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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Peter Thiel's evil, but he's not an "evil genius"

Peter Thiel: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” It’s the far-right billionaire’s most telling phrase. Thiel wants us to think he’s an evil genius, because he wants us to think he’s a genius. So much of Thiel’s activity is devoted to self-mythologizing, like when he made us all think he was infusing the blood of teenagers in a bid to become immortal:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood

But as Ben Burgis writes for Jacobin, Thiel isn’t an evil genius, “he’s just a rich guy”:

https://jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-superrich-wealth-inequality-political-influence/

Burgis cites Max Chafkin’s 2021 Thiel biography, The Contrarian, which shines a glaring light on the distance between Thiel’s stated commitment to high-minded ideals of “liberty” and his self-serving defense of mass surveillance and human rights abuses:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-contrarian-peter-thiel-and-silicon-valley-s-pursuit-of-power/9781984878533

If you think Thiel is an evil genius, then maybe these contradictions are the result of your puny brain lacking the subtlety to understand how, on a higher plane of reasoning, they can be resolved. If you understand that Theil is an ordinary mediocrity, no better than you or me, sickened by pathological greed, then there’s a much simpler explanation: it’s all bullshit, and the only thing Thiel really cares about is becoming richer and more powerful.

That explanation goes a long way to explain why a “libertarian” would defend Apartheid, express regret that women are allowed to vote, state that “freedom and democracy” are incompatible, and secretly fund a lawsuit to destroy a media organization that embarrassed him:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2019/12/23/best-stories-of-the-decade-behind-peter-thiels-plan-to-destroy-gawker/

Thiel’s self-mythologizing provides a cover for all of this, while making him far richer: for example, his campaign to make us think that Palantir played a role in killing Osama bin Laden was an obvious gambit to increase the share-price of Palantir.

Burgis cites Nathan Robinson’s Current Affairs article, “Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives,” which used the example of Jordan Peterson as a template for critiquing self-mythologizing far-right figures without helping them by calling them evil geniuses:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/two-ways-of-responding-to-conservatives

Robinson proposes a test: “Does it reinforce the person’s self-conception or undermine it?” Burgis applies this test to Thiel, urging us not to dwell on the drinking blood, taking votes away from women, or funding “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin.

Rather, Burgis says, we should focus on how Thiel spends his political money, backing “populists” like JD Vance, who say they’re fighting for working people, but who oppose universal healthcare, universal childcare, and against raising the minimum wage.

Burgis: “Thiel is dangerous — not because he’s an evil mastermind, but because he’s a billionaire who enjoys playing with our politics and he couldn’t care less about the people who get hurt in the process.”

Burgis’s critique ties nicely into Lee Vinsel’s idea of “criti-hype” — criticism that starts by accepting it’s subject’s own self-mythologizing, then damns them for it. Think of critics who accept Google’s claims that its “AI”-driven ads can sell anything to anyone, then criticize it for having built a mind-control ray:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

Like Thiel, Google would rather be seen as evil than as incompetent. When Google’s critics run around accusing the company of having perfected machine learning mind-control, they help Google sell ads, because the advertisers Google is pitching aren’t upset that Google has a mind-control ray, provided Google will rent it out to them.

A smart synthesis of criti-hype comes from Maria Farrell, whose “Prodigal Techbro” is a great way to understand the problems with allowing ourselves to be lured into “evil genius” talk:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

Farrell’s prodigal techbro is an ex-Big-Tech geek turned anti-Big-Tech crusader, whose anti-Big-Tech position starts with the proposition that they and their former colleagues were all evil geniuses who hijacked our brains’ reward-centers with junk-science psych ideas like “Big Five Personality Types” and “Sentiment Analysis” (conveniently omitting the fact that these have been seriously undermined by the replication crisis):

https://replicationindex.com/category/big-five/

Focusing on what Big Tech says it does isn’t just a problem because it perpetuates the companies’ self-mythologizing, but also because it distracts from what we know Big Tech actually does. If we repeat the lie that Big Tech’s ad billions are the result of its mind-control ray, then we omit the fact that Facebook and Google entered into an illegal conspiracy to rig the ad market:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

“Just a rich guy” is the perfect epithet for Theil, who, after all, is not an ideologue or an 11-dimensional chess master. He’s just another thin-skinned, greedy bastard who uses his money and power to accumulate more money and power. The rest is just window-dressing.

Image: Dan Taylor for www.heisenbergmedia.com (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/heisenbergmedia/13887527438/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Austin Powers, New Line Cinema (modified) https://www.warnerbros.com/company/divisions/motion-pictures

Fair use https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[Image ID: A still of Michael Meyers as 'Dr Evil' from the Austin Powers movies. He is holding one pinky finger to his lips. His face has been replaced by Peter Thiel's.]

#pluralistic

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sayedhusaini · 3 years ago

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Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer Its Power to Censor

by Moderator

📷(Stock Catalog / Flickr)By Glenn Greenwald / SubstackMuch is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes

interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach." Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of "restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies "to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook's Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:

This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT's tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation's discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls "power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin's brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that "Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the "delete” or "ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his,

but someone else’s. . . .Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written poast, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment's "free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.There is another issue raised by this week's events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be "modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess "misinformation” and "hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and

anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.

Correction, Oct. 5, 2021, 5:59 pm ET: This article was edited to reflect that just under 2/3 of Democrats favor U.S. Government censorship of the internet in the name of fighting misinformation, not just over.

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antoine-roquentin · 8 years ago

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In the past few days, two Medium posts that quickly seeped through the cloistered know-it-all sector of the internet have exemplified this weird form of politics. The first, “Trial Balloon for a Coup?,” is by Yonatan Zunger; the second, more forceful piece, comes from Jake Fuentes, and is titled “The Immigration Ban is a Headfake, and We’re Falling For It.” Both tread largely the same ground: They argue that the chaos and indeterminacy surrounding Trump’s ban on travel to the United States by anyone from seven Muslim-majority nations is actually a devious ploy. This is done through some very familiar techniques. Which positions are still unfilled at the State Department? Why did Trump’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day not make any mention of Jews? And why, of all people, was it Reince Priebus who defended that decision, when it’s not part of his usual job? And, like with the old Russia-watchers, these questions lead us to the idea that nothing is irrelevant, but that something monstrous is afoot.

Some of these conclusions are straightforwardly true. Zunger tells us that “the aims of crushing various groups—Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press—are very much primary aims of the regime”—but you don’t need a sophisticated analysis of bureaucratic sub-departments to know that; just basic reading comprehension. Others are a little more suspect. Trump and his cronies want people to protest, Zunger writes. “The goal is to create resistance fatigue.” They want judges to issue court orders demanding that people detained at airports are allowed to see a lawyer; it’s all part of their game, “testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government.” What looks like the beginnings of a breakdown in effective government, or an opportunity, is nothing of the sort. They planned everything, and everything fell into place.

The left is no stranger to this kind of defeatism, and it’s not hard to see why. Capitalism is omnivorous and polymorphously perverse; today’s revolutionary slogans are found on tomorrow’s Coke cans. Radical demands—the emancipation of women, the liberation of sexuality, the expression of cultural difference—have a tendency to end up being shallowly incorporated into an existing order, suckered up by a vast and shapeless amoeba that keeps squelching disastrously across the world as if nothing had happened. Right-wing politicians and right-ish editorial boards now honor Martin Luther King Jr., a small-c communist and big-h Hegelian, and try to claim him as one of their own: a preacher of hard work, personal responsibility and subservience to the all-conquering devil-god. If you look backward from the state of the world today at all the heroic resistance movements that have failed throughout history, it’s easy to think that this was all part of the plan.

Much of this is true, but its effects can be paralyzing. We’ve fucked up so much that it’s made us afraid of victory; faced with an enormous and implacable enemy, there are people who are now convinced that its power is infinite. Whenever it looks like the reactionaries have massively over-reached themselves it’s just part of a larger plan, one that we can’t see. If Steve Bannon’s pants fell down tomorrow and he tottered crying into a muddy pond, there would be someone ready to announce that actually, this made him even more omnipotent than he was before.

