* Not to be pedantic, but not all of these figures are "tech" as such. The Mercers, of course, are financiers from Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that sprouted from the collaborations of lots of math guys from a nearby SUNY school. Mercer pere was, as you might expect, notably antisocial and weird even for a group of math professors.
So he has a slightly different intellectual formation than the Silicon Valley tech guys -- who, academically, often come from a milieu of a) hating the humanities and b) practicing amateur humanities anyway. Nevertheless everyone gets to the same anti-political place.
* I think the spirit is best summed up in this recent Washington Post article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/04/22/chicago-reader-free-speech-goodman) about a controversy over the Chicago Reader, an alt-weekly over there, where the owner is facing a revolt by staff over an op-ed he wrote. The content (anti-vaxxer) is one thing, but the owner seems to see literally any kind of fact-checking or editing as an offense to him and the First Amendment.
Dubious constitutional law aside, it's pretty much the result of more-or-less decades of celebration of individualism -- or of the "founder" as a heroic figure -- where any attempts at institutional creation are suspect in of itself.
As an avid reader of The Reader, I would say it was more like “fact-checking for me, but not for thee” that Goodman was complaining about. The piece, and the fact-checking, were pretty much what you’d expect, which is to say imperfect on both sides, with institutional cascading of errors on the fact-checking side, which was Goodman’s main point, obscured by the shoddiness of his own side.
Apparently Goodman stepped away, allowing the paper to get non-Profit protection and continue, which is all to the good, but I’m not going to tell anyone that The Reader is worthy as a single source.
such an excellent piece, synoptic in the best way.
A couple of thoughts/extra notes:
* Not to be pedantic, but not all of these figures are "tech" as such. The Mercers, of course, are financiers from Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that sprouted from the collaborations of lots of math guys from a nearby SUNY school. Mercer pere was, as you might expect, notably antisocial and weird even for a group of math professors.
So he has a slightly different intellectual formation than the Silicon Valley tech guys -- who, academically, often come from a milieu of a) hating the humanities and b) practicing amateur humanities anyway. Nevertheless everyone gets to the same anti-political place.
* I think the spirit is best summed up in this recent Washington Post article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/04/22/chicago-reader-free-speech-goodman) about a controversy over the Chicago Reader, an alt-weekly over there, where the owner is facing a revolt by staff over an op-ed he wrote. The content (anti-vaxxer) is one thing, but the owner seems to see literally any kind of fact-checking or editing as an offense to him and the First Amendment.
Dubious constitutional law aside, it's pretty much the result of more-or-less decades of celebration of individualism -- or of the "founder" as a heroic figure -- where any attempts at institutional creation are suspect in of itself.
As an avid reader of The Reader, I would say it was more like “fact-checking for me, but not for thee” that Goodman was complaining about. The piece, and the fact-checking, were pretty much what you’d expect, which is to say imperfect on both sides, with institutional cascading of errors on the fact-checking side, which was Goodman’s main point, obscured by the shoddiness of his own side.
Apparently Goodman stepped away, allowing the paper to get non-Profit protection and continue, which is all to the good, but I’m not going to tell anyone that The Reader is worthy as a single source.
Ugh, skimmed through Yarvin's gibberish. Not even wrong.