Silicon Valley Liberalism
A while ago, I stumbled across the following study of the political opinions of tech entrepreneurs, which found a distinctive pattern. Tech entrepreneurs tend to have liberal positions on social issues, globalism, and redistribution, while having conservative opinions on regulation.
Specifically, according to the questionnaire, tech entrepreneurs believe the following:
Globalism
- We should not pay…
Taking this at face value, it is possible that my own politics could be fairly described as “Silicon Valley monarchism.”
What does that mean?
It’s always dangerous to delve into object-level politics casually, but in a very very basic and surface-level sense:
Freedom of speech, and other basic liberties, are very important. Universal distribution of wealth is very important. Avoiding wars and other destructive factional conflicts is very important. Having government that will act as though all individuals possess moral salience is very important. Capable technocratic management is very important.
All these things are so important, in fact, that they should be defended by a Leviathan of unparalleled power and unlimited domain. The vagaries of public opinion cannot be relied upon to do the job, and neither can any entity that must struggle continually to maintain control.
Where are you gonna find a friendly leviathan, though. This idea seems to suffer from the same problem as communism, where some part of the system needs to be infallible and completely benevolent for it to succeed (leviathan vs dictatorship of the proletariat)
Short version: it’s a serious problem, but engineering a friendly leviathan sounds so much easier than trying to jury-rig something friendly out of a large social system with a million moving parts.
There are also real issues with getting the system set up in the first place [conquest], and with securing and stabilizing it before it’s had the chance to become the recognized default [legitimacy]. I don’t mean to downplay things like this, I just think they’re more tractable than the equivalent problems in pretty much any other scheme.
Do you have previous writing where you go into more detail? I disagree for a number of reasons but I don’t want to make you go through counterarguments if you’ve made them a bunch of times before or something
Not on this topic. And in fact I don’t especially intend to discuss it further, right now. As I said, diving into object-level politics is dangerous; trying to explain a complicated network of related thoughts, or mount a serious defense of something, when you haven’t done the masses of necessary setup and prep work, seems almost certain to go very badly.