But the pathology that’s animating these viral conspiracy theories is different. It’s a determinism of a far more granular sort: It assumes, quite improbably, that the Trump team knew exactly what sort of thing would happen after their every move, that they were only testing out the details. As if Jared Kushner could see through time, as if Stephen Miller could read our thoughts. Its universe is one that’s programmable. To adopt their own hermeneutic stance: What’s really going on, underneath all the layered lies, and what little puncta might give it away? The most notable clue here is that neither Zunger nor Fuentes are political analysts or journalists or academics or even civil servants. Instead, both come from the tech industry.

Zunger is on the privacy team at Google; Fuentes was behind LevelMoney, an app since acquired by Capital One. They belong to a particular class, with a particular way of looking at the world. Silicon Valley doesn’t really approach politics as a sphere of competing social interests, a space in which people have the ability to make collective demands and collectively alter the conditions of their existences, but as a system—something with an input, an output and reams of complex programming in between. Whenever the tech world turns its attention to politics, there’s always the hint of this nerdish fascination for system: an inattention to what politics actually is or does, but a fetishization of efficiency, the latent notion that all these 18th-century structures really should just be replaced with something you can download on your phone.

Often, this can lead to fascism: Take Curtis Yarvin, a startup founder (backed by Peter Thiel) who proposed replacing all government with a repressive corporate dictatorship, and who—despite his almost total ignorance of political and social theory—ended up providing the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of what went on to become the neo-Nazi alt-right. The Bay Area might not like the current president, but it’s not intrinsically opposed to racism and repression either. After all, many of its luminaries came out to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the subcontinent’s very own Donald Trump, a man fairly recently banned from traveling to the U.S. or Britain for his role in deadly anti-Muslim pogroms. But in the hands of stalwart liberals like Zunger and Fuentes, the baseline tech-ideology gives you this: a society in which people are users or consumers, in which democracy is a series of in-app purchases, in which all power belongs to the programmers.

“Popular attention,” Fuentes writes, “must focus less on whether we agree with what the government is doing, and more on whether the system of checks and balances we have in place is working.” (Never mind that every American president in living memory has managed to trample on the law with all checks and balances apparently in place.) It’s impossible for him to imagine that the Muslim ban really is directed against Muslims. Anything happening within the system can only really concern the system itself. We shouldn’t be fighting for our rights and our dignity, but to make sure that nobody tampers with the source code. Never mind the danger Trump poses to so many lives: What about our abstract institutions?

This isn’t to say that we should ignore any potential power grab within the political system, or hope that by protesting in airports we will bring down the government. But it’s worth keeping in mind that politics is about more than clashing personalities and chthonic power-plays. These clever little games do happen, but there’s a clinamen that tends to screw with the results—Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, energetically promoted Trump during the primaries, under the impression that he’d be a far easier opponent; we all know how that turned out. It’s almost comforting, in a way, to imagine yourself as a pawn. There’s no moral duty involved: The evil plan is grand and inscrutable; it gives a sense of order in what looks like disintegration, and tells you what your place is in it. But there is a moral duty, and we need to face up to it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the people in charge are just as blinkered as we are.

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hondacivictrucknuts · 4 years ago

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I wrote that in June 2018. I'm revisiting it now that Curtis Yarvin beat me to the Quadratic perspective on Weyl v. Alexander:

“Technocracy,” to Weyl (obviously others have used the label) is simply the absence of his one big idea: “quadratic voting.” This is also his “channel of communication” to the “low-income housing projects.”

I stopped following Weyl's career a few years ago, but I looked through the first 7 pages of citations to Quadratic Voting on Google scholar just now, and I still see no attempt to explore this fairly obvious research question.

How obvious? Well, in 2012 Al Roth won the Nobel in economics for pointing out, in 1984, that the matching algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley in 1962 (in a recreational math journal!) was in fact how the AMA had been "matching" residents to residencies since the 1950s. Observation matches theory! Markets in the real world have evolved to function the way ideal markets have been shown to work on the blackboard! This used to be the great goal of microeconomic theory, from Paul Samuelson on.

If Weyl were curious, instead of hungry for power, what could be have applied QV to? Yarvin again:

Quadratic voting, in which my second vote costs me 2 votes, my third 4, and so on, is a perfect system for incentivizing invisible corruption. If my third vote for A costs me four times as much as your first vote for A, why on earth would we not make a deal?

That is an empirical prediction: if QV in fact approximates how political power works in a democracy, we should see members of different interest groups "trading" low-cost commitments to each other's causes. That appears to be the relationship between BLM and the transgender movement, with BLM activists opening meetings with pronoun circles and many non-black transgender activists bringing their financial and institutional resources to the aide of BLM. I'll be damned, it's a positive theory of intersectional solidarity! What could be more useful in making sense of the past few years' protests?

The theory also predicts that protests lose effectiveness if the protesters seem to be having too much fun. That one seems obviously true.

Less obvious is the utility of the "accomplices not allies" line, i.e. the stated preference of some Black activists for seriousness of commitment over raw numbers in the white people who show up to their protests. The uncharitable view is that they're simply wrong, and that this was King's point in Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? Maybe they're onto something, though: perhaps the low-commitment allies they scorn are enduring zero net cost of participation in the movement, and as such their participation expresses only views already baked in to the current consensus. By getting some white people to publicly incur nontrivial costs, they show the watching voters and legislators that in fact the socially optimal level of racial justice is to the left of the status quo.

When I had this idea a few years ago, I thought it was clever and original. In light of Yarvin's essay, its originality testifies not to my cleverness, but to the sorry state of microeconomic theory today.

Empirical quadratic voting

Glen Weyl proposed Quadratic Voting as a mechanism design result, but what if we consider it as a model for understanding politics?

The basic insight is that democracy can efficiently consider the relative strengths of voters’ preferences if voters can buy multiple votes at a cost that is quadratic in the number of votes purchased. This makes the marginal cost linear in votes purchased, and thus theoretically proportional to each voter’s intensity of preference over the outcome. So one way to read it is that an efficient democracy lets each voter influence each political outcome more or less, at a cost that increases quadratically.

For example, if one third of the country really badly wants legal same-sex marriage, one third doesn’t particularly want it, and another third doesn’t care that much but will say no if they have to choose, then when put to a vote the nays will have it. But since the people who want it want it really badly and those opposed aren’t too opposed, there’s a sense in which legalizing same-sex marriage would make the country better off as a whole. Quadratic voting proposes to solve this by letting people buy votes (with scarce vote credits), so that the people who want same-sex marriage will buy more credits than those opposed.

But our political system already does this! We each get one vote, for legislators and the president, but there’s much more a citizen can do about an issue she cares about. She can post to facebook. She can talk to her friends and family members, and try to get them on her side if their opposed or uncommitted. She can go knock on doors, and talk to strangers about it. She can donate money to advocacy groups, who run ads and hire lobbyists to press the issue. She can recruit others to volunteer and give money, and so on.

If the political system is ideally quadratic, then each additional unit of influence (on the ultimate outcome) costs proportionally as much as all the previous ones combined. Taking the next step on an issue takes more work than the previous one, for no more payoff.

#glen weyl #curtis yarvin

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baronvonn · 4 years ago

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Free Speech Leftists Still Exist

In brighter times, the reprimanding of Lindsay Shepherd at Wilfrid Laurier University would have found strong condemnation among left intellectuals. Instead, left publications largely chose to ignore the issue. You will find no pieces on Vox covering Wilfrid Laurier or Bret Weinstein’s clash with overreaching faculty at Evergreen, nor will the incrimination of BDS activism by US lawmakers find exposure outside of niche outlets like The Intercept. The free speech debate, in other words, has become too partisan.

When Lindsay Shepherd revealed that Jordan Peterson’s fears about Bill C16 were well-founded, and that pointing out that sex differences exist was considered by Wilfrid Laurier’s administration to be comparable to Adolf Hitler, the response of left publications was either disinterest or full-throated attacks on Peterson as a reactionary monster. If one sought to hear out Lindsay Shepherd, the outlets willing to speak with her were mainly conservative or libertarian YouTube channels belonging to figures like Stephen Crowder and Stefan Molyneux. The perception, understandably, follows that the right is in favor of free expression, and the left has become wholly illiberal.

