The biggest obstacle for the Tech Right are women, particularly the highly educated ones: most of them are very Liberal and the ones that are not are anti-tech, like Harrington. Also women are very aware of vibes and status, things tech guys are famously unaware.
Love this! 2 things. First I feel like you need to emphasis more autist nature of tech. We just really really really care about truth and having an acurate world model.
Second, there were just a bunch of radicalizing events. Being called racist and ridiculed for worrying about covid early. The editing of and lying about the James Demore memo, the big tech companies becoming more like other large companies, the doxing of scott alexander, Taylor lorenz making up someting about Balji, lying about it and pretending to be a victim. Constantly being the only white male in an engineering meeting and reading articles how the tech industry is too white. The left kept saying, we don't like you and want your status to be lowered. At some point we started listening. That didn't make us right aligned but it made us anti-left.
Good comparison of the mentalities of academia and IRBs vs entrepreneurs. Also the importance of conformity.
Almost all the top students at top universities are conformists. They want to understand how to get the “A” and then go do exactly that. They are very risk averse and they become corporate salarymen/women in the industries of the moment (tech, consulting, etc)
I worked in banking and when I started a lot of the entry level hires were promotions from the back office, were based upon nepotism or connections or came from a wide swath of universities. The odds of any new hire “making it” were pretty low- like many businesses, maybe half the employees can basically do the job but are utterly replaceable, while the top 5-10 percent have the potential to make a huge impact. The strategy was to churn through hires trying to find the high performers and then give those performers as much leeway and responsibility as they could handle. In investment banking, these performers are MDs by their early 30’s and given “stretch” assignments and enough rope to gang themselves.
About 25-30 years ago there was a sea change in recruiting. Because of globalization, raging equity markets and low interest rates banking had become a boom industry. We needed more warm bodies and the pay in the business attracted kids from top schools who previously would have become doctors, lawyers, CPAs and engineers. While few of us had come from top schools, it felt good to hire these sorts of kids. However, the stats didn’t improve. Only 5-10 pct of them became phenoms while the bulk were utterly replaceable (OK, because overpaying some warm bodies to handle the flow when business is good is easier than having to hire replacements). Moreover, analysis of our grad recruitment effort showed no significant correlation between GPA or school and performance (eg a 3.9 gpa from Harvard no more likely to be successful than a 3.5 from Norte Dame, a first from Oxford no more likely to be successful than a 2-1 from Edinburgh).
Anyway, in addition to the prestige of sending the trainee from Oxford out to get our coffees, what we loved about these “top grads” was their conformity and work ethic. No more would prove to be phenoms than the old back office or nepo hires, but frankly they were much more reliable, pliable and hard-working as warm bodies.
Anyway, overly long way of saying that investment banking is dominated by the same conformist, left-leaning hires that populate Google’s marketing department or the average liberal arts PhD program.
There are some right wingers in banking, sure, but most tend to be cynical and highly dubious of any pol or party. The whole point of making lots of cash is to insulate oneself from the clowncar that is the country.
???? Google and Apple employees have for years been amongst the largest donors to campaigns (Dems) and tech bros generally fund dark money (and “charitable” contribution tax scams) groups like Arabella. Google built Obama’s database in 2008 and helped transform GOTV and voter (and prospective federal employee) profiles for the Dems. Zuckerberg probably bought the 2020 election for Biden by funding ballot harvesting and partisan infiltration of municipal voting operations in key states/districts. What a shocker that Facebook hasn’t been broken up or regulated and we have neither a wealth tax or higher capital gains taxes, eh? Almost as if Zuck bought himself some protection.
The biggest tech firms have been cheerleaders for censorship and actively collaborated with government censors (greasing the wheels with some hires from the Deep State).
Tech entering our politics? Tech bros have dominated politics since 2008 - and no surprise the Dems have transformed themselves into the party of tycoons and rich white folks.
Sure, Dem partisans want to make the likes of Thiel and Elon the new Koch brothers and a “threat to our democracy”, but who on earth would believe such nonsense? Even in the generally libertarian/alt right crypto space (dying out now with leftist-dominated AI/LLMs dominating the hype space), didn’t SBF know where his bread was buttered? While some start-up tech entrepreneurs may lean right, alt right or libertarian, they mostly believe in money, and politically they know what is good for them.
> If immigration produces difficulties down the line, deal with them then.
