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.
> 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.
This is a telling sentiment. Both the original article and your comment reflect the fear of the Professional Managerial Class that it might be possible to run a successful company or even a successful society without them, thus undermining the justification for their existence.
That's not fair. SAP was founded by four programmers. They grew big and then started having issues because they knew how to make a good product, but had no idea about things like corporate strategy, and then they had bring in a professional managerial type.
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/
Returning the mixed compliment (but genuinely meant as a compliment) I thought that there was a lot that was interesting in your piece, but found the organizing conceit about the difference between DC and SV a little off target. It could just be that I mix with a different kind of DC wonk, but I find that they do read books, and indeed complain about them vociferously - have gotten a fair amount of pushback from people in the Biden adminstration about my own, including from people from very different parts of the ecosystem. Rather than looking at books as modern mirrors of princes (which I take to be your argument), they are more interested in mirrors of principalities in my experience - the organizing principle of conversation is the place of America in the world.
Circling back to this, I don't quite think my argument is that these books are mirrors of princes because I don't think most tech lords think of themselves as princes, rulers of principalities, etc. We sometimes call tech ceos "robber barrons" but that suggests one man in command with hosts at his control. In reality every start up is more a "great team" than "great man," and I think SV CEOs identify just as much as with the other techbros *as a class or caste* as they do with the company they lead. The real purpose of those books, then, is not about guiding the leader so much as staking out the norms, conventions, and ideals that govern the community as a whole--that govern it, and *make* it one shared community.
Just back from a weekend trip, about to teach first class, and bringing oldest offspring to college - so it may be a day or two at least, but I think that there is a longer post in this.
It would be interesting to revisit the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which was huge for a while. The most notable character was M King Hubbert who also gave us the Peak Oil theory
It would be interesting to compare Srinivasan's vision of a "vast array of start-up societies that ordinary people could choose between" with that depicted in Ada Palmer's SF novels. I would argue that the latter is politically less naive than the former, although technologically predicated on a magical flying car technology. And they have a fair dose of interstellar ambition too. It seems significant that they have not been incorporated into SV cult scripture, whereas, LOL, Curtis Yarvin has.
The pronouncements cited in the article strobgly remind me of 40s-50s SF, where a couple of plucky unemployed engineers and their secretary can save mankind with that thing they've been working on since college.
Yes. A Heinlein novel where a magical technological innovation gives a small band of technocrats the absolute physical power to reorder society as they see fit. Vinge did a better job in The Peace War; at least he was thinking in mainly political terms. But neither of these are really the same as Palmer's deployment of magical technology; I don't think Srinivasan or Andreessen even perceive the problem it is intended to solve.
Thanks for bringing up Ada Palmer. I’m about to start the fourth (and final?) book of her series. One of the many things that are interesting in her series is that she realizes that any technoutopia is balanced on a knife’s edge and can easily fall into chaos.
I wonder whether they want Singapore. Or how it was 10 years ago when I checked.
Singapore is (was) in one sense working very well, the average person made a lot of money, healthcare and education was excellent and affordable, government employees are very educated and so on, the practicalities of life were just working very well.
On the other hand, a one-party system that silences critics by having the courts fine them very high for libel. This system is on one hand very conservative, you can't smuggle in a PlayBoy (not sure the techbros would like that) on the other hand, centrist, they do understand that things like ethnic nationalism or racism are not compatible with playing global capitalism.
It seems people accept this because the economy works very well, the development from the 1960's to the 2000's was amazing, and on the other hand, I think one reason why the economy works very well that all the people who would put their energies into playing politics in some way in a free system, are focusing on making money.
And of course some people will wonder whether these two are related. Does a good economy require political authoritarianism? Note that it does not seem so that the authoritarianism is all about exploiting workers. Not directly in Singapore at least, the workers there do not seem very exploited and the age of communist revolutions is over anyway.
One amusing idea is perhaps that in a free society, people waste too much energy on politics. Like imagine the amount of time invested arguing whether to not to defund the police. In Singapore they will just say the government will figure that out and go back to work.
I don't know. Recently Singapore shows signs of opening up. My take is that successful authoritarianism requires exceptional leaders. Lee Kuan Yew was one. Smart enough to not let power blind him, and charismatic enough to have support. But regression to the mean always happens.
I guess if the techbros wanted President Thiel, one could think about it... but Trump? Dude bought a casino, it was very profitable, so he built another one next to it, sales was of course the same but costs doubled and he did not understand what went wrong...
Nevermind, Vance is an intellectual. Is he? After his comments on childless people, Walz laid a trap for him with free school lunches and he walked right into the trap. This trap has been so obvious...
In the most recent issue of foreign affairs magazine there is an interesting article by Amy Zegart where she states this scary fact (I believe it is somewhat related to this thread) “This year, Princeton University announced that it would dip into its endowment to purchase 300 advanced NVIDIA chips to use for research (at a cost of at least $9 million), while Meta announced plans to have 350,000 of the same chips by year’s end, spending an estimated $10 billion.”
I read once that the actual phrase is "eating your cake and having it", as the reverse can be seen as a sort of non-contradiction, a causal order, while the 'actual phrase' cannot.
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.
> 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.
This is a telling sentiment. Both the original article and your comment reflect the fear of the Professional Managerial Class that it might be possible to run a successful company or even a successful society without them, thus undermining the justification for their existence.
