There's a strange DEI phobia some folks have picked up. I'm not particularly partial to DEI polices myself (I think many are misplaced at best), but also I can say I've never personally been hurt by them. But there are many people who feel very hurt by this idea of DEI, they're extremely emotional about it, and yet if you ask them what they personally have experienced ... it's often nothing.
It's wild that so much emotion, fear and anger can be stirred up with a topic that has not touched them.
I do wonder how we'll look back on this era in future generations. My theory is that COVID lockdowns in 2020 had a lasting impact few of us have really reckoned with. I think one understated impact is that the tech billionaire class disappeared (even further) into their own world and they haven't come back since.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in the article feels downstream of that. They're all in their own private chats frothing themselves into a storm over a crazy array of reactionary things and there's no-one in the room saying "hey, this sounds kind of nuts to me?". It's notable that Andreesen cites the summer of 2020 was an inflection point. The BLM protests are framed by these folks as an overcorrection of anti-racism or something like that. I see it differently: it was a large scale, somewhat cohesive social movement that came from the ground up. This terrifies Andreesen and his ilk and they see it as a personal affront. Couple that with the competition for hiring tech workers in the same era that gave engineers more power than they used to have... I'm convinced this even extends to the current hysteria for AI, too. They want to permanently reduce worker power in tech.
I find Marc Andreesen's mindset interesting and troubling. I could probably right a short book on it; He's so angry, it's very interesting to me the way he describes "the Deal". As like, I dunno, I'm really a narcississtic sociopath who doesn't want to help people, but if you were going to write a nice obituary I guess I would have but now I won't anymore.
It's like I think behavioral economics and incentives are interesting, and an important part of how we conduct social policy and face reality, but to lean into like "well fuck you for not providing the right incentives" rather than doing things because of the world you want to create; help people and build non-profits and etc. It all feels very pathological. If this is who he is, then I guess this is who he is! But don't blame the media for "Forcing you" to be shitty.
Also, I just don't buy into his whole "the woke elite kept people who grew up in my home towns down through woke/dei" because this is the same person who said:
"I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."
The thing is, I'm sure Marc's arguments make sense to alot of the people he's trying to talk to - other rich folks with grievance.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadIt's wild that so much emotion, fear and anger can be stirred up with a topic that has not touched them.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in the article feels downstream of that. They're all in their own private chats frothing themselves into a storm over a crazy array of reactionary things and there's no-one in the room saying "hey, this sounds kind of nuts to me?". It's notable that Andreesen cites the summer of 2020 was an inflection point. The BLM protests are framed by these folks as an overcorrection of anti-racism or something like that. I see it differently: it was a large scale, somewhat cohesive social movement that came from the ground up. This terrifies Andreesen and his ilk and they see it as a personal affront. Couple that with the competition for hiring tech workers in the same era that gave engineers more power than they used to have... I'm convinced this even extends to the current hysteria for AI, too. They want to permanently reduce worker power in tech.
Also, I just don't buy into his whole "the woke elite kept people who grew up in my home towns down through woke/dei" because this is the same person who said: "I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."
The thing is, I'm sure Marc's arguments make sense to alot of the people he's trying to talk to - other rich folks with grievance.