our media and boardrooms don’t hold people accountable for what they say and when said ideas go unchallenged and are being backed by serious capital.
While examples of how influence and wealth work in America abound, I’m reminded of a small and recent local example that is, perhaps not coincidentally, tied in with local politics and the remaking of society. In this case, I’m thinking of how Garry Tan, the CEO of the influential tech incubator YCombinator (Airbnb, DoorDash, Reddit, Stripe) and a supporter of Balaji has been given a pass. In January, Tan drunkenly tweeted that he wishes a slow death on local politicians. That tweet then prompted anonymous threats against the politicians. In the non-tech world – for some CEOs, and certainly for rank and file employees – such a public statement (Tan has over 400k followers on Twitter) would be cause for dismissal. Google recently fired 50 employees for staging a sit-in over their cloud computing contact with Israel. So if you’re keeping score – influential CEO tweets that elected officials should die slow and keeps his job. Engineers stage sit in and are fired.
As for tweeting what some have considered to be threats, these things are usually covered in the code of ethics section of the employee handbook which details being a good steward of the company’s image. I know this because I had to help craft a social media policy after a colleague was dismissed for sharing a transphobic comment on Facebook. But as so often happens with influential people, the inciters of violence then say it was taken out of context or they were just joking or they do the apology tour, and then get help in rebuilding their reputation from venerated media outlets like the NYT who feel compelled to bend over backwards in their both sideism fear of being labeled woke or liberal leaning (the Times recently ran a piece painting Tan as a normal dad just trying to make his city better).
And to be honest, some of that may be true. The tweet could have been meant as a joke – and he might be a normal dad calling for reasonable reforms. It might be as innocent as a drunken tweet for which he is truly sorry. What the Times doesn’t point out, that both the San Francisco Standard and Parallel Mirror point out, is Tan’s troubling association to the fringe notion of a network state aren’t loose ties that should easily be dismissed. Tan seems to be among a few of these tech execs who are evangelists for a new form of governing based on tribalism – a government that is committed to ousting “blues.”
And again, I try to be open to new ideas… I, too, am frustrated by the way things are. Democracy has always had it’s challenges and there is always room for improvement. But what’s being proposed by the network state evangelists, isn’t just a decentralized nation based on tribalism – but a nation in which the “blues” are banished. Yes, the dystopian vision being presented is one in which citizens will belong to a tribe and not a nation. The tribe of tofu lovers and the tribe of anti-abortion advocates and the tribe of free housing for all and the tribe of from my cold dead hands. There can be a tribe for anything and everything (so think meetup but as mini nations). In this future, tribes will dress according to their tribal affiliations – there are three main ones that align with political leanings. The reds are who you think they are and the blues are who you think they are, but the supreme group will be the technocrats dressed in gray. If you want to spend four hours listening to this being explained, you can watch a YouTube interview with Balaji Srinivasan, the man behind the network state agenda, or you can read through Duran’s piece in The New Republic or his on own site for a few of the highlights.
I started to watch the video but when weighed against going outside to frolic in the sun, reading poetry, or looking for a job, I couldn’t justify the time expense or the frustration. However, from the small bit I did watch, I noticed that Balaji applauds Elmo’s purchase of Twitter as some heroic effort to save free speech. He says that it was bought so that people could once again ask the question what is a woman (the bros interviewing him respond to the dog whistle with sly and knowing smiles). For those not familiar, What Is A Woman is a conservative film masked as a documentary intended to discredit gender theory and current practices in medical care for transgender individuals.
What these clowns, and at this point I’m tempted to say gaslighting narcissists, fail to acknowledge is that no one on the left has said you can’t have your binary (and, yes, in our opinion bigoted) view about gender. You can ask the question all you want – but at least be honest about what you’re driving at. This form of “inquiry” is Tucker Carlson 101 (just asking questions) – ask a bunch of rhetorical and politically or racially motivated questions as though they’re framed in spirit of inquiry so that you can claim the high ground as being open minded. Then, when people see that what your doing is politically motivated and rightfully say I don’t have time for this bullshit or that, as quite a few people have suggested, what you’re doing is harmful, possibly bigoted, and may have real consequences for people just trying to live their lives (in this case to people who are transgender) you claim that you’re being discriminated against or cancelled. And maybe they are being cancelled. Just like maybe they have commercial-sized freezers full of dead puppies which they serve with a side of couscous to their evil friends – I don’t know, I’m just asking questions.
