The Tech Right has shown itself to be completely detached from ordinary people. This is perfectly illustrated in the reactions of many right-wing intellectuals to “Rich Men North of Richmond”.
"Although Lind’s critique is in bad faith, and is at times statistically illiterate (“when you control for class, it turns out that working-class whites aren’t that much wealthier than working-class blacks”), it points to an important truth. Genetic realism is often to used to advance runaway neoliberal policies, which do not follow from the data. Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
Neoliberal policies do follow from the data though. That's the connection between accepting behavioral genetics and accepting economics. Both involve comfort with uncomfortable truths that go against social desirability bias, of course Michael Lind hates both. This is not "hate" for the working class. They do better under capitalism than any other system. I could go on, but the author doesn't seem to be too familiar with the arguments he's critiquing.
The options aren't limited to 'capitalism' and 'any other system'. If we can show statistically that the working class were doing better on multiple statistical measures under a different policy regime, and we absolutely can, it follows that this policy regime is better for the working classes. Duh!
I'd agree with this. Capitalism and markets are great tools that solve a number of problems well, but they're not without downsides and can and should be ameliorated when they start to interfere with basic priorities like family formation.
Disappointing that Aporia didn't find this too embarrassing to publish. I'm left waiting for an explanation for how neoliberal trade policies cause otherwise virtuous people to divorce their spouses, have illegitimate children, keep poor dietary habits, and abuse narcotics.
The argument would be that manufacturing jobs were held by men and allowed them to be bread winners. Replacing these jobs with service jobs causes poor women to earn more money than poor men who can no longer best them economically. Leading to worse outcomes for the children, the men and maybe the women depending on your values.
Tech Bros believe in this thing called 'culture' which floats around in the ether and has no connection to economic reality, technological development, or the material conditions in which people live. All social problems are the result of this metaphysical 'culture' and so there can be no justification for interference in the holy cause of corporations making more money. Hence geniuses like Richard Hananiah believe that the only way to solve the obesity epidemic is just to be mean to fat people.
Divorce and childlessness are great for GDP in the short-to-medium term, because childless people have more disposable income and can work longer hours. Obesity is great for producers of food products so long as they don't have to pick up the tab of paying for healthcare, etc. The list goes on. It's always possible optimise for short-term economic gains at the expense of cannibalising long-term social capital, until the boomers finally retire and everything starts to fall over.
The idea that you win power by winning over working-class people is ridiculous. How do you think the current elite attained power? Elite power is the only thing that matters in politics. The masses are socially conditioned and gaslighted into supporting whatever policy the ruling elite wants.
"Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
There are three arguments for redistribution:
1) It has a high ROI, because the poor can improve themselves by using those funds better then the rich.
2) It is "fair" in some cosmic sense.
3) It is necessary for social and political stability (cheaper to pay then not to pay).
#1 is the justification for most social spending. Education, healthcare, etc are justified mostly based on ROI. If someone want to justify universal pre-K then show a study showing that earlier interventions raise IQ or some nonsense.
If the ROI isn't there most of what we spend money on collapses into little more then make-work jobs for professional class vote banks.
#2 should probably acknowledge fairness to the future. Higher economic growth benefits the unborn, so if redistribution today slows growth then it's unfair to the future.
#3 Is a sound argument, but do we really need to spend 50%+ of GDP? Again most of the big expenditures are #1 related and generally benefit the providers more than the provided for.
The tech and/or new right has antipathy to working class populist politics because its base is low iq and distractible. They are enamored by ephemera like Hunter Biden’s dick picks, and they don’t have the attention span to focus in policy, which is why they are constantly routed.
Rich men north of richmond are not responsible for fatties milking welfare; left wing nonprofits and racial minority interest groups are.
It was possible to be a milk man who worked 6-8 hour days, had a stay at home wife, and a 3 bedroom house with a nice yard. The boomers were spoiled though. If you were a white man of average intelligence you had very little standing in your way to live a decent life. Now they are angry, greedy or both and they want everyone to pay for them. Especially those who are now younger than them and unrelated. Boomers had it great. Unless they were single women, mothers, women married to aholes, neurodivergents, minorities, smart or really stupid. A society set up to serve the average means only one specific part of that average is valued and the rest are scapegoated. White men are not special. They were just chosen to be the valued party to serve the ruling class.
