Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.

I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a libertarian tech-stereotype when I was younger, and in large part it has been from seeing the conservative half of american slide slowly further into insanity and horribleness, seemingly driven by fox news, at least among family.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Definitely this option.

And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have nothing in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.

Americans have a very weird conception of what "far-left" means. Liberal feel good minority appeasement by billion dollar multinational corporations is as far from "far-left" as you can get.

For someone like Thiel, as it pertains to their life and continued living in this world, what is there to fear?

You have multiple generations of people uploading (metadata) in real-time to a multitude of platforms they own/control to some large degree, that they continue to profit off of, and if needed could easily funneled to a tasking queue for metadata drone strikes if they so happen to go abroad (or legalized for domestic usage in the future, possibly with the aid of PMC's).

If anything the fear people are increasingly acting on in "public" will only make such future realities more certain as people feel that they need to go to extremes to address any actual or perceived injustice done to them.

That's because it's entirely a matter of individual perspective and experience. Everyone takes their own tiny viewport onto a region of millions of diverse people and attempts to claim "oh yeah SF/bay area is like this..." "Oh no I had a different experience so you see it's like this..."

This is absolutely blindingly self-evident in SF and if you disagree I wonder if you have actually been there.

Well unfortunately nothing can stop that, but things have definitely changed. I remember thinking that too.

  Nothing can stop [aging]

Before that, it was rare for tech workers to live in SF. Most would live in South Bay and come up to SF to party on weekends.

Also, salaries went crazy in the last 8-10 years. Once all these rich tech workers came to the city that thought they knew best because they were rich and young, that's probably what caused the shift.

If you're young and you don't have left wing views, you have no heart.

If you're old and you still have left wing views, you have no brain.

We have voting records and financial contributions to campaigns. Both tell the same exact story. San Francisco is as far left as cities get in the US.

The mistake being made by the top level parent, is thinking that there was ever actually a wide-spread libertarian burst. There was not. That was nothing more than a media meme for a few minutes, mostly thanks to Andreessen, Thiel and a few others. SF overall has been extreme left for the last 40 years plus.

Marc Andreessen for one, has entirely disappeared from the public discussion politically. He's a particularly openly avowed libertarian type in terms of beliefs. There's a reason he shut down like he did, it's the same reason Thiel is being evicted from the inner circles of tech. There is no room for mistakes in the current police state of speech that exists in SV. One mistake, stepping out of line with dogma, and you're done. Andreessen wants to stay in Silicon Valley and wants to maintain his VC firm at the top tier, so he shut his mouth to put it simply. Thiel is unwilling to go along with the political & speech requirements of continuing to exist in SV.

I think you're mistaking how extreme their political beliefs are with how extremely devoted to their political beliefs they are. Most of these people aren't 'far left' they're just very, very committed to their center/center-left politics.

I could say that there are no hard-right parties in Europe (with mainstream ideals - I'm ignoring the fascist parties).

I use it to describe any political ideology focussed on equality of outcome and legitimacy through elimination of self-judged "oppression", which is IMO as good a definition as any as the communist disasters of the 20th century.

This has not radically changed recently.

Once we abandon that assumption then all hope is lost.

California has some conservative areas as well, but those aren't the big cities.

To go much further left, you have to enter Venezuela style Socialism. The GP openly advocates for changing essentially everything about the US political and economic system and shifting every area much further to the left ideologically (by much further, I mean it far surpasses what even "liberals" in Congress advocate for).

Czech and Poland are entirely different from France and Denmark when it comes to such. Germany and Switzerland are also far different from France.

There are at least a dozen nations in Europe with very aggressive hard right parties, often derived from former neo-Nazi parties, that have won a political seat at the table in the last decade. That trend is still continuing. Europe overall has a worse far right problem than the US does and it's getting worse at an alarming rate. Europe even has multiple fascist dictatorships, in Belarus, Turkey and Russia.

Leftists aren't really bothered about whether the CEO or President is black or white or male or female or transgender, but by the fact that any single person is allowed the wield the power that a CEO or President can yield. Many of them also reject reformist politics.

Black Panther Party member Fred Hampton(As good an example of a "far-left" American figure as you can find) can probably explain it better:

> We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

> We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

> We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don't care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html

A good rule of thumb is - Anything done by multi billion dollar corporations is probably not leftist.

>This simplistic tribalistic nonsense is not how you run a society.

Ironically it seems like you two are being just as tribalistic as the people you complain about. Maybe something to think about.

To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in:

- treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*) - believing in the science of climate change - believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders - believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay

Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...

