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

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370 points sillypuddy | 1 comments | 18 Feb 18 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.468s | source
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wpietri ◴[18 Feb 18 19:47 UTC] No.16407907[source]▶
> they feel people there are resistant to different social values and political ideologies

This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies (not to mention backgrounds and interests) here than pretty much any place I've lived. The main hostility I see is to intolerance, but that's hardly surprising given SF's long, welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance. [1]

If I were to worry about any sort of uniformity, it wouldn't be political, but in startup culture. 20 years of success has created some very well-greased rails into which most innovation has to fit: bright young founders, seed round followed quickly by A and B rounds. That can be fine as far as it goes, but it has become so orthodox that I think we're not a great place for doing anything other than a plausible Next Big Thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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friedman23 ◴[18 Feb 18 20:53 UTC] No.16408525[source]▶
> This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies

Really? Because the only values I've heard expressed have been standard democratic talking points and once in a while far left ideologies.

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1. wpietri ◴[18 Feb 18 23:23 UTC] No.16409514[source]▶
Maybe it's who you hang around.

I regularly see a lot of different views and values, both online and in the streets. I agree the most common is what I think of as "moneyed Democrat", meaning pro-status-quo left, what in other countries would be either center-left or center-right. But I hear a lot from socialists, communists, anarchists, libertarians, and what I think of as fundamentalist capitalists. And I know plenty of people who are, like myself, socially liberal, fiscally conservative independents that in another era probably would have been Rockefeller Republicans.

The only thing I really don't see much of here is modern Republicans. Which I get, in that a lot of the modern Republican talking points are anti-tolerance (e.g., anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-nonwhite-immigrant), anti-science (e.g., evolution, climate change), pro-corporate, and/or pro-authoritarian. And given the way the CA Republican Party self-destructed over the last few decades, the lack just seems unsurprising.