What criteria are you going by to deem it successful? Humanity has been around a lot longer than your examples that only fall in the last few hundred years. We are in the fall of another patriarchal society and this time as a global one. We are going by history that has been curated by "winning" men only and passed down in the written word. Do you realize that oral history is actually more accurate than written history? Patriarchal societies self implode. They may destroy, assimilate and oppress other societies but their own excess always lead to their downfall. Don't believe me keep living another 50 years and watch this one go down with all it's might is right leaders at the helm. Also America is not 90% white. Its almost 50% non-white.
Our society is already collapsing. Whether men lead it likely depends on the amount of people that will die in this collapse. Egalitarian societies tend to exist when the populations are small groups and each child's birth is sacred. If you are giving birth and each new addition means humanity and this group might live a little longer you treat the women and children better because they are the future. Matriarchy is egalitarian in most its functioning. They just keep track of the children via the mother's lineage because that is the simplest way to do so and it is about the whole group surviving not the name.
You give examples from a really small part of human existence. Humans in their current form have been around for 200K years. We have only had civilization for the last 6K. You are talking about times that are only half way into the era of civilization.
We are collapsing. How far we collapse depends on how stupid we are. We are seem to be sticking our heads in the sand even though the signs are pretty clear so it may be total extinction.
"the working class is better-off (in material terms) than it was 50 years ago"
Who writes this stuff? The U.S. broad 60% middle-class, since 1980, has lost HALF its real wealth, has 3X greater real debt, and must work almost 2x as hard (as in 1980) to maintain the average home. Where did all that middle-class wealth go? It was re-distributed upwards into the top 10%, and mostly the top 1%, and mostly again into the top 0.1%. And wealth continues to be redistributed from the broad middle to the very top at the rate of roughly 0.5% per year. We have achieved (2013) the same level of class-inequality last seen in 1928, after the first experiment in supply-side socio-economics.
Compare 1945-1980. Zero class-inequality. All classes thrived. We created the greatest all-class socioeconomic experience in human history. Why? Our nation's economy was based on demand-side policies and true progressive fiscal discipline. We created untold millionaires during this period, but NOT at the expense of other classes. ALL classes shared identical wealth-growth and income-growth slopes.
That all changed after supply-side, Neoliberal policies replaced Truman-Eisenhower economic policies. Supply-side policies have been in place now for over 40 years, causing the greatest class-inequality since 1928, and worsening year over year. The "working class" is NOT better off, by any metric, than 50 years ago. We are dying as a nation, and growing as a plutocracy. No wonder our social polarization is at its highest levels in modern history.
The use of the word "inequality" here is not in the absolute (Marxist) sense. You'll notice that the word "class" modifies the word "inequality". When used together, it signifies that (1) there is a continuum of socioeconomic classes, and (2) said continuum is perfectly linear / proportional from the poorest to the richest (1945-1980). That is, identical (equa-slope) wealth-growth and income-growth among ALL classes, from the poorest to the richest. This was by design. If that's not clear, review the excellent CBPP summary of historical inequality.
The problem isn't class. The problem (1980-present) is non-linear wealth-growth and income-growth distribution among classes. At our present rate of upward wealth redistribution (middle to top), U.S. inequality will be roughly equivalent to pre-revolutionary France circa 1785, where the "aristocracy" (their "1% class") had amassed somewhere around 55% of all national assets/wealth (for comparison, in 1980, the top 1% possessed 20% of all U.S. wealth, while the broad middle possessed around 42%. Today, the top 1% possesses somewhere around 37 to 42% depending on whose numbers you use, while the broad middle controls just 22% of U.S. wealth. And that ratio of upward distribution continues at roughly 0.5% per year).
Sasha, Imagine someone complaining to you about indoor plumbing and suggesting that carrying shit in buckets might be superior. To inspire your revulsion towards indoor plumbing they bring you to a toilet that exploded leaving the bathroom covered with shit. And yet when take a look at it, you immediately see exploded shell pieces from a hand grenade. How would you feel about the complainer in question?
Outside of support for mass immigration which imports a massive and hostile ethnic enemy class (which is itself hardly fond of capitalism); neoliberal policies are only truly ruinous to the extent that they are combined with other specific malicious decisions.
