Marc Andreesen and the Billionaire Victims Club
thebulwark.com
thebulwark.com
It's wild that so much emotion, fear and anger can be stirred up with a topic that has not touched them.
“I am special, look at me. I will remain special. I won’t allow you to stop me from being special.” broadly speaking.
(this is not to say skill and effort are not needed to become very wealthy and powerful, but most of it is luck, based on the evidence)
Both fame and money have the same effect: no one will stand up, puff up their chest, look you in the eye, and say "you idiot, that's fucking mental".
You can afford to just dismiss everyone you don't like. At the same time you can find a group of people cheering you on, no matter how outlandish or bizarre your views or actions are. There are still people defending that P Diddy guy. It fosters unrealistic beliefs about yourself and the world, especially if this happens at too young of an age. You stop growing up.
One caveat I’d carve out is for parents. I have friends who had kids in the San Francisco system. It’s rough every way, but nevertheless, there is a noticeable preference for certain races and attributes. (I say this as someone who would have probably been in one of the “good” groups.)
I don’t think Andreessen is motivated by this because he is a thoroughly selfish creature. But it may be animating his supporters.
It’d be perhaps more interesting to think about it as preferring people with specific backgrounds.
The shitty half-assed way companies implemented it, helped make it really unpopular.
And as America's motto goes: if it's hard, it's not worth doing. Instead, we can weaponize our incompetence until people stop asking us to make things better.
It's wild that so much emotion, fear and anger can be stirred up with a topic that has not touched them.
The mandate given to ICE by the executive branch is blatantly unconstitutional and is grounds for impeachment in any civilized society. The absence of due process for individuals within the borders of the United States of America is a betrayal of everything for which our revolution was fought. You may think differently, but that's your problem.
>Does this "empathy" term you speak of also apply to those that are not directly disadvantaged by DEI policies but still opposed to them?
On to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Which one of these things do you oppose? Or, is it the concept of DEI? Or the implementation?
If it's the concept, why?
Is hiring such an exact science that we can always identify the most qualified applicant? Has DEI fouled up the previously perfect process by adding variables like gender and ethnicity?
Or, have minorities and women always just been less qualified and white dudes were always just better? That's the argument made by such stellar conservative thought leaders as Ann Coulter, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec. They argue that white people, especially men, are seeing the jobs that should rightfully be theirs given to unqualified minorities and women.
Or, are you denying that the US has dealt with systemic racism since its inception? If not, please justify the Dred Scott decision or Thind v. United States.
If it's the implementation, then you should be fine with tweaks to the process to make sure that equal treatment is applied equally. If you just don't like some specifics then that can be remedied. I'm betting that's not really it, though.
My belief is that the conservative problem with DEI is that a large part of their identity is being aggrieved and claiming that they are being persecuted. Bringing it back to ICE, how can you complain about "maybe not getting a job because DEI" while simultaneously saying that children being deported without their medication doesn't mean anything? I know the answer: a selfish lack of empathy.
Anway, have fun figuring out how to justify protecting pedophiles. I believe that Charlie Kirk already has some new beliefs for you to swap in.
What you're describing is called "empathy". People with empathy understand and *empathize" with others experience pain or injustice.
Only caring about things that happen directly to you, or your loved ones is a form of narcissism.
> not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
I have friends in academia who had in the recent past been told not to hire any more "white guys".
Examples abound to justify DEI phobia.
You say that because you lack the tribal mindset. While people who do have the tribal mindset, if they see another person of the same demographic as them being mistreated, will automatically interpret it as a personal threat to themselves and their friends, and as evidence of discrimination against their group - regardless of the facts of the case.
That's quite rare, more likely, the person you replied to is in a different identity group, I doubt he is an Aristotelian outcast:
"...man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one'..."
Aristotle
Of course they themselves do exactly the same thing with "that's antisemitic!" to shut down criticism.
Obviously there is plenty of racism and antisemitism around and it's fine to call that out – I have done so myself. But it's such an easy and powerful tool to misuse. I don't really know how to solve this.
All of that said, Andreesen is just on another level. He complains about the last 60 years. That's going back to 1965. I'm not American and wasn't alive at the time, but it's not my impression that before 1965 there was a great harmonious environment of peace, love, and understanding between different ethnic groups in the United States. But maybe I'm wrong? I don't know.
It's of course just outright bizarre to take the end of segregation and Jim Crow laws as the starting point of "DEI gone mad".
People like Andreesen just latch on to "DEI" to spout their racist bollocks. Whatever he says bears no relation to the excesses of "DEI". He doesn't go too far in the other direction, because he's not on the same axis that we are. We could disagree on some things here, but there are a few core truth we (hopefully) agree on such as "all people are equal, regardless of ethnicity" and "talking about "our people" vs. them is not good, especially when it comes to black people, who have been here for hundreds of years". If you don't recognise those base values then you're just operating on an entirely different axis.
United States v Virginia was in 1996, and finally required VMI to enroll women.
At best, segregation and jim crow ended in the mid 70s. In my opinion, it never really ended. Desegregation could never succeed because the steps required to make it succeed were blocked by the courts.
In my opinion, the most blindingly clear argument for Andreesen being motivated by racism rather than "merit" is that a16z hired Daniel Penny, a man whose only qualification was strangling another person to death on the subway. Merit.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in the article feels downstream of that. They're all in their own private chats frothing themselves into a storm over a crazy array of reactionary things and there's no-one in the room saying "hey, this sounds kind of nuts to me?". It's notable that Andreesen cites the summer of 2020 was an inflection point. The BLM protests are framed by these folks as an overcorrection of anti-racism or something like that. I see it differently: it was a large scale, somewhat cohesive social movement that came from the ground up. This terrifies Andreesen and his ilk and they see it as a personal affront. Couple that with the competition for hiring tech workers in the same era that gave engineers more power than they used to have... I'm convinced this even extends to the current hysteria for AI, too. They want to permanently reduce worker power in tech.
Possibly what terrified them most was the Work From Home movement and Quiet Quitting. Both were real workers asserting their needs for a sane un-exploitated life and a fair deal.
Both of those emerged from COVID, with the hard proof that commuting daily to an office was not only not required, it is actively counterproductive for profitable business. It was proof that RTO was at best an outmoded model preserved primarily as a means of control over the workers, even "respected" educated knowledge workers.
To people with $billions who see both their wealth and their personal identity as being able to exploit people and extract their resources to their own purposes at will, this is an existential threat.
So, yes, their self-victimization is bullsh*t, and merely another play in the Oligarch's playbook.
(Edit: clarifying by inserting missing words)
It is no surprise that we saw one of the largest increases in worker power (especially in tech) between mid 2020 and 2022 and that the bosses went nuts in reaction to this. Remote work. Compensation increases. Tons of new benefits. The bosses tried to push back against this with the "quiet quitting" stuff and crying that everybody was actually working two jobs and stealing from the bosses based on a small number of anecdotes. But this didn't really stick.
Then came AI. Finally, a way to stick it to those noisy workers. Magical. The bosses can do all of the stuff they want without paying people (or by paying people in vastly cheaper regions by augmenting them with AI). This is why the narrative around AI is "we need to lay people off to pay for training AI" and "we need to lay people off because people should be more efficient by using AI" rather than "now that our workers are more efficient we can do more and hire more." You see this now with CEOs saying in public that AI is going to completely upend job markets.
Also, I just don't buy into his whole "the woke elite kept people who grew up in my home towns down through woke/dei" because this is the same person who said: "I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."
The thing is, I'm sure Marc's arguments make sense to alot of the people he's trying to talk to - other rich folks with grievance.