Anger
Anger is a strange emotion. I’ve made no efforts to conceal that I have a lot of it, and toward such vile targets (such as those who have destroyed the culture of Silicon Valley and, by extension due to that region’s assigned status of leadership, the technology industry) that most would call it “justified”. Anger is, however, one of those emotions that humans prefer to ignore. It produces (in roughly increasing order of severity) foul language, outbursts, threats, retaliations and destroyed relationships, and frank physical violence. The fruits of anger are disliked, and not for bad reasons, because most of those byproducts are horrible. Most anger is, additionally, a passing and somewhat errant emotion; the target of the anger might not be deserving of violence, retaliation, or even insults. In fact, some anger is completely unjustified; so it’s best not to act on anger until we’ve had a chance to process and examine it. The bad kind of anger tends to be short-lived but, if humans acted on it when it emerged, we wouldn’t have made it this far as a species. Still, most of us agree that much anger, especially the long-lived kind that doesn’t go away, is justified in some moral sense. To be angry, three years later, at an incompetent driver is deemed silly. To be angry over a traumatic incident or a life-altering injustice is held as understandable.
However, is justified anger good? The answer, I would say, is paradoxical. For the individual, anger isn’t good. I’m not saying that the emotion should be ignored or “bottled in”. It should be acknowledged and let to pass. Holding on to it forever is, however, counterproductive. It’s stressful and unpleasant and sometimes harmful. As Buddha said, “holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” Anger, held too long, is a toxic and dreadful emotion that seems to be devoid of value– to the individual. This isn’t news. So what’s the issue? Why am I interested in talking about it? Because anger is extremely useful for the human collective.
Only anger, it often seems, can muster the force that is needed to overthrow evil. Let’s be honest: the problem has its act together. We aren’t going to overthrow the global corporate elite by beaming love waves at them. No one is going to liberate the technology industry from its Damaso overlords with a message of hope and joy alone. We can probably get them to vacate without forcibly removing them, but it’s not going to happen without a threatening storm headed their way. Any solution to any social problem will involve some people getting hurt, if only because the people who run the world now are willing to hurt other people, by the millions, in order to protect their positions.
Anger is, I’m afraid, the emotion that spreads most quickly throughout a group, and sometimes the only thing that can hold it together. Of course, this can be a force for good or for evil. Many of history’s most noted ragemongers were people did bad to the world. I would, however, say that this fact makes the argument that, if good people shy away from the job of spreading indignation and resentment, then only evil people will being doing it. For me, that’s an upsetting realization.
Whether we’re talking about “yellow journalism” or bloggers or anyone else who fights for social change, spreading anger is a major part of what they do. It’s something that I do, often consciously. The reason, when I discuss Silicon Valley’s cultural problems, for me to mention Evan Spiegel or Lucas Duplan (for the uninitiated, they are two well-connected, rich, unlikeable and unqualified people who were made startup founders) is because they inspire resentment and hatred. Dry discussions of systemic problems don’t lead to social change; they lead to more dry debate and that debate leads to more debate, but nothing ever gets done until someone “condescends” to talk to the public and get them pissed off. For that purpose, a Joffrey figure like Evan Spiegel is just much “catchier”. This is why founder-quality issues like Duplan and Spiegel, and “Google Buses”, are a better vector of attack against Sand Hill Road than the deeper technical reasons (e.g. principal-agent problems that take kilowords to explain in detail) for that ecosystem’s moral failure. It’s hard to get people riled up about investor collusion, and much easier to point to this picture of Lucas Duplan.
This current incarnation of Silicon Valley needs to be pushed aside and discarded, because it’s hurting the world. The whole ecosystem– the shitty corporate cultures with the age discrimination and open-plan fetishism, the juvenile talk about “unicorns” because it’s a cute way of covering up the reality of an industry that only cares about growth for its own sake, the insane short-term greed, the utter lack of concern for ethics, the investor collusion, and the founder-quality issues– needs to be burned to the ground so we can build something new. And I have enough talent that, while I can’t change anything on my own, I can contribute. When I (unintentionally) revealed the existence of stack-ranking at Google to the public, I damaged that company’s reputation. The degree to which I did so is probably not significant, relative to its daily swings on the stock market, but with enough people in the good fight, victory is possible.
Here’s what I don’t like. Clearly, anger is painful for the person experiencing it. As an individual, I would be better to let it pass. I can personally deal with the pain of it, but it’s leads me to question whether there is social value in disseminating it. And yet, without people like me spreading and multiplying this justified anger at the moral failure of Silicon Valley, no change will occur and evil will win. This is what makes anger paradoxical. As an individual, the prudent thing to do is to let it go. For society, moral justice demands that it spread and amplify. Even if we accept that collective anger can just as easily be a force for bad (and it can) we still have to confront the fact that if good people decline to spread and multiply anger against evil, then the sheer power of collective anger will be wielded only by evil. We need, as a countervailing force, for the good people to comprehend and direct the force of collective anger.