For starters:
1. There are plenty of affordable places for low wage unskilled workers, it's just that these are populated with violent blacks and so the white working class must either resign itself to life under regular abuse or flee these affordable places for less affordable ones.
2. Government directly devaluating the male role as a supplier, not through vague "neo-liberalism" but by forcing every industry in existence to spend obscene amounts on make-work jobs for women (see the rise of HR departments after the civil rights act). Also, hostile divorce policies (though these are somewhat overstated by the manosphere).
...
Let me address the idea that "Variation in human ability exists for a reason". This is what Dennett calls a deepity. A deepity is a phrase that has two meanings, one true and meaningful; the other which would be earthshattering if it were true. The deepist works by getting his reader's system 1 to substitute agreement with meaning one to agreement with meaning two.
You've discovered that evolution did not always lead to the most intelligent humans (true) and concluded that unintelligent humans are needed in a society (highly questionable). You might aswell say that the 40% infant mortality rate in the 1800s was high "for a reason", and therefore we should not attempt to nearly eliminate it, as we have. If you are going to argue that intelligence can be bad, you have the burden of proof, and should attempt to meet it instead of pulling this switcheroo.
Thoughtful essay. IMO, A lot of the tech right's apparent disdain for the working class is mostly opposition to working class politics, which they (IMO rightfully) see as bad ideas politically, economically, both for the working class and society as a whole. They're more concerned than most about addressing the real causes of crime, drug addiction, family breakdown etc., but they attribute a lot of that to leftwing economic policy and practices, as well as structural changes. Part of what is going on is that the tech right, unlike the New Right, doesn't try and put out an image that they really know what it's like to deal with working class issues, and don't brand themselves as being on the side of the working class, because people in elite industries don't want to be part of a movement that explicitly tries to brand itself as lower class.
"...don't brand themselves as being on the side of the working class."
For the most part, yes. They've done it in the past wrt to the "unbanked" overseas, and somewhat domestically, in certain fintech endeavors. But by and large it's a b2b kind of effort (productivity hacks) or b2c but for largely middle and upper-middle class needs/wants, e.g. electric scooters, food delivery, VR entertainment etc.
Many in tech aren't bothered by the working class not being able to keep up with increasing labor and societal complexity and proliferating temptations/super stimuli. They're not exactly predisposed to appreciating these things because they have the executive function, intelligence and conscientiousness to not succumb to it.
In any case there is something vaguely off-brand about this piece from Aporia (albeit acknowledging that the site is new enough to not entirely know what it's brand should look like yet). Surely it was written with Lind's Eugenicons top of mind, mostly inspired by that alone. An attempt to distance itself from the villain in his piece.
> Many in tech aren't bothered by the working class not being able to keep up with increasing labor and societal complexity and proliferating temptations/super stimuli
Thanks to capitalism, they don't need to. You can earn $20/hour washing dishes, or much more in construction. A reliable handyman can easily make $50/hour.
The Tech Right is all Men. Men who work with mostly other Men. Men who are all whipped up over their maleness and that their rights and superiority is being diminished. This is no different than what will happen with the intellectual class when the new creative class starts to really replace them. We have change going down. Those who are no longer deemed winners will be angry because they believe they deserve their success, because they earned it. What people simply don't understand is we have no free will. Those in favor are favored because they provide value to the ruling class. When they no longer provide the value and there is another group to replace them, they are discarded. This is what happens in narcissistic relationships. We live in a narcissistic culture and this is all of our realities. They could be smart about it and see the big picture but they never had too because they had it so good. Trauma is learning. It is forced learning of other people's perspectives without your own being valued. This crowd hasn't had trauma before so they are acting like rowdy spoiled children who do what their football coaches whip them up to do.
The "tech-right" is a sham that has never existed.
Elon Musk was a left wing darling for ages, and was selected as a WEF Young Global Leader back in '08. Twitter's purchase was a partially an exercise in influence laundering, making a figurehead who promotes globalist policies (brain chips, UBI, green energy, etc.) palatable to the emergent populist right. While the other side of the story is the bait and switch Freedom of Speech trap just so he can use Twitter's established market share to subsidize his attempt to replicate China's WeChat app and infrastructure.
