Tyler Cowen links today to a thread about California from a guy named Tiago Forte. After reading it, what I wanted to ask was, Has this guy ever actually talked to a Californian? Luckily I did a teensy bit of due diligence first and learned that he grew up in Orange County; went to college at Cal State San Diego; and currently runs Forte Labs, which is based in Long Beach. So I guess he's talked to a Californian or two.
Still, where does this kind of thing come from?
As U.S. hegemony is fading, California's cultural hegemony is only growing stronger as money pours into media and tech. The U.S. can now be seen as a thin administrative shell surrounding its richest and most influential state, on which it parasitically depends.
Um, OK. Please continue:
As an article of faith, Californians deeply believe this is the best place to live and the highest achievement of modern civilization.
~20% of Americans were raised in a religious household and leave it later in life....Taking religion's place as a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are various ideologies: Mindfulness/yoga, tarot/astrology, social progressivism, LGBTQ+, wellness/self-care, online communities like Reddit & the Rationalist community, new age spirituality.
....What do all of these have in common? They were all created, incubated, or popularized largely in California.
California is the best place to live—though this is mostly because of great weather. Aside from that, it's still pretty great as long as you're middle income or better. It has a top notch university system. A thriving job market. Lots of square mileage for solar and wind farms. Three of the ten biggest cities in the country. Lots of strong industries, including tech, Hollywood, agriculture, tourism, and even aerospace.
But this is too mundane, so Forte defines the entire state as a raging conflict between Social Justice Culture (SJC) and Silicon Valley Utopianism (SVU). What's more, you must choose. You're either one or the other:
With all this in mind, Elon's purchase of Twitter isn't just a business transaction. It represents a hostile takeover by the SVU of one of SJC's most sacred sites – as if the Palestinians occupied the Temple Mount and began using it as a base of operations.
Damn. I'd guess that no more than 1% of Californians have any idea that SVU even exists. SJC is obviously more well known, but I'm not sure I'd even put California as its epicenter, let alone its biggest practitioner. If I had to pick the spot where it's strongest, I'd guess it would be Harvard and its Northeastern environs.¹ From there it spread across the country and was adopted in every college town and lefty state, including California.
But it's a funny thing. SJC is often the source of battles in the legislature or in city councils or university groups, but in ordinary life I almost never come across it. It's just a non-issue.
I gather, ironically, that it is a big deal in Silicon Valley, the same place that spawned SVU. So if I were going to say anything about this at all, I'd say that the unique feature here is not California, but Silicon Valley, which combines SJC, SVU, and an obsession with money into a single febrile statelet cut off from the rest of us. But that statelet is too busy doing its own thing to bother trying to spread ideologies of any kind. Outside of the ridiculous marketing presentations about potential market sizes—a feature of businesses worldwide—they are entirely inward-looking. And since it's fundamentally a nerd-based culture, they love to carry on dorm room brawls over everything, with the most trivial subjects getting the most attention.
I don't think there's much question that Elon Musk's turn to the dark side started with his annoyance over wokeism at his Bay Area Tesla plant. But in reality it was never about wokeism except in his own mind. He was mostly annoyed by unions; by the state of California actually expecting him to obey the law; and by employees wanting to put a stop to garden variety racism. What's worse, at the same time all this was steadily feeding his resentments, he developed a cult of admirers who validated his every utterance and egged him on against the critics.
So he moved Tesla's headquarters—i.e., its highest paid executives—to Texas, which doesn't have a personal income tax. Ka-ching! There he stewed and stewed over how California had treated him—him! the richest man in the world!—and eventually fell down the rabbit hole of anti-wokeism. This isn't really surprising. He was primed and ready, and there's no better place in the world to hate California and wokeism than Texas.
He's pretty far down the rabbit hole now, and who knows how it will turn out? Despite his high-profile failures, there's not much question that Musk is a brilliant businessman with a stunning number of successful ventures to his name, including PayPal, Tesla, Tesla Energy (solar and batteries), SpaceX, Starlink, and OpenAI.
