He really should stick to tweeting about programming and startups. He appears to think that his expertise in computer science makes him insightful in areas he knows nothing about. He doesn’t know the sociology of “Silicon Valley”.
He ought not state things authoritatively without studies to back him. In his experience it is as he said but his experience is hardly normative or conclusive.
Its the inevitable end state when you give anyone a mic and allow them to broadcast to the entire chimp troupe forever.
As Michael Goldhaber reminded us at the dawn of the Internet - people have limited Attention to pay to anything but unlimited capacity to receive Attention.
So he will keep talking. Less people will pay attention. And the more the algos promote his content the more the backlash will build.
The design principles of Who gets the Mic in a broadcast(1 to All) environment, who we pay attention too, and for how long are still a work in progress and have a long way to go.
In my building the men's bathrooms are stuffed with menstrual pads for those men who menstruate. In the next building over, the women's rooms have mxnstrual pads because "there are no men in menstruate".
You can't find any elected politicians who are that bad. Still I wish those folks would claw each other's eyes out.
Nah, 20 years ago there was a panic at the data center when I showed up on Halloween in drag with 4 inch high heels, fishnet stockings and a crop top. They rethought all the security policies. The microexpressions I saw on some people's faces indicated it wasn't a completely safe thing to do.
Today I don't have the figure for it, but I think it is even less safe because of the polarization that has been driven by people's need for polarization.
(1) If the left had been focusing on broadly inclusive issues (speak to 5% of persuadable people, instead of 1% of extremists who'll stay home on election day anyhow) we could have 'woke' up in a different America; anti-fascists crying wolf for 20 years brought on the thing they said they were afraid of -- or were they? Is life more meaningful if it were like V for Vendetta or are they just jealous of the footwear?
(2) I live in one of the wokest small cities in America. My acting coach got devastated because she cast the 'wrong' person for a role in a high school play. She's trained people who have gone on to real careers in Hollywood, you wouldn't expect to find somebody like that in a small city -- they destroyed her.
I've seen the devastation that the current environment brought on many young men who are turning to charlatans like Joe Rogan, who are either taking anabolic steroids [1] or estrogen because they can never be enough. I can't stand glib pronouncements for the good of 2 or 3 people when so many young men are failing or being failed.
(3) I am not fan of PG's essay on wokeness, it's the same glib register as the signs they put in the bathroom. Woke isn't bad just because it's bad, it's bad because it's turned the left from something that should be majoritarian (we are the 99%, talk about pissing off PG!) into something that's minoritarian.
[1] ... but not as part of a program of athletic or bodybuilding training
If the left had been focusing on broadly inclusive issues (speak to 5% of persuadable people, instead of 1% of extremists who'll stay home on election day anyhow) we could have 'woke' up in a different America; anti-fascists crying wolf for 20 years brought on the thing they said they were afraid of -- or were they?
I know you feel this to be the case in the same way PG feels “woke” is what made Silicon Valley turn rightward. But do you have evidence beyond your feelings? It’s OK if you don’t. Most of our beliefs about such matters are unsubstantiated.
My view is that this is all part of a new reactionary masculine pushback. For the first time in thousands of years women in a few countries are able to exercise sexual autonomy and are gaining economic independence. Men largely can’t handle this new reality.
PG's talk about it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh talking about Net Neutrality. I disagreed with Rush about most things but most of the time I thought Rush had some understanding of the issues he talked about. His opposition to Net Neutrality came across as completely ignorant, he didn't seem to know what it was, he was just against it because the phone company told him to be against it, the same way that my son's trans friend hates J. K. Rowling because somebody told them to.
Unlike PG I can point to specific men and women, some trans, who have been hurt by it. That's a step up in evidence.
I've spent plenty of time looking at conference proceedings, review articles and such in the social sciences. If a literature search turns up a conclusive conclusion about anything it's because somebody wrote one paper and nobody followed it up for 20 years.
Here's my view. (Disclaimer: I lean conservative, quite anti Trump, and think liberals have some valid points. Use that to decide whether to bother reading.)
Liberals/Democrats, classically, were the party of the little guy, the working class. The working class has been being destroyed ever since NAFTA. Thinks are getting worse and worse for them. The Democrats should have been running on how the economy effects the little guy. They should have been the ones screaming about the price of eggs.
Instead, the impression everyone got was that, if you're working class but you don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or you don't think trans people belong in womens' bathrooms and on womens' sports teams, or you don't like abortion, then you're a moral leper, and the Democratic party is committed to the total eradication of your viewpoint and culture.
Unsurprisingly (given human nature), a bunch of people on the receiving end of that decided to flip the Democrats the bird, and instead voted for the guy who at least pretended to care about their concerns.
So, yeah. There may be "reactionary masculine pushback", but I think it's more pushback from the socially conservative section of the working class. Those people are supposed to be the Democrats' core constituency, but the Democrats quit listening to them.
Myself I'm fine with gay marriage. If you can pass, use whatever bathroom you want, just don't show me anything I don't want to see. (e.g. if you want to be a man, man up!) I think it is up to sports leagues to decide who plays: I don't want the state to mandate it either way. (A man I know was one of the charter players on the Sirens, a women's hockey team, because they didn't have enough players to make a quorum and he wasn't particularly big or dangerous.)
OK, that's all fine[1], until we come to abortion.
If you're working class, and you passed high school biology, you know that the fetus doesn't really fit in "this is my body". (It has different DNA, for one thing.) And if you look at that slogan, being endlessly repeated, and decide that one side is trying very hard to avoid the actual issue (and you lean socially conservative anyway), then you still have a bit of a problem with the Democratic Party. How big a problem is probably an individual gut-feel question.
[1] That's all fine, unless the state requires leagues to admit trans when the league doesn't want to. I haven't been keeping real close tabs on this, but did at least some states do that with at least some leagues?
I largely agree with your overall points. What follows is my pet theory for how this angst is being manifested at this time.
I’m very liberal. The Democratic party is dead to me. I think this demise of the Democratic party started under Clinton when he embraced neo-liberalism and decided against worker and environmental protections in the free trade agreements. It’s rational for people to not want illegal immigration. Liberals look for heretics while conservatives look for converts. But at this time in U.S. history I think the genesis of the backlash comes from disenchanted men and this disenchantment largely stems from women being empowered sexually and otherwise. The American political system has major structural imbalances so it was inevitable that a backlash of some form took hold. The system needs rebalancing. Such is my unsubstantiated, non expert view.
There is a case study in that second book about Stanley, a brand that represented masculinity and how it's trajectory reflected the decline of men, in recent years Stanley has become a symbol of female-gendered consumerism.