Peter Thiel's probably the only other ostensibly right wing Tech bro, and he's the one responsible for PALANTIR, part of the PayPal mafia, and masquerades as a libertarian while doing more to advance authoritarianism than the majority of the other billionaires in the world, regardless of their political alignment.
Also, I strained my eyes trying to find where the claim that Lind's statement about racial disparities in wealth among the working class is "statistically illiterate" is substantiated, but I couldn't find it. The fact that this assertion is made so pointedly and that it's expected to be taken as a given, immediately after accusing someone of arguing in bad Faith (which very well may be true) is hypocritical enough to dismiss the objection out of hand. But I have a feeling the actual numbers would bury it even further.
Otherwise the article was well written and made a few interesting points. Just needs a bit of a reality check.
Lind's point is statistically illiterate because he says that blacks aren't much proper than whites if you control for class. This suggests he doesn't understand at a basic level what the concept of 'control' means in statistics. As Steve Sailer points out, if you 'control' for wealth, you find that blacks and whites are equally wealthy.
An excellent and timely article. Very disappointing to see Nathan Cofnas reverting to crude measures of wealth to justify social decay. Almost Soviet in a way.
Why does the author have so much sympathy for the American working class (who can easily earn >$20/hour, or more if you learn a very basic skill), but so much disdain for foreigners who want a chance at a better life in America?
I'll tell you why I do. It's because the American working class played a role in making this a nice country, and the foreigners you describe (who are rarely Japanese for some reason) played a corresponding role in making their own countries into shitholes. Now you wanna roll the dice on the most beautiful civilization that has ever existed on the off chance that people who never built anything in the same universe will suddenly begin to do so.
Personally, I shun the terms Left and Right, though I am ok with liberal and conservative. Any healthy democracy needs both liberals and conservatives. But for myself, I prefer the very narrow road that runs right down the middle, neither left, nor right, but creatively centrist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
What is missing in our society right now is imagination.
"Although Lind’s critique is in bad faith, and is at times statistically illiterate (“when you control for class, it turns out that working-class whites aren’t that much wealthier than working-class blacks”), it points to an important truth. Genetic realism is often to used to advance runaway neoliberal policies, which do not follow from the data. Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
Neoliberal policies do follow from the data though. That's the connection between accepting behavioral genetics and accepting economics. Both involve comfort with uncomfortable truths that go against social desirability bias, of course Michael Lind hates both. This is not "hate" for the working class. They do better under capitalism than any other system. I could go on, but the author doesn't seem to be too familiar with the arguments he's critiquing.
The options aren't limited to 'capitalism' and 'any other system'. If we can show statistically that the working class were doing better on multiple statistical measures under a different policy regime, and we absolutely can, it follows that this policy regime is better for the working classes. Duh!
I'd agree with this. Capitalism and markets are great tools that solve a number of problems well, but they're not without downsides and can and should be ameliorated when they start to interfere with basic priorities like family formation.
Disappointing that Aporia didn't find this too embarrassing to publish. I'm left waiting for an explanation for how neoliberal trade policies cause otherwise virtuous people to divorce their spouses, have illegitimate children, keep poor dietary habits, and abuse narcotics.
The argument would be that manufacturing jobs were held by men and allowed them to be bread winners. Replacing these jobs with service jobs causes poor women to earn more money than poor men who can no longer best them economically. Leading to worse outcomes for the children, the men and maybe the women depending on your values.
Tech Bros believe in this thing called 'culture' which floats around in the ether and has no connection to economic reality, technological development, or the material conditions in which people live. All social problems are the result of this metaphysical 'culture' and so there can be no justification for interference in the holy cause of corporations making more money. Hence geniuses like Richard Hananiah believe that the only way to solve the obesity epidemic is just to be mean to fat people.
Divorce and childlessness are great for GDP in the short-to-medium term, because childless people have more disposable income and can work longer hours. Obesity is great for producers of food products so long as they don't have to pick up the tab of paying for healthcare, etc. The list goes on. It's always possible optimise for short-term economic gains at the expense of cannibalising long-term social capital, until the boomers finally retire and everything starts to fall over.
The idea that you win power by winning over working-class people is ridiculous. How do you think the current elite attained power? Elite power is the only thing that matters in politics. The masses are socially conditioned and gaslighted into supporting whatever policy the ruling elite wants.