But what has he done lately? Will Twitter be his greatest victory or the final leap down the rabbit hole? At the moment it looks like Musk's resentments have gotten the best of him and he's hurtling down the rabbit hole at maximum warp. Teaming up with the MAGAnauts is incomprehensibly stupid from a business perspective, but I guess he can't help himself anymore. I recommend a nice big prescription of Zoloft.
¹People often think of California as ground zero of weirdo lefty culture, but that's a mistake. California has always been a unique blend of two cultures: weirdo counterculture stuff and hardheaded business attitudes descended from the wave of Midwestern migrants who populated the state in the early 20th century.
Ronald Reagan was a famous product of this cultural fusion, and you can't really understand him unless you come to grips with it. Because it truly is a fusion, not a war. Hollywood was once the leading example of this fusion, but today it's Silicon Valley, whose residents are simultaneously the flakiest of the flaky and the greediest of the greedy. It's a helluva powerful combination.
It's not SVU, it's SVL -- Silicon Valley Libertarianism. The schism isn't between them and the Social Justice Warriors, it's the separation between the conservative and progressive wings of the SVL. Peter Thiel, for one, reflects the conservative wing of the SVL.
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I say again, you wouldn't need to work so hard to earn an absurdly fake amount of money if your extended family didn't sleep with each other and keep that crotch rash circulating.
It figures Cowen would link to gibberish like that. He's an idiot.
He's actually intelligent, but completely socially handicapped.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Care to point to any specific example of this intelligence you claim for him?
California is to the rest of the country as the US is to the rest of the world. We live rent-free in their heads but they really have no idea about us, they just get aghast at the worst examples.
Anytime I read things like this or similar takes about the US as a whole, I cringe. 40 million people here. More than all but the biggest countries. There's a lot going on. It's also a physically big place. How many people talking about what weirdos in SF are doing have been to Modoc County?
And while it's true SV dominates the Bay to some extent and Hollywood LA to some extent, neither are one industry towns and major portions of the state have ag as their major industry.
That part seems to always be forgotten.
In the list of things ‘incubated’ in California he forgot to include smog, Scientology and congested freeways. Chauvinism, however, is not a California innovation.
By the way, the Palestinians do occupy the Temple Mount, it’s the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Waqf that controls the top of the Temple Mount (al-aqsa is just part of it) is Jordanian and Israeli police control it, so I'm not sure in what sense the Palestinians control it.
The waqf is funded by Jordan, but according to Wikipedia its leadership (appointed by the Jordanian king) is Palestinian; as is also the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who oversees religious affairs on the Mount. The Israeli police (and IDF) used to avoid encroaching on the Mount. Ariel Sharon’s visit there in 2000, with an escort of Israeli police, sparked a deadly riot, and was widely condemned as a provocation. Nevertheless, it is true that the Israeli government claims ultimate authority over all of Jerusalem, including the Mount.
Well, at least the rest of us aren't hearing frequent warnings of the utter devastation looming over Californians in the event of disaster resulting from the San Andreas and/or Bay Area Faults. A coworker in the eighties was so afraid of moving there, she considered leaving her marriage if her husband took a California job offer.
Musk's great business skill is finding competent people who want to do something and barking loudly at them and about them while throwing money around.
And that's all it takes to be a wingnut dreamdate.
Dude is full of shit.
I am a transplant to SV. I've lived here since the early 90s, working for startups. (Most of them internet services - that's what I do.)
Tiago does something that's very typical of a certain type of SV "founder" - relegates most of the people he talks about to NPC ("non-player character") status. He only cares about a narrow sliver of people in the state who are taking sides on what is effectively a corporate governance dispute they're trying to recast as "woke anti-free-speech" or what have you.
That's all you need to know - he's painting his personal agenda for you. Although I don't understand why he doesn't just talk to his second brain: https://fortelabs.com
Anyway, California is great. I choose to live here. But dudebro needs to get out more.
