I say this as a pre-eminent respecter of you, your opinions, and your huge brain: a lot of your recent pieces have been scolding "silicon valley" culture as not living by its values wrt Trump. But to me, a lot of what's happening in the dark alliance between the two is the natural outcome of the progress of silicon valley and tech as an industry. Desperation and greed have become the animating values of the valley in the last ten years, and nothing destroys stated values more than them. Perhaps it's worth considering that the apple is a bit rotten to the core, and that the positive outcomes you like are actually almost accidentally won, ancillary to the true twin purposes of the modern tech industry: destruction in the name of renewal, and extraction in the name of efficiency. But also: it's nice to see you be surprised, because it means you were optimistic. My bleak inner world sees horrific stuff from our industry and sighs an "of course" sigh. So I like reading your thoughts
I maintain that many people in tech, if not most, hate this. The vibe on, say, HN, has strongly turned against maga.
But I mentioned in my post about SF that many are keeping their head low and running scared, mostly from fear of questionably legal prosecution. That applies to me too -- I'm but a small nobody, and I too refuse to actively call out individuals who really ought to be called out
Sure, maybe most tech employees (read: not capitalists (and I mean capitalists in the actual sense, not the ideological sense)) hate it, especially the hn people who are like "craft" focused neurodiverse (lol) workers who want to just crank on beautiful code, but I certainly think that VC and founder culture, even if not explicitly pro trump, has generally vibe shifted significantly post end of ZIRP to be way more ruthless and way less interested in what their employees even think. Just look at the way that marc andreesen talks about tech employees. To him, they're the enemy! And it's because he understands that the relationship is actually a bit fundamentally adversarial -- he wants to extract from them without being questioned, and they want to make money and work on something they feel good about. Silicon valley, though it claims to be egalitarian, is the furthest thing from a democracy I can imagine. It's centralized power and it's uninterested in listening to anything that affects the bottom line
fair, i think this is anecdotally correct -- I think a lot about that young gay founder kid who was an outright blackpill maga.
This may be an outgrowth of lower barriers to entry to start companies. I think that's a good thing, mind you, but in previous iterations of the Valley you needed to have legitimate technical chops to do anything. That's increasingly less true, which has led for less need for craft and, concomitantly, an influx of people who dont give a damn about craft and just want to make money.
I still think founder world is egalitarian, though. Startups are the closest thing we have to a meritocracy currently. Of course, I think that also leads to people with inflated egos who are pretty misinformed, going about breaking things while assuming theyre right. Hard to balance. Startups require arrogance, so they filter for arrogant people.
Still, none of that really explains whats going on with the current vocal magas who have really all been a part of the bay area fabric for a long time. So idk, maybe they were always ruthless and self interested. But my personal opinion is that something broke in their brains -- a combination of drugs and social media adulation and echo chambers. The titans of the tech world arent immune to the monsters they create, and having massive platforms of adoring fans while being surrounded by yes men in your tiny echo chamber group chats is a hell of a drug.
there must someday be investigation into the phenomenon where left-wingers say it's bad to cave your head in with a claw hammer and maga joyfully does it so they don't seem like they're listening to woke. it's shocking the degree to which every other priority disintegrates in favour of owning the libs
Have you read the recent Brian Caplan post? It’s titled “Let them be Hillsdale” and makes the explicit argument that it’s better to cut all American higher education off from Federal funding if that’s what it takes to ban wokeness.
He’s not really a libertarian any more, more of a MAGA-accelerationist.
I have. I think that's a pretty stupid take, and I had that piece in mind partially when writing this one.
Quoting from the article:
```
"We should defund woke universities" sounds edgy and cool. "We should kill national cancer research labs" is bizarre and weird and, frankly, really dumb.
```
First, Caplan is making a category error, which is assuming that universities are primarily about the humanities (and therefore spend a lot of time and money on 'woke'). They aren't. Caplan works at GMU. If you look at the budget (https://fiscal.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/FY25-Budget-Book-Executive-Summary.pdf), very very generously, the school is spending ~10% on woke and ~40% on research, stem, business, etc. This assumes that the *entire* humanities, social sciences, education, and visual & performing arts departments are exclusively doing woke things. So, like, what are we even talking about? Cut the nose to spite the face?
Second, Caplan is of course making a more generic libertarian argument, which is that if you take money from the government you are beholden to the government. And like, yea sure, whatever, there's a trivial sense where this is true. But its also stupid if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it. Caplan is suggesting a pre WWII world where university funding comes exclusively from private sources -- so no research pipeline, no engine of scientific progress and dominance. For what? A slightly more purist libertarian dystopia? No thanks. I like modern comforts like not dying from covid. I'd rather live in a world where we are less ideologically pure about being libertarian, and also have actual nice things.
