The New York Times is unable to write the truth here for fear of offending their readers: The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people. This is so obviously the case and they are going so far out of their way here to not mention it one can only conclude that they are attempting to mislead deliberately.
The reason the New York Times can’t say “Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem” is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.
But if you write that down as the Times, you immediately become a target for political attack. So they take the easy road here which is vaguely mentioning some foggy, abstract term “monoculture.”
We know what monoculture means. It isn’t a conservative republican monoculture.
I work in this industry, 90% of my coworkers and colleagues universally agree and emphatically support diversity of all types. They talk about it all the time, hold diversity workshops etc. nothing much has changed.
So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.
The New York Times is unable to write the truth here for fear of offending their readers: The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people.
Hyper liberal people are fine. It's intolerant authoritarian people which are the problem, regardless of where they claim to be on the political spectrum. In activist circles, it's said that no movement can succeed without at least 10% radicals. That's nothing new. What's new in the past several years is the willingness to harass, destroy people's lives and livelihoods, and even to vandalize and enact physical violence.
Most of the tech class in SV isn't doing the things I list above. However, many people here give their tacit acceptance of these things.
So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.
The monoculture is a real monoculture. It's also really Orwellian. There's this kind of "seeking out" stance people can take. I remember it when getting profiled from racists. I remember such attention from people questioning my sexual orientation. Now I see it from people I meet here in the Bay Area.
I find myself allying with anti-authoritarians across the political spectrum, as both parties (though more so the republicans) have cozied up more with more extreme and more authoritarian ideologies.
Liberals are all about "we know whats best because of our education and these studies" and conservatives "we know whats best because jesus (tradition, et al)" - in the end, both of them are trying to pass more malum prohibitum laws with dubious effects. I'm dubious of technocrats and religious tests.
The thing that I see that scares me the lack of room for disagreement, if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them' whoever them is.
The thing that I see that scares me the lack of room for disagreement, if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them' whoever them is.
Hell, "if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them'" is okay, so long as people remain cordial and just chill. I had that while at grad school at the University of South Carolina. The traddies, folkies, world music people, eastern religious nuts, African drum people, neo-hippies, goths, metal-heads, Harley motorcycle people, punks,... I could go on. We all hung out together. We even got into arguments and tried to point out how the other was deluded and screwed up, and we still hung out together.
I guess it's easy if you're a small group of fringers in a sea of mainstream people. When the fringe gets too big, it starts to develop social pathologies of its own. I think the Bay Area fringe is more prone to such pathologies than average.
I think the point that I was trying to hammer home, is you must be ideologically pure, and in total harmony with all views, otherwise you're branded one of 'them' and you, and any viewpoints you have, are discarded.
>In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal...
So is being conservative. And both of those are just as homogeneous and unoriginal as being independent. Etc etc.
You don't even get originality when you mix these sorts of dogmatic ideologies, because they are quasi-religious at this point. Just kind of the reality of the modern era. You have to choose to live in a place and go with it. If it makes you feel any better, none of these political ideologies are likely to be any more beneficial than the religious ideologies that preceded them.
It also would hit home too hard, since print institutions like the Times have been a significant source of this monoculture within the highly literate Silicon Valley.
Bingo. This shit is starting to seep into my company and may drive me out. I'll just have to find reasonable types and start my own billion dollar industry I suppose.
Yeah even as an American I've noticed "decadent" used this way. Not just chocolate, you see it with many sweets or other calorie dense foods. Hell Starbucks has become one of the most ubiquitous companies in the world largely due to the popularity/markup of its breakfast milkshakes.
I guess the idea with "decadent" is something like "this is your rare and entirely sinful reward for your hard work maintaining your overall health with your generally sensible choices in what you eat." Kindof like a dietary lent.
Meanwhile 40% of the US adult population is obese. 40%. That is absolutely staggering.
There's nothing "decadent" about eating food that is nutritionally poor here...it's entirely normal.
It's all relative. Every place has it's own unique political spectrum. The US is no exception in this regard. To your point though, there is nothing "liberal" about companies behaving the way you describe. If we are guilty of anything, it's conflating the ideas of "liberal" and the political left.
some americans have really weird meanings for some words.
such as left to mean center-right
Political Compass put me at center-left. Some people in the Bay Area have tried to call me a Republican. Differing Points of View can be weird. That's what Diversity is all about.
Come to Europe to get a different perpective. I would guess Bay Area liberals would be placed somewhere slightly left / liberal of center over here. And neo-cons in terms on capatalism. I can only guess what I would be called in the US. Perspective is everything I guess.
Ok, that is strange. There is, it seems, more than one political axis. What kind of test did you take? Now I'm curious to find out what I'm classified as.
I duno. I feel like the valley is a weird / contradictory mix of some liberal policies / ideas and libertarianism when it comes to handling users, the responsibility of handling so much data and etc.
I think it is more of a wild mix of differing ideas.
Hard to imagine anyone with any political perspective watching valley companies operate and figuring it is in a "liberal" fashion...
"Conservative Republican" describes like dozens of belief systems in 2018.
Does a conservative Republican support free trade or tariffs?
Does a conservative Republican believe "I earn what I get" or "companies must be forced to provide equal time for me"?
