Good Lord

We have the conch; we run the island; what sort of rulers will we be?

A couple years ago, Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that was started by Peter Thiel, hosted a conference called Hereticon. It was branded as a “conference for thoughtcrime," and featured a slate of talks that combined mildly edgy taboos—tattoos, psychedelics, non-monogamy—edge-of-science moonshots—biohacking, terraforming, chasing immortality—and shock jock contrarianism—nicotine is good; a guide to stealing elections; eugenics is misunderstood, actually.¹ From the outside, it was a bunch of TED talks about effective accelerationism held at Burning Man. From the inside, I have no idea what it was, because I did not go.

Regardless of the specifics, the conference represents a certain intellectual theme that’s relatively common among both Silicon Valley’s ruling elite and its Very Online underbelly: That the orthodoxy is wrong, that most people are mindless pawns to the bloated powers that be, and that one of the gravest threats to both America and to human civilization itself is those powers trying to silence the free-thinking heretics. We need more people to question, to challenge conventional wisdom, to ”think from first principles,” and to be brave enough to swim against the overwhelming tides of groupthink and mainstream opinion.

This rough ethos is everywhere in Silicon Valley. It shows up in our most read blogs, on our most popular podcasts, and as part of our most selective job interviews. The rationalist blog Astral Codex Ten (née Star Slate Codex) is its most canonical form: Long essays, deeply linked to academic sites likes arXiv, and framed as intellectually curious and truth-seeking, but impossible to read without a sinking feeling that part of the motivation is to flirt with offensive ideas but never quite touch them.²

Anyway, my point is not to debate this strain of thought; it is simply to point out its undeniable existence. In Silicon Valley, according to our collective brand guidelines, the best of us are unflinching in the face of controversial ideas, and unafraid to think for ourselves.

Dissidents, however, don’t just exist at Miami meetups and in the bowels of Hacker News; in some cases, they make their way into mainstream media outlets. And several years ago, another dramatic example of heretical thinking landed on the front pages of the New York Times Magazine: The 1619 Project.

The collection of essays, which argues that slavery played a much more important part in America’s 400-year arc than is typically told in most history books, checks all of the boxes that Silicon Valley loves: It’s an ultimate narrative violation, rejecting centuries of conventional wisdom about the founding narratives of the United States. It’s deeply researched, riddled with references to academic scholarship. It’s a story of government failure, of state institutions that are corrupt and immoral, and of political leaders who self-serving and short-sighted. It’s a story of overextended regulation, of cronyism, and of market distortions. It’s a story of systems thinking, explaining how social elements are connected and intertwined, and how distant causes can have long-echoing effects. It’s a story of unappreciated actors, people held back by flawed policies, by the unchallenged beliefs of bad scientists, and by the comfortable bourgeois elite. And it’s controversial—a number of historians and supposed experts disagreed with it—just, I’m sure, as lots of doctors would disagree with people huffing nicotine. It was, in every sense, heretical.

And yet, I doubt—though I could be wrong!—that it was popular at Hereticon, nor does it seem to be popular among the broader community of technologists that orbit it. It may not be popular on this blog. People may scoff at it, roll their eyes at it, dismiss it as the work of an unserious shrill. But why? Why does this idea, despite its clear qualification as a dangerous thoughtcrime, feel out of place among Silicon Valley’s self-styled free thinkers, skeptics, and revolutionaries?

I mean, you know, there is that one thing. But to take a more generous view, my suspicion is that Silicon Valley contrarianism isn’t about a relentless pursuit of every truth; it’s about indulgence. The talks at Hereticon aren’t hard realities that make the people giving and watching them uncomfortable; they’re forbidden fruits that make other people uncomfortable. Hereticon’s speakers appear to frame their ideas as meeting two criteria—that they are controversial, and perhaps true—but I’d guess that there is also a third: That they want them to be true.

The core thesis of the 1619 Project is, for many people in Silicon Valley, something else. Though it doesn’t accuse today’s generations of wrongdoing, it complicates many of America’s traditional heroes, and asks us to think about our social stations, our successes or failures, and how we arrived at them. It is not an idea that gets us in a fun bit of rambunctious trouble; it is, more simply, an idea that a lot of people in Silicon Valley would rather not be true.³

No sense in contemplating something like that, I suppose.⁴

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I moved to San Francisco in 2012, out of a stale cubicle in Washington, DC, and into a half-billion dollar frat house. The company I joined was fairly typical for its era: Moving fast, breaking things, and having parties. We ate free lunches and catered dinners at the office. We conducted interviews drinking Coronas. Two product managers organized an official beer pong tournament every Friday. I bought a big wheel. We were loud, well fed, and on drugs.⁵ People flirted; people hooked up; dated; broke up; dated anew. Three engineering leaders dated marketers; one dated a designer, then a recruiter. Some people got married. It was a bender of excess and alcohol, and it was fun, for me.