I can only report what I've seen from the inside of an Ivy League. I work in the undergrad biology teaching labs--we feed the med school, biochem, &c--where I've seen three professors, with over 100 years' cumulative time at the university, unceremoniously fired with very little notice. One ran a program locating and sequencing bacteriophages, a program which had resulted in at least one student going on to do serious medical research on the one they'd found for medical purposes; at least two were beloved student advisors. I wouldn't have to take off my shoes to name all the professors we had in total when those three were working.
Now all three are gone, with so little fanfare that many students thought they'd simply quit until we informed them otherwise. To replace professors with 33 years lab experience, the university has provided a revolving door of grad student TAs, supported by faculty who haven't been in a lab in years (or who already have full course and research loads and are receiving zero additional compensation--my institution doesnt pay non-professors for teaching courses, and doesn't adjust professors' pay with increasing course loads).
They've cut back 1,000 little things over the years.
- the research greenhouse used to sell excess plants every year. No anymore
- custodians used to get eight hours to clean a single library. Nowadays they're expected to do two in three hours. Unrelated: we've been restocking our own paper towels and cleaning our own floors for years
- maintenance is clearly being forced to play whack-a-mole. Frequent outages of building services, vital equipment down for months at a time
- the research machinist in the basement retired, and the room has sat empty for almost a year. I worked with the guy; we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and supported research which often fed into the pipeline you describe in the post by making custom fixtures, repairing old equipment, &c.
- I had a roommate who worked for the hazmat collection contractor: our institution is notoriously stingy with contractor hours. We sometimes have to get creative with full containers as they pile up between pickups
- emergency staff used to get accommodations allocated from those built for visiting scholars, &c. This year, we had a blizzard which shut down the city; cafeteria staff slept on army cots in the basement, with no showers, for days
- I've personally shoveled snow that was blocking the emergency exits from my building (which houses, in addition to teaching labs, six floors of research labs, mostly wet) because they'd been blocked for a week after the last snowfall event
- there used to be security guards all over campus, but they were cut back. We had a trivially-preventable shooting last year, and the university had to bring on expensive outside contractors to show the flag
Meanwhile, the official daily bulletin frequently celebrates the hiring of a new Dean of Liberal Medicine or some other non-existent administrative job, and the annual budget report is very careful not to break down payroll between faculty, staff, and administration.
My only communication with the research side of things was through the aforementioned machine shop; even that small glimpse was enough to confirm the dysfunction was not limited to the undergrad education side of things. These trends were going on long before Trump pulled his nonsense with grant funding. I have no doubt his actions caused harm--they usually do--but at least my university was suffering from mismanagement before he even started.
I say this as a pre-eminent respecter of you, your opinions, and your huge brain: a lot of your recent pieces have been scolding "silicon valley" culture as not living by its values wrt Trump. But to me, a lot of what's happening in the dark alliance between the two is the natural outcome of the progress of silicon valley and tech as an industry. Desperation and greed have become the animating values of the valley in the last ten years, and nothing destroys stated values more than them. Perhaps it's worth considering that the apple is a bit rotten to the core, and that the positive outcomes you like are actually almost accidentally won, ancillary to the true twin purposes of the modern tech industry: destruction in the name of renewal, and extraction in the name of efficiency. But also: it's nice to see you be surprised, because it means you were optimistic. My bleak inner world sees horrific stuff from our industry and sighs an "of course" sigh. So I like reading your thoughts
I maintain that many people in tech, if not most, hate this. The vibe on, say, HN, has strongly turned against maga.
But I mentioned in my post about SF that many are keeping their head low and running scared, mostly from fear of questionably legal prosecution. That applies to me too -- I'm but a small nobody, and I too refuse to actively call out individuals who really ought to be called out
Sure, maybe most tech employees (read: not capitalists (and I mean capitalists in the actual sense, not the ideological sense)) hate it, especially the hn people who are like "craft" focused neurodiverse (lol) workers who want to just crank on beautiful code, but I certainly think that VC and founder culture, even if not explicitly pro trump, has generally vibe shifted significantly post end of ZIRP to be way more ruthless and way less interested in what their employees even think. Just look at the way that marc andreesen talks about tech employees. To him, they're the enemy! And it's because he understands that the relationship is actually a bit fundamentally adversarial -- he wants to extract from them without being questioned, and they want to make money and work on something they feel good about. Silicon valley, though it claims to be egalitarian, is the furthest thing from a democracy I can imagine. It's centralized power and it's uninterested in listening to anything that affects the bottom line
fair, i think this is anecdotally correct -- I think a lot about that young gay founder kid who was an outright blackpill maga.
This may be an outgrowth of lower barriers to entry to start companies. I think that's a good thing, mind you, but in previous iterations of the Valley you needed to have legitimate technical chops to do anything. That's increasingly less true, which has led for less need for craft and, concomitantly, an influx of people who dont give a damn about craft and just want to make money.
I still think founder world is egalitarian, though. Startups are the closest thing we have to a meritocracy currently. Of course, I think that also leads to people with inflated egos who are pretty misinformed, going about breaking things while assuming theyre right. Hard to balance. Startups require arrogance, so they filter for arrogant people.
