My concern is that there are genuinely malicious actors with a burning hatred for all things European or Euro-descendant. They are not true-believers per se, but they understand how the current direction of the West is in line with their hatred and desire to see us all humiliated and detroyed, and so they may come off as those "dyed in the wool true believers".
I wonder how much they really care about their elite-status and lifestyle if their malice is realised or to what degree they believe themselves to be the future inheritors of a new total rule over a population of low IQ third-worlders who will be too dumb to offer any meaningful resistance.
I too hope we could wake up the elites but some of them already are and they do it willfully. It's always difficult to know how to deal with true evil.
In practice, successful companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google ruthlessly prioritize competence. They pay lip service to ideological considerations, but it’s really just PR twaddle to stay in the regime’s good graces. Companies that are foolish enough to prioritize ideology over competence will face a financial reckoning sooner or later. I suspect in the years ahead, other large and mid-sized corporations will figure this out and tailor their hiring practices just enough to keep the Justice Dept. off their backs.
I think Musk’s problem is that he’s on the autism spectrum, and doesn’t see the social necessity of playing silly rhetorical games. He draws too much attention by openly pointing out the hypocrisy of our ruling class, so they’re making an example of him. Since most government agencies are staffed by people who used to work in the industries they oversee, we’ll reach an equilibrium where companies will publish meaningless DEI statements, get a pat on the head from regulators, and then go back to running their operations based on actual business logic.
Your assumption that the tech companies care about competence is sadly not true. Amazon is very high pressure performance metric-driven internally and may be more resistant than the others to corrosion, but this micromanagerial approach also stunts their ability to innovate and explains why using Amazon's professional and industrial products is such a chore.
Google on the other hand is all-in on DEI, as are several other companies and many across the rest of technology and industry. The slow degradation of all their products from best-in-class or at least strong competitors to useless buggy crap is the outward sign of this. For example when Google search fails to find a thing you're looking for that you know exists, that is fundamentally a bug and prioritizing political ideology over functional performance is a consequence of incompetence.
The internal rot is worse than it looks, because this accumulation of errors comes from people who *do not know* how to maintain let alone improve the hardware and software they're working on. They don't know what that even looks like. The damage they're causing can't be corrected by simply changing their minds ideologically; it will be harder to fix than it was to cause, and they're not up to the task, and the people who are have moved on to other companies or left the industry and have no intention of coming back.
Fair points all around, I was going off anecdotal information I’ve heard about Amazon’s management practices (which you referenced) and similar things I’ve heard from Apple employees.
My original examples may be off, but I think there is still hope for competence in smaller companies without vast DEI bureaucracies. Eventually, businesses reality gets a vote. So I guess my hope is that competence and innovation still have a chance to reassert themselves in smaller, scrappier organizations as the problems at larger companies get harder to ignore in the years ahead.
> I think there is still hope for competence in smaller companies without vast DEI bureaucracies
You are right about this. The DEI infestation starts around 100 employees, when hiring policy regulations and liabilities kick in and necessitate an HR department. Anything that can be done on a scale smaller than this, and kept to that scale, has a chance.
This will not save us from the imminent catastrophic failure of large global- and regional-scale complex systems, but it can give us a head start on their decentralized, resilient replacements.
Unfortunately right now the culture of financialization, acquisitions and mergers in the tech and industry worlds is killing a lot of this activity in the cradle. You see it a lot in tech: rock star technologist breaks away from big tech firm to found a startup, attracts venture capital, builds wildly successful "disruptive" new product, VCs insist on taking it public and it gets acquired by a big tech firm which guts it and destroys the product (or else the VCs arrange for a direct private sale to big tech).
This is how tech has been routing around their own diversity footguns for the past decade, by letting R&D happen outside their own campuses and then cannibalizing the result. But diminishing returns and increasing cost of capital is slowly killing this workaround too.
Excellent piece. Not sure if post-WWII is the starting point -- WWI was already a dry run for the whole 'end of history' war to end all wars unite the world under democracy & League of Nations stuff, and the British Empire was already Globalism 1.0, with one currency and telegrams as email. Still, it is a "salient point" as they say. If so, contemplating who won and who lost WWII may suggest some insight into what's happening. A Certain People not known for their love of "Western civilization" or their ability to run a functioning nation. The sort of People who think its acceptable to move into someone else's nation and genocide the population, expecting the world to go along with it, because they wrote a book saying God told them to. A People whose book also predicts the End of the World arising from just such a conflict. A People who, until now, were expelled over and over from their host nations when they went too far. "Sunk cost fallacy" gives them too much credit for rationality.
