After listening to an alarming interview on Fresh Air with Gil Duran, author of “'The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.”
It seems not that long ago that Silicon Valley techies were seen as genius-heroes, who brought us this wonderful and marvelous age we live in. Now we have loonies like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Marc Andreesen openly espousing autocracy and fascism and proposing autonomous new cities where they can rule without interference from any government.
WTF happened?
Just as an example of the vibe shift: 10 years ago we had “Silicon Valley”, where all the characters were lovable nerds (and wicked smart). Now this fall on CBS, we have “Cupertino” which has this official summary:
CUPERTINO is a David vs. Goliath legal drama set in the heart of Silicon Valley that follows a lawyer (Mike Colter) who is being cheated out of his stock options by his former employer, a tech start-up. Refusing to back down, he joins forces with another recently fired attorney (Rachel Keller) to represent those taken advantage of by the tech elite and help them fight back in a high-stakes battle against the Goliaths controlling Silicon Valley.
In an attempt to clarify the mythology surrounding James Bond, I tracked his old rival down to his headquarters in the Ministry of Inward Investment in the breakaway Republic of Transdniestria. Somewhat suspicious at first, Mr. Blofeld relaxed as soon as he realized I was not pursuing him on behalf of the FSB, CIA, or IMF, and kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. Now aged 72, Blofeld is a cheerful veteran of numerous high-tech start-ups, and not a few multinationals where, as a specialist in international risk management and arbitrage, he applied his unique skills to business expansion. Today he is semi-retired but has agreed to work in an voluntary capacity as director of the State investment agency.
Over the course of an hour, Ernst explained to me how he first became aware that the UK was attempting to sabotage his business interests. “It was back in 1960 or thereabouts that they first tried to destroy one of my subsidiaries. Until then I hadn’t really had anything to do with them, but I believe one of my rivals in the phosphate mining business put it about that my man on site was some sort of spy, and they sent this Bond fellow – not just to arrest him or charge him with some trumped-up nonsense, but to kill him.” His lips paled with indignation at he contemplated the iniquity of the situation: that agents of the British government might go after an honest businessman for no better reason than an unsubstantiated allegation that he was spying on American missile tests.
Were we watching the same show? You had tech moguls on there that were injecting themselves with the blood of young, fit men, killed elephants to make a point and rode on private jets separately and played chess online rather than share a jet. And that was all just one character. Pretty much all the existing wealthy people depicted on the show were terrible people.
And the main cast wasn’t much better. Two of them debated letting a guy die so one of them could comfort the grieving ex-girlfriend. And Richard was consistently shown as styming his own success in self-destructive ways.
@jsc1953 - Silicon Valley was about a bunch douchey nerds who spent most of the series dealing with egomaniacal, if not insane fictionalized versions of the people you mentioned.
Not to mention that Bond himself is an alcoholic womanizing assassin who serves as an anachronistic instrument of a defunct empire.
What “happened” IMHO started back in the 80s and 90s where the success of Gates with Microsoft and Jobs with Apple (and others) ushered in an age where it became possible to become a billionaire seemingly overnight by building world-changing tech.
The rise of the internet and subsequent dot-com bubble cranked that narrative up to 11.
Then came the rise of social media with Zuckerberg. Which also by the way not only enabled them to change the world but also control the narrative.
So yeah, after decades of generating tech billionaires in a somewhat insular and incestuous system of big tech firms, startups, and venture capital, we have this class of uber-wealthy people who both have come to believe they are smarter and know better than everyone else in the world while being completely out of touch with how people actually live.
If they have become Bond villains, the only true way to defeat them is to ignore the urge to monologue and exploit their fatal flaw: supreme arrogance. Shoot them before they explain their master plan, use Silicon gadgets wisely, and always destroy their secret volcano or island base control panel before leaving.
I think people’s memories are also distorted in forgetting just how short the blip of tech messiahnism actually was. The 90s tech scene canonically believed that most big tech companies were evil corruptions: Bill Gates and Windows, Oracle, Cisco, Compaq, Dell. The constant parade of DRM and suing of pirates. The “good guys” were the open source community, people releasing tech demos and products without any expectation of payment, and Apple as the main exception among certain groups.
The Web 2.0 era was when the tech-as-heroes boom really hit: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix were all hot young startups that were going to disrupt the existing corrupt incumbents and show how tech was going to be done the “right way”. People pointed to Arab Spring as tech bringing freedom to oppressed people, how Amazon’s customer obsession was killing the bloated corpse of Barnes & Noble, how Google was going to scan all the books in the world and give them out for free because it had the motto “Don’t be Evil” etc. Bill Gates reformed his image as a philanthropist and everyone still holding out memories of the “old Gates” was derided as being old fashioned.
But that was maybe only 15 years: From about 2001 or so when Google became a household name overnight to 2016 when Trump got elected for the first time.
All of tech prior and post that point has more in common with each other than it does the middle of that boom.
I disagree that there was any change where they suddenly became evil. Google et al. were evil from the get-go, and any perceived worsening between 2001 and 2016 by the end user is due to the tried-and-tested model of Enshittification.
What’s alarming me is that they’ve gone from being techno - business evil, to socio-political evil. If one doesn’t like their product or business practices, that’s one thing. But trying to tear down the fabric of our society is another.