The latest from Muskrat land is that Twitter hasn't been paying rent on most of its offices for the last few weeks, has begun stiffing vendors, and is looking for ways to avoid paying the severance package that they promised laid off employees. Someone needs to tell Elmo that these strong arm tactics may work just once, and that any new vendor / landlord will want to be prepaid, or demand cash on delivery, or a large security deposit or bank LOC to do business with him. Unless he is able to resurrect Arthur Anderson from the Enron graveyard, his current accountants will still accrue these unpaid expenses unless and until there is a settlement reducing the amount payable.
Most of the country view NY as almost as bad as California (as far as lefty's go), but has snow instead of palm trees.
There is a theory afoot that Elmo is trying to be as completely irresponsible and unpredictable as possible, driving down Twitter's value, in order to scare his lenders into letting him settle their loans for pennies on the dollar. A very trumpy kind of play, if true, but pulling it off would depend on fixity of purpose over a period of months and I'm not sure that's an Elmo attribute.
Sadly, Tyler Cohen is the one who is going down the rabbit hole. Lately he has been spewing how deranged articles like this are making Twitter so much better. As to Forte’s nonsense, it is just that, nonsense. The guy clearly has too much time on his hands.
That's a good point. What has happened to him? Is it just a matter of getting older?
When it became impossible to ignore how happy "libertarians" were to pile on to Team Alt-Right, it seemed like he started re-congealing his own beliefs in to something he called "state-capacity libertarianism", but I don't think he had any takers.
I wonder if he's just tagging along with the authoritarian whores and scoundrels to stay relevant, or convincing himself he's OK with fascism after all.
I'm thinking he's depressed at the demise of the Shoppers Food Warehouse with the great ethnic food section.
Yah, it's gotta be having to keep telling himself that fascism is what he wanted all along.
Well, yeah, except that it became impossible to ignore who Team Libertarians were playing for sometime back in the, oh, mid-90's at the latest.
The comparison I'd make to Musk now is 1920s-onward Henry Ford, when Ford dropped down the rabbit hole of reactionary, often antisemitic conservatism and became an aging crank who was increasingly less effective as a business leader.
I think it's also that his non-SpaceX businesses have all come under stress. Tesla's stock valuation (and thus his net worth) are way down from where they were even earlier this year, and his other companies have mostly not panned out as promise. SpaceX is the exception, but there's basically nothing for him to do with it while it runs in the competent hands of Gwynne Shotwell.
That stress and hit to pride in turn made him more likely to seek validation and ego-boosting from the uncritical conservative fandom he's got, which only became more potent once they decided he really was "one of them".
SpaceX is panning out well, but I wouldn’t describe it as being “as promised” - certainly as to Musk’s schedule promises.
Got Water?
The recent storm system aside, we are paying (or at least pretending to) a price for that great weather.
Yeah, water is the big problem there, isn't it ? All of the southwest in fact..
Lol, this whole water/malthusian argument that seems to only apply to California.
The guy who started it was from Minnesota. Got heating oil? (No oil in Minnesota).
There's almost nowhere in the world where millions of people live that is sustainable on its own local natural resources. Get over it.
There seem to be plenty of places willing to sell oil, and of course there are alternatives.
There is no alternative to water, and at what price will someone be willing to sell it to California?
I have something of a love/hate reaction to California. My mother grew up on a farm in the Central Valley and I spent a lot of idyllic summers there as a kid. FWIW, contrary to the current stereotype her family were lifelong Democrats. My aunt had a singular loathing for Reagan and I remember first hearing about JFK there in the summer of 1960. My Aunt was a big supporter but my mother feared Kennedy was too young and had preferred the more liberal candidate who had dropped out of the 1960 race, Hubert Humphrey.
OTOH, I mostly grew up in New York state (back when there was such a thing as a moderate Republican- Rockefeller, Javits, Keating ) and I've spent the last 30+ years living and working in Kennedy country, much of it working in high tech in Cambridge (People's Republic of).
My brother lived in the Bay Area in the 70's and when I visited there then I really liked it but then several times in the late 90's I wound up spending some work time in Silicon Valley and I confess I was not impressed. It was money, money, money . Everyone talked about it, real estate, especially . Everyone drove brand new cars. It felt much more like a one industry town - tech - than Boston/Cambridge and much more of a boom/bust mentality than back east.