But the hyper-partisan atmosphere surrounding free speech has ignored many left thinkers who have defended liberal principles relentlessly for years. There remain many on the left who stand for free expression and an open academy. Writing on his blog in 2015 Freddie de Boer made the obvious point that “the left should embrace free speech rights and other legal protections of rights because, due to our lack of power, the left is most likely to be subject to assaults on those rights from above.” Chris Hedges has also written forcefully against the idea of Nazi-punching as a political practice, and rejects Antifa and black bloc tactics. Angela Nagle has written objectively about the alt-right from a left position, seeking to understand web culture rather than ask for the censorship of unruly demons. Greenwald, Fang and Jilani at The Intercept routinely push back against leftist calls for censorship, and do so from their own understanding of left principles. And Jesse Singal at New York Magazine has pushed back on nonsense arguments equating free speech with violence.

Much of the commentary surrounding the regressive left traces its frustrations back to postmodernism. If knowledge is only a consequence of accepting or rejecting power structures, after all, then open debate between people can solve nothing. Language would only be an illusion designed to appease power structures or defy them. Appeals for ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ would only be veiled appeals to the normality of whiteness. But recall that Noam Chomsky himself, a titan of left thought, rejected postmodernism for his entire life, and debated Michel Foucault in 1967, dismissing the blank slate and Foucault’s naïve argument that there was no defined human nature. Chomsky traces much of postmodernism to the peculiarities of French intellectuals in Paris, condemning them by noting that many were “the last Stalinists, if they weren’t Stalinists they were Maoists…Kristeva happened to be in the mid-70s, a flaming Maoist.” Chomsky was a scientist who fused his analytical attitude with critiques of media (many of which are now embraced by the right, as Donald Trump finds himself the enemy of conformist media consensus) and a dismantling of the arguments for United States military intervention. He was a modernist, and represents the rational left, which has always rejected postmodern assumptions about science, human nature and language.

Chomsky praised Alan Sokal, the professor behind the famous Sokal hoax, and he has spoken unequivocally in favor of free speech, especially for the most abhorrent elements of society. Chomsky said: “If someone calls you an anti-Semite…if someone says you’re a racist, a Nazi, you always lose. The person who throws them out always wins, because there’s no way of responding to such charges.” Understanding the nature of propaganda, one of Chomsky’s most famous quotes follows: “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

The commitment of the left to non-dogmatic thought does not end there by any means. Young left writers such as Briahna Joy Gray have written nuanced critiques of Ta-Nehisi Coates and determinist identity politics from the left. Bernie Sanders himself has spoken against identity politics, and The Young Turks’ Jimmy Dore rails against the Democratic Party and the hypocrisy of using multiculturalism to cover up the dismissal of the working class. Elizabeth Bruenig is a socialist writer and a pro-life Christian, destroying conventional political boundaries. Just because there is a dark era in the state of our public intellectuals right now does not mean that new forces are not thriving on the margins, and seeking eventually to create a new left culture. Especially if the upcoming Generation Z is expected to reject identity politics, contrary to the millennials, a left understanding of history may be reborn entirely from its slow death in the 2010s at the hands of radical identity politics and the end of Obama’s broad but ultimately ineffective coalition to stop Donald Trump.

Shifting its ideas along with the left, figures on the right and in the center have also become increasingly critical of centralized corporate power. When James Damore was fired from Google for his views, the right of corporations to censor their employees became a serious problem. Facebook, Twitter and Google have earned the ire of conservatives for selectively applying algorithms, ‘shadow-banning’, and otherwise proving that they have the power to legislate content on their centralized platforms. Major tech companies, treated with unabashed optimism for decades, are now undergoing a major backlash from both the left and the right. In order to hold big tech accountable, and prevent humankind from transmuting itself into censored machinery designed to click on ads, the left and the right can and should cooperate to create a free and open internet. If net neutrality is dead, decentralization should follow – not the consolidation of speech on an increasingly few number of privately owned and centralized websites.

Libertarian attempts to create a decentralized internet, such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin’s ongoing Urbit experiment, strike me as necessary and interesting. I may disagree with Thiel, and Yarvin’s politics strike me as utterly abhorrent, but a dogmatic attitude that people we dislike and disagree with are incapable of contributing to the future will only cripple our ability to engage with reality. Decentralizing tech, or creating an individualized internet not subject to single social media leviathans whom we never consented to be ruled by, are promising goals if we hope to preserve a future of open discourse.

The margins of politics do often agree on certain critical ideas. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both opposed NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because they understood that global capital does harm middle class American workers who cannot be expected to compete with sweat shops in an open marketplace. I find Trump’s nationalism to be shallow, but leveraging national identity against a global cosmopolitan authority is a force that has found great traction across the left and the right. Few people find a world of impersonal cities connected by finance and run by decaying municipalities to be inspiring. If the entire world is being sculpted through capital to reflect the West, we must reconsider our priorities – the West is in a state of stagnation and atrophy, as unlimited global capital has in many ways taken our culture as far as it can go. The annual reiterations of Star Wars and an increasingly niche literary scene reflect repetition, exhaustion and pretentiousness as our main outlets of creative expression.

A kind of feeling is evident in the air, that we are at a point in history where we are burning our bridges to an old world and stumbling headlong like depressed and awkward homunculi into a new one we cannot possibly understand. As social media, virtual currency and technology only continue to accelerate their influence over our lifetimes, it does not make sense to hold on to old political arrangements. As far as I’m concerned, the left and the right are both dinosaurs coping with their own ignorance of major cataclysms to come.

We should follow Jordan Peterson’s Jungian advice in times in these – we have elements of our culture that we must preserve, such as individual dignity, human rights, free expression and opposition to censorship, and we must fight for that against both Donald Trump and the postmodern left. But how best to do that, and how most effectively we can translate the decaying political sphere of 2017 into a vibrant new renaissance, remains to be seen.

So here is my advice – those who emotionally resonate with the political right should seek to explore the rational arguments on the left, and those who resonate with the left should seek to understand the rational traditions of the right. If we become more like our enemies, or understand the souls of our enemies, perhaps we will find the enemy outside to evaporate, and locate a more ordered republic within. After all, that is the ultimate goal of all free and open discourse – to reach a higher vantage point through discussion than two eternally conflicting, isolated sides can ever achieve on their own.