"Acknowledgement of innate differences in ability is an argument for redistribution and economic protection, not against them."
There are three arguments for redistribution:
1) It has a high ROI, because the poor can improve themselves by using those funds better then the rich.
2) It is "fair" in some cosmic sense.
3) It is necessary for social and political stability (cheaper to pay then not to pay).
#1 is the justification for most social spending. Education, healthcare, etc are justified mostly based on ROI. If someone want to justify universal pre-K then show a study showing that earlier interventions raise IQ or some nonsense.
If the ROI isn't there most of what we spend money on collapses into little more then make-work jobs for professional class vote banks.
#2 should probably acknowledge fairness to the future. Higher economic growth benefits the unborn, so if redistribution today slows growth then it's unfair to the future.
#3 Is a sound argument, but do we really need to spend 50%+ of GDP? Again most of the big expenditures are #1 related and generally benefit the providers more than the provided for.
The tech and/or new right has antipathy to working class populist politics because its base is low iq and distractible. They are enamored by ephemera like Hunter Biden’s dick picks, and they don’t have the attention span to focus in policy, which is why they are constantly routed.
Rich men north of richmond are not responsible for fatties milking welfare; left wing nonprofits and racial minority interest groups are.
Good essay.
50 years ago, it also was possible to raise a littler of human kittens on one salary without also being a Hedge Fund Billionaire or a Trust Fund Baby.
Real working class wages have been stagnant since the late 1970s.
It was possible to be a milk man who worked 6-8 hour days, had a stay at home wife, and a 3 bedroom house with a nice yard. The boomers were spoiled though. If you were a white man of average intelligence you had very little standing in your way to live a decent life. Now they are angry, greedy or both and they want everyone to pay for them. Especially those who are now younger than them and unrelated. Boomers had it great. Unless they were single women, mothers, women married to aholes, neurodivergents, minorities, smart or really stupid. A society set up to serve the average means only one specific part of that average is valued and the rest are scapegoated. White men are not special. They were just chosen to be the valued party to serve the ruling class.
What are you talking about? Boomer living standards absolutely sucked compared to today, but this caricature of America you're describing is retarded.
What criteria are you going by to deem it successful? Humanity has been around a lot longer than your examples that only fall in the last few hundred years. We are in the fall of another patriarchal society and this time as a global one. We are going by history that has been curated by "winning" men only and passed down in the written word. Do you realize that oral history is actually more accurate than written history? Patriarchal societies self implode. They may destroy, assimilate and oppress other societies but their own excess always lead to their downfall. Don't believe me keep living another 50 years and watch this one go down with all it's might is right leaders at the helm. Also America is not 90% white. Its almost 50% non-white.
Our society is already collapsing. Whether men lead it likely depends on the amount of people that will die in this collapse. Egalitarian societies tend to exist when the populations are small groups and each child's birth is sacred. If you are giving birth and each new addition means humanity and this group might live a little longer you treat the women and children better because they are the future. Matriarchy is egalitarian in most its functioning. They just keep track of the children via the mother's lineage because that is the simplest way to do so and it is about the whole group surviving not the name.
You give examples from a really small part of human existence. Humans in their current form have been around for 200K years. We have only had civilization for the last 6K. You are talking about times that are only half way into the era of civilization.
We are collapsing. How far we collapse depends on how stupid we are. We are seem to be sticking our heads in the sand even though the signs are pretty clear so it may be total extinction.
Nathan Cofnas = the tech right, whatever that is
Trump = demagogue
That’s some top notch analysis.
"the working class is better-off (in material terms) than it was 50 years ago"
Who writes this stuff? The U.S. broad 60% middle-class, since 1980, has lost HALF its real wealth, has 3X greater real debt, and must work almost 2x as hard (as in 1980) to maintain the average home. Where did all that middle-class wealth go? It was re-distributed upwards into the top 10%, and mostly the top 1%, and mostly again into the top 0.1%. And wealth continues to be redistributed from the broad middle to the very top at the rate of roughly 0.5% per year. We have achieved (2013) the same level of class-inequality last seen in 1928, after the first experiment in supply-side socio-economics.