The reality is, Elmo isn’t the free speech absolutist that he claims to be or that Balaji applauds. He cancels people all of the time. But when you begin to understand the mindset of a “disruptor capitalist,” his stance on allowing neo-nazi’s back on to Twitter becomes all too understandable. In the name of engagement and profits, yet under the guise of free-thinking, narcissist technocrats have defined themselves as agents of chaos and disruption for the greater good. Except, under closer examination we’re stuck wondering whose good? Yes, nazi’s are happy to have access back while the rest of us have to now deal with nazi bullshit and bullying. The worship of this ideology and the framing of the self as some high-minded victim is disturbing. The gaslighter’s playbook is one in which most accusations are both and admission and a projection. The tribalist accuses other’s of being intolerant and tribal in nature. The nazi who wants to cancel the life and livelihood of anyone who isn’t a fellow nazi cries that his free speech rights are being trampled when someone tells him that threats of violence don’t fall under the protection of free speech.
As with much of their thinking – the move fast and break things crowd only applies their logic to when it will benefit the gray group. We have clear evidence that platforms have dicked us over – meaning they’re no longer working for the customers they were designed to serve. True entrepreneurs beholden to actual market forces would be forced to re-tool and reinvent. However, this seems to be the precise moment when they lose interest in moving fast or breaking things. Put simply, they’re inclined to break the status quo in order to create something new… but when the product they’ve created becomes the status quo and degrades to the point of being nearly useless – they’re not so quick to break it. So I guess this boils down to “working for whom?” Google no longer works. It works fine for it’s shareholders, but not for the people who use it. Food delivery apps like DoorDash aren’t working terribly well for restaurants or delivery drivers, and as the fees creep up, they’ll stop working for customers too. But by this point, as Doctorow is so fond of saying, the apps have grown “too big to care.”
So what can we do about this? I wish I had good answers.
We seem to be at a logical and psychological crossroads where we’ve devolved into tribalism in which each camp is feeling threatened by the other camp. We seem to have reached the logical breaking point in which many norms are being challenged. This is when my frustration turns to resignation. I have, at times, thought that maybe America needs to decouple. Maybe we’re at the point of needing a divorce, and we can negotiate who gets the house and the pets. Florida goes to the red team, Massachusetts goes to the blue team, and as is being proposed California goes to the gray team (in which case, I may be forced to move). At least if we negotiate ahead of time, we might avoid bloodshed. Which seems to be part of what Balaji is arguing – an argument that might have some credence if it wasn’t mixed in with his strong-man rhetoric of a militaristic “Gray Pride” parade where the reds are welcomed, but the blues are not. This is my primary complaint about tech thinking. They seem so obsessed with their model of move fast and break things, that they seldom pause to wonder about what should be kept and what are the consequences of all this breaking.
And this is when I come back to the shittiness of human beings. At some point, some leader (and yes, I think it would be the captain of the red team or gray team) is going to say, I don’t see why we can’t have Yosemite – or worse, some valuable yet-to-be discovered resource will be found within the boarders of one team’s territory, and when they can’t agree on a barter or price, the other team will send in the tanks to take it by force. Oh, the precious element imaginanium can only be found in the tofustan? Well, the networked state of we love baseball bats as weapons has an idea on how to get some of that imaginanium.
I worry that some humans will always look for ways to break the social contract. They’re often demagogues who believe that rules don’t apply to them. Despite this, in my heart of hearts, I’m an optimist who believes we’re better off when we compromise and that we’re better when we have healthy forms of conflict. I think governments work best when opposing ideas are shared and considered. That’s not where we are right now… and that’s what I find so dangerous about the thinking of our wannabe tech bro dictators. They are (or at least some of them are) suggesting purge-like tactics – mostly on people who think like me. And I worry that they have the resources (in the form of tech surveillance and capital) to do it. They undermine institutions like the free press as a way to shut down criticism and bad publicity. This too is part of the gaslighter’s handbook – call into question the very nature of reality – label everything that doesn’t fit your narrative as “fake news.”