To answer a question you raised, nothing will make them reconsider. They live in a delusional false reality in which a) the problems you identify aren't happening, they're just a reactionary hallucination and b) technology is developing at an exponential pace and will naturally overtake any linear-scale problem (like decrease in competency) that might arise from their policy initiatives.
I don't think much more needs to be said about A.
On B, I am endlessly disappointed that much of the dissident right buys into this fairy tale. It is not true, and it was never true. Every apparent exponential curve in nature is a nascent sigmoid. Reality is place of limitations, not infinities. Reality is a world of growth, plateau, and decline.
We have already reached the plateau and begun decline in most of the lines-going-up that sold a generation on the singulatarian cult in the first place. Most failed to notice because noticing it was inconvenient to their world view.
Notably Moore's Law, however you like to define it, ground to a halt over a decade ago, with increasingly marginal gains and most growth happening in non-generalizable niches like parallel processing, which themselves are already plateauing (your super cool graphics in your super cool vidya are the most notable example of this). Since most of the techno-utopian pseudoscience-fiction ideology rests fundamentally on Moore's Law, they should have cause for alarm.
But they don't. And they won't, because noticing is inconvenient. Just like noticing certain things about certain demographics is inconvenient. They will burn civilization to the ground in utter conviction that they're doing the right thing and what's best for everyone, and then they will Pikachu face and defend their positions at the top of the rubble heap with the resources they have hoarded as sole beneficiaries of the demolition program.
The veil of sunken costs is only skin deep here. The systematic collapse of nations itself is the point. Turning them all into helpless ghettos until they start the slow death into irrelevance, and leave the elites with a board free from riff raff with all the technology and data they have collected. Thinking that the play they put on amounts to their primary goals, and that their constantly pushing the same things is their grip on the sunken costs, or that they have some investment in the advancement of humanity as a whole is a complete red herring, I think.
Marvellously thoughtful as always.
My concern is that there are genuinely malicious actors with a burning hatred for all things European or Euro-descendant. They are not true-believers per se, but they understand how the current direction of the West is in line with their hatred and desire to see us all humiliated and detroyed, and so they may come off as those "dyed in the wool true believers".
I wonder how much they really care about their elite-status and lifestyle if their malice is realised or to what degree they believe themselves to be the future inheritors of a new total rule over a population of low IQ third-worlders who will be too dumb to offer any meaningful resistance.
I too hope we could wake up the elites but some of them already are and they do it willfully. It's always difficult to know how to deal with true evil.
In practice, successful companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google ruthlessly prioritize competence. They pay lip service to ideological considerations, but it’s really just PR twaddle to stay in the regime’s good graces. Companies that are foolish enough to prioritize ideology over competence will face a financial reckoning sooner or later. I suspect in the years ahead, other large and mid-sized corporations will figure this out and tailor their hiring practices just enough to keep the Justice Dept. off their backs.
I think Musk’s problem is that he’s on the autism spectrum, and doesn’t see the social necessity of playing silly rhetorical games. He draws too much attention by openly pointing out the hypocrisy of our ruling class, so they’re making an example of him. Since most government agencies are staffed by people who used to work in the industries they oversee, we’ll reach an equilibrium where companies will publish meaningless DEI statements, get a pat on the head from regulators, and then go back to running their operations based on actual business logic.
Your assumption that the tech companies care about competence is sadly not true. Amazon is very high pressure performance metric-driven internally and may be more resistant than the others to corrosion, but this micromanagerial approach also stunts their ability to innovate and explains why using Amazon's professional and industrial products is such a chore.
Google on the other hand is all-in on DEI, as are several other companies and many across the rest of technology and industry. The slow degradation of all their products from best-in-class or at least strong competitors to useless buggy crap is the outward sign of this. For example when Google search fails to find a thing you're looking for that you know exists, that is fundamentally a bug and prioritizing political ideology over functional performance is a consequence of incompetence.