The Middle Path
Why do I detest Silicon Valley? I don’t live there, and I have better options than to take a pay cut in exchange for 0.03% of a post-A startup, so why does that cesspool matter to me at this point? In large part, it’s because the Bay Area wasn’t always a cesspool. It used to be run by lifelong engineers for engineers, and now it’s some shitty outpost of the mainstream business culture, and I find that devolution to be deplorable. The Valley used to be a haven for nerds (here, meaning people who value intellectual fulfillment more than maximizing their wealth and social status) and now it’s become a haven for MBA-culture rejects who go West to take advantage of the nerds. It’s a joke, it’s awful, and it’s very easy to get angry at it. But why? Why is it worth anger? Shouldn’t we divest ourselves, emotionally, and be content to let that cesspool implode?
I don’t care about Silicon Valley, meaning the Bay Area, but I do care about the future of the technology industry. Technology is just too important to the future of humanity for us to ignore it, or to surrender it to barbarians. The technology industry used to represent the Middle Path between the two undesirable options of (a) wholesale subordination to the existing elite and (b) violent revolt. It was founded by people who neither wanted to acquiesce to the Establishment nor to overthrow it with physical force. They just wanted to build cool things, to indulge their intellectual curiosities, and possibly to outperform an existing oligarchy and therefore refute its claims of meritocracy.
Unfortunately, Silicon Valley became a victim of its own success. It outperformed the Establishment and so the Establishment, rather than declining gracefully into lesser relevance, found a way to colonize it through the good-old-boy network of Bay Area venture capital. To be fair, the natives allowed themselves to be conquered. It wasn’t hard for the invaders to do, because software engineers have such a broken tribal identity and such a culture of foolish individualism that divide-and-conquer tactics (like– for a modern example that illustrates how fucked we are as a tribe, “Agile”/Scrum– which has evolved into a system where programmers rat each other out to management for free) worked easily. Programmers are, not surprisingly, prone to a bit of cerebral narcissism, and the result of this is that they lash out with more anger at unskilled programmers and bad code than against the managerial forces (lack of interest in training, deadline culture) that created the bad programmers and awful legacy code in the first place. It’s remarkably easy for a businessman to turn a group of programmers against itself, so much so that any collective action (either a labor union, or professionalization) by programmers remains a pipe dream. The result is a culture of individualism and arrogance where almost every programmer believes that most of his colleagues are mouth-breathing idiots (and, to be fair, most of them are severely undertrained). There’s a joke in Silicon Valley about “flat” software teams where every programmer considers himself to be the leader, but it’s not entirely a joke. In the typical venture-funded startup, the engineers each believe that they’ll have investor contact within 6 months and founder/CEO status inside of 3 years. (They wouldn’t throw down 90-hour weeks if it were otherwise.) By the time programmers are old enough to recognize how rarely that happens (and how even more rarely people actually get rich in this game, unless they were born into the contacts that put them on the VC side or can have them inserted in high positions in portfolio companies, allowing diversification) they’re judged as being too old to program in the Valley. That is too convenient for those in power to be attributed to coincidence.
Sand Hill Road needs to be taken down because it has blocked the Middle Path that used to exist in Silicon Valley, and that should exist, if not in that location, in the technology industry somewhere. The old Establishment might have its territory chipped away (harmlessly, most often, because large corporations don’t die unless they do it to themselves) by technology startups, and it was content to have this happen because, so often, the territory it lost was what it didn’t understand well enough to care about. The new Establishment, on Sand Hill Road, is harder to outperform because, if it sees you as a threat, it will fund your competitors, ruin your reputation, and render your company unable to function.
I don’t believe that Silicon Valley’s closing of the Middle Path will be permanent, and it’s best for all of us that it not be. I am obviously not in favor of subordination to the global elite. They are the enemy, and something will have to be done about, or at least around, them in order to reverse the corruption and organizational decay that they’ve inflicted on the world. On the other hand, I view violent revolution as an absolute last resort. Violence is preferable to subordination and defeat, but nonetheless it is usually the absolute worst possible way to achieve something. Disliking the extremes, I want the moderate approach: effective opposition to the enemies of progress, without the violence that so easily leads to chaos and the harm of innocents. So when the mainstream business elite enters a space (like technology) in which it does not belong, colonizes it, and thereby blocks the Middle Path, it’s a scary proposition. Of course I cannot predict the future, but I can perceive risks; and the closing of the Middle Path represents too much of a risk for us to allow it. If the Middle Path has closed in venture-funded technology in the Valley, it’s time to move on to something else.
Do I think that humanity is doomed, simply because a man-child oligarchy in one geographical area (“Silicon Valley”) has closed the Middle Path when it existed in their location? Of course not. Among those in the know, the VC-engorged monstrosity that now exists in the Valley has ceased to inspire, or even to lead. It seems, then, that it is time to move past it, and to figure out where to open a new Middle Path.
If getting people to do this– to recognize the importance of doing this– requires a bit of emotional appeal along a vector such as anger or resentment, I’ll be around and I know how to pull it off.