That's not fair. SAP was founded by four programmers. They grew big and then started having issues because they knew how to make a good product, but had no idea about things like corporate strategy, and then they had bring in a professional managerial type.
“If Silicon Valley thinkers are to take their political commitments to liberty and technological progress seriously,…”
Do you genuinely believe they have such things? Seems to me their commitment is to maintaining and extending a social order that has them at the top.
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
Returning the mixed compliment (but genuinely meant as a compliment) I thought that there was a lot that was interesting in your piece, but found the organizing conceit about the difference between DC and SV a little off target. It could just be that I mix with a different kind of DC wonk, but I find that they do read books, and indeed complain about them vociferously - have gotten a fair amount of pushback from people in the Biden adminstration about my own, including from people from very different parts of the ecosystem. Rather than looking at books as modern mirrors of princes (which I take to be your argument), they are more interested in mirrors of principalities in my experience - the organizing principle of conversation is the place of America in the world.
Circling back to this, I don't quite think my argument is that these books are mirrors of princes because I don't think most tech lords think of themselves as princes, rulers of principalities, etc. We sometimes call tech ceos "robber barrons" but that suggests one man in command with hosts at his control. In reality every start up is more a "great team" than "great man," and I think SV CEOs identify just as much as with the other techbros *as a class or caste* as they do with the company they lead. The real purpose of those books, then, is not about guiding the leader so much as staking out the norms, conventions, and ideals that govern the community as a whole--that govern it, and *make* it one shared community.
Well, *you* certainly are a DC intellectual who reads books!
Could you dissect a bit more for me the distinction you see between the mirror for princes vs the mirrors for principalities ?
Just back from a weekend trip, about to teach first class, and bringing oldest offspring to college - so it may be a day or two at least, but I think that there is a longer post in this.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/silicon-valley-is-an-aristocratic
It would be interesting to revisit the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which was huge for a while. The most notable character was M King Hubbert who also gave us the Peak Oil theory
It would be interesting to compare Srinivasan's vision of a "vast array of start-up societies that ordinary people could choose between" with that depicted in Ada Palmer's SF novels. I would argue that the latter is politically less naive than the former, although technologically predicated on a magical flying car technology. And they have a fair dose of interstellar ambition too. It seems significant that they have not been incorporated into SV cult scripture, whereas, LOL, Curtis Yarvin has.
The pronouncements cited in the article strobgly remind me of 40s-50s SF, where a couple of plucky unemployed engineers and their secretary can save mankind with that thing they've been working on since college.
Yes. A Heinlein novel where a magical technological innovation gives a small band of technocrats the absolute physical power to reorder society as they see fit. Vinge did a better job in The Peace War; at least he was thinking in mainly political terms. But neither of these are really the same as Palmer's deployment of magical technology; I don't think Srinivasan or Andreessen even perceive the problem it is intended to solve.
Thanks for bringing up Ada Palmer. I’m about to start the fourth (and final?) book of her series. One of the many things that are interesting in her series is that she realizes that any technoutopia is balanced on a knife’s edge and can easily fall into chaos.
I wonder whether they want Singapore. Or how it was 10 years ago when I checked.
Singapore is (was) in one sense working very well, the average person made a lot of money, healthcare and education was excellent and affordable, government employees are very educated and so on, the practicalities of life were just working very well.
On the other hand, a one-party system that silences critics by having the courts fine them very high for libel. This system is on one hand very conservative, you can't smuggle in a PlayBoy (not sure the techbros would like that) on the other hand, centrist, they do understand that things like ethnic nationalism or racism are not compatible with playing global capitalism.
It seems people accept this because the economy works very well, the development from the 1960's to the 2000's was amazing, and on the other hand, I think one reason why the economy works very well that all the people who would put their energies into playing politics in some way in a free system, are focusing on making money.
And of course some people will wonder whether these two are related. Does a good economy require political authoritarianism? Note that it does not seem so that the authoritarianism is all about exploiting workers. Not directly in Singapore at least, the workers there do not seem very exploited and the age of communist revolutions is over anyway.
One amusing idea is perhaps that in a free society, people waste too much energy on politics. Like imagine the amount of time invested arguing whether to not to defund the police. In Singapore they will just say the government will figure that out and go back to work.
I don't know. Recently Singapore shows signs of opening up. My take is that successful authoritarianism requires exceptional leaders. Lee Kuan Yew was one. Smart enough to not let power blind him, and charismatic enough to have support. But regression to the mean always happens.
I guess if the techbros wanted President Thiel, one could think about it... but Trump? Dude bought a casino, it was very profitable, so he built another one next to it, sales was of course the same but costs doubled and he did not understand what went wrong...
Nevermind, Vance is an intellectual. Is he? After his comments on childless people, Walz laid a trap for him with free school lunches and he walked right into the trap. This trap has been so obvious...
You know the answer is not enough women.
In the most recent issue of foreign affairs magazine there is an interesting article by Amy Zegart where she states this scary fact (I believe it is somewhat related to this thread) “This year, Princeton University announced that it would dip into its endowment to purchase 300 advanced NVIDIA chips to use for research (at a cost of at least $9 million), while Meta announced plans to have 350,000 of the same chips by year’s end, spending an estimated $10 billion.”
Another minor error. The "traitorous eight" left Shockley to found Fairchild.
Thanks - that again is on me.
Great article in American Affairs indeed.
I read once that the actual phrase is "eating your cake and having it", as the reverse can be seen as a sort of non-contradiction, a causal order, while the 'actual phrase' cannot.