Still, none of that really explains whats going on with the current vocal magas who have really all been a part of the bay area fabric for a long time. So idk, maybe they were always ruthless and self interested. But my personal opinion is that something broke in their brains -- a combination of drugs and social media adulation and echo chambers. The titans of the tech world arent immune to the monsters they create, and having massive platforms of adoring fans while being surrounded by yes men in your tiny echo chamber group chats is a hell of a drug.
there must someday be investigation into the phenomenon where left-wingers say it's bad to cave your head in with a claw hammer and maga joyfully does it so they don't seem like they're listening to woke. it's shocking the degree to which every other priority disintegrates in favour of owning the libs
Have you read the recent Brian Caplan post? It’s titled “Let them be Hillsdale” and makes the explicit argument that it’s better to cut all American higher education off from Federal funding if that’s what it takes to ban wokeness.
He’s not really a libertarian any more, more of a MAGA-accelerationist.
I have. I think that's a pretty stupid take, and I had that piece in mind partially when writing this one.
Quoting from the article:
```
"We should defund woke universities" sounds edgy and cool. "We should kill national cancer research labs" is bizarre and weird and, frankly, really dumb.
```
First, Caplan is making a category error, which is assuming that universities are primarily about the humanities (and therefore spend a lot of time and money on 'woke'). They aren't. Caplan works at GMU. If you look at the budget (https://fiscal.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/FY25-Budget-Book-Executive-Summary.pdf), very very generously, the school is spending ~10% on woke and ~40% on research, stem, business, etc. This assumes that the *entire* humanities, social sciences, education, and visual & performing arts departments are exclusively doing woke things. So, like, what are we even talking about? Cut the nose to spite the face?
Second, Caplan is of course making a more generic libertarian argument, which is that if you take money from the government you are beholden to the government. And like, yea sure, whatever, there's a trivial sense where this is true. But its also stupid if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it. Caplan is suggesting a pre WWII world where university funding comes exclusively from private sources -- so no research pipeline, no engine of scientific progress and dominance. For what? A slightly more purist libertarian dystopia? No thanks. I like modern comforts like not dying from covid. I'd rather live in a world where we are less ideologically pure about being libertarian, and also have actual nice things.
I can only report what I've seen from the inside of an Ivy League. I work in the undergrad biology teaching labs--we feed the med school, biochem, &c--where I've seen three professors, with over 100 years' cumulative time at the university, unceremoniously fired with very little notice. One ran a program locating and sequencing bacteriophages, a program which had resulted in at least one student going on to do serious medical research on the one they'd found for medical purposes; at least two were beloved student advisors. I wouldn't have to take off my shoes to name all the professors we had in total when those three were working.
Now all three are gone, with so little fanfare that many students thought they'd simply quit until we informed them otherwise. To replace professors with 33 years lab experience, the university has provided a revolving door of grad student TAs, supported by faculty who haven't been in a lab in years (or who already have full course and research loads and are receiving zero additional compensation--my institution doesnt pay non-professors for teaching courses, and doesn't adjust professors' pay with increasing course loads).
They've cut back 1,000 little things over the years.
- the research greenhouse used to sell excess plants every year. No anymore
- custodians used to get eight hours to clean a single library. Nowadays they're expected to do two in three hours. Unrelated: we've been restocking our own paper towels and cleaning our own floors for years
- maintenance is clearly being forced to play whack-a-mole. Frequent outages of building services, vital equipment down for months at a time
- the research machinist in the basement retired, and the room has sat empty for almost a year. I worked with the guy; we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and supported research which often fed into the pipeline you describe in the post by making custom fixtures, repairing old equipment, &c.
- I had a roommate who worked for the hazmat collection contractor: our institution is notoriously stingy with contractor hours. We sometimes have to get creative with full containers as they pile up between pickups
- emergency staff used to get accommodations allocated from those built for visiting scholars, &c. This year, we had a blizzard which shut down the city; cafeteria staff slept on army cots in the basement, with no showers, for days
- I've personally shoveled snow that was blocking the emergency exits from my building (which houses, in addition to teaching labs, six floors of research labs, mostly wet) because they'd been blocked for a week after the last snowfall event
- there used to be security guards all over campus, but they were cut back. We had a trivially-preventable shooting last year, and the university had to bring on expensive outside contractors to show the flag
Meanwhile, the official daily bulletin frequently celebrates the hiring of a new Dean of Liberal Medicine or some other non-existent administrative job, and the annual budget report is very careful not to break down payroll between faculty, staff, and administration.
My only communication with the research side of things was through the aforementioned machine shop; even that small glimpse was enough to confirm the dysfunction was not limited to the undergrad education side of things. These trends were going on long before Trump pulled his nonsense with grant funding. I have no doubt his actions caused harm--they usually do--but at least my university was suffering from mismanagement before he even started.