Compare 1945-1980. Zero class-inequality. All classes thrived. We created the greatest all-class socioeconomic experience in human history. Why? Our nation's economy was based on demand-side policies and true progressive fiscal discipline. We created untold millionaires during this period, but NOT at the expense of other classes. ALL classes shared identical wealth-growth and income-growth slopes.
That all changed after supply-side, Neoliberal policies replaced Truman-Eisenhower economic policies. Supply-side policies have been in place now for over 40 years, causing the greatest class-inequality since 1928, and worsening year over year. The "working class" is NOT better off, by any metric, than 50 years ago. We are dying as a nation, and growing as a plutocracy. No wonder our social polarization is at its highest levels in modern history.
"Compare 1945-1980. Zero class-inequality"
- Words have meanings you know, they are not just random signifiers of how you feel.
Rush Limbaugh used to say that a lot.
The use of the word "inequality" here is not in the absolute (Marxist) sense. You'll notice that the word "class" modifies the word "inequality". When used together, it signifies that (1) there is a continuum of socioeconomic classes, and (2) said continuum is perfectly linear / proportional from the poorest to the richest (1945-1980). That is, identical (equa-slope) wealth-growth and income-growth among ALL classes, from the poorest to the richest. This was by design. If that's not clear, review the excellent CBPP summary of historical inequality.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality
The problem isn't class. The problem (1980-present) is non-linear wealth-growth and income-growth distribution among classes. At our present rate of upward wealth redistribution (middle to top), U.S. inequality will be roughly equivalent to pre-revolutionary France circa 1785, where the "aristocracy" (their "1% class") had amassed somewhere around 55% of all national assets/wealth (for comparison, in 1980, the top 1% possessed 20% of all U.S. wealth, while the broad middle possessed around 42%. Today, the top 1% possesses somewhere around 37 to 42% depending on whose numbers you use, while the broad middle controls just 22% of U.S. wealth. And that ratio of upward distribution continues at roughly 0.5% per year).
Sasha, Imagine someone complaining to you about indoor plumbing and suggesting that carrying shit in buckets might be superior. To inspire your revulsion towards indoor plumbing they bring you to a toilet that exploded leaving the bathroom covered with shit. And yet when take a look at it, you immediately see exploded shell pieces from a hand grenade. How would you feel about the complainer in question?
Outside of support for mass immigration which imports a massive and hostile ethnic enemy class (which is itself hardly fond of capitalism); neoliberal policies are only truly ruinous to the extent that they are combined with other specific malicious decisions.
For starters:
1. There are plenty of affordable places for low wage unskilled workers, it's just that these are populated with violent blacks and so the white working class must either resign itself to life under regular abuse or flee these affordable places for less affordable ones.
2. Government directly devaluating the male role as a supplier, not through vague "neo-liberalism" but by forcing every industry in existence to spend obscene amounts on make-work jobs for women (see the rise of HR departments after the civil rights act). Also, hostile divorce policies (though these are somewhat overstated by the manosphere).
...
Let me address the idea that "Variation in human ability exists for a reason". This is what Dennett calls a deepity. A deepity is a phrase that has two meanings, one true and meaningful; the other which would be earthshattering if it were true. The deepist works by getting his reader's system 1 to substitute agreement with meaning one to agreement with meaning two.
You've discovered that evolution did not always lead to the most intelligent humans (true) and concluded that unintelligent humans are needed in a society (highly questionable). You might aswell say that the 40% infant mortality rate in the 1800s was high "for a reason", and therefore we should not attempt to nearly eliminate it, as we have. If you are going to argue that intelligence can be bad, you have the burden of proof, and should attempt to meet it instead of pulling this switcheroo.
Thoughtful essay. IMO, A lot of the tech right's apparent disdain for the working class is mostly opposition to working class politics, which they (IMO rightfully) see as bad ideas politically, economically, both for the working class and society as a whole. They're more concerned than most about addressing the real causes of crime, drug addiction, family breakdown etc., but they attribute a lot of that to leftwing economic policy and practices, as well as structural changes. Part of what is going on is that the tech right, unlike the New Right, doesn't try and put out an image that they really know what it's like to deal with working class issues, and don't brand themselves as being on the side of the working class, because people in elite industries don't want to be part of a movement that explicitly tries to brand itself as lower class.
"...don't brand themselves as being on the side of the working class."