How are you going to "deal with" a majority of voters becoming socialists? Garett Jones' has attributed Argentina's fall-from-grace to immigration of socialists, how would you recommend an Argentinian fix their problem now?
This piece strikes me as a clear and convincing analysis of what is emerging as a new set of beliefs, principles, and policies on the right. I agree with you that this new worldview is the opposite of what is offered by Mary Harrington (I was thinking that while reading the piece and then discovered that you mentioned her work as offering an opposite worldview). At some point, it would be good for you to articulate what you believe the end of a human life is. What are the positive outcomes you believe these approaches would offer to people? Although I think that some of your views are empirically grounded (e.g., that there are genetic influences on individual differences), I actually think that other views are not grounded in what we know empirically about human nature and what leads to human happiness and flourishing. But maybe happiness and flourishing are not what you consider to be the positive outcomes of a human life.
Really not excited to see the "longtermism" and "effective altruism" labels thrown into the mix. These can easily become Trojan horses, as anyone halfway smart can argue anything through long-term rationality, and altruism without significant modifiers (and "effective" is not one of them) is an endless quest that can easily overwhelm the rest of the program. Outlawing gas stoves and intra-state flights for climate? Longtermism. Foreign aid without conditions and earmarks? Effective altruism.
Also, transhumanism and extropianism as political values? Sure, I'd love myself some immortality, but it's a bit rich to promise these goals in a political program when no scientists would bet their house on their possibility; you could just as well add in interstellar flight and a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. A serious danger with such goals is that the whole program will lose reputation if they fail to be achieved. You can be a science-friendly libertarian even if the war on aging is lost; I'm in fact somewhat mistrustful of anyone who would yoke their libertarianism to such uncertain conditions.
In general, I don't think we should have Timnit Gebru decide on our values.
The big problem with getting Tech Right-ism into politics is how few people in it want to get involved with politics. There aren't that many such people and the leverage points are all in building better apps, pretty much. Like, the guys who founded Substack have had a way bigger impact on politics by doing that than by running for local government and failing.
The big way to change that however, is for the philosophy to spread beyond the tech community to people who aren't engineers but who agree with the tenets of the worldview. They can then run and be supported by the rich guys who earned tons of money. This may have a chance.
Don't be misled by the high rates of Democratic donations in tech firms. As has been seen repeatedly, leftists in these companies will utterly destroy anyone they find who appears to be a Republican. It's barely possible anymore to be openly Republican there without these people mounting full blown harassment campaigns against you, not only whilst you work there but indefinitely afterwards as well. Given these people also control the government in California and can do what they want without fear, that's not a good place to be. I can assure you there are or were actually quite a lot of Tech Right in these firms, but they have been bleeding out of these companies and spreading out over other places with time because the leftist oppression got too much for them.
“You would think people who try to become professors are those most interested in ideas. My experience is, if anything, the opposite. They’re the kind of people who like the idea of thinking about themselves as people interested in ideas, but actually lack genuine curiosity about the world. If they did have curiosity about the world, they would go participate in it, where they’d have real experiences, find out how it works, and not spend their time bogged down in so much paperwork...”
This comment (and other very unflattering comments about woke liberals in this piece) are probably one reason I bridle when you dunk on conservatives (I am a libertarian) for being low IQ and not reading. Various iterations of woke nonsense have been hampering progress for centuries. To the extent that these high IQ wokels alienate conservatives with their blank slate nonsense, they are also responsible for (some) conservative reaction.
For steelmanning purposes, a classic trad-right case against the Tech Right is found in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (esp. That Hideous Strength) and Abolition of Man, recently discussed in Michael Ward's book After Humanity. Key point: increases in wealth/power/cool stuff/freedom, while good in themselves, are not the only goods, and perhaps not even the highest goods. More:
Other than the antiwoke stuff they sound kinda gay. Republican party needs to embrace populism. When they do i will register as a republican. They have some of the social issues but they need to embrace the economic as well. Socially right wing and fiscally center left is the only path forward for republicans. Very few people are actually these free market weirdos anyways. These people tend to only really care about GDP which creates a toxic ideology that allows the left to win the culture war without even a challenge. GDP at this point just means the elites get wealthier while the average American is fucked over.
If republicans want Hispanics like they always claim to this is how you do it as well. Hispanics tend to be more socially right than your average American but are not for free markets either which is part of the reason they vote democrat.
Republicans now are against Social Leftism from a vaguely liberal perspective. That needs to change as well though. They need to be against it from a truly socially right perspective.