I know enough history to know that we’ve always been a nation where the laws have been skewed to favor an elite class. I also know that we’ve often held on to the hope that we can do better. I try not to spend too much time thinking about these things because they get me riled up. They make me feel powerless. The combination of those two feelings leads to cynicism. I don’t want to be cynical. I don’t like being cynical. Quite often, I can’t help but to wish and hope for something better. I can’t help but to want solutions and fairness and something close to universal reparations for the decades (and centuries) of harmful policies that have led to the inequality we experience today. But I never know what this would look like.
Unfortunately, one of my hobbies, a passion I hadn’t realized was a passion of mine, is getting riled up and then trying to figure out how to untangle and sooth the frothy emotional soup that I’ve so vigorously stirred. A hobby that isn’t listed in the checkboxes on the the dating apps I use is shaking my fist at the passing clouds of commerce, power, wealth, and injustice while still in my boxers, stretched out and stained t-shirt, and black socks. In a few months, I’ll turn fifty and I’ll get my well-earned invitation from AARP. I’ll start receiving solicitations for term-life insurance and reverse mortgages. A few years later, I’ll begin to qualify for Wednesday afternoon shopping discounts at retailers and free rides on buses. With so many things to look forward to on the golden horizon of my golden years (not least of which is Oxy and video games to keep my quiet), why would I possibly spend any of my time thinking about injustice or crapitalism (which, if that’s not already a term, I’m claiming it now) or how the whole world is going to shit and my only goal is not be at the bottom when it does.
Links/Sources:
“Medicaid: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (YouTube)
“The Tech Barron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of Blues” (The New Republic)
“Tax Sharks Are Back and They’re Coming for Your Home” (Pluralistic)
“Elon Musk’s Jet Took A 9-Minute Flight From San Jose to San Francisco” (Entrepreneur)
“The specific process by which Google enshittified its search” (Pluralistic)
“Billionaires are building bunkers and buying islands. But are they prepping for the apocalypse – or pioneering a new feudalism?” (The Conversation)
Wikipedia: Billionaire Space Race (Wikipedia – though there’s lots of media about this)
“Keeping up with the Bezoses: Mark Zuckerberg buys a super yacht, reports say” (San Jose Mercury News)
“‘California Forever,’ the Billionaire-Backed City No One Asked For” (Vanity Fair)
“‘Terrified’: Latest billionaire acquisition in Carmel sets off alarm bells” (SF Gate)
“Big Tech Eyes Billions in Public Subsidies for AI, Cloud Computing” (Good Jobs First)”
“Stock buybacks are lethal, literally” (Substack – Robert Reich)
“Civil War History Shows the Danger of Comparing Trump to Jesus” (Time)
“Three SF Supervisors Say They’ve Received Death Threat Mailers After Garry Tan’s ‘Die Slow’ Tweet” (SFiST)
“Google has fired 50 employees after protests over Israel cloud deal, organizers say” (CNN)
“San Francisco’s ‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer? He Might Be Both” (NYTimes)
“Garry Tan’s tweet isn’t the danger—his push to kill liberal San Francisco is” (San Francisco Standard)
“Psst, New York Times. The Network State cult hates you” (ParallelMirror)
“Balaji on How the Tech Tribe Can Save Our Cities” (Moment of Zen – YouTube)
“Cool Gray City of Tech Authoritarians: Balaji’s dark vision for San Francisco” (ParallelMirror)
“How Tucker Carlson Weaponized Asking Questions” (Samuel Clemens – Medium *member-only story)
“Food Delivery Apps: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (YouTube)
“My Dinner With Andreessen – Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series” (The American Prospect)
“The End of Liberalism and the rise of Network States?” (Jules Evans – Medium)
“Tech’s proposed utopian communities don’t seem to be for everyone.” (SF Chronicle)