What went wrong with the Silicon Valley right
What went wrong with the Silicon Valley right
It is difficult for a man to understand something when his business model depends on his not understanding it
“To promote open inquiry and free, market-based technological progress, you need an open society, not one founded on the enemy principle. The understandable desire to escape criticism, misunderstanding, and the frustrations of ordinary politics does not entail the radical remaking of the global geoeconomic order to confound the New York Times and its allies. The cult of progress and the technocapital singularity are Hayek’s “religion of the engineers” with the valences reversed—so that markets and AI rather than the state become the objects of worship. Over the last few years, Silicon Valley thinking has gotten drunk on its own business model, in a feedback loop in which wild premises feed into wilder assertions and then back. It’s time to sober up.”
I’ve written an article on the Silicon Valley right, which has just gone up in American Affairs. Here’s the link so that you can read the rest. It may be worth noting that the piece came back from final edits before the Andreessen-Horowitz announcement that they were backing Trump. Hence, it doesn’t talk about that shift, although it helps clarify the forces which lay behind it.
Some critics of Silicon Valley might find the piece not critical enough, but it is not written for them. The intuition behind it, correct or incorrect, is that a better Silicon Valley right is possible - and a piece explaining why in an uncompromising but not completely inimical way, written for a journal like American Affairs, is more likely to push a few people in this direction than a jeremiad. Two minor corrections. One error crept in as the piece was edited (mostly my fault) - the Dread Pirate Roberts’ efforts to hire hitmen were not what led to the Silk Road’s demise. The other was present from the beginning - “Balaji”’s surname is Srinivasan, not Srinavasan. And if you want more on the “technocapital singularity,” this piece for the Economist and this, right here on this Substack might be helpful. You’ll find little enough in the American Affairs piece, which mostly focuses on the politics of business models.
Enough - read the article!
Really liked the article. Guys like Andreesen come across as nothing so much as founding engineers who cannot hand over their company to more experienced leadership that know how to build a sucessful startup into a global business. I think the reason "move fast and break things" resonates still is the implicit assumption that the cleanup of those broken things is at most a trivial exercize someone else can deal with. Very startup mentality, which is hard to maintain when you're a global presence being held responsible for those broken things by governments. No wonder they dream of bypassing those governments completely.
I found the article less compelling than it might be. The main claim of the article is that Silicon Valley ideology is downstream the Silicon Valley business model, but "build fast and break things" is not a business model. It does not explain why SV entrepreneurs succeeded in upending several industries 1995-2015, and it is not the sort of thing VCs like Andreesen or Thiel use to evaluate which start ups to fund.
I think you have the seeds of something smart here but it needs to start with the actual foundations of SV business strategy.
One place to start might be Ben Thompson's essays for Stratechery, especially those under the "Distribution and Transaction Costs" and maybe "Aggregator Theory.: https://stratechery.com/concepts/
Another would be Paul Graham's more business focused essays, like this one: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
The SV oriented business strategy books at the end of this might also be consulted: https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-canon