— Computer people in Silicon Valley are mainly very clever, but they’re weird about politics. Demographics say that upper-middle class people with college degrees who live in the suburbs should be moderate Republicans, but Republicans of any stripe are rare here, mainly confined to the venture capitalists and some corporate management, like John Chambers at Cisco.
While engineers in other parts of the country conform to their demographic, Silicon Valley’s rank-and-file tend to be split between Chomskyites, libertarians, and feminist Democrats. Chomsky appeals to people like hardware engineers who believe that human society has to look like the systems they design, where predictability comes out of complexity when big feedback loops govern the operation of many small circuits. Chomskyites, like all paranoid schizophrenics, are fundamentally lazy and want an all-embracing explanation without doing the work it takes to get literate on subjects as complicated as politics, culture, and media.
Libertarians understand at some level that there need to be rules for the masses of dumb people who predominate numerically, but they don’t feel that these rules should apply to them, and besides they don’t like keeping their rooms clean, so they’re caught in a sophomoric political philosophy. While I have some sympathy for that point of view, at the end of the day I realize that November votes for third parties are throw-aways, so I reject it. Libertarianism isn’t so much a philosophy as it is a non-philosophy that basically says “I’m too clever for this debate, so screw you, I’m going fishing.” Fishing is good, but it’s not politics.
Feminist democrats are the easiest to understand, because they’re just lonely boys trying hard to get laid in a sub-culture where males outnumber females about 20 to 1.
The one thing all these folks seem to agree on is that complicated human problems should have solutions simpler than your average hunk of application code, and when this thought takes hold in concrete form, the results are pathetic. They elect people like Mike Honda, a former schoolteacher with a 2-digit IQ, to Congress over much smarter Reeps like Jim Cuneen simply because Honda’s a Democrat, and they support people like Boxer, Barbara Lee, and Pete Stark, even though you’d be embarrassed to bring any of them home for Thanksgiving dinner.
A particularly sharp example of Silicon Valley political naivete is the essay on Dave Winer’s blog titled “Sharon Must Go.” Winer is the king of the Elf Clan that others have called the San Francisco web kids and I used to call the “Font Kiddiez.” He’s a common phenomenon in this valley, the accidental millionaire who made it big selling Mac applications in the 80s when nobody really quite knew what, if anything, the Mac was good for. He amuses himself now, while living off his interest, by building blogging tools. Here’s the essence of his argument:
I try to see both sides. Sharon went out of his way to press Palestinian buttons. He’s as responsible for the terrorist bombings, imho, as Arafat is.
The effort to see “both sides” doesn’t include any attempt to understand why Israel might like to avoid being wiped off the map, and the beef with Sharon seems to be a lurking suspicion that the Prime Minister is a troll who “punches buttons.” Winer also doesn’t quite seem to realize that the only possible successor to Sharon in the wings right now is Netanyahu, a more hawkish man than Sharon himself. And that moral equivalency thing is simply pathetic.
I find all of this disturbing because I realize that this Winer character, for all of his obvious flaws, is way smarter than the average human, so if he’s dead wrong about the war in the Middle East, how can the average man get it? Probably, because the average man doesn’t have as many mechanisms of defense going on as Winer, he’s better able to grasp the obvious. Whether you think the establishment of the state of Israel was a good thing or a bad thing in 1948, sensible people realize that that’s a done deal, and in 2002 the Israeli people have a right to live in peace and security, by whatever means are necessary. And Sharon’s personality isn’t really a factor.
I don’t see this piece going into Blog Nation, frankly.
Update: Dave comments on today’s J. D. Lasica piece on media East and West, and misses the point entirely, in a predictably navel-gazing rant confined to the Tech press. Sigh. Real soon now, I’m going to write about why the Tech press failed to warn us about the real nature of the Dot Com Swindle, a scam so vast it makes Enron look like small potatoes.
Interesting comments. Silicon Valley political views also remind me of Hayek’s statement about the “engineering mentality.”
A friend of mine who worked at Apple while Winer was still there thought his name aptly described his personality.
Heh heh. What did Hayek say about engineers?
It wasn’t so much about engineers per se. He used the phrase “engineering mentality” to describe the mindset of anyone who thinks he can create order and utopia merely by developing and executing a master plan for all kinds of complex social systems. I like the phrase because that’s how a lot of engineers actually think, even outside the office, as we know too well.
FA Hayek said that the engineering mentality was the mindset from “which all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives.”
Essentially, it’s the problem of hubris. Very smart people often HATE having rules decided for them by people whom they think are less intelligent, and this sometimes leads them into the type of libertarianism you describe. But there’s also a tendency by the very intelligent to think that they can run everything, that with just their wise benevolence/direction of funding/additional education/etc. everything would be so much better. They think that they’re smart enough to control and direct everything.
It’s why I’m afraid that the Randian type of libertarianism often leads to statism and technocratism. Too much hero-worship in her books.
It can be very difficult for the highly intelligent to learn when not to act, when to trust others, or when to let natural forces take their course. (Or as the late Edward C. Banfield put it, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”)
Of course, there is a tendency for smart people to take an extreme position (like your position relative to Israel), and make ad hominem attacks on any person that cares to disagree.
In this case, Arafat’s desire to remove Israel is matched by an equally odious desire by Sharon and Netanyahu to colonize the West Bank. Both desires are out of pace with the larger world and must be extinguished. Your type of thinking is the fuel for the fascists running Israel today to continue to place people in the lands they occupy in concentration camps while they move quickly to take their land. It is also fuel for people on the other side to continue to justify the random slaughter of innocents in Israel.
Get a life. Moderate your mind and join the real world.
Dude says:
Interesting theory. The actual reason the Palestinians are in refugee camps is because they don’t want to live in Israel, and the Arab countries won’t let them immigrate, but don’t let me interfere with your delusions.
Nice job with the personal attack.
I’M WILLING TO GIVE BENNETT READING LESSONS FOR FREE. WE CAN START WITH THE A,B,C’S AND IN ABOUT 10 YEARS MOVE ON TO HISTORY 101. AFTER ABOUT 20 YEARS OF AMERICAN HISTORY WE CAN EXPAND INTO OTHER AREAS, MIDDLE-EAST 101 AND HOW CORPORATE PROPAGANDA INFLUENCES UNWITTING-MODERN-DAY STALINISTS-ATTEMPTING-TO-SEEM-PATRIOTIC 101. THEN ABOUT 10 YEARS LATER WE CAN PROBABLY JUST BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND ONE SENTENCE OF CHOMSKY’S. FOR HIS DISSERTATION I’D SUGGEST BENNET READ ALL OF CHOMSKY’S BOOKS AT LEAST 3 TIMES EACH AND DO A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF ALL THE MISTAKES CHOMSKY MAKES. THIS SHOULDN’T TAKE LONG AS THERE WILL BE SO FEW. PERHAPS, HE CAN THEN COMPILE ALL OF HIS FINDINGS INTO A 2 PAGE BOOK AND SELL IT TO SOME WAR CRIMINAL SUCH AS HENRY KISSINGER. WHEN WILL CLASSES BEGIN?