* 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.
Always astounds me returning to this post since Trump 2.0. Been sending around this quote (with link) as post after post on Renee Good are flooded with trolls: "the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters."
But the rest of the post, too. Uncanny and unsettling that for those with eyes to see, the writing was already on the wall. Grateful for your hard work digging around in these sewers and bringing such prescient clarity to it all. Would that you were wrong, though.
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.
Always astounds me returning to this post since Trump 2.0. Been sending around this quote (with link) as post after post on Renee Good are flooded with trolls: "the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters."
But the rest of the post, too. Uncanny and unsettling that for those with eyes to see, the writing was already on the wall. Grateful for your hard work digging around in these sewers and bringing such prescient clarity to it all. Would that you were wrong, though.