The thing about oligarchs is that all of them have been spectacularly lucky; there is no other way of becoming an oligarch. And the thing about being extraordinarily lucky is that change is inherently bad for you, because there are vastly more changes that make you worse off than make you better off. Thus every oligarch has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - being "conservative" in the natural language sense.
Conservatives tend to prefer allying with reactionaries rather than democrats because the former want to preserve social hierarchies whereas the latter want to flatten them. The fallacy in this thinking is that reactionaries want to replace the people at the top of the hierarchy, and they usually succeed. But conservatives never learn.
Silicon Valley techbros do add a special ingredient to this fallacy: they are all persuaded that they have reached their present position by creating the future. They think that they will be able to direct change, to bend it to their advantage. They will not, because their agents the reactionaries will choose the changes that benefit themselves, not their erstwhile allies. And even if the techbros could control change, there would still be unforeseen consequences; "even the very wise cannot see all ends", and these people are very far from being very wise.
It could work the other way: they could be extraordinarily risk-averse, or they could be extraordinarily overconfident in their ability to manage situations. It depends on whether they realize they have been really lucky or believe that they are really smart.
Yes, I like your formulation, it is more succinct. The older, landed aristocracy paradoxically considered themselves innately superior and yet were aware of the precarity of their position; after all, younger sons and unfortunately married daughters were routinely pushed to the edges of the charmed circle and beyond. In Patrick O'Brian's formulation, "they worshiped capital with a steady and unswerving devotion." They are inclined to be risk-averse.
The SV aristocracy considers themselves to be "self-made", often to have come from "humble origins". While this often turns out to be an exaggeration upon inspection, it is undeniably true that they have reached undreamed of heights by gambling all-or-nothing 20 times in a row and winning every time. That can't be a coincidence, right? After all, what are the odds? So of course they think they will win the 21st throw of the dice too; it seems perfectly rational to seek risk.
So are the Junkers of Yakima overconfident because they think they are smart and aggressive go-getters, or overscared because they exaggerate the vulnerability of their positions? Brad
Your experience with these types is both more extensive and less parochial than my own; I think I may have to defer to your opinion.
One point I concede immediately is that the world is messier and more complicated than my simple typology. There are cases where fear and overconfidence are superposed; what I am suggesting is that when the wave function collapses, we are usually left with fear. There are cases where the question seems ill-posed. One encounters Toronto's old money on the boards of arts organizations and charities, where they often seem a little kooky. They seem neither to fear the future nor to imagine themselves shaping it; they are perhaps unable to conceive of a situation in which they should be fearful and blind to any need to control change. There are cases where the object is indeed to control change, but not in any overconfident way. I once worked for a company bankrolled by a scion of old money. He wasn't a swashbuckling entrepreneur, but he was cognizant that times and technologies change, and he was pursuing the continuation of rents by other means. Yet I think he was aware that his capital was inherited, not earned.
My limited experience with American gentry has come on vacation. These people had mostly founded companies rather than inherited them. Even so, there was often a recognition of good fortune. I recall one fellow who had created a successful business on Guam saying "Guam is the wild west. It's not hard to make money on Guam". There was a bit of humblebrag to this, but there was some honesty too.
Horowitz has long held sociopathic tendencies, exacerbated by the simplistic libertarian tendencies in parts of Silicon Valley. This is, sadly, a natural progression.
I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
Can Andreessen or Horowitz point to a nation with crypto regs more to their likeing? If so, they could toddle off and peddle their wares there. AFAIK, the current US regs are not so different from elsewhere. If so, what they want is Trump to change the regs to more suit themselves. So nothing to do with Biden or teh administration, but rather the institutions.
IIRC, they are investors in the "eco town" that the techbros want to build in CA's Solano County. They hoped to put pressure on the local government by putting the proposal on teh ballot. It was withdrawn probably due to clear indications it would not pass. Perhaps another reason these folks want autocracy rather than democracy..
The thing about oligarchs is that all of them have been spectacularly lucky; there is no other way of becoming an oligarch. And the thing about being extraordinarily lucky is that change is inherently bad for you, because there are vastly more changes that make you worse off than make you better off. Thus every oligarch has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - being "conservative" in the natural language sense.