The enlightenment was a mixed bag. I do think though some of it helped to usher in this woke stuff though. Not directly, it just made society unable to fight against Cultural Marxism. Of course i think it's more people bot understanding what the enlightenment was. When many of the people from the enlightenment where still very socially right wing and weren't as individualistic as some might expect or they would even claim. Nor did they support freedom and Liberty is the same way we do today. Its a bad interpretation of the enlightenment I think is the main problem.
Curtis Yarvin is pretty hit or miss for me, but I'd be paying attention to his piece earlier this year ("Acorns for the Culture War") if I were a Tech Right leader trying to get the most change for my bucks.
Richard, I think Musk for all of his personal flaws and merits, is a useful test case for understanding what you call the "Tech Right." I am a bit loath to divide people into dichotomous groups, so I would probably use a term like "Pro Progress Middle" or "Rational Middle," but I digress.
Musk has long been a champion of left-ish causes. I mean, look his record; he started a solar power company to combat climate change, which he has frequently called "Russian roulette with the planet." He started Tesla for the same reason. He has also long advocated for UBI, and generally voted for and supported Democrats.
So what happened, what caused his perspective to change? My theory is...he got rich. He got rich advocating and promoting leftish causes and the left, bizarrely, rejected him for it. Just look on Reddit or Twitter, anytime Musk is mentioned, the conversation devolves into tired tropes of how he invented nothing, did noting of any consequence, and is just another lazy billionaire criminal who shouldn't exist. If I were him, I would be appalled and deeply distrustful of the "new left" as well.
I have the benefit of being someone who informally followed Musk since circa 2006. It is absolutely stunning to watch how the darling of climate change and UBI turned into the left's arch nemesis in the last few years. I am sure he has also felt this rejection, so sought refuge where he is more welcome.
I think it’s interesting how at the same time as this phenomenon exists, lots of tech right people (and others) describe tech companies as being super woke, presumably because of their employee base. How do you reconcile the two?
The biggest obstacle for the Tech Right are women, particularly the highly educated ones: most of them are very Liberal and the ones that are not are anti-tech, like Harrington. Also women are very aware of vibes and status, things tech guys are famously unaware.
Love this! 2 things. First I feel like you need to emphasis more autist nature of tech. We just really really really care about truth and having an acurate world model.
Second, there were just a bunch of radicalizing events. Being called racist and ridiculed for worrying about covid early. The editing of and lying about the James Demore memo, the big tech companies becoming more like other large companies, the doxing of scott alexander, Taylor lorenz making up someting about Balji, lying about it and pretending to be a victim. Constantly being the only white male in an engineering meeting and reading articles how the tech industry is too white. The left kept saying, we don't like you and want your status to be lowered. At some point we started listening. That didn't make us right aligned but it made us anti-left.
I'm Tech Right in the streets, Trad Right in the sheets, baby.
Also, great point about IRBs. Holy crap, that paperwork attack...
Good comparison of the mentalities of academia and IRBs vs entrepreneurs. Also the importance of conformity.
Almost all the top students at top universities are conformists. They want to understand how to get the “A” and then go do exactly that. They are very risk averse and they become corporate salarymen/women in the industries of the moment (tech, consulting, etc)
I worked in banking and when I started a lot of the entry level hires were promotions from the back office, were based upon nepotism or connections or came from a wide swath of universities. The odds of any new hire “making it” were pretty low- like many businesses, maybe half the employees can basically do the job but are utterly replaceable, while the top 5-10 percent have the potential to make a huge impact. The strategy was to churn through hires trying to find the high performers and then give those performers as much leeway and responsibility as they could handle. In investment banking, these performers are MDs by their early 30’s and given “stretch” assignments and enough rope to gang themselves.
About 25-30 years ago there was a sea change in recruiting. Because of globalization, raging equity markets and low interest rates banking had become a boom industry. We needed more warm bodies and the pay in the business attracted kids from top schools who previously would have become doctors, lawyers, CPAs and engineers. While few of us had come from top schools, it felt good to hire these sorts of kids. However, the stats didn’t improve. Only 5-10 pct of them became phenoms while the bulk were utterly replaceable (OK, because overpaying some warm bodies to handle the flow when business is good is easier than having to hire replacements). Moreover, analysis of our grad recruitment effort showed no significant correlation between GPA or school and performance (eg a 3.9 gpa from Harvard no more likely to be successful than a 3.5 from Norte Dame, a first from Oxford no more likely to be successful than a 2-1 from Edinburgh).