You might be right. I just don't know what to do about political discussion these days. The punchline is, in case you didn't see any other posts by me, is that I've never not been on the left.

In my defence I'll address a few points. The cannabis and DACA issues were not contemporaneous with the president's election, so exclude those. Trump promised, disingenuously, "bigger, better" healthcare. The Muslim thing was not known at the time. Actually, none of your points stick.

But I'll concede anyway. Yes, elections have real-world consequences. But the vibe I got from the comment I replied to - of valley girls crying into their pumpkin spice lattes - was valid. They were mourning their team losing. This is a deathly trap we fall into these days politics-wise. It's a team sport and you will never forsake "your" team. I picked up a few traces of that loyalty from your examples, btw.

> It's not exactly like their team lost the superbowl

I'd counter that it is exactly like their team lost, or won, the superbowl

Going through all that's required to get a green card and then have the government take that away from me as if it's nothing, and for such a stupid reason? I would cry too.

And other Americans have a very weird conception of what far-left is outside of America.

There are nations out there that are very, very conservative compared to the US. Republican talking points would be far-left in much of the world outside Western Europe, Canada and Australasia.

Trump, during the campaign, said he would immediately terminate DACA if elected, and also (by the end) had reversed his earlier position of leaving marijuana legalization up to the states, in favor of reinforcing prohibition. So, both were active issues in the election.

> Trump promised, disingenuously, "bigger, better" healthcare.

With no actual content except the repeal of the ACA.

> The Muslim thing was not known at the time

The Muslim ban was one of the earliest and most frequently repeated campaign promises, though the exact wording changed over time. It was not a policy preference that was out of the public awareness at the time of the election.

In TX, we'd call these people Republicans.

- Rejection of capitalism and private property

- Opposition to all forms of social hierarchy

- Rejection of electoral and reformist politics

- Revolutionary, often militant program

- Explicitly communist or anarchist in nature

I'm not a US citizen and probably didn't follow all of this stuff as closely as you. Maybe Trump getting elected was literally worth crying over. I'll concede the issue.

With hardly any senior elected officials even at the municipal level. Like many fringe parties, it is just about big enough to qualify for public election financing but not to be competitive in any races that matter.

http://www.gp.org/officeholders

In my view, exactly what happened is that a generation of feminists used the internet (esp. blogs and social media) very effectively. You can look to gaming culture, not as a primary source of this necessarily, but at least as a convenient observable thermometer and timeline. Again, I don't mean to suggest that gaming was the source of all this, but you can watch the dissemination of the ideas, and the predominating cultural shift, by reviewing the timelines of the Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy (2010-11), and GamerGate (2014). A more direct connection is that the central figures in GamerGate did in fact offer anti-harassment consulting services to SV technology companies.

I'm having a really hard time taking this at face value.

valley girls crying into their pumpkin spice lattes

'Valley girls' refers to the San Fernando valley in Southern California, as (stereotypically) depicted on TV shows like 'The OC' - shallow fashionistas primarily concerned with gossip and social status. It's specifically a Southern California Thing and has never ever been associated with Silicon Valley.

Perhaps your social observation skills aren't as keen as you imagine them to be?

Even if you start with the premise that no laws explicitly target any race/gender/etc, it doesn't automatically follow that everyone is treated equally under the law.

Citation needed. There are elements of meritocracy in most systems, but I don't think that's the defining feature of what we (the US) "are".

- Treat all people equally, and legislate that outcomes are the same for all groups of people

- Believe in the science of climate change and legislate reductions programs which incentivize offshoring manufacturing (but don't put any constraints on global trade)

- Mass murders are caused by guns and that outweighs all advantages of civilian gun ownership, and there's no other way to solve the problem, so it should be banned

- The more you earn, the more tax you should pay, so if your economic output is really high you should hide your money in other countries and signal your virtue on other fronts so people forgive you for being a tax cheat

For example, is there any right wing party advocating eliminating universal healthcare?

S.F. and California as a whole has also been a crucible of multiculturalism and socioeconomic tension since missionaries first accosted the natives, redefining itself with each wave of arrivals including fur trappers, ranchers, farmers, prospectors and Chinese laborers of the gold rush and railroad age, the Okies of the depression, and black and hispanic laborers for WWII. The city has also been a west coast stronghold of finance, lawyers, and corporatism at least since the gold rush era started creating locally concentrated wealth. These forces have shaped and continue to shape both politics and popular culture.

To a first order, what is happening in S.F. or S.V. within the blindered tech employee sphere is much the same. Local experience is warped by the continued influx of youngsters from outside. We have been having an endless September far longer than the internet's version. They dilute and revise popular culture as much or more than they are themselves inculturated.