Conservatives tend to prefer allying with reactionaries rather than democrats because the former want to preserve social hierarchies whereas the latter want to flatten them. The fallacy in this thinking is that reactionaries want to replace the people at the top of the hierarchy, and they usually succeed. But conservatives never learn.
Silicon Valley techbros do add a special ingredient to this fallacy: they are all persuaded that they have reached their present position by creating the future. They think that they will be able to direct change, to bend it to their advantage. They will not, because their agents the reactionaries will choose the changes that benefit themselves, not their erstwhile allies. And even if the techbros could control change, there would still be unforeseen consequences; "even the very wise cannot see all ends", and these people are very far from being very wise.
It could work the other way: they could be extraordinarily risk-averse, or they could be extraordinarily overconfident in their ability to manage situations. It depends on whether they realize they have been really lucky or believe that they are really smart.
Yes, I like your formulation, it is more succinct. The older, landed aristocracy paradoxically considered themselves innately superior and yet were aware of the precarity of their position; after all, younger sons and unfortunately married daughters were routinely pushed to the edges of the charmed circle and beyond. In Patrick O'Brian's formulation, "they worshiped capital with a steady and unswerving devotion." They are inclined to be risk-averse.
The SV aristocracy considers themselves to be "self-made", often to have come from "humble origins". While this often turns out to be an exaggeration upon inspection, it is undeniably true that they have reached undreamed of heights by gambling all-or-nothing 20 times in a row and winning every time. That can't be a coincidence, right? After all, what are the odds? So of course they think they will win the 21st throw of the dice too; it seems perfectly rational to seek risk.
Cf. Patrick Wyman on the "American Gentry" class...
I'd forgotten about the Junkers of Yakima! Good point, I didn't need to reach back to the 19th century to find gentry.
So are the Junkers of Yakima overconfident because they think they are smart and aggressive go-getters, or overscared because they exaggerate the vulnerability of their positions? Brad
Your experience with these types is both more extensive and less parochial than my own; I think I may have to defer to your opinion.
One point I concede immediately is that the world is messier and more complicated than my simple typology. There are cases where fear and overconfidence are superposed; what I am suggesting is that when the wave function collapses, we are usually left with fear. There are cases where the question seems ill-posed. One encounters Toronto's old money on the boards of arts organizations and charities, where they often seem a little kooky. They seem neither to fear the future nor to imagine themselves shaping it; they are perhaps unable to conceive of a situation in which they should be fearful and blind to any need to control change. There are cases where the object is indeed to control change, but not in any overconfident way. I once worked for a company bankrolled by a scion of old money. He wasn't a swashbuckling entrepreneur, but he was cognizant that times and technologies change, and he was pursuing the continuation of rents by other means. Yet I think he was aware that his capital was inherited, not earned.
My limited experience with American gentry has come on vacation. These people had mostly founded companies rather than inherited them. Even so, there was often a recognition of good fortune. I recall one fellow who had created a successful business on Guam saying "Guam is the wild west. It's not hard to make money on Guam". There was a bit of humblebrag to this, but there was some honesty too.
Horowitz has long held sociopathic tendencies, exacerbated by the simplistic libertarian tendencies in parts of Silicon Valley. This is, sadly, a natural progression.
Tell me more...
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Rick Perlstein is nearly always worth reading:
https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/
I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.
It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.
I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
I can imagine how he views the "lesser people" in SV.
Can Andreessen or Horowitz point to a nation with crypto regs more to their likeing? If so, they could toddle off and peddle their wares there. AFAIK, the current US regs are not so different from elsewhere. If so, what they want is Trump to change the regs to more suit themselves. So nothing to do with Biden or teh administration, but rather the institutions.
IIRC, they are investors in the "eco town" that the techbros want to build in CA's Solano County. They hoped to put pressure on the local government by putting the proposal on teh ballot. It was withdrawn probably due to clear indications it would not pass. Perhaps another reason these folks want autocracy rather than democracy..
"But that is not the case. Kleptocrats regard plutocrats as their prey:"
... or, as their useful idiots.
Yes...