Anyway, in addition to the prestige of sending the trainee from Oxford out to get our coffees, what we loved about these “top grads” was their conformity and work ethic. No more would prove to be phenoms than the old back office or nepo hires, but frankly they were much more reliable, pliable and hard-working as warm bodies.
Anyway, overly long way of saying that investment banking is dominated by the same conformist, left-leaning hires that populate Google’s marketing department or the average liberal arts PhD program.
There are some right wingers in banking, sure, but most tend to be cynical and highly dubious of any pol or party. The whole point of making lots of cash is to insulate oneself from the clowncar that is the country.
???? Google and Apple employees have for years been amongst the largest donors to campaigns (Dems) and tech bros generally fund dark money (and “charitable” contribution tax scams) groups like Arabella. Google built Obama’s database in 2008 and helped transform GOTV and voter (and prospective federal employee) profiles for the Dems. Zuckerberg probably bought the 2020 election for Biden by funding ballot harvesting and partisan infiltration of municipal voting operations in key states/districts. What a shocker that Facebook hasn’t been broken up or regulated and we have neither a wealth tax or higher capital gains taxes, eh? Almost as if Zuck bought himself some protection.
The biggest tech firms have been cheerleaders for censorship and actively collaborated with government censors (greasing the wheels with some hires from the Deep State).
Tech entering our politics? Tech bros have dominated politics since 2008 - and no surprise the Dems have transformed themselves into the party of tycoons and rich white folks.
Sure, Dem partisans want to make the likes of Thiel and Elon the new Koch brothers and a “threat to our democracy”, but who on earth would believe such nonsense? Even in the generally libertarian/alt right crypto space (dying out now with leftist-dominated AI/LLMs dominating the hype space), didn’t SBF know where his bread was buttered? While some start-up tech entrepreneurs may lean right, alt right or libertarian, they mostly believe in money, and politically they know what is good for them.
> If immigration produces difficulties down the line, deal with them then.
How are you going to "deal with" a majority of voters becoming socialists? Garett Jones' has attributed Argentina's fall-from-grace to immigration of socialists, how would you recommend an Argentinian fix their problem now?
This piece strikes me as a clear and convincing analysis of what is emerging as a new set of beliefs, principles, and policies on the right. I agree with you that this new worldview is the opposite of what is offered by Mary Harrington (I was thinking that while reading the piece and then discovered that you mentioned her work as offering an opposite worldview). At some point, it would be good for you to articulate what you believe the end of a human life is. What are the positive outcomes you believe these approaches would offer to people? Although I think that some of your views are empirically grounded (e.g., that there are genetic influences on individual differences), I actually think that other views are not grounded in what we know empirically about human nature and what leads to human happiness and flourishing. But maybe happiness and flourishing are not what you consider to be the positive outcomes of a human life.
Really not excited to see the "longtermism" and "effective altruism" labels thrown into the mix. These can easily become Trojan horses, as anyone halfway smart can argue anything through long-term rationality, and altruism without significant modifiers (and "effective" is not one of them) is an endless quest that can easily overwhelm the rest of the program. Outlawing gas stoves and intra-state flights for climate? Longtermism. Foreign aid without conditions and earmarks? Effective altruism.
Also, transhumanism and extropianism as political values? Sure, I'd love myself some immortality, but it's a bit rich to promise these goals in a political program when no scientists would bet their house on their possibility; you could just as well add in interstellar flight and a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. A serious danger with such goals is that the whole program will lose reputation if they fail to be achieved. You can be a science-friendly libertarian even if the war on aging is lost; I'm in fact somewhat mistrustful of anyone who would yoke their libertarianism to such uncertain conditions.
In general, I don't think we should have Timnit Gebru decide on our values.
The big problem with getting Tech Right-ism into politics is how few people in it want to get involved with politics. There aren't that many such people and the leverage points are all in building better apps, pretty much. Like, the guys who founded Substack have had a way bigger impact on politics by doing that than by running for local government and failing.
The big way to change that however, is for the philosophy to spread beyond the tech community to people who aren't engineers but who agree with the tenets of the worldview. They can then run and be supported by the rich guys who earned tons of money. This may have a chance.
