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Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline by Cory Doctorow
Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros:
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
Smart people have written well about what this means, and have gotten me thinking, too:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right
Regular readers will know that I make a kind of hobby of collecting definitions of right-wing thought:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism
One of these – a hoary old cliche – is that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." I don't give this one much credence, but it takes on an interesting sheen when combined with this anonymous gem: "Conservatives say they long for the simpler times of their childhood, but what they miss is that the reason they lived simpler lives back then wasn't that the times were simpler; rather, it's because they were children."
If you're a tech founder who once lived in a world where your workers were also your pals and didn't shout at you about labor relations, perhaps that's not because workers got "woke," but rather, because when you were all scrapping at a startup, you were all on an equal footing and there weren't any labor relations to speak of. And if you're a once-right-on tech founder who used to abstractly favor "social justice" but now find yourself beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have.
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
Smart people have written well about what this means, and have gotten me thinking, too:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right
Regular readers will know that I make a kind of hobby of collecting definitions of right-wing thought:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism
One of these – a hoary old cliche – is that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." I don't give this one much credence, but it takes on an interesting sheen when combined with this anonymous gem: "Conservatives say they long for the simpler times of their childhood, but what they miss is that the reason they lived simpler lives back then wasn't that the times were simpler; rather, it's because they were children."
If you're a tech founder who once lived in a world where your workers were also your pals and didn't shout at you about labor relations, perhaps that's not because workers got "woke," but rather, because when you were all scrapping at a startup, you were all on an equal footing and there weren't any labor relations to speak of. And if you're a once-right-on tech founder who used to abstractly favor "social justice" but now find yourself beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have.
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