The battle over tech's values
If you’ve paid attention to the news in the last decade, you’ve probably noticed a negative turn in sentiment towards the tech industry, sometimes called the tech “backlash.”
Ask people what caused this backlash, and you’ll likely hear about how the unchecked spread of misinformation on tech platforms caused regulators to step in, triggering a public reckoning with tech’s impact on the world and its moral legitimacy as an industry. I’ve personally never resonated with this story; it simply doesn’t match my experience working in tech.
So I tried to tell the story I saw, where the tech backlash is explained not by surface-level media events, but a deeper clash between two generations of power in America, who each built their wealth in a different way, and accordingly have different views on how to shape the world and its future. That piece, published with Tablet Magazine, is out today.
I don’t think any essay has ever caused me so much grief. I started writing the first draft last summer, and since then it’s been through at least six major revisions (or perhaps that’s just when I lost count). It took just as long to find great editors to work with, who understood what I was trying to say and could help bring it into fruition. (Many thanks to Alana Newhouse and David Sugarman for their patience and hard work!)
I hope you’ll give it a read and let me know what you think. You can check it out below.
Thanks for the essay. It's a real and deepening schism and the term "counterelite" seems apt. I hope your term catches on, because it captures some of the contradictions in the movement. (It's definitely better than TESCREAL.)
But I think you're setting out the divisions in a way that's a little too friendly to the counterelite and their way of looking at the world. The counterelite see a vast conspiracy of institutional mediocrities holding us all back. But, is there anything that a16z has done in the past two years worthy of their own "it's time to build" essay? Axie Infinity? Few software people seem to be able to make the jump into the physical science innovations that we need today, no matter how interested. (Exception: Elon Musk).
You're expressing the counterelite ideology as one where "ambition" is the engine that saves the world. To be honest, I'm not sure that's accurate. The ideology of the counterelite is that not that innovation is good for everyone, it's that the individual innovator is all that matters. They openly dehumanize people who simply aren't part of their culture, calling them NPCs. Many embrace eugenics and see the withering of democracy as an actively good thing. They also embrace UBI, but not as a way to achieve economic justice or invest in the future; it's just a way to placate and distract the hordes of their inferiors.
Perhaps part of the backlash is that only white men and several Indian/Asian-American men apparently make up the world view and dominate perspectives. Zero Black people, zero Hispanics and two women (both referenced as wife of). How is that a relevant swath of society?