Don't be misled by the high rates of Democratic donations in tech firms. As has been seen repeatedly, leftists in these companies will utterly destroy anyone they find who appears to be a Republican. It's barely possible anymore to be openly Republican there without these people mounting full blown harassment campaigns against you, not only whilst you work there but indefinitely afterwards as well. Given these people also control the government in California and can do what they want without fear, that's not a good place to be. I can assure you there are or were actually quite a lot of Tech Right in these firms, but they have been bleeding out of these companies and spreading out over other places with time because the leftist oppression got too much for them.
“You would think people who try to become professors are those most interested in ideas. My experience is, if anything, the opposite. They’re the kind of people who like the idea of thinking about themselves as people interested in ideas, but actually lack genuine curiosity about the world. If they did have curiosity about the world, they would go participate in it, where they’d have real experiences, find out how it works, and not spend their time bogged down in so much paperwork...”
This comment (and other very unflattering comments about woke liberals in this piece) are probably one reason I bridle when you dunk on conservatives (I am a libertarian) for being low IQ and not reading. Various iterations of woke nonsense have been hampering progress for centuries. To the extent that these high IQ wokels alienate conservatives with their blank slate nonsense, they are also responsible for (some) conservative reaction.
For steelmanning purposes, a classic trad-right case against the Tech Right is found in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (esp. That Hideous Strength) and Abolition of Man, recently discussed in Michael Ward's book After Humanity. Key point: increases in wealth/power/cool stuff/freedom, while good in themselves, are not the only goods, and perhaps not even the highest goods. More:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/06/19803/
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/that-hideous-strength-is-nonfiction
https://www.radixmagazine.com/2021/11/09/three-reasons-to-read-or-reread-c-s-lewiss-that-hideous-strength/
Other than the antiwoke stuff they sound kinda gay. Republican party needs to embrace populism. When they do i will register as a republican. They have some of the social issues but they need to embrace the economic as well. Socially right wing and fiscally center left is the only path forward for republicans. Very few people are actually these free market weirdos anyways. These people tend to only really care about GDP which creates a toxic ideology that allows the left to win the culture war without even a challenge. GDP at this point just means the elites get wealthier while the average American is fucked over.
If republicans want Hispanics like they always claim to this is how you do it as well. Hispanics tend to be more socially right than your average American but are not for free markets either which is part of the reason they vote democrat.
Republicans now are against Social Leftism from a vaguely liberal perspective. That needs to change as well though. They need to be against it from a truly socially right perspective.
The enlightenment was a mixed bag. I do think though some of it helped to usher in this woke stuff though. Not directly, it just made society unable to fight against Cultural Marxism. Of course i think it's more people bot understanding what the enlightenment was. When many of the people from the enlightenment where still very socially right wing and weren't as individualistic as some might expect or they would even claim. Nor did they support freedom and Liberty is the same way we do today. Its a bad interpretation of the enlightenment I think is the main problem.
Curtis Yarvin is pretty hit or miss for me, but I'd be paying attention to his piece earlier this year ("Acorns for the Culture War") if I were a Tech Right leader trying to get the most change for my bucks.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/acorns-for-the-culture-war
Richard, I think Musk for all of his personal flaws and merits, is a useful test case for understanding what you call the "Tech Right." I am a bit loath to divide people into dichotomous groups, so I would probably use a term like "Pro Progress Middle" or "Rational Middle," but I digress.
Musk has long been a champion of left-ish causes. I mean, look his record; he started a solar power company to combat climate change, which he has frequently called "Russian roulette with the planet." He started Tesla for the same reason. He has also long advocated for UBI, and generally voted for and supported Democrats.
So what happened, what caused his perspective to change? My theory is...he got rich. He got rich advocating and promoting leftish causes and the left, bizarrely, rejected him for it. Just look on Reddit or Twitter, anytime Musk is mentioned, the conversation devolves into tired tropes of how he invented nothing, did noting of any consequence, and is just another lazy billionaire criminal who shouldn't exist. If I were him, I would be appalled and deeply distrustful of the "new left" as well.
I have the benefit of being someone who informally followed Musk since circa 2006. It is absolutely stunning to watch how the darling of climate change and UBI turned into the left's arch nemesis in the last few years. I am sure he has also felt this rejection, so sought refuge where he is more welcome.
"Right" and "Left" are meaningless. Just leave them behind and use actual descriptive words please.
I think it’s interesting how at the same time as this phenomenon exists, lots of tech right people (and others) describe tech companies as being super woke, presumably because of their employee base. How do you reconcile the two?