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damonbation · 6 years ago

Text

The Third Web #16 - Urbit, Your New Server

The range of third-web platforms in development today is greater than ever. From data-centric blockchain based approaches to agent-centric designs like Secure Scuttlebut, the potential futures of the third web are rapidly expanding. Today we look at another approach with the Urbit platform. Like Secure Scuttlebutt, Urbit is agent centric. It is a deterministic operating system designed to be the filter between a user and the online services they use. I last covered Urbit in 2016 and the project is now nearing public launch. Galen Wolf-Pauly explains.What is Urbit?A personal ServerA secure computer that you actually ownStores an event log of everything that has ever happened to itThat's designed to live on any cloud serverBut be controlled by a private key that you actually ownYour Urbit is meant to replace all of the consumer cloud software that you already useHow can it possibly be better than all of the expensive software that has already been created?The basic thesis is that everything we use today runs on top of a unix of some kind.The reason we wound up in this centralised world of cloud-based software is that Unix is too complicated.Because the Unix is complicated, complicated layers between Unix and the application are needed.The Urbit solution is to rip all of that out and create a single, extremely simple, complex system.Urbit is a virtual machine, programming language, and operating system in 30,000 lines of code.For comparison, Wordpress, an application that runs on Unix is 500,000 lines of codeTechnical simplicity should turn into user interface simplicity.Additionally, by hosting your Urbit in the cloud you no longer have a middleman serving you applications, Instead you only need them to host your virtual computer. What does an Urbit future look like?A single platform allows tighter integration of, for example, productivity software like Git & Asana.As a designer, Galen looks forward to interface standardisation, -having messaging, documenting, code collaboration, task management and other consumer software working seamlessly as one system.Rather than interfaces built for many people.Do we need a new back end for a new front end? Hasn't Wechat done this?Today we use many services that have unified UIsGoogle has both email and documents but do you really trust Google to have total control and visibility into your use of those services?What if Google goes away?Being able to run a server myself that I trust will be around a long time and is secure to me makes me feel alot better. [Platform Risk]Wechat is a really great achievementApps are more like modulesBut you have given total power to a single companyThe decentralised Wechat pitch has gotten tired but Urbit is very much targeting that problem.The future of cloud computing does look like that but makes no compromises in privacy or durability.So is your vision as a designer that an individual defines their interface standard and that the applications automatically conform to that individual standard?Yes, instead of going to facebook, twitter, Google Docs, etc. and having them deliver the interface to me it is much more like installing a desktop application.In a desktop application scenario most applications make use of common interface elements because it makes more sense to the userYour computing environment should feel like your physical environment. Individuals have different preferences with regard to furnishing and it is relatively easy to pick from different modules of furniture or colours of walls. These are decisions of the size that we are comfortable making. Contrast this to computing interfaces which are like a prefab trailer, or hotel room that you wind up living in the whole time but have no power to customise, only choose between. The alternative is being a Linux SysAdmin who builds their entire interface home themselves. That tradeoff is as unfair and unrealistic as everyone physically building their own homes from scratch.To clarify, it is people working on Urbit full time who would be the ones building interfaces but those interfaces would be able to be applied to all of the applications that run on Urbit, and tweaks to those interfaces would affect all apps.Moving on from the interface. What is the advantage over existing cloud platforms? How is it possible to build something from scratch that is easier to use than the systems that have been developed by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of 30 years?Firstly, Urbit runs on Unix, the internet, TCP/IP, UDP We take the existing infrastructure and build a new layer on top.We are antagonistic toward the existing web stackUrbit is designed for an individual to useYou can think of Urbit as a personal blockchain or a 100 year computer - something that has never existed.Who is the target user?The gold standard is 'œWould I recommend this to my Mom?'More than just the technical community is interested in online privacy and security.The question is more like 'œWould I send an Urbit to my cousin?'This year your friend will be able to acquire an Urbit address and use it to chat with others and make the decision for themselves.Urbit is most interesting to somewhat technical people who are interested in unusual system software. It is also populated by small interesting micro-communitiesThe Urbit testnet has been live since 2013Does Urbit have enterprise applications?In the world of agriculture you cannot customise the software that runs in the machinery commonly available.You can't customise the software inside a Nest IoT device. You cant even connect it to a different server.Urbit operates on it's own network of devices.It is ideal for industrial IoT and can communicate on a local network.Currently data from these devices is collected and stored by third parties who represent a risk of abuse or leaks. Let's take a look at how it works, the networking and application stack.3 main components:Azimuth - the identity system. A series of Ethereum contracts. An Azimuth point is like a combination between a domain name, an email address and an IP address. There is a finite address space and each address is represented as a pronounceable phrase. In total there are ~4 billion user addresses. These addresses are divided hierarchically and have different uses in mind: 264 'œMoons' (devices), 232 'œPlanets' (user addresses), 216 'œStars' (routing nodes), 28 'œGalaxies' (protocol governors).Arvo - the Urbit OS. Very clean separation from external identity system on Ethereum, connected by a common key pair. The Arvo OS has a file system, a system for building applications, a webserver, a networking protocol which is routed over UDP, a vault for secrets or keychain, and a build system. These aree individual kernel modules that provide things from the web stack. A core kernel manages the interactions between these components. The OS is written in a custom language called Hoon which compiles to the Urbit assembly language called Nock. The result is a single deterministic function that Urbit executes every time it gets an event.Aegean?Who makes money from Urbit?Employees of the Tlon company that is developing Urbit, in the form of wages.Holders of Azimuth address space.Providers of Urbit hosting & application development services Recently, Curtis Yarvin, the founder of the Urbit project, left. Is it true that he gave all of his address space to Tlon?NoCurtis Yarvin signed over the the Galaxy addresses he held to Tlon. He retained the control of the stars.Future & FearsThe biggest threat to Urbit is success. If it begins to succeed as an alternative computing model, its possible that large players will attempt to build products that solve the same problems.Urbit's goal is not to be a single network, but rather a network of networks.It takes granular tools to map the way people interact in a computing environment and Urbit aims to make the many different permutations of human communication representable. from Money 101 https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/the-third-web-16-urbit-your-new-server via http://www.rssmix.com/

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danielmarkharrison · 6 years ago

Text

The Third Web #16 - Urbit, Your New Server

The range of third-web platforms in development today is greater than ever. From data-centric blockchain based approaches to agent-centric designs like Secure Scuttlebut, the potential futures of the third web are rapidly expanding. Today we look at another approach with the Urbit platform. Like Secure Scuttlebutt, Urbit is agent centric. It is a deterministic operating system designed to be the filter between a user and the online services they use. I last covered Urbit in 2016 and the project is now nearing public launch. Galen Wolf-Pauly explains.What is Urbit?A personal ServerA secure computer that you actually ownStores an event log of everything that has ever happened to itThat's designed to live on any cloud serverBut be controlled by a private key that you actually ownYour Urbit is meant to replace all of the consumer cloud software that you already useHow can it possibly be better than all of the expensive software that has already been created?The basic thesis is that everything we use today runs on top of a unix of some kind.The reason we wound up in this centralised world of cloud-based software is that Unix is too complicated.Because the Unix is complicated, complicated layers between Unix and the application are needed.The Urbit solution is to rip all of that out and create a single, extremely simple, complex system.Urbit is a virtual machine, programming language, and operating system in 30,000 lines of code.For comparison, Wordpress, an application that runs on Unix is 500,000 lines of codeTechnical simplicity should turn into user interface simplicity.Additionally, by hosting your Urbit in the cloud you no longer have a middleman serving you applications, Instead you only need them to host your virtual computer. What does an Urbit future look like?A single platform allows tighter integration of, for example, productivity software like Git & Asana.As a designer, Galen looks forward to interface standardisation, -having messaging, documenting, code collaboration, task management and other consumer software working seamlessly as one system.Rather than interfaces built for many people.Do we need a new back end for a new front end? Hasn't Wechat done this?Today we use many services that have unified UIsGoogle has both email and documents but do you really trust Google to have total control and visibility into your use of those services?What if Google goes away?Being able to run a server myself that I trust will be around a long time and is secure to me makes me feel alot better. [Platform Risk]Wechat is a really great achievementApps are more like modulesBut you have given total power to a single companyThe decentralised Wechat pitch has gotten tired but Urbit is very much targeting that problem.The future of cloud computing does look like that but makes no compromises in privacy or durability.So is your vision as a designer that an individual defines their interface standard and that the applications automatically conform to that individual standard?Yes, instead of going to facebook, twitter, Google Docs, etc. and having them deliver the interface to me it is much more like installing a desktop application.In a desktop application scenario most applications make use of common interface elements because it makes more sense to the userYour computing environment should feel like your physical environment. Individuals have different preferences with regard to furnishing and it is relatively easy to pick from different modules of furniture or colours of walls. These are decisions of the size that we are comfortable making. Contrast this to computing interfaces which are like a prefab trailer, or hotel room that you wind up living in the whole time but have no power to customise, only choose between. The alternative is being a Linux SysAdmin who builds their entire interface home themselves. That tradeoff is as unfair and unrealistic as everyone physically building their own homes from scratch.To clarify, it is people working on Urbit full time who would be the ones building interfaces but those interfaces would be able to be applied to all of the applications that run on Urbit, and tweaks to those interfaces would affect all apps.Moving on from the interface. What is the advantage over existing cloud platforms? How is it possible to build something from scratch that is easier to use than the systems that have been developed by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of 30 years?Firstly, Urbit runs on Unix, the internet, TCP/IP, UDP We take the existing infrastructure and build a new layer on top.We are antagonistic toward the existing web stackUrbit is designed for an individual to useYou can think of Urbit as a personal blockchain or a 100 year computer - something that has never existed.Who is the target user?The gold standard is 'œWould I recommend this to my Mom?'More than just the technical community is interested in online privacy and security.The question is more like 'œWould I send an Urbit to my cousin?'This year your friend will be able to acquire an Urbit address and use it to chat with others and make the decision for themselves.Urbit is most interesting to somewhat technical people who are interested in unusual system software. It is also populated by small interesting micro-communitiesThe Urbit testnet has been live since 2013Does Urbit have enterprise applications?In the world of agriculture you cannot customise the software that runs in the machinery commonly available.You can't customise the software inside a Nest IoT device. You cant even connect it to a different server.Urbit operates on it's own network of devices.It is ideal for industrial IoT and can communicate on a local network.Currently data from these devices is collected and stored by third parties who represent a risk of abuse or leaks. Let's take a look at how it works, the networking and application stack.3 main components:Azimuth - the identity system. A series of Ethereum contracts. An Azimuth point is like a combination between a domain name, an email address and an IP address. There is a finite address space and each address is represented as a pronounceable phrase. In total there are ~4 billion user addresses. These addresses are divided hierarchically and have different uses in mind: 264 'œMoons' (devices), 232 'œPlanets' (user addresses), 216 'œStars' (routing nodes), 28 'œGalaxies' (protocol governors).Arvo - the Urbit OS. Very clean separation from external identity system on Ethereum, connected by a common key pair. The Arvo OS has a file system, a system for building applications, a webserver, a networking protocol which is routed over UDP, a vault for secrets or keychain, and a build system. These aree individual kernel modules that provide things from the web stack. A core kernel manages the interactions between these components. The OS is written in a custom language called Hoon which compiles to the Urbit assembly language called Nock. The result is a single deterministic function that Urbit executes every time it gets an event.Aegean?Who makes money from Urbit?Employees of the Tlon company that is developing Urbit, in the form of wages.Holders of Azimuth address space.Providers of Urbit hosting & application development services Recently, Curtis Yarvin, the founder of the Urbit project, left. Is it true that he gave all of his address space to Tlon?NoCurtis Yarvin signed over the the Galaxy addresses he held to Tlon. He retained the control of the stars.Future & FearsThe biggest threat to Urbit is success. If it begins to succeed as an alternative computing model, its possible that large players will attempt to build products that solve the same problems.Urbit's goal is not to be a single network, but rather a network of networks.It takes granular tools to map the way people interact in a computing environment and Urbit aims to make the many different permutations of human communication representable. from The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network https://ift.tt/2Fj0ays via IFTTT

