Silicon Valley's worldview is not just an ideology; it's a personality disorder | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's worldview is not just an ideology; it's a personality disorder

crookedtimber.org

86 pointscratermoon95 comments

It’s hard for me to read this kind of article because I share the author’s frustration on the one hand, and can’t help but feel he is making a spurious comparison on the other. Silicon Valley isn’t a person. If you take any sufficiently large group of people, the mass behavior will appear as a personality disorder insofar as there is a plurality of personalities involved.

If you want another example, look no further than hacker news.

The author credited is Maria, presumably Maria Farrell who is listed as one of the contributors to the site, who proudly displays a "Tim Cook said something nice about me" excerpt on her personal home page.

It really does a disservice to the cause as well. If we assume everything bad is the work of untouchable dark figures in smoke filled rooms, we'll never confront the real problem of various policies with broken incentives.

Silicon Valley does have untouchable dark figures in smoke filled rooms though. Many of them have a podcast.

Can't remember last time I met a Silicon Valley person that smokes.

Weed, there’s plenty.

Then you're not getting out there if you live in the Valley, lol.

As if that were the relevant part of the imagery…

Where else does the smoke that fills the room come from?

I’d be content with some recognition that there are multiple such figures with a plurality of opinions and impulses, and that this is the main driver behind SV’s apparent “personality disorder”. So framed, we can at least call for these shadowy figures (many of whom have names and public personas) to engage with some of the contradictions of SV and suggest ways to resolve them.

> If we assume everything bad is the work of untouchable dark figures in smoke filled rooms, we'll never confront the real problem of various policies with broken incentives

In that worldview I think it's the dark figures in smoke-filled rooms who are in charge of all policy, broken-incentive or not.

More seriously: in any system where broken incentives are [still] in place, isn't it typically those in power who are primarily responsible for that being so?

My point is that if you start from a position that the powerful make policy and we are not powerful then we accept hopelessness and cede any power or responsibility we do have.

No, it just means we accept that we have no power working within the system, only working against it.

Which, for every demographic in the US besides white, straight Christian men, has often just been the self-evident truth.

That’s not what this piece is saying. It’s calling out the toxic ideologies that are indeed common in SV, especially among leadership. There’s no question that those attitudes strongly influence how companies are run and what lobbying is done. That influence extends out to government and other companies that buy into that technocratic mindset.

The overarching policy here with broken incentives is the kind of relatively unrestricted capitalism which Silicon Valley would be loath to give up. Most of the attitudes listed in the article tie strongly into that: money is seen as defining worth, values that can’t be monetized or that inhibit profit are rejected, often vehemently, and so on.

If you’re inclined to dismiss a piece like this, it may be because you’re too enmeshed in at least some of the ideologies in question to recognize its accuracy.

She's not speaking metaphorically, in my read, she is saying people like "Thiel, Musk and Andreesen" don't just share an ideology, they share a personality disorder. The super-powerful companies they run and the ecosystem of people that idolize them for some reason are just outgrowths of their immaturity, self-centeredness, and so on.

No, she uses them as an avatar for the whole

> So, to the moderately powerful men who prop up and benefit from Silicon Valley’s ideology, and leave us the real work of fixing what it breaks...

Even if I were to accept your premise, I’d disagree with your conclusion. There will be powerful people with “personality disorders” [0] in any sufficiently large group.

Her analysis just isn’t very interesting. It’s merely a well-written rant.

[0] I am deliberately ignoring the fact that if we are being literal, these people most certainly do not have a personality disorder, unpalatable though their characters may be.

I can't but cringe to see how many things are reduced to a so called "master/slave" model of analysis. I can't say it is never productive, but I do feel it has taken on tasks in which it is not productive.

Reading through the rest, this seems largely picking on some of the bad actors and just making a populist argument against them? I'm all for criticism, but a lot of this reads as someone that hasn't looked at other industries and locations?

I grant that other behavior is not an excuse for bad things. But don't mistake a reversion to the mean for an industry as somehow evidence that that industry is uniquely bad.

The sheer iron of a post calling SV out for being thin-skinned manchildren immediately getting flagged on HN. Way to tell on yourself.

I also appreciate the irony. But I think their arguments missed the mark a bit, making it easier. I personally like the discussion it provokes more than the message itself.

Well, perhaps, but the article is utter trash. It might be even right in some points, but it's written in a childish, fallacious and inflammatory manner. SV needs good critics, but that ain't it.

