We Need To Talk About Tech Bros

 Yglesias looks at Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter, in light of his currently cozy relationship with China. More broadly, there are two issues here. Yglesias can run you through the way China extrudes its censorship regime into the West, via its market dominance. If you want to do business in China, you have to abide by their twisted version of the "truth" regarding Hong Kong, Xinxiang, Tibet and Taiwan. 

The specific malfeasance of China is an important discussion to have. Unlike Russia, China is an international illiberal force with real economic clout. Russia's behavior could largely be ignored, because Russia is poor and poorly governed. China is powerful and the tools we can bring to bear on China are few and far between compared to Russia.

However, we should probably also examine the political culture of Silicon Valley, too.

Thirty years ago, Benjamin Barber wrote Jihad vs McWorld, in which he argued that both rising ethnic tribalism and global capitalism were at best indifferent to liberal democracy and at worst actively hostile to it. The idea that free markets make free people has always been mostly bullshit. Among other things, there really is no such thing as a "free" market at any scale. Once you get beyond a barter economy, markets are dramatically influenced by all sorts of government policies. Silicon Valley, for instance, was created due to its close proximity to major research universities that get massive Federal grants and having better weather than Boston.

Because at most of the Tech entrepreneurs have some engineering background, they tend to be deficient in Humanities education. They took coding classes and got MBAs; they didn't study civics. As a result you get extreme examples like Peter Thiel, who is quite literally funding candidates to end liberal democracy. For people like Thiel, democracy means listening to the plebs, and he has a haughty disdain for those plebs, unless he can exploit their racial and economic insecurities to make an end run at electoral democracy.

Musk isn't Thiel, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this guy. He's just a profoundly strange guy who has billions of dollars. As we saw with Trump, having a lot of money and a damaged or broken psyche is a really bad combination. The sort of checks on poor behavior are erased as they are protected by their great wealth. Because we venerate wealth, we imbue people like Trump or Thiel or Musk with some sort of Social Darwinian excellence that they simply don't possess.

I'm not opposed to people being rewarded for excellence. I do wonder how much people like Gates, Bezos and Musk benefit from a sort of soft monopolistic model, but they do produce things that people want and they can reap those benefits.

I am opposed to the very idea of a billionaire class of supposed betters.

Sinclair Lewis wrote that if fascism came to America it would be wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible. Apparently it will also be funded venture capitalists and Tech Bros.