#The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network

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d33-alex · 7 years ago

Text

Total Political War

The election of President Trump made it clear that America is not engaged in politics as usual. We are in the midst of a political war.

If this wasn’t evident to some observers before, the furor this week over the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have driven it home. These are not ordinary political times.

Regardless of their partisan leanings, those earnestly seeking to grasp what is happening understand that President Trump is, as Venkatesh Rao says, “more consequence than cause” of the underlying conflict. Perhaps he is a consequence of the fact that “the fault line in American politics is no longer Republican vs. Democrat nor conservative vs. liberal but establishment vs. anti-establishment,” as William Lind put it at the American Conservative.

What we mean when we say “establishment” versus “anti-establishment” is the question of the hour, but as Jordan Greenhall declared, “while 2016 still formally looked like politics, what is really going on here is a revolutionary war.”

War is confusing. In the fog of battle it is not clear what might be happening or even who and where one’s friends and enemies are. While this is especially so in the midst of a revolutionary war, there is agreement among keen observers as to what the revolution is against.

Eight years ago, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla called it the “Ruling Class,” a popular thesis which he turned into a book (The Ruling Class) and used deftly to explain the 2016 election and its aftermath. Michael Anton, in perhaps the most significant essay of the election, called it the “Davoisie oligarchy,” or the “Davos class” and recently coined the word the “oligogues” to describe the majority of elites in their camp that flatter and support them.

On our rulers, widely disparate thinkers agree. In 2012, Joel Kotkin called these same elites the Clerisy, which he says minister to the Oligarchs. In 2014, Kotkin published a book, The New Class Conflict, which aptly applies to explain the 2016 election and beyond. Jordan Greenhall calls it the “Blue Church.” The influential “Dark Enlightenment” thinker Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, calls it “the Cathedral.”

Regardless of its name, the ruling class attempts at present to reinforce, daily, morality tales of justice and injustice surrounding a single battlefront.

The political and media establishments relentlessly promote a tale in which Donald Trump became president of the United States by colluding with a foreign government and the inappropriate use of digital media.

President Trump and his supporters say this narrative is fictional.

These positions are irreconcilable.

As Trump’s opponents will readily tell you, at stake is not a normal matter of policy but the legitimacy of the Trump presidency itself and its power to set policy. There is, however, another side to that coin. Also at stake, in a way it has not been for nearly a century, is the legitimacy of the administrative state itself—at the moment most prominently represented by the FBI. Further, given its long time collusion with and partisanship on behalf of the administrative state, the legitimacy of the old media as a whole hangs in the balance of the outcome of our revolutionary cold war.

Weekly events like the McCabe firing and reports about Cambridge Analytica prompt only a doubling down on all sides. Trump’s administration is “all in,” defending its political life. Most of the political establishments and most established media outlets are “all in,” in defense of various interpretations of the status quo that would allow them to hold their respective positions.

For some time now, the political stage has been inexorably set for a collision course on the matter of collusion and digital media.

Make no mistake: the process is now indeed inexorable. In this digital age of “leaks,” if the truth is that Trump colluded with the Kremlin, it is hard to imagine that it will not eventually out. If the truth is that the political establishment and the deep state, aided and abetted by a zealous media, colluded against Trump, it is hard to imagine it will not eventually out, if it has not already.

But the truth does not always win wars, be they about rhetoric or geography. Geographic wars are won by means of physical maneuver and violence. Rhetorical wars are won by means of strategic communication and persuasion. And what is at stake is nothing less than the means of communication and therefore persuasion in America.

There is a tightly controlled communications technology that has profoundly and purposefully influenced and manipulated American society, behavior, cultural self-understanding, and politics without most people realizing its deeper effects for decades: it’s called television. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, is the message: ultimately, digital rhetoric is never going to be able to be controlled the same way elite society was able to control discourse and cultural self-understanding in the era of TV. Until figures like Mark Zuckerberg can find the courage to tell the establishment to go to hell, however, it will seek to find a way.

At first, the oligogues cheered and gloated when the co-founder of Facebook or the CEO of Google and the top minds in tech worked directly for and with President Obama and candidate Clinton. But when the message fails, the messenger blames the medium. Since President Trump’s win media establishmentarians have begun to turn viciously—and ungratefully—against the larger digital corporations, putting increasingly intense and grossly unfair cultural, political, and legal pressure on them to control speech and fall in line with “Blue Church” dogma and politics.

Meanwhile, almost every opportunity the mainstream media has had to moderate or qualify themselves in relation to the Russian collusion narrative has been rejected in favor of all-out attacks.

They had better be right.

Like most American cultural and civic institutions, the old media is already distrusted by historic numbers of Americans, but has not yet been dealt a knockout blow. If it turns out that there was no collusion, CNN has become the Ivy League version of InfoWars.

Trump has already begun to wrest the #fakenews spear—hand-forged for use against him by titans like Obama, Clinton, CNN, and the New York Times—from their hands. The question is whether he’s able to drive it right through their beating hearts over the next year on the matter of collusion. Their hands are wrapped around his so tightly it looks—and, if he is right, will continue to look—as if we are witnessing a kind of old media seppuku.

It is the fact that they are waging total war against an active opponent in the White House that makes this a potential last stand: regardless of the usual obfuscation in the aftermath, if it turns out old media is wrong about Russian collusion and digital media, its collapse will be complete. It will diminish over the next few years, to be re-processed and subsumed forever into a new digital landscape.

For most Americans, the results will be deeply unsettling, but mesmerizing: like watching the old family car catch fire, crackle, and melt as it goes up in smoke.

In the meantime, it would be wise for Silicon Valley to hedge its bets. Thoughtful observers ought to recognize the frenzied desperation and shrieking hysteria coming from the side with the most to lose. Methinks they protest too much.

Blame President Trump all you want. He didn’t actively work for decades to create a “post-truth” era. Our educational and cultural leaders did. He didn’t “weaponize” communications technology or the federal government. His predecessors did. He didn’t destabilize democracy. That happened under the long and increasingly decadent watch of our ruling class, which is now irrationally blinded by rage that their house is on fire.