A longer term economic trend has been the wind-down of military bases and defense-related manufacturing in the S.F. Bay Area. This has affected economic immigration into the region by removing one large source of conservative outsiders (those young ex-military folk with tech training and a new-found awareness of the local economy) and also a selection of jobs funded by military contracts and including hands-on engineering and industrial tasks. Meanwhile, the dreamers continue to immigrate on their own, much like youth flock to Los Angeles with dreams of the entertainment industry.

This alienating, pod-people replacement process ought to seem like it is accelerating right now partly due to simple demographics. There are more youngsters to flow in as part of a general pulse of young people in America, compared to the dip in the population curve we experienced through Gen X around the first dot-com cycle. In almost every context, young people in their 20s are more liberal, more naive, more idealistic, and more outspoken about their opinions. Having more such people at once is very visible, just like it was in the 1960s with the boomers.

I wonder how the vanguard of the 60s felt when they started to hear that they were "too old" to be trusted by the growing wave of hippies and yippies.

The parent comment is asking why the idea of equal opportunity is seen as far left. I am trying to explain that everyone pretty much agrees we should have equal opportunities, and explain that the debate has now become about whether we enforce/regulate the distribution of wealth and jobs such that society ends up statistically "equal". And that this is a very controversial and political topic and has nothing to do with racism despite the rhetoric employed at both extremes of the horseshoe.

It's not leftism so much as people who are committed to political orthodoxy versus people who don't care about it. Trump eschewed political orthodoxy, and still got elected, and that was very scary for a lot of people. (In contrast, I lean left, but come from a country where bombs go off after one side loses an election, so I found it very hard to get worked up about Trump.)

There are far left parties, but they do even worse than the Green's two state lower house seats and no more significant seats anywhere in the country, electing exactly no one to any even modestly significant office.

I suspect you've fallen for some propaganda here if you think the rich pay less in taxes in the US or that Republicans think they shouldn't pay more. The top 1% already pay half of all taxes at the federal level.

The argument comes down to what proportion of income should go to taxes at various income brackets. This is hardly a settled topic even in liberal countries like France.

I fail to understand how "crying Donald J Trump is the president of the United States" equals being an "insane insufferable far left crazy." Even if you mostly agree with him politically, you may still be very upset about someone who boasted about sexually assaulting women representing you/your political beliefs. That's just one example.

Equal outcomes isn't really compatible with equal opportunities.

Advocates of equal outcomes want fewer opportunities for people from whatever group they label "overrepresented" or "privileged". In the most extreme cases, they want opportunities to be designated for certain groups and forbidden to others.

Also why is setting up a company so expensive.

One rightwing think tank did a survey of countries and the UK came out as abetter place to do business :-)

As far as I know, there are no remaining laws explicitly targeting e.g. a race, and racial discrimination is socially taboo. A lot of people recognize that and make the invalid argument I described above — that everyone now is treated equally. IMO, a lot of the left operates in the space between that and what you've described, where they want to eliminate implicitly discriminatory laws and social norms.

I'm also genuinely curious — let's say an industry discriminates against a group of people (we'll use the tech industry and either women or conservatives, to keep this somewhat neutral). How do you try to correct the lack of equal opportunity without it looking something like trying to achieve equal outcomes?

Not to start a political flame war but that's the only thing I disagree with you on - mostly. I think guns allow for easy mass murder at a distance but you have to have a mental illness along with some other potential extreme views, to be able to jump the mental hurdles where mass murder is an acceptable option.

The people committing these horrendous crimes are not the same people as most gun owners. That being said I think some federally mandated gun control laws are needed - leaving it totally up to the states allows things like what happened in Florida to occur.

> Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...

If you can frame those issues outside of politics, I think they are in the US too. Once people think their political affiliations come into play it becomes personal like the scum that use Emacs.

For instance, despite the similarities, I don't think that the prevailing progressivism in SV can be equated with classical Marxism, which is far-left in the original sense, since they disagree fundamentally on the most central questions to the Marxists, which are the centrality of economic class, and private property. I find the links between Fascism and far-right (again, in the original sense) Conservatism to be equally tenuous, given that they radically differ on the attitudes towards tradition and progress. Even the Republicans and Democrats don't really fit the mols. Think about it: what grounds do opposition to abortion and market liberalism have in common, really?

Trump doesn't fall neatly onto the line either, and I suspect that the tendency to place him somewhere on the old line has contributed to the rather confused, and reflexively negative reaction that many in the political class have had to his emergence and presidency.

It's best to think of political outlooks as clusters of positions in a high-dimensional space. The left-right model is like a poorly-executed PCA -- a reduction that confuses as much as it clarifies.

