How Silicon Valley Ends
I was prompted to write this article when this by Paul Graham was retweeted into my timeline.
It is clear that Silicon Valley is still in denial about what is coming, about how Silicon Valley ends.
The hour is upon you. The Trump family are kleptocrats and have survived and are surviving the revelation that they connived with Putin.
Silicon Valley will end in an all-American way. That which will assail you will be as the apple pie and motherhood of the old republic.
The American Republic has long been a racial republic and for the disfavoured there has been a political and police settlement of terrible brutality. It is from there that Silicon Valley’s nemesis will come.
At the heart of this is a system for reversing the 13th Amendment — the convertion of the free black population into disenfranchised felons. The US lacks a presumptive right to vote in the archaic constitution. From this sin all manner of problems flow above and beyond disenfranchisment:
- gerrymandered constituencies.
- state interference in political parties — (in no other free country does the state run the candidate selection as it does in the US primaries).
- the prison complex.
- asset forfeiture — particular ‘catcher-keeps’ where the organ of the state that seizes the property gets to sell it under its own recognisances, at its own prices and keeps the proceeds.
- the street-to-prison justice system where over 90% of criminal indictments end in a guilty plea — a figure maintained by co-ercion
US politics has long tolerated vast injustice as long as it is deployed against the African American community.
The racial republic is over — Trump is post-racial, he is post-sexuality, he is post-abortion-and-the-culture-wars. He doesn’t mind if you are black or white, Jewish or athiest, rich or poor, if you have had an abortion or a penchant for cocaine. All are welcome in his house: from Caitlyn Jenner to dominionist Christians, from orthodox Jews to Hungarian fascists.
“Stand them where on Trump?” is his aqua regis.
The opium of Silicon Valley is the belief that the father-in-law of tech investor Jared Kushner will magically behave differently from the father of jewellery-and-tatmonger Ivanka Kushner.
This is how the wealth of Silicon Valley will flow the Trumps:
Post-racial plea-bargains, post-racial disenfranchisement, post-racial street-to-prison conveyor and most of all post-racial asset forfeiture, post-racial asset forfeiture and post-racial asset forfeiture.
Oh, and it will be done in the name of progress. Trump’s voter-supression activities now are being done in the name of free elections.
Stalin’s 1937 constitution was famously the best, the freeest, the most progressive, the most modern constitution in the history of the world. It abolished the death penalty! But still, and faster, they gave people 9 grams in the back of the neck.
This is a play: find a federal statute that a VC violated in his treatment of a female investor.
Such intolerable behaviour!
Imagine such a beast doing that to a fragrant young entrepreneur as Ivanka!
For shame!
Forfeiture is a just and necessary penalty!
If you don’t like that play, there are plenty others.
So what to do?
Cut links with Trump, with his acolytes and normalisers: the Peter Thiel’s and his crew.
(If you have your heart pinned on Zuck ’20 take a long hard look in the mirror).
Paul Graham is a prime huckster and purveyor of Silicon Valley anti-historicalism and anti-intellectualism dressed up as profound insights. Dump him and his ilk and start reading history, politics, social affairs, sociology and all the rest (his thoughts on company formation and innovation are worth reading, but that subject is not so important now).
The normal response to kleptocracy is capital flight. If you wish to preserve you assets, companies and achievements seek to exfiltrate them to jurisdictions where the rule of law pertains — and no Poland wouldn’t be top of my list at the moment, Paul Graham is at least right on that.
There are two ways to end the Trump nightmare and preserve the republic:
- impeachment — which needs Republican Congressmen and Senators
- a military coup
Your new historian friends will tell you of the Danegeld and quote you Kipling:
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane
Buying soldiers is a mugs market, but Republicans?
Buy Republicans for impeachment: craven or noble, afraid of their right, of the Kochs, or venial men who shit corkscrews, social liberals, social conservatives, Rinos— buy them all.
Open your coffers, spend your coin gladly, pay whatever price. This is the hot market, this is the market that has returns.
If you think that buying elected members will destroy the republic you revere consider this.
I remember reading about a kid in Oakland, stopped by the police. They used asset forfeiture to seize less than a dollar change and his crucifix. We know of this because the policeman, in his impunity, registered and published it.
In The Gulag Archipelego, Solzhenistyn wrote about the heroic struggle of the Trotskyists against Stalinism in the liquidators and camps in the late 30s: the hunger strikes, the defiance, the deaths.
But, as he pointed out, it was Trotsky that swept the Cadets and the Mensheviks, the Right SRs and the Left SRs, the Georgians, the historians, the Ukrainians and more into the maw.
Do not say the republic went wrong when it turned on you. If you seek your Cadets and Mensheviks already swept away, seek them in Oakland, in the projects, in your groaning jails.
Otherwise, the man who shits in a golden toilet will enjoy making his golden omelettes from your golden eggs. Your goose is nearly cooked.
Fight now while there is still time.