President Trump didn’t start the fire. The fire summoned him.

Impeach him tomorrow, and it will rage on. Install an establishmentarian from either party in his place, and the fires will only burn brighter and more dangerously than they did before.

Let those with ears to hear and minds to apprehend begin to think longer term about new modes and orders of rhetoric, and new coalitions of power. Take some advice from Generation Z: “Let the past die.”

American Greatness, 2018.03.23 By Matthew J. Peterson – Vice President of Education at the Claremont Institute. As a professor, Dr. Peterson has taught courses on political philosophy, American government, rhetoric, and media at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, Loyola Marymount University, and Claremont McKenna College, among others. Dr. Peterson graduated from Thomas Aquinas College, and received his M.A. in politics and Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate University.

#anti-establishment #politics #president trump

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goicelevstuff · 7 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on Coinlus.com

Old LessWrong conversations seem to be spot-on in predicting the prices of Bitcoin, as the now-archival discussion sounds prophetic.

While we are discussing the future of Bitcoin in terms of Wall Street and regulators, older discussions from 2011 reveal what the thought process of early adopters may have been. On Bitcoin making people wealthy:One of the most active forums for Bitcoin was LessWrong, a lively hive of futurism, transhumanism, scientific skepticism - and, additionally, Bitcoin and cryptography. The LessWrong discussion of early adopters contains some surprising gems.

"I think the probability of Bitcoin succeeding is very low. I would not put it at a million to one, though, so I recommend that you go out and buy a few bitcoins if you have the technical chops. My financial advice is to not buy more than ten, which should be F-U money if Bitcoin wins," wrote Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin).

Later to become an alt-right cult figure (though denying he is alt-right himself), he turned out to be partially correct. Still, 10 BTC is indeed F-U money, in many cases. For Yarvin, Bitcoin may be a small reward, especially as he was recently revealed to be a persona non grata on the Google campus. The above further reveals how much of a niche project Bitcoin was back in 2011.

Bitcoin’s Value

User Wei-Dai gave some early advise on mining vs. buying Bitcoin at $1:

"If you value 1 BTC at $25, you should just buy BTC with cash directly. I understand there are websites that allow you to do this, and the current price is less than $2 per BTC. Apparently, either most people have not considered that a bitcoin may eventually be worth more than $10,000, or they think the probability of this happening is closer to 0.01%."

At above $11,000, and at one point with a price of $19,000, BTC must have done the impossible.

Mining and Hard Forks

And then user Isparrish went on to predict the advent of mining rigs, happening around 2013:

"However there is probably a near future where customized ASICs (structured ASICs initially) are the most profitable kind of mining -- something for which a large number of shareholders and a small number of specialists is the more favorable strategy."

And JoshuaZ was prophetic on the issue of Bitcoin forks:

"That's a major reason why governments generally like to control currency. Forking currency can be quite bad. The good news is that when one doesn't have physical currency having two different cryptographic currencies in circulation shouldn't be hard to deal with. One could even imagine software the converts between them nearly seamlessly."

As Bitcoin struggles to find a directions, with predictions ranging from total obliteration to a price of $1 million, a similar discussion is going on. Perhaps the answers would be clearer in another 10 years. But one thing is sure, LessWrong was right in the advice to at least buy a bit of BTC at one dollar apiece. - http://bit.ly/2vDfXp8 - Coinlus.com

#bitcoin #BTC #Bitcoin #Cryptocurrency

0 notes

scelebmagazine-blog · 7 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on Coinlus.com

Old LessWrong conversations seem to be spot-on in predicting the prices of Bitcoin, as the now-archival discussion sounds prophetic.

Bitcoin’s Value

User Wei-Dai gave some early advise on mining vs. buying Bitcoin at $1:

At above $11,000, and at one point with a price of $19,000, BTC must have done the impossible.

Mining and Hard Forks

And then user Isparrish went on to predict the advent of mining rigs, happening around 2013:

And JoshuaZ was prophetic on the issue of Bitcoin forks:

#bitcoin #BTC

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 7 years ago

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The dudes exposed by alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos' gross emails

Where do I even start. BuzzFeed News got its hands on a bunch of emails and documents from white nationalist troll Milo Yiannopoulos, and they're disgusting.

Yiannopoulos was the tech editor for Breitbart, until he resigned after seemingly condoning pedophilia.

SEE ALSO: Google algorithm fail puts 4chan's wrongly named Las Vegas gunman on top of search

It's an epically long read, so let's break it down, shall we? Here are the main take-aways from the story BuzzFeed ran on Thursday:

Men in tech media corresponded with Milo

Here are the men who associate with Yiannopoulos.

1. Dan Lyons: The former Forbes senior editor wrote on two seasons of HBO's Silicon Valley, a sitcom about the egalitarian wonderland that is the tech industry. He reportedly corresponded with Milo several times about GamerGate, which was supposedly about "ethics" in gaming journalism, but was really about misogynistic trolls harassing women.

According to BuzzFeed, he "emailed Yiannopoulos ('my little troublemaker') periodically to wonder about the birth sex of Zoë Quinn, another GamerGate target, and Amber Discko, the founder of the feminist website Femsplain, and to suggest a story about the public treatment of the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who had been accused of sexual assault in a lawsuit that the plaintiff eventually dropped."

This did not come to a shock to some women in the industry.

Starting with Dan Lyons (tech people yelled at me for once writing negatively about him and called him "one of the good guys"): pic.twitter.com/Akl4eDgM8I

— Lily Herman (@lkherman) October 5, 2017

No one reading https://t.co/yd25JXnrag should be shocked about Dan Lyon's involvement in anything misogynist. https://t.co/NR3fAVOna7

— Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) October 5, 2017

Kumail Nanjiani, one of the stars of Silicon Valley, weighed in later on Twitter.

This excerpt from the @BuzzFeed story made me sick to my stomach. Ugh. https://t.co/SHxwEgalLa pic.twitter.com/7fku5HhEl2

— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) October 5, 2017

2. Mitchell Sunderland: Seriously, WTF. He's a senior staff writer for Broadly, which is Vice's channel meant to "provide a sustained focus on the issues that matter most to women."

In a May 2016 email, according to BuzzFeed, he asked Milo to "Please mock this fat feminist" — referring to Lindy West, from Jezebel, the New York Times, and other publications.

A Vice spokesperson told Mashable, "We are shocked and disappointed by this highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct. We just learned about this and have begun a formal review into the matter."

The next day, the company told BuzzFeed that it had fired Sunderland.

3. David Auerbach: The former Slate tech writer, according to BuzzFeed, once passed Milo "background information about the love life of Anita Sarkeesian," who was bombarded with threats and insults during GamerGate for the sin of pointing out sexist tropes in video games.

"Inasmuch as the story concerns me, it is utter bullshit," Auerbach told Mashable.

4. Vivek Wadhwa: The tech entrepreneur and fellow at Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering also reportedly connected with Yiannopoulos, once to complain about a boycott of a Kickstarter game. He also complained about the backlash Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham got over an essay about gender inequality, saying political correctness "has gone too far. The alternative is communism — not equality."

When contacted by Mashable, Wadhwa said, "A lot of this is shocking to me and goes against everything I believe in."

"I have known Milo since 2009, when I was introduced to him at TechCrunch by one of their editors (I was a guest columnist). Since then, he started his own publication, The Kernel, and was a strong proponent of skilled immigration and had me write a lengthy piece about my research on this subject. I’ve also known him as a gay who was afraid to step out of the closet and of Jewish descent. So this is not the Milo that I am reading about."

He stood behind the link he sent to Milo, saying the women behind the Kickstarter campaign "were very good women being attacked unfairly."

"And on Paul Graham, I still stand behind him—he is a good human being and has done a lot for women. I had sent these to other journalists also because I wanted to set the record straight."

Milo often looked to virulent racists and fascists for feedback

Who was Yiannopoulos talking to when he wasn't corresponding with tech and media's best and brightest? He apparently asked advice from these fine gentlemen:

1. Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer: The system administrator for neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer asked his followers to disrupt the funeral of Heather Heyer, who was murdered while protesting white nationalists in Charlottesville.

