I'd make one adjustment to the thesis. It's not about money but a sophomoric grab for meaning. They all have way more than enough money. It's about a really bad mid-life crisis for a generation of aging Gen Xers
I try to resist psychologizing. It's unfalsifiable and essentially a form of ad hominem. Of course, that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
Even if we accept that the cause of the current situation is a series of mid-life psychological crises for leaders in the Tech industry, we should still inquire as to the structural conditions for why THESE men, in THIS industry, have ended up in such a crisis. There appears to be something specific to Tech that produces this sort of crisis in way that doesn't happen (nearly as much, anyways) to men in other industries. You don't see finance bros or oil&gas executives imagining that they can run the entire government like they do their own businesses, much less trying to upend our constitutional order. They mostly just want to keep the subsidies flowing and the carried interest loophole intact.
Kara Swisher offered Ezra Klein last week a psychologizing answer to why Tech is beset by such men: she claimed that techbros duffer from what she called "small dick energy" because techbros were almost all nerdy boys who didn't get the ass they wanted as teenagers and now that they've reached the apex of power they're decompensating for that. That might be true in some cases, but who knows? It's certainly an ad hominem claim. (And also cringe.)
I prefer a more structural answer: that there is something about the *ideology* of "Tech" that produces in its leaders megalomaniacal conceptions of their own understanding of the future. Leaders in other powerful industries, such finance or oil&gas execs, also put in huge efforts to assessing the future and make massive bets on how they think things are going to turn out. But "Tech" leaders have a much more grandiose, even messianic ideological self-conception: they believe they are MAKING a *radically new* future, and that they have a unique insight into how that future should be. That belief is what defines "tech" as a industry, as I tried to argue here: https://www.noemamag.com/the-myth-of-tech-exceptionalism/
Put it this way: what makes Tesla a "tech" company and not just, well, a car company like Toyota or BYD? The answer is, in fact, quite precisely: the messianic (if not millenarian) cult around its self-described "techno-king."
We're living through a real-world analog of the archetypal scene from the Road Runner cartoon, in which Wile E. Coyote goes careening over a precipice. For a few moments, he keeps going and floating as if there were still ground beneath his feet; it is only when he looks down, thus becoming cognitively aware of how the support beneath him is gone, that he begins to fall. The comic effect derives from the fact that it seems to be the cognitive break rather than the law of gravity that "causes" the fall.
Something similar applies in revolutionary moments. As a political regime starts definitively disintegrating, there is always a weird liminal period at the beginning when the regime continues to persist although its time is clearly over, as if it goes on living because it doesn’t notice that it is already dead. For normie Obama-Biden liberals, that moment ran from November 6 to January 20.
Looking down at the hell coming up at them, these folks are now realizing the gravity of the situation.
I'd make one adjustment to the thesis. It's not about money but a sophomoric grab for meaning. They all have way more than enough money. It's about a really bad mid-life crisis for a generation of aging Gen Xers
I try to resist psychologizing. It's unfalsifiable and essentially a form of ad hominem. Of course, that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
Even if we accept that the cause of the current situation is a series of mid-life psychological crises for leaders in the Tech industry, we should still inquire as to the structural conditions for why THESE men, in THIS industry, have ended up in such a crisis. There appears to be something specific to Tech that produces this sort of crisis in way that doesn't happen (nearly as much, anyways) to men in other industries. You don't see finance bros or oil&gas executives imagining that they can run the entire government like they do their own businesses, much less trying to upend our constitutional order. They mostly just want to keep the subsidies flowing and the carried interest loophole intact.
Kara Swisher offered Ezra Klein last week a psychologizing answer to why Tech is beset by such men: she claimed that techbros duffer from what she called "small dick energy" because techbros were almost all nerdy boys who didn't get the ass they wanted as teenagers and now that they've reached the apex of power they're decompensating for that. That might be true in some cases, but who knows? It's certainly an ad hominem claim. (And also cringe.)
I prefer a more structural answer: that there is something about the *ideology* of "Tech" that produces in its leaders megalomaniacal conceptions of their own understanding of the future. Leaders in other powerful industries, such finance or oil&gas execs, also put in huge efforts to assessing the future and make massive bets on how they think things are going to turn out. But "Tech" leaders have a much more grandiose, even messianic ideological self-conception: they believe they are MAKING a *radically new* future, and that they have a unique insight into how that future should be. That belief is what defines "tech" as a industry, as I tried to argue here: https://www.noemamag.com/the-myth-of-tech-exceptionalism/
Put it this way: what makes Tesla a "tech" company and not just, well, a car company like Toyota or BYD? The answer is, in fact, quite precisely: the messianic (if not millenarian) cult around its self-described "techno-king."
Thanks Venkat for leading me here.
You did. Superb work.
Any thoughts on next steps? Perhaps, if we’re lucky, this is a necesssry step to a better future? And hopefully not Gibson’s Jackpot future!
We're living through a real-world analog of the archetypal scene from the Road Runner cartoon, in which Wile E. Coyote goes careening over a precipice. For a few moments, he keeps going and floating as if there were still ground beneath his feet; it is only when he looks down, thus becoming cognitively aware of how the support beneath him is gone, that he begins to fall. The comic effect derives from the fact that it seems to be the cognitive break rather than the law of gravity that "causes" the fall.
Something similar applies in revolutionary moments. As a political regime starts definitively disintegrating, there is always a weird liminal period at the beginning when the regime continues to persist although its time is clearly over, as if it goes on living because it doesn’t notice that it is already dead. For normie Obama-Biden liberals, that moment ran from November 6 to January 20.
Looking down at the hell coming up at them, these folks are now realizing the gravity of the situation.