I Wanna Tweet Like Common People Do

Jack Dorsey has officially left the board of Bluesky, letting the world know via a rambling interview.  In that interview, Dorsey inadvertently highlights the anti-equality, ant-liberty view of too many of our tech overlords.

The interview is bog-standard, right-wing fantasy.  Dorsey is leaving the board of Bluesky because, basically, it moderates.  Or, at least, moderates in a way that he does not like.  He gives lip service to the idea that Twitter is a free speech haven, despite the fact that Twitter allows the heckler’s veto to run rampant (Twitter does almost nothing to prevent hate groups from harassing users) while selectively banning people Musk does not like.  But what really stuck out from the interview was this line: “It's [Bluesky -ed.] the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd.”

That is not a throwaway line.  A lot of powerful, rich people in the tech industry really do think that their luck in business (People forget that Twitter was an unusable mess in the beginning, for example.  It just happened to be the first micro-blogging site whose feed potentially included everyone.) and/or somewhat dubious technological prowess (Most of what VC backed tech companies produce are, at their cores, pretty simple platforms.) makes them better than the average person.  And it appears to enrage them when the rest of us hoi polloi dare not accept that judgement.

Peter Thiel has disparaged women voting and the concept of democracy itself and yet is still welcomed as a donor in the GOP.  Silicon Valley billionaires like Thiel are taking their philosophical marching orders from anti-democratic thinkers who argue that CEOs should rule us because they are better than us. And then there is their love for Balaji Srinivasan.  

Marc Andreesen, a driving force in the tech world’s funding, claims that Srinivasan “…has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.” Srinivasan recently gave a speech calling the US outdated and “[t]he speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator…” And what are these brilliant, applause worthy ideas?  Autocracy:

Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

…

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

…

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation.... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones …”

Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).

The article is silent on whether Srinivasan expects us to bow when the Greys pass or whether merely taking our hats off would suffice.

This is all insane, of course, but they really do seem to believe it.  The idea that people are genetically superior or entitled to rule over others because they have talent or luck in a certain area has been disproved by, well, the entirety of human history.  Tell me with a straight face you want the Windsors of the UK to actually run Britain rather than be a full employment program for tabloids.   And fascists have failed at pretty much everything they have tried to do (Mussolini dd not, in fact, make the trains run on time.  The saying started as a joke because he failed to keep the trains on time, or pretty much do anything else.  And fascists are terrible at winning wars, their supposed main virtue.)  The whims of the entitled are a terrible basis for government.

Democracy has its flaws.  The US governmental structure is not one anyone in their right mind would setup.   But people ruling themselves, collectively, is the only system that has even approached providing human beings with individual dignity and control over their own fates.  I am not willing to trade that for a man who looks like a bad Rasputin cos-player or the authoritarian dreams of people who think reinventing the city bus is genius.  I prefer to keep my freedoms, imperfect and messy as they may be, and negotiate the rules of life with my fellow citizens over bowing to these wanna-be aristocrats.  

I wonder if there is an Uber for guillotines?  Though, I suppose, in the end, that is just called “voting.”  Leave it to Silcon Valley to reinvent another wheel.

(BTW, for those who get the reference, Shatner’s version is better than Pulp’s original.  A song like this should have at least a hint of guillotines being built in the background. Shatner’s has that necessary anger.  Pulp’s just sounds whiny.)