2. Curtis Yarvin: This dude literally wants a return to feudalism. It doesn't get more reactionary than this, unless some alt-right asshole pushes for mankind to revert to single-celled organisms.

3. Devin Saucier: He helps edit a white nationalist magazine and belonged to a "white power wolf cult" (???), one of whose members "pleaded guilty to setting fire to a historic black church."

He was funded by a family of billionaires

Here are the populists who funded Milo's rise to the bottom.

Here's why it matters

Yiannopoulos actively sought the advice of white nationalists and neo-Nazis who want to create authoritarian white ethno-states (don't ask how they plan to "get rid" of America's many minorities). He was funded by billionaires who helped make his ideas mainstream — enough to catch the ear of "mainstream" journalists, academics, and tech entrepreneurs. And he was guided by Steve Bannon, who was chief strategist to President Donald Trump.

Image: Getty Images

Think about that. According to BuzzFeed, one of Yiannopoulos' passwords began with "LongKnives1290," a reference to the night Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of his political enemies and the year King Edward I expelled Jews from England.

This is how racist, sexist, and fascist ideas get smoothed over for public acceptance — and how they worm their way into policy at the highest levels. And many of the people pushing those ideas are ordinary bros who seem like "good guys."

WATCH: Here's the difference between the 1982 'Blade Runner' and Philip Dick's novel that inspired it

#_author:Keith Wagstaff #_uuid:4cad7edc-59c8-35e4-9f9f-6904411d17c0 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

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96thdayofrage · 7 years ago

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Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. “The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT,” white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election. “I have seen so many people like that.” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, told me he gets donations from Silicon Valley, and that Santa Clara County, home to Apple and Intel, is his site’s largest traffic source. Chuck Johnson, the publisher of the conspiracy-mongering site Got News, said he gets lots of page views from the San Francisco Bay Area.

“If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode.”

After Peinovich was outed, he also insisted to me that many techies secretly identify with the alt-right, which he attributed to a backlash against the “corporate feminist and diversity agenda” of tech companies. “The fact that speaking up about this virtually guarantees career and social suicide, as in my case, shows why so many white males in tech would be attracted to the alt-right.”

None of these alt-right figures would provide any data to support their claims. As I’ve reported, some alt-right sites have wildly overstated their reach. Moreover, the tech industry is renowned for its globalist outlook: Public-opinion surveys conducted by a Stanford political economist have found that rank-and-file workers in Silicon Valley exhibit less racial resentment and more favorable views toward most forms of immigration than average Americans.

Nonetheless, “alt-techies,” as Spencer and others call them, do appear to play a role in a movement that first incubated in the backwaters of the internet and eventually spread online with the rise of Trump. Some heroes of the far right are associated with tech: They include former Breitbart News “tech editor” Milo Yiannopoulos; the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer (a.k.a. Weev); and the video gaming vlogger Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, whose “Pewdiepie” YouTube channel featuring Nazi-themed jokes has 54 million subscribers. (Last month Kjellberg apologized for the jokes and said he is not a Nazi.)

There are also successful figures in the tech industry who appeal to and have commingled with the alt-right: The DeploraBall, a gathering of far-right activists and conspiracy theorists during Trump’s inauguration, was co-organized by software investor Jeff Giesea and attended by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel.San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin is known for launching the pro-authoritarian “neoreactionary” movement and reportedly has been in contact with Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. (Yarvin denies this.) Giesea and Yarvin, both of whom I interviewed, reject the “alt-right” label for its associations with white nationalism, yet they share the movement’s disdain for the race and gender politics of the left. (Thiel’s media representative did not respond to a request for comment from him.)

To further gauge the influence of the alt-right in tech, I interviewed seven people in the industry who embrace aspects of the movement. They included current or former employees of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, some of whom responded to me after I reached out to them through their Facebook pages. They asked that I not publish their names, citing concerns about their jobs. I also interviewed two techies associated with the Daily Stormer; one declined to disclose his identity to me but has a posting history on the site indicative of working in tech in the Bay Area.

Three of the alt-techies I interviewed said explicitly that they were white nationalists. The others did not identify that way, but they emphasized their belief in racial or gender differences in IQ or social behavior, and strongly rejected identity politics, affirmative action, and what they see as toxic political correctness. Their views shed light on how the alt-right has found a receptive audience on the margins, at least, of the tech world.

A former product manager for a top tech company who now consults for Twitter told me that white and Asian male domination in the tech sector has more to do with innate abilities and culture than discrimination. “If you even try to posit that racism and sexism aren’t why women and minorities aren’t making it, that it’s some combination of talent and values, people’s heads just explode,” he says. “They just refuse to even float the idea.”

“I’m not necessarily saying any one race is bad,” says “Mark,” a former software developer for Yahoo and Facebook. “But we should at least agree that statistically, race and sex genes do make us differ enough on average to make things uneven in certain areas.”

“The history of nearly every field of science and engineering was driven by white Europeans,” declares a 45-year-old computer chip designer who says he lives in Berkeley, California, and who posts under the name “White Morpheus” on the Daily Stormer. “Nobody will say their real feelings [about the alt-right] because a mob of fat blue-hair complainers will drive you away from your career forever. Peter Thiel coming out [for Trump] was a joy to us all, because he could show his support for the Trump train where we could not.”

In 1990, Ku Klux Klan “Grand Dragon” Don Black created Stormfront as a dial-up computer bulletin board for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s campaign for Louisiana governor. By 1995 it had evolved into the first major public website dedicated to promoting white supremacy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But online hate speech mostly remained confined to its traditional base of neo-Nazis and Klansmen until the launch in 2003 of 4chan. Originally conceived as an anonymous message board for discussing Japanese anime and manga, 4chan attracted a cult following among techies at around the same time that its political discussion board, now known as /pol/ (short for “politically incorrect”), became a hotbed for racist jokes and ironically intended Hitler memes.

The political glue binding the predominately young, male 4chan community is essentially anti-leftist: a disdain for identity politics and so-called “social justice warriors.” This attitude thrives amid a culture of anonymity, in which status ostensibly comes from page views rather than one’s gender, ethnic, or social background. “Larry,” a software engineer for Google and an alt-right fan, points to the infamous 4chan post, “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” where one 4channer profanely lectures another about how online life is a meritocracy in which gender should play no role.

Yet, hostility toward women and people of color thrives on 4chan and on Reddit, the social sharing site whose political and gaming forums /r/the_donald and /r/kotakuinaction are popular with the alt-right. In 2014, 4chan and Reddit users launched an elaborate campaign of rape and death threats against female video game developers that became known as Gamergate. They found champions in Yiannopoulos, who argued that the true victims were the men whose gaming culture was being destroyed by “feminist bullies” and the “achingly politically correct” tech press, and in Mike Cernovich, a blogger who has trumpeted the neuroticism and other alleged weaknesses of women as well as what he claims to be the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. When former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao last year banned five “harassing subreddits,” including one called ShitNiggersSay, the move unleashed weeks of bigoted trolling (a.k.a. “shitposting”) and digital vandalism on the site—and a migration to a Reddit copycat site, Voat. (More recently, similar migrations took place after Reddit banned /r/altright and discussion of the fake-news scandal #PizzaGate.)

The anonymity of 4chan and Reddit makes it impossible to tell the extent to which they are dominated by tech workers, though an abiding interest from the tech presssuggests considerable overlap. “It’s definitely geek culture,” says McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, who has studied how 4chan gave rise to the hactivist group Anonymous. “Clint,” a Valley cybersecurity startup founder and longtime visitor to the site, told me that the majority of active users on 4chan/pol/ are in tech, though typically in lower-level system administrator and tech support jobs that come with a lot of downtime during the workday. Dale Beran, who recently wrote about the political history of 4chan, argues that techies have become less dominant as 4chan and similar sites have expanded, though they still play a role: “We can define [4chan users] by their retreat into the computer, which means a lot of them have computer skills—whether that’s networking or coding or whatever—but to some it may have simply been World of Warcraft.”

“Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” declares one notorious hacker.