Some good points but lots of sweeping generalizations. I think the issue is everyone reads this, agrees with some, but then everyone in SV believes it is referring to someone else or other companies.

Specific examples are much more useful.

Taking a moment to ask oneself, "Are we the baddies?" would be perhaps even more useful.

inb4, "No, it's the bloggers who are wrong."

I think it's a mistake to assume that there is just one SV ideology. Of course there are multiple. In the 'Personality Disorder' section, the author switches to talking about CEOS, but (a) are those really the only people who matter to such a discussion? and (b) to the degree that they're true of any group, are those traits often also true of CEOs in non-tech/SV companies?

I think there are a lot of really valid critiques of tactics, companies, and people in SV, but painting with such a broad brush obscures important details.

True, although it's also true that there is a set of characteristics that are dominant in SV companies.

A+ quality rant. Some of thes are 'out there' and indulge in compositional fallacies, but I agree with the sentiment – and it can all be mapped backed to the attitudes of the robber barons of yore.

I don't think it's conspiracy so much as emergent though; an ideological slope that you can't help but fall down given the way incentives are aligned in SV and big business writ large.

"Disruption is something that is done to us. It is not something open to us to do."

The book “Palo Alto” by Malcolm Harris does underwrite a lot of the terse remarks made in this blog post.

I think that book should be “mandatory reading” for the HN crowd.

In particular, I found the history on Stanford university quite enlightening.

> “Palo Alto” by Malcolm Harris does underwrite a lot of the terse remarks made in this blog post

The research is great. But the tone is grating and often self congratulatory, with heavy doses of sins of thy father interspersed. Large sections of the book had me simultaneously intrigued while asking myself "tell me you were at Occupy Wall Street without telling me you were at Occupy Wall Street."

It's a good book for people likely to agree with the author's worldview. But it's not written to change minds nor even engage in serious debate. (I do recommend it for anyone who finds the culture and history of Silicon Valley interesting.)

Thanks for this comment. I might check the book out anyway, but I struggle with (some) books that are in this vein. For example, I probably agree with Dawkins on most of his positions in "The God Delusion" but I found the tone so off-putting I didn't finish it.

It's been quite some time, but I just recall feeling it went overboard to being mean-spirited and (ironically) preaching to the choir rather than being something that might persuade anyone.

David Graeber does appear in the word cloud (I guess some sites still use these?) on this site. So, the comparison to that book is legit.

The historical context is what really matters and why this book is so interesting to me. Tone-policing the book isn’t really valid criticism to me.

Not pushing back on the book per se, just it meeting the required-reading bar. Someone else will need to refine it to meet that threshold.

For most people in Silicon Valley, particularly decision makers, the relevant Wikipedia articles are a better use of time.

For those interested in a less pathologizing take on what was named The Californian Ideology (1995).

https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...

This is kinda rich in irony, like the following 2 bullets being in sequence

"There is no such thing as human rights. There is only identity politics and culture war, which are profit centres.

• Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else."

There are other examples of complaints of how the other fish are drinking water but there's no point in listing them. After all the author did not claim to be outside of the silicon valley worldview

forced birth for white women

This in particular stood out among the rest of the hysterics. What percentage of "Silicon Valley" is anti-abortion? I'd be amazed if it was above 20%.

One out of five makes it a common opinion, even if it's not the majority.

It doesn't make it "Silicon Valley's worldview", though.

Her point is the pro-natalism view common among business leaders like Musk and Thiel, not that it's a common view among regular people.

There might be some real analysis hidden in there, but this is clearly deeply biased by the author’s ideological lens and no attempt to shore up its thesis with facts rather than rhetoric.

The sentiment is pretty spot on, the reasoning not so much.

EDIT: don't read this more than once. It gets more disgusting with each pass.

The author mentions white supremacism/nationalism 6x ... pretty comical. Have they been to SV? This is your brain on salon.com

For me, when Musk suddenly went far-right, and I realized that Thiel et al. kind of all shared the same philosophy (described in the article as "Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee"), it made me suspect that at the top of Silicon Valley it's basically a country club where they discuss what sorts of dystopian utopias they are going to try to create.

What makes musk 'far right' as opposed to his previously expressed values? Everyone says this, but it doesn't connect for me. His actions have been in the same vein since well before twitter or even tesla.

