Even among, I don't know, bartenders and schoolteachers, some are in the business simply to make money.
Back in the day, one heard of students who went to law school to right wrongs, and came out to bill hours.
> These “equity engineers,” as I’ll call them by one of their goals, cashing out, might have studied computer science in order to solve problems, or to live a good life. It would be a caricature to say that these archetypes don’t care at all for politics, but their radicalism tends to be an inward-facing one, lured by technolibertarian fetishes such as blockchain. For this group, technology is politics, and seeing the two at odds becomes incoherent.
It says that it's explicitly avoiding a caricature, but these people who just want to be paid to do work are still radicalized, technolibertarian fetishists for whom technology is politics.
I hate this view of silicon valley and tech workers as characters you'd expect to see in a cyberpunk story, rather than, like, normal people who happen to live in the bay area and work with computers, or even alongside people who work with computers. Instead everyone has to be radicalized in some direction or another. If they don't appear to be radicalized, then "their radicalism [must] be an inward-facing one." That's not a caricature?
Not saying I particularly agree, but coming from a more traditional work background, seeing the ball pits/slides/wave pool college campus like billion dollar companies, hearing (probably exaggerated stories) of bizarre costume parties etc seems to be very much an isolated (radical) group.
There is also the worship of billionaires and a dark dystopian vision of the future with the promotion of things like the gig economy, offshoring, and an internal class system in the companies of the "red badges" and the "brilliant engineers"
I don't think it is a stretch to see this as a breeding ground for radical technolibertarianism. I mean, they made it, why can't everyone else?
Sorry, I just get really frustrated when the media labels the kookiest loudest of us as what Silicon Valley is. Especially when they're trying to describe the boring ones without caricatures.
Facebook and Google are advertising companies primarily. They will be taking money from advertisers for nearly anything that isn't in their TOS. I'm sure most employees would object to something in that list not lining up with their personal beliefs.
The concept that your employer should conform to your ideas around politics or the environment seems to only happen in SV.
Nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich.
People do whatever they can for a paycheck —some do it out of altruism, sure, but some do it because it’s what they can do.
There was a book about this once, Harrison Bergeron.
Seems like with population growth, we are trying to educate more and more kids, and unlike in the past, we dont just discard that parts that would be expensive or difficult.
In the past, we ignored the problem so it wasnt factored into budgets, head counts. There needs to be more money overall for education. It returns more than $1 for every $1 invested over the long term.
Leave them behind and underfunded like in the past? Lock them up?
Closing institutions insteading of reforming and modernizing them for these sorts of people was indeed a mistake.