1. How is discrimination defined? Is it an excess of reports of discriminatory behavior e.g. sexual harassment, or is it a discrepancy between the general distribution of some class and the observed distribution?

If it's the latter, you're already implicitly arguing that society should have an equal distribution of outcomes.

If it's the former, sign me up for what whatever awareness campaign is going to help address the issue socially & politically. I'd truly be happy to participate in raising awareness and working to create an inclusive and safe environment for everyone (and I have supported such in the past, regardless of whether I personally think there may be an issue or not, out of solidarity). I'm willing to be proven wrong here: I just haven't seen anything that indicates SV actually has, following with the example, a sexual harassment problem relative to the rest of the world. If we demonstrated that SV observes more sexual harassment than average, I'd wonder WTF was up too and even agree with trying to _target SV_ in order to solve the problem. Where the logic breaks down for me is when we target SV and paint it as a place with rampant sexual harassment in a campaign to address a general social issue.

Speaking for socially-liberal-economically-conservative individuals for a second: we don't disagree with the ideals, it's usually that we disagree with the tactics. A minor example, say we agree ingrained and harmful social norms regarding expectations of females' role in society is causing women to be underpaid in the workforce today. Instead of demanding the regulation of salaries at a political level (a very economically liberal idea that I think plenty of people are not onboard with) we'd argue for an approach involving educating and empowering women so that they don't end up, at large, agreeing to work for numbers that are below average/market rates (I'm not blaming women, but I'm suggesting that they share some of the responsibility in correcting the imbalance because at the end of the day it is their problem).

I'm saying all this because I feel much of the issue is exactly that these nuanced topics are easily conflated, "You don't support regulating equal salaries for all? You're a sexist bigot!". Just no. It's so frustrating to hear that and it really hinders progress towards agreeable solutions for investing resources in solving issues.

2. Strategies for addressing industry-level discrimination that don't involve looking at the outputs? A few come to mind. I am a huge supporter of listening to the under-represented groups and making sure their feedback is present when developing responsible, inclusionary methods for hiring and operation. Also education. If our "American dream biased" (otherwise, capitalist) mode of operation has lead to a systemically ingrained and observed e.g. education gap, then we should invest resources in educating under represented groups specifically in creating programs that serve to bolster the industry in question.

The only thing to keep in mind is how we come to the conclusion that one industry exhibits an abnormal skew. We'll probably disagree a bit here, but I think it's okay for an industry to exhibit a general (not abnormal) "post game" skew. Whether it's females in nursing or men in engineering, I am willing to entertain the idea that it might be related to the nature of the game and less about the playing field and rules. One of the biggest arguments against the wage gap is that if a company could pay 70 cents on the dollar for female employees, men would be out a job pretty quick. That is of course assuming an unlimited supply of qualified female candidates. Regardless, either a) the industry is wildly sexist and prefers men (sexist enough that they're willing to pay 30% more on the budget sheet), or b) something else is contributing to the gap. It could be as simple as a difference in interests between genders. Especially conceding those differences could be the result of socially poisonous expectations cast upon children, I think the answer is again to focus on the pipeline.

I guess my overall point is that it's hard to come to an objective definition of discrimination. I have also realized that if you define it by the outcomes, it becomes a much bigger problem because you have to effectively control for everything in society to realize a world where we've achieved 100% utopian uniformity (importantly, it's no longer diversity). I find it more effective and productive and intellectually honest to focus the lens on making sure children are given a safe environment and equal opportunity to to explore whatever keeps their heart content. Would you not also agree it would be a problem to impose some idealistic notion of a perfect 50/50 split in gender across all industries upon children for fear of coercing them to do something they're not actually interested in due to pressure to achieve some broader fabricated social utopia? Don't take that the wrong way, I still think we need to target our efforts at building a fair platform, but it's the flip-side of the regulated outcomes argument: if you're not careful you end up discriminating all the same, just at the other end of the pipe. Let's just keep the pipes clean... social neutrality!

What world do you live in, man?

This is a hard truth for people to swallow, but no, you don't have to be mentally ill to think this. It's really easy to think murder is an acceptable option when you live in a country which is constantly murdering innocent civilians daily.

Look, I'm not a mass murderer sympathizer or anything like that. But the US army killed somewhere near 1 million civilians in Iraq alone (possibly more, this poll is from over a decade ago): https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/09/14/poll-civilian-d...

When you live in a world which routinely brushes away and rationalizes that kind of mass murder because it promotes American interests and American values, it's not hard to see why some random dude might see killing people he disagrees with as a way to promote his values.