The internal rot is worse than it looks, because this accumulation of errors comes from people who *do not know* how to maintain let alone improve the hardware and software they're working on. They don't know what that even looks like. The damage they're causing can't be corrected by simply changing their minds ideologically; it will be harder to fix than it was to cause, and they're not up to the task, and the people who are have moved on to other companies or left the industry and have no intention of coming back.
Fair points all around, I was going off anecdotal information I’ve heard about Amazon’s management practices (which you referenced) and similar things I’ve heard from Apple employees.
My original examples may be off, but I think there is still hope for competence in smaller companies without vast DEI bureaucracies. Eventually, businesses reality gets a vote. So I guess my hope is that competence and innovation still have a chance to reassert themselves in smaller, scrappier organizations as the problems at larger companies get harder to ignore in the years ahead.
> I think there is still hope for competence in smaller companies without vast DEI bureaucracies
You are right about this. The DEI infestation starts around 100 employees, when hiring policy regulations and liabilities kick in and necessitate an HR department. Anything that can be done on a scale smaller than this, and kept to that scale, has a chance.
This will not save us from the imminent catastrophic failure of large global- and regional-scale complex systems, but it can give us a head start on their decentralized, resilient replacements.
Unfortunately right now the culture of financialization, acquisitions and mergers in the tech and industry worlds is killing a lot of this activity in the cradle. You see it a lot in tech: rock star technologist breaks away from big tech firm to found a startup, attracts venture capital, builds wildly successful "disruptive" new product, VCs insist on taking it public and it gets acquired by a big tech firm which guts it and destroys the product (or else the VCs arrange for a direct private sale to big tech).
This is how tech has been routing around their own diversity footguns for the past decade, by letting R&D happen outside their own campuses and then cannibalizing the result. But diminishing returns and increasing cost of capital is slowly killing this workaround too.
Excellent piece. Not sure if post-WWII is the starting point -- WWI was already a dry run for the whole 'end of history' war to end all wars unite the world under democracy & League of Nations stuff, and the British Empire was already Globalism 1.0, with one currency and telegrams as email. Still, it is a "salient point" as they say. If so, contemplating who won and who lost WWII may suggest some insight into what's happening. A Certain People not known for their love of "Western civilization" or their ability to run a functioning nation. The sort of People who think its acceptable to move into someone else's nation and genocide the population, expecting the world to go along with it, because they wrote a book saying God told them to. A People whose book also predicts the End of the World arising from just such a conflict. A People who, until now, were expelled over and over from their host nations when they went too far. "Sunk cost fallacy" gives them too much credit for rationality.
To answer a question you raised, nothing will make them reconsider. They live in a delusional false reality in which a) the problems you identify aren't happening, they're just a reactionary hallucination and b) technology is developing at an exponential pace and will naturally overtake any linear-scale problem (like decrease in competency) that might arise from their policy initiatives.
I don't think much more needs to be said about A.
On B, I am endlessly disappointed that much of the dissident right buys into this fairy tale. It is not true, and it was never true. Every apparent exponential curve in nature is a nascent sigmoid. Reality is place of limitations, not infinities. Reality is a world of growth, plateau, and decline.
We have already reached the plateau and begun decline in most of the lines-going-up that sold a generation on the singulatarian cult in the first place. Most failed to notice because noticing it was inconvenient to their world view.
Notably Moore's Law, however you like to define it, ground to a halt over a decade ago, with increasingly marginal gains and most growth happening in non-generalizable niches like parallel processing, which themselves are already plateauing (your super cool graphics in your super cool vidya are the most notable example of this). Since most of the techno-utopian pseudoscience-fiction ideology rests fundamentally on Moore's Law, they should have cause for alarm.
But they don't. And they won't, because noticing is inconvenient. Just like noticing certain things about certain demographics is inconvenient. They will burn civilization to the ground in utter conviction that they're doing the right thing and what's best for everyone, and then they will Pikachu face and defend their positions at the top of the rubble heap with the resources they have hoarded as sole beneficiaries of the demolition program.
The veil of sunken costs is only skin deep here. The systematic collapse of nations itself is the point. Turning them all into helpless ghettos until they start the slow death into irrelevance, and leave the elites with a board free from riff raff with all the technology and data they have collected. Thinking that the play they put on amounts to their primary goals, and that their constantly pushing the same things is their grip on the sunken costs, or that they have some investment in the advancement of humanity as a whole is a complete red herring, I think.