Of course, it wasn’t fun for everyone. Our raucous circus was unwelcoming to some; outright dangerous to others. Women got harassed, mistreated, and passed over for promotions. But for those of us of a certain demographic,⁶ we didn’t see that, not directly, not without looking. The suffering happened silently, later, in bathrooms we didn’t use and group texts that we weren’t invited to. Through the blurry eyes of a perpetual buzz, it was easy to dismiss the problems.

Until it wasn’t. The stories came out, at our company and others like it. The tech industry’s brand soured, the political winds turned, and we had to give away our toys. A new Silicon Valley emerged from our hangover: An attentive one; a sober one; a "woke" one. Human resources teams were hired; code bases were purged of their ASCII smut. We were told to grow up, because we were behaving like children.

Though much of it was a necessary correction—a bumpy curve towards progress, with veers in both directions—the new regime was delicate and uneasy. Good people wondered if there was a way to bring back the fun baby without the toxic bathwater; other people longed for both. But social pressures kept the tension roughly in balance, with flare ups but no explosions.

—

Ah well. After years of keeping our music down, the party is back on, and we are making Silicon Valley Great Again. Tech is empowered, engorged, and enjoying itself. Its wealth used to gauche and understated; it is now worn a million dollars at a time. It is regressing to its baser self, reigniting the vulgarity of the previous decade, with righteous force. It is excited to say retarded again.⁷ It is codifying its excitement into its terms of service.

We can bring it all back, if we want. Tech has always been an industry of bottomless wealth; in recent years, it has become one of unfathomable social power. Now, it has conquered Washington: We are in the White House; in the Oval Office; we are trusted advisors; the Vice President; the co-president.

We can do anything we want. To the victors go the spoils, and the spoils can be ghostwritten into an executive order. We can build with reckless abandon. We can accelerate with the governor off. We can get launch permits to Mars. We can run roughshod over whatever norm we find annoying. We can indulge ourselves in the stories that we want to be true—that what is good for technology is good for humanity; that those who dislike our debauchery are the ones who need to grow up; that we were right all along. We are self-governed now, and our decency—and our mercy—must come from within.

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But no, that is an exaggeration. There is at least one thing we can’t do: We cannot say the plain and obvious truth that, no matter how many of our pet projects he funds and how much bureaucratic red tape he cuts and how high the stock market goes, the president is an awful man doing awful things, for vengeance and money. His strategy is not to avoid scandal and savagery, but to flood the zone with it; to overwhelm us with so many new cruelties and so much naked corruption that we can’t digest any of it. We’re five days in, and there is already a deportation force, threatening to raid schools; there are veterans’ families and unaccompanied minors, left stranded on the tarmac with reneged papers;⁸ there are informant networks snitching on their coworkers; there is the “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to end birthright citizenship; there is entrusting the world’s largest fighting force with a man who allegedly can’t stay sober long enough to not threaten his own wife; there are pardons for his militia; there are investigations for his enemies; there is open auction for his favor. He is bulldozing us, and giving us TikTok back as our opiate.

We may not want these things to be true, because we want an SEC that supports innovation in crypto, or a White House that convenes a Manhattan project for AI. We may not want to live in a complex world of distant causes and long-echoing effects. It is easier to say thank you, to put our heads down and our hands out, and pretend these other things are not happening or not our business. It is easier to stay silent. Because with Donald Trump, the famous quote—“First they came for the socialists…”—comes with a twist at the end: “But he never came for me—so long as I did not speak out.”

We are the most powerful industry in the world, rich beyond belief, unfireable, with all of this civilization staring into our apps and the cradle of the next one being engineered in our labs. And if, despite all that, we cannot stand up to anything that is happening now—not even everything, but anything—perhaps we are not such brave heretics after all.

1. All of these topics are listed in the agenda, but I could only find videos for some of them.

2. The teaser for the eugenics talk at Hereticon is a good example of this. The video says, “aha, technically, eugenics includes any individual choice to increase desired genetic characteristics in the next generation, so being selective in who you date is a form of eugenics!” It’s a sort of semantic motte-and-bailey that’s engineered to trigger outrage, while hedging just enough to say that the people reacting to you are the unreasonable ones.

3. Is it true? To me, yes, I believe it. But that’s beside the point. As Hereticon founder Mike Solana says, his criteria for a good talk isn’t necessarily for him to believe it’s right; it’s to ask, "Is there interesting evidence here?" And if nothing else, the 1619 Project meets that bar.

4. In fairness, it does happen sometimes; for example, when David Sacks wondered if the Google employees protesting Gaza, who were generally dismissed by most of Silicon Valley’s chattering elite, were on the noble side of history. It doesn’t happen often, but, credit where credit is due.

5. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that the women’s bathroom had more cocaine than women.

6. “Demographic” is only approximately correct. Yes, there were clear demographic patterns for who fit into this version of Silicon Valley’s culture and who didn’t, but there were many exceptions to those patterns.

7. See footnote 2.

8. Families, these are the most important things. If you can help someone save their marriage, that’s a lot more important and virtuous than most things we do.