> His actions have been in the same vein since well before twitter or even tesla.

Yes, he's always been far right. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/21/elon-m...

He gave generously to Obama's campaign. When he was advocating for universal basic income (2016?), and before that, he called himself a moderate, somewhere between the Democrats and the Republicans of the time (who hadn't themselves yet gone full-in on racism, sexism, etc). Now he inhabits a part of the political spectrum that was virtually unknown before the Tea Party.

> it made me suspect that at the top of Silicon Valley it's basically a country club where they discuss what sorts of dystopian utopias they are going to try to create.

this seems like any industry ... you don't think the execs/owners/board members in pharma, finance, non-profit, defense, etc - all have influence to shape their respective fields? this is hardly new

I don't think it's relevant that other industries have their own kinds of evil—isn't that just whataboutism? Tech is trying to "disrupt" and remake our society in ways and to an extent that other sectors aren't.

The author's focus on the "whiteness" of Silicon Valley betrays a comical disconnection with reality. I suspect this author lives in the Silicon Valley of Twitter and Social Media.

Has this person ever waited in line for Din Tai Fung? Or know the difference between IIT Bombay vs IIT Delhi?

Give me a break.

VCs and C-suite are a great deal whiter than the engineers, if you hadn’t noticed.

You misunderstand the nature of whiteness, if you think this is a problem. An uninterrogated aspiration to a Western state of being, atrocities and all, is tantamount to The Thing Itself.

The author may be surprised to find out what happens outside of Silicon Valley.

The techies didn't invent the ways of the world. They merely joined the existing power circles because tech turns out to be a pretty powerful lever.

That's all that's happened.

If you think techies came up with uniquely 'evil' masterplans that weren't commonplace at the time of their rise to prominence - you're wrong. Have one listen to that delightful All-In podcast if you want a glimpse into how unoriginal and devoid of insight tech billionaires who think they have insight are. Imagine what the rest are like.

Techies invented some cool tech. When it comes to politics and power, they've invented nothing. Complicit and cowardly? Sure but what did you expect? Iron Man?

This is a good rant, so let me join in.

The computer is what gives you the ability to pontificate online. The computer makes every other labor intensive process efficient, creating the excess bounty that grants you time to get good at writing things down. The computer drives the factory that makes all the shit delivered to you, at low cost, so that you can live your life of letters. At every stage of the production pipeline, from the raw dirt to your apartment, the computer drives the process of creating more with less, of creating better easier, of sharing and training and organizing and making it frictionless and easy to do all this stuff that creates value in the world. The computer makes everything in the grocery store a dollar cheaper. Not just everything in the grocery store, everything in every store.

You didn't need to pay a dollar for paper on which to write this rant. You didn't need to pay for stamps to mail it out. You didn't need to pay to read other people's point of view on feminism and critical theory and all the political stuff you're into; those people, like you, could publish for free, without any gatekeeping; and of course, they all experienced the same bounty of efficiency that you did, so they had time to form their opinions, time to write them down, time away from toil so that they could share their ideas with you. The computer.

Not only that, but the computer gave them the freedom to fully express themselves, to form their identity completely away from their harsh physical world. The computer is how a disabled person, a gay person, a non-binary person, can escape into a world where they are accepted for who they are and how they express themselves. A world where a woman can actually completely control her presentation; a world where everyone can share themselves, totally divorced of their physical, economic, socio-political circumstance. The computer is why so many people consider themselves part of LGBTQ. Why so many are exploring such radically different ideas of gender, race, sexuality. The computer.

Fascism? Huh??

Yeah that plastic guy who wants to live to 300 kind of a weirdo.

This just reads like a long-winded version of Mr. Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

> Silicon Valley’s most famous funders and CEOs veer strongly into sociopathy, narcissism....

Any competitive industry or profession finds this personality type rising to the top at many an entity, agency, etc. Its both a bug and a feature of mercantilistic societies, where I might add, most innovation and increases in standards of living take place. There's also no shortage of these personality types in non-mercantilistic societies including, theocracies, authoritarian governments and local school boards!

> Its both a bug and a feature

I think it's just a bug. It's hard to think of any genuine upside to sociopathy.

> Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

Well now I can’t take this seriously. This assertion is laughably loaded and biased. I’m pro choice and I can admit has the radical left not pushed for expanded abortion, Roe v Wade might still be in place. And eugenics? lol lol lol

lol flagged hacker news doesn’t like to self reflect

> Silicon Valley

> Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

How can anybody take this text seriously?

> Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

Writing tip: don't make laughably false claims above the fold. You expect me to believe that the prevailing opinion in Silicon Valley is against abortion?! Save your silliest assertions for after your readers have become too tired to recognize them, or you'll discredit yourself too quickly.

>Optimisation culture masks the abusive and bizarre relations with the human body, primarily their own. Dorsey’s eating issues.

And once you've done that, the disgusting cheap shots like this just mark you as a troll.

I stopped reading here: "Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else."

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which I did look for in the body of the article; didn't find). Without supporting sweeping statements like this with actual, verifiable evidence, this is simply not a serious article meant to be read seriously by serious people.

It’s a well written article that makes many substantive arguments. If you refuse to engage with text that contains “obviously wrong” statements you will inevitably get stuck in some echo chamber. Open-mindedness is about trying to figure out what people are actually trying to say so you get a glimpse of the worldview from which the author’s statements make sense.

Nothing bad happens when you seriously read and engage with texts you disagree with. Try it sometime.

Read his bio. I bet he couldn’t hit the flag button fast enough.

pathologizing people you disagree with is a pretty dehumanizing tactic and one i think we should pretty much stay away, or from doing armchair psychology on a whole group of incredibly diverse people.

the author's argument such as it is is a series of strawman arguments. this isn't academic it is political, which is fine.

I guess this is the logical continuation of Citizens United. We should be able to put corps in the psych ward!

There's a difference between identifying patterns between individuals and identifying cultural (superorganismal) patterns themselves.

Hyperbolic and chock full of conspiracy theories. This rant contributes nothing substantive to this site.

>> Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

SV heavily promotes DEI, which is newspeak for no white guys. Not my definition of white supremacy.

That's where she lost me. Every vendor I've worked with from the valley was rarely white and about half the time male. Admittedly a small sample set but still...

Agreed. I haven't heard of companies outside tech that put the same amount of efforts into DEI. It's not only sham programs either, many companies are putting diversity above performance when it comes to hiring/promotions (not judging this either way, just stating the facts).

DEI is newspeak for "we're not actually going to change anything, but we'll talk a whole lot about diversity while we're in the process of not changing anything".

I love the article. It’s so directly stating facts we’ve all experienced in one way or another. I just hope we have the collective maturity to evolve out of it sooner rather than later.

> Far right white supremacism; libertarianism for white men, forced birth for white women. Eugenics for everyone else.

You've experienced that in SV?

You haven't? The culture gets "exported" quite far from SV as well, it's not limited geographically.

reminds me of my own opinion that a lot of what goes on in academia, along other 'dynastic' systems of lineage-tracking, apprentice-master chains, IN large institutional settings (groups)

I think there's a lot of collective trauma (i.e. abuse) that is transferred from group of elder to the next group.

the idea is how this is similar to parent-child abuse "chains"... to summ up, in the psychologist's phrase: "either repeat your trauma or fix it" but with the added complexity that this is happening to entire groups of people traumatizing and insisting on repeating (passing on) trauma to the next younger group "because that's what they do" or some other weak excuse. the kind of excuse that psychology (taken as one whole field) solved for the individual personality.

however, the complexity pulls the problem beyond the field of psychology, and into something which also involves sociology and possibly anthropology, to say the least

I am really confused by this board lately. The Same line of thinking of this post expressed in a comment under a musk-simping thread about spacex next launch yields tons of downvotes. Then a (great but flawed) rant like this post gains the home page and positive comments.

Aliasing error, the downvoters simply didn’t arrive yet.

Threads about Starship attract positive people who see unproductive comments like that and downvote. Threads about someone's imaginary personal status competition against Silicon Valley more likely just get flagged or ignored, so the individual comments don't attract downvotes.

I think that generally, people coming into Starship threads are more interested in what a spacecraft with that kind of capability could enable and how it would pressure the industry as a whole to move forward than they are specifically about specific company or the individuals behind it. Threads about similarly promising space companies and projects associated with less controversial figures receive traffic from approximately the same group.

Stories can't be downvoted the way comments can be.

And I'm seeing plenty of negative comments.

I'm similarly confused why your comment got downvoted.

I would like to thank everyone who proved me wrong by downvoting this comment as well! Much appreciated, little brigadeers

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