— 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 … Continue reading “Silicon Valley Politics”
— 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.