Before Gamergate, Larry, the Google software engineer, was “a standard Democrat straight-voting person,” as he puts it. But reading about the movement in the tech press and on pro-Gamergate websites “did highlight some of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies with positions on the left,” he says. A comment in a Gamergate thread led Larry to the Unz Review, a website run by Palo Alto tech entrepreneur and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz. There, Larry says he was exposed to treatises on “human biological diversity” expounding on the supposed cognitive differences between intellectually superior and inferior races.

Human biological diversity has also gained currency in the Valley through computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Starting in 2007, in series of blog posts often cited by alt-right followers, Yarvin laid out a political philosophy known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment.” Combining a technocratic sensibility with reactionary political thought, neoreaction rejects Enlightenment concepts—such as democracy and equality of the races and sexes—and instead advocates something much closer to authoritarianism. Yarvin believes government would work much better if run like a tech company and helmed by an all-powerful CEO president. He spoke admiringly of Napoleon, whom he considers to be “kind of the Steve Jobs of France.”

Yarvin’s blog combines dorky programmer lingo with dense references to obscure, proto-fascist political texts. “When I started blogging 10 years ago, the availability of completely unorthodox written content [online] was mostly confined to the pre-1923 corpus, which Google did such a nice job scanning,” Yarvin told me in an email. He believes that software programmers are attracted to his writings because they “are always looking for something to do with their restless, fidgety brains. Especially if it’s weird and doesn’t involve dealing with physical humans.”

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump’s transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote on the Cato Institute’s blog in 2009, adding that women and “welfare beneficiaries” have through their voting habits “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women’s suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on “unelected technocratic agencies.”)

Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin’s cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by “presenting alternative viewpoints.” In the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually “seductions that are later regretted”—a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes, “Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.”

DeploraBall co-sponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Trump’s campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News contentand memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their “featured guests” list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed, “I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself.”

In 2014, Jesse Jackson began pushing Silicon Valley tech companies to disclose statistics about the racial and gender composition of their workforces. By the following summer, he had pressured Google, Facebook, Apple, and many other major tech companies to reveal their paucity of black, Hispanic, and female employees and commit to making improvements. But when he appeared on Reddit that summer to answer questions about diversity in tech, he faced a virulent backlash. By far the most up-voted question began, “You are an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain.”

The comment came from an anonymous account that was later deleted; few people in Silicon Valley are willing to question the value of diversity out in the open. “If there was [opposition to diversity policy], it’s probably something someone says to themselves in the car on the way home or on the bus on the way back to San Francisco,” says Reed Galen, a GOP consultant who advises tech companies and has been trolled online by the alt-right over his criticism of Trump.

Chuck Johnson, who runs the pro-Trump site Got News from his home in Fresno, California, and claims to have received funding offers from wealthy tech investors, points to an obvious outlet for closeted alt-techies: “A lot of these people see a sort of ostracism takes place [after they question the value of diversity], and they either rebel against it internally or they go online and they have a different identity and they shitpost on Reddit.”

Several alt-techies I interviewed said they were fans of A Troublesome Inheritance, a national bestseller published in 2014 by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade that makes a case for the existence of differences in average IQ and behavior between races. The book and others like it have been widely criticized by geneticists as misleading, overly speculative, and not based on scientific consensus, but the alt-techies claim such critiques are just political correctness. “Nobody wants to touch it or admit it for fear of being branded alt-right,” Mark, the Facebook engineer, told me.

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night.

White supremacists see the historical dominance of Silicon Valley by white males as a reflection of the world’s natural order. “The reality is that for the vast majority of all human civilization, the majority of makers have been white,” insists Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. Weev, a notorious troll and hacker who says he does tech support for the Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff. “Most contributions that built the internet came from white people,” he says, but now “our contributions are essentially being stolen from us.”

Alt-techies are scornful of South Asians working in Silicon Valley under H-1B visas. White Morpheus, the Daily Stormer reader, told me that he became a white supremacist after working with “unqualified subcontinentals who were brought in by visa fraud to drive down American engineering wages” and who “produce subpar work product.” (Before I contacted him, White Morpheus had posted on Daily Stormer about forming a neo-Nazi meetup group in Silicon Valley and using programming tools to create more video games “like Angry Goy.”)

The H-1B visa program, which Trump has vowed to reform, is unpopular among many tech workers due to concerns about its effect on wages and job security. Studies have shown that the largest recipients of H-1B visas are outsourcing firms, and that H-1B workers get paid less money than their American counterparts for the same work. But hardcore racists see an opening to turn the H-1B debate into a recruitment tool in the Valley. “A bill is being introduced in the House of Representatives that will neutralize the economic advantages these anti-American companies get from gaming the H1-b visa system,” a contributor to the Daily Stormer wrote recently. “If the cucks in Congress don’t block it, the not-so-humanitarian motives of big business in browning and third-worldizing America will be revealed.”

“Tomorrow, being a Hispanic, Black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary,” the Latino founder of a Silicon Valley startup wrote on Facebook on election night. The post elicited an outpouring of solidarity from many Bay Area techies—but not from Andrew Torba, an alum of the Y-Combinator tech incubator, who tweeted a screenshot of the post with the line “Build the wall.”

When other Y-Combinator graduates began criticizing Torba on Facebook, he waded into the fray: “All of you: Fuck off,” he wrote. “Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.” Using an alt-right term meant to demean mainstream conservatives, he added, “I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a president into office, cucks.”

Y-Combinator soon banned Torba from its alumni network for “speaking in a threatening, harassing way towards other YC founders,” in violation of its ethics policy. Torba denied threatening or harassing YC founders and called the ban “a quintessential example of Silicon Valley censorship in action.” He later turned down my request to speak with him about the incident by posting parts of my email to him on social media with the comment “We don’t interview with fake news sites.”

Picking fights online may have helped Torba’s startup Gab, a social-media network that quickly positioned itself as a haven for alt-right-ers banned from Twitter. Gab’s frog logo is reminiscent of the alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog, and Torba has posted on Gab what could be construed as riffs on the Pepe hand signal and the alt-right’s red-pill meme. (A Gab spokesman said Torba does not identify as part of the alt-right.) Trump’s victory seemed to encourage other alt-techies to speak up, albeit pseudonymously.

“What if some cultures are better?” a commenter wrote a few days later on Y-Combinator’s popular social forum, Hacker News. “Why should we respect foreign cultures if they don’t respect our own? Why should you lose your job if you make a joke in public that some people deem offensive? Why is racism against whites and sexism against men acceptable?”

Another commenter on the thread chimed in: “Based on the tone of the comments around here lately, I’m getting a sense that HN has been populated by closeted alt-right for a while now.” (A few weeks later, Hacker News announced a “political detox week” in which political stories and threads were banned.)

A similar controversy has played out in recent months on Reddit—another young, male techie-dominated site—as r/The_Donald has risen to become one of the site’s most active subreddits. Its participants are notorious for trolling other Reddit communities and attacking people based on their religion, race, gender, and sexual identity, as Gizmodo‘s Bryan Menegus has documented. Citing two former Trump campaign officials, Politico‘s Ben Schreckinger recently reported that Trump’s campaign team privately communicated last fall with r/The_Donald’s most active users to seed new trends and feed catchy memes from the site back to Trump social-media director Dan Scavino.

The gaming vlogger Pewdiepie, whose YouTube channel is the world’s largest, made rape jokes early in his career and sometimes uses the word “slut” as an insult. Since August, he has made nine videos featuring Nazi imagery or anti-Semitic humor, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. (He later apologized but also said the Journal took the remarks out of context.) In a vlog posted in January that has been viewed more than 7 million times, he jokes about getting banned from Fiverr, a website where freelancers offer their services for $5, after hiring people to make a video of themselves holding a sign that said, “DEATH TO ALL JEWS”—drawing kudos from neo-Nazis. In February, Disney’s Maker Studios said it would no longer run PewDiePie’s network and YouTube canceled the release of the second season of his reality show, Scare PewDiePie.

The alt-techies I spoke with remain aware of the risks of emerging further from the shadows. “If I posted publicly about what I told you, I’d get fired,” says Larry, the Google software engineer. “Even with Trump, there is huge cultural inertia.”

#tech

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