Some of this is unfair I'm sure. I never lived there, but I have worked with folks out there multiple times and that SV libertarianism strain is strong so I've been vaguely distrustful of the SV ethos for a while now. Nevertheless I still love California and look forward to visiting my crazy cousins spread out across the state.
As for Musk, it's probably important to remember he came from South Africa .
You mean to suggest that those who come to the United States don’t automatically take-on its fabled liberal (generic usage) mindset?
No, I just think it's useful to remember that Musk spent his first 18 years in a different country, a very specific one, Apartheid South Africa and it's hard to believe that had no influence on who is now , but people are complicated so I don't assume anything more than that.
Do you think it is a coincidence that all his companies have reputations for racism and misogyny?
It is possible to consider connections and influences on human behavior without making dead certain judgements. Like I said, Musk's South African birth is worth noting. but maybe we should all be more careful about jumping to conclusions about people based on their ethnicity and place of birth.
I'll note that a lot of companies not run by former South Africans have reputations for racism and misogyny and high tech is certainly no exception.
Real estate prices here are a bit of an illusion. The total bill we pay is very low for the amount because we have the diabolical Proposition 13. In other words, we pay comically low property taxes and since the market is set by how much people can afford to pay in a mortgage all-in, based on their income, not on the property price alone, it makes a difference.
Most of California is more affordable than you'd think because wages are higher. The Central Coast region is almost as expensive as the Bay Area but almost completely empty of quality jobs so it's relatively more expensive.
Most of the shit people believe about California is like people who think giving birth is something you have to cram for. 40 million people are doing it, so it can't be impossible. But I'm happy to have them keep believe it.
In fact, the worst people here are the ones who moved here because they believed in things like the Hollywood miracle path of success or the Silicon Valley miracle path of success.
“As an article of faith, Californians deeply believe this is the best place to live and the highest achievement of modern civilization.”
Um, no we don’t. Some of us just happen to live here (for now).
Many others were simply born in a state so vast that they may have gone on many long journeys without ever leaving it. So they don’t even know what other states (or countries) are actually like …
And: highest achievement of modern civilization? Either this guy is smoking some good product or I’m seriously missing something (or modern civilization doesn’t actually have much to boast about…)
Many of us do so the use of we is appropriate, despite your egocentrism.
Worked a fair number of startups back in the golden era, Elon is just falling into the same old trap a lot of successful startup CEO's eventually fall into. They succeed through a combination of luck and skill, but they actually have very little sense of what they are good at. Once success goes to their head, they start dropping the skills responsible for their success and emphasizing the skills that they succeeded in spite of.
California is not the best place to live. It's simply a place where lots of people live. Sure, the weather's pretty great, unless you count fire as weather. Since there's a "fire season", I count it as weather.
Also water.
Also California isn't as great as it's made out to be. It's got tons of problems.
Then you've got the politics of California, which I'll just take a straight pass on having to think about participating in. No thanks. I think people forget that outside of the cities, California is pretty rural, pretty ag-focused, and pretty red, so it has some of the same issues as some other states with the same urban/rural dichotomy (Maryland, Virginia, and Iowa all being ones I've lived in with the same dynamic). It's not a pleasant state of affairs to live in, in my experience.
To be fair to California, I guess, I don't think any of the US states are the best state to live in. They all have major flaws. It's just that generally, living in one of the US states is the least bad of mostly bad options.
And then there is the LA City Council…
I don't think Zoloft is the correct drug for Elon. Lithium would probably be a better choice.
I see what you did there.
People love making or using sweeping narratives and overgeneralizations to make sense of our complex world. The usual end product is almost always highly limited and inaccurate. This ultra-glib analysis about the Golden State is similar to the never-ending pronouncement about how the generational interplay (boomer, millennial, etc) explains things, or Albion's Seed, or American Nations.