Does a conservative Republican support "work toward citizenship" or "kick Muslims and Mexicans out"?
Does a conservative Republican believe business owners should be free to pursue profit, or business owners should be forced to deliver the President's policy goals?
Does a conservative Republican believe in "leader of the free world" or "America first"?
Does a conservative Republican believe in "pax Americana" or "the U.S. is not the world's policeman"?
Who does a conservative Republican like more: Justin Trudeau or Vladimir Putin? Angela Merkel or Kim Jong Un?
The crazy thing is, right now you can find people who believe either side of one of those dichotomies above, and both of them might call themselves a conservative Republican!
Likewise: it's equally silly to say that "The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people." Because it's possible to do the same exercise with conflicting liberal beliefs.
The key thing to consider is that there is more to thought than where it lies on a political spectrum. A liberal millionaire and a conservative millionaire are going to share modes of thought that are orthogonal to which party they prefer to vote for.
It’s a white male monoculture. The liberalism you’re talking about is white male liberalism, which in all honesty isn’t that different from conservatism. Being in favour of diversity and actually working to make it happen, kicking out harassers &c are quite different. Take a look at the recent love-in between Bannon and Maher.
I hate to disappoint you, but you have way more in common with your liberal co-workers than you think, and you both have less in common with the general population than you’d like to believe.
Interesting view, given that Whites are proportionally underrepresented in much of Silicon valley companies. In fact, Google's tech roles are now majority non-white. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it does not align with the idea that SV's monocultue comes from an overrepresentation of White people.
The point is, at most there's a male over representation - but there's not a white over representation. The majority of Googlers are non-white, it seems dubious the country would have a white monoculture.
Not to mention, we're being pretty ambiguous as to what we're really referring to by a "white male" culture. I'm going to hazard a guess that the >60% of white men who voted for Trump have a very different culture than the average white person at Google.
“Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem” is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.
Silicon Valley definitely isn't 100% liberal. Not even close. The SF Bay Area is overwhelmingly liberal, true, but most male techies self-identify as libertarians, to the extent they choose to engage in politics, making the SV portion of the Bay Area comparatively conservative.
Moreover, you seem to be conflating multiple types of liberals into a single identity. Just as there are neocons, MRAs, white supremacists, and evangelicals on the conservative side, their are different types of liberals. You have treehuggers, bleeding hearts, socialists, progressives, pragmatists, BFL (business friendly liberals aka blue dogs), reformed Republicans, etc. Many of these groups (like the MRAs, neocons, white supremacists, and evangelicals on the conservative side) identify themselves by what they are fighting against. But the majority identify themselves by what they are for.
Adding to @gamblor956 comments, the greater bay area - where I've lived for a quarter century - is still dominated by old money country club types with a separate highly transient population coming and going. The latest waves have been tech.
The european concepts of 'liberal' and the US version (especially on the west coast which is completely different culturally to the east coast) causes endless confusion as like so many words in the English language mean different things on different continents and even places.
While in the U.S. being libertarian is associated with being right-leaning, the small government vs big government debate is pretty orthogonal to left vs right. The silicon valley stance on economic matters doesn't fit cleanly into the usual liberal or conservative platforms.
On social issues, it's more clear.
Edit: I thought this was a fairly bland comment on my part, so can I ask what reasons people have for silently disagreeing?
OK, I'll not-silently disagree (though I didn't downvote you).
The right can be either small- or big-government. (Cynically, the party of the "right", the Republicans, is big-government when in power and small-government when out of power.) But I see very little on the left that is small-government - certainly not the Democratic Party, and not much outside it. (I suppose at least some of the anarchists can be considered left, but as far as I can tell they are a very small group.)
>but most male techies self-identify as libertarians,
Aka "I'm a liberal but a highly visible minority of the people around me who call themselves liberals are extremists who have gone too far so I need to call myself something else to distance myself from them."
This account looks to have been created for the sole purpose of posting this comment.
I've noticed an increasing trend of top level comments on social commentary articles immediately jumping to "liberals are the problem". Just yesterday, [0], the first reply. I do not see this happening in reverse. It is divisive and disheartening.
Further, this comment does not echo my take on the article as a whole. It's half a book review, half a person's commentary on their life in SV. The key paragraph:
> I felt like I’d ceased to become anything else,” she said. “All I did was work all the time and talk about tech.” She concluded that a job that asked her to jump from crisis to crisis, that did not admit time or perspective to consider many ideas that were outside its small world, was not the best use of her time.
The main gist of the sameness mentioned is that everything is tech.
Where is this political play coming from? Why is it a liberal problem?
On HN, I mostly see it in replies. Then again, I don't click on all comment sections; maybe I naturally have been avoiding the articles that elicit those comments.
Generally, I expect comment sections that immediately devolve into political discussions to be flagged.
The reason the New York Times can’t say “Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem” is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.
But if you write that down as the Times, you immediately become a target for political attack. So they take the easy road here which is vaguely mentioning some foggy, abstract term “monoculture.”
We know what monoculture means. It isn’t a conservative republican monoculture.
I work in this industry, 90% of my coworkers and colleagues universally agree and emphatically support diversity of all types. They talk about it all the time, hold diversity workshops etc. nothing much has changed.
So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.