For the most part, yes. They've done it in the past wrt to the "unbanked" overseas, and somewhat domestically, in certain fintech endeavors. But by and large it's a b2b kind of effort (productivity hacks) or b2c but for largely middle and upper-middle class needs/wants, e.g. electric scooters, food delivery, VR entertainment etc.
Many in tech aren't bothered by the working class not being able to keep up with increasing labor and societal complexity and proliferating temptations/super stimuli. They're not exactly predisposed to appreciating these things because they have the executive function, intelligence and conscientiousness to not succumb to it.
In any case there is something vaguely off-brand about this piece from Aporia (albeit acknowledging that the site is new enough to not entirely know what it's brand should look like yet). Surely it was written with Lind's Eugenicons top of mind, mostly inspired by that alone. An attempt to distance itself from the villain in his piece.
> Many in tech aren't bothered by the working class not being able to keep up with increasing labor and societal complexity and proliferating temptations/super stimuli
Thanks to capitalism, they don't need to. You can earn $20/hour washing dishes, or much more in construction. A reliable handyman can easily make $50/hour.
The Tech Right is all Men. Men who work with mostly other Men. Men who are all whipped up over their maleness and that their rights and superiority is being diminished. This is no different than what will happen with the intellectual class when the new creative class starts to really replace them. We have change going down. Those who are no longer deemed winners will be angry because they believe they deserve their success, because they earned it. What people simply don't understand is we have no free will. Those in favor are favored because they provide value to the ruling class. When they no longer provide the value and there is another group to replace them, they are discarded. This is what happens in narcissistic relationships. We live in a narcissistic culture and this is all of our realities. They could be smart about it and see the big picture but they never had too because they had it so good. Trauma is learning. It is forced learning of other people's perspectives without your own being valued. This crowd hasn't had trauma before so they are acting like rowdy spoiled children who do what their football coaches whip them up to do.
The "tech-right" is a sham that has never existed.
Elon Musk was a left wing darling for ages, and was selected as a WEF Young Global Leader back in '08. Twitter's purchase was a partially an exercise in influence laundering, making a figurehead who promotes globalist policies (brain chips, UBI, green energy, etc.) palatable to the emergent populist right. While the other side of the story is the bait and switch Freedom of Speech trap just so he can use Twitter's established market share to subsidize his attempt to replicate China's WeChat app and infrastructure.
Peter Thiel's probably the only other ostensibly right wing Tech bro, and he's the one responsible for PALANTIR, part of the PayPal mafia, and masquerades as a libertarian while doing more to advance authoritarianism than the majority of the other billionaires in the world, regardless of their political alignment.
Also, I strained my eyes trying to find where the claim that Lind's statement about racial disparities in wealth among the working class is "statistically illiterate" is substantiated, but I couldn't find it. The fact that this assertion is made so pointedly and that it's expected to be taken as a given, immediately after accusing someone of arguing in bad Faith (which very well may be true) is hypocritical enough to dismiss the objection out of hand. But I have a feeling the actual numbers would bury it even further.
Otherwise the article was well written and made a few interesting points. Just needs a bit of a reality check.
Lind's point is statistically illiterate because he says that blacks aren't much proper than whites if you control for class. This suggests he doesn't understand at a basic level what the concept of 'control' means in statistics. As Steve Sailer points out, if you 'control' for wealth, you find that blacks and whites are equally wealthy.
An excellent and timely article. Very disappointing to see Nathan Cofnas reverting to crude measures of wealth to justify social decay. Almost Soviet in a way.
Why does the author have so much sympathy for the American working class (who can easily earn >$20/hour, or more if you learn a very basic skill), but so much disdain for foreigners who want a chance at a better life in America?
I'll tell you why I do. It's because the American working class played a role in making this a nice country, and the foreigners you describe (who are rarely Japanese for some reason) played a corresponding role in making their own countries into shitholes. Now you wanna roll the dice on the most beautiful civilization that has ever existed on the off chance that people who never built anything in the same universe will suddenly begin to do so.
Personally, I shun the terms Left and Right, though I am ok with liberal and conservative. Any healthy democracy needs both liberals and conservatives. But for myself, I prefer the very narrow road that runs right down the middle, neither left, nor right, but creatively centrist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
What is missing in our society right now is imagination.