+1
Musk stole Tesla from its actual founders and has been fighting a Wikipedia war ever since to elide that fact from history. Tesla is what it is because it is the only game in town. As the Kias and Toyotas of the world enter that space, it will experience a mighty fall. Teslas have a reputation for execrable build quality and are dead last in Consumer Reports' reliability survey. It has also shown a distinct inability to produce anything other than luxury cars. A lot of people haven't noticed that the $39,000 version of the Model 3 was never made in any significant numbers and vanished several years ago. It was clearly being sold at a lost to make good on a Musk promise. The cheapest one you can buy now costs as much as a Mercedes C class.
SpaceX is built on government developed technology and heavily subsidized by government contracts. Without that, it would be unprofitable. The Mars colonization thing is pure bushwa. Would you fly in coach class for two years to get there? Would you spend your life in a hole in the ground so you don't get irradiated? Terraforming is a ridiculous idea. Mars lost its atmosphere because it is small. The most probably velocity of most gas molecules is well above escape velocity for Mars. Give it a new atmosphere and it will lose that one as well, unless you can also figure out how to make its mass about 5 times larger.
Starlink is a plague on astronomy and having serious scaling issues that lead to multiple price hikes, data caps, and bandwidth crunches. It is always going to be cheaper to lay fiber than to launch a never ending stream of satellites. Starlink is the new Iridium.
The Boring Company is sucking air into its pump and has actually abandoned several cities. To this day, the only tunnels it has built are at its corporate headquarters and a loop that circles the Las Vegas convention center where human drivers take you on underground jaunts in Model 3s..
Paypal was founded (as Confinity) by Peter Thiel and co conspirators. Musk created an online bank called X.com. Paypal was one of Confinity's products, at the time allowing users of Palm Pilots to send money to each other through the infrared ports. Confinity and X.com merged. Musk was briefly CEO but was soon replaced by Thiel. Musk was in control from March to September of 2000. Then he was out. So he can hardly receive credit for much of what happened to PayPal. Most of his involvement with PayPal consisted of holding a lot of shares until eBay bought it and made him rich. Musk eventually repurchased the X.com domain and used it to sell Boring Company hats.
Does anyone seriously believe any significant number of people are going to let Neuralink stick wires into their brains? Or that Musk is going to produce humanoid robots in months when Honda, NASA, General Motors, and DARPA have failed to do so? Humanoid robots are hard, expensive, and don't really have much of a use case.
Color me unimpressed. His biggest assets are being narcissitic, totally unscrupulous, and holding the right stock when money was being made. That is not a business genius.
Mars lost its atmosphere because it is small.
If you mean that because Mars is small, its metallic core solidified early on, then yes, that's exactly why Mars lost its atmosphere.
Thanks for the Elmo business summation!
To me, he also seems to have a knack for attracting attention and convincing some people, especially some key journalists, that he's really smart. And I think Tesla's approach to making and marketing cars is pretty unscrupulous. Liability lawyers should be eating that outfit alive by now.
Really only responding to point out that the Mars stuff in here isn't really accurate.
Two things,
a, this thing,
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1603421819721031680
b, is this a new thing with Twitter where only people the poster mentions can reply?
It helped that Hollywood, for a long time the most visible industry in California, had Jews running vaious studios and had to deal with the creative community. From the 1920s well into the 1970s, "creative" was a euphemism for "homosexual". The fight is old, and the SJWs in Hollywood sometimes had to cut sequences involving black actors and singers to mollify the racists in the South. As you said, it was a fusion of hard headed business sense and a fight for social justice.
This fits with my theories about why blue states are economically stronger than red states. That fusion pays off in both dollars and justice.
Kevin, you wrote "But it's a funny thing. SJC is often the source of battles in the legislature or in city councils or university groups, but in ordinary life I almost never come across it. It's just a non-issue.
I gather, ironically, that it is a big deal in Silicon Valley, the same place that spawned SVU."
I've been living in Silicon Valley for the past 30 years, working in tech. Moved here from SoCal.
From what I've seen, no, it's pretty much a non-issue here too. In ordinary life you never come across social justice crusaders. Social justice and libertarian BS are fringe wherever you are. The whole "woke" thing is pretty much just made up outrage, both from those for and against.
So... look elsewhere.