- The survey covers just SV elites. It would be interesting to see how those beliefs compare to rank-and-file SV tech company employees (and to see that broken down further by profession). Differences in values between employees and bosses could lead to conflict further down the road.
- I'm reading more lately about the degree to which our temperament (the Big 5 personality index) influences our political beliefs. For instance, the managers and executives of established companies tend to be very high in Conscientiousness, which correlates with conservative beliefs. Entrepreneurs on the other hand score very high in Openness, which correlates with Liberal beliefs. I suspect their differences from standard Democrat politics stems from a relatively lower score in Agreeableness.
Great points on both. On #2, we wanted to include those, but space constraints :/. Given the interest in this survey we'll probably do another after collecting more suggestions like these. Thanks!
the nyt open with:
"Silicon Valley has long preferred to remain aloof from national politics, but the Trump era has altered that stance."
which is kinda of hard to defend since Obama constantly blocked the bay area on reelection campaigns and most of his advisors came from/went to silicon Valley companies.
I'm kind of wondering what happened between c. 1999 and now. The WTO meetings in Seattle were protested vigorously by "anarchist anti-globalists" who sought to protect American workers from the competition of outsourcing and cheap goods from overseas (China was going to enter WTO) So much so the next meetings were in Doha.
But now, these same class of people are quite a bit more pro globalization and might be considered globalists. They somewhat ironically seem to embrace some big aspects of neoliberal economics which is something they were quite antithetical to back in the early 2000's --so what gives?
Because "globalism" is a misnomer, it's shorthand for "economic globalism". Economic globalism is the exploitation of the masses by opening the borders for trade and desirable workers, whilst keeping them closed for the 99% of this planets population.
That's the kind of "globalism" the tech elite supports. They love to hide behind closed borders when it protects their wealth and power.
Those "same class of people" have always supported true globalism for the people in terms of a complete removal of borders. Don't blame them because greedy neoliberals have hijacked the term globalism.
During the TPP debate I thought there was a discussion about this type of "free trade" I think this article from C4SS sums up the position of this new globalism
"In the early 20th century, when most industrial capital was national, Western countries’ main imports were raw materials from the colonial world and their main exports were finished industrial goods. So it was in the interest of American manufacturers to restrict competition in the domestic market from imported goods manufactured in other industrialized countries. Fast forward 100 years though, and most American imports are by the Western-owned global corporations themselves, importing goods produced under contract for them so they can sell them in the domestic market at an enormous “intellectual property” markup over the cost of production.
Since the movement of goods across borders is now mostly an internal affair of global corporations themselves, outmoded tariffs that impede the movement of goods have become an inconvenience. What they need, instead, is a form of protectionism that still gives them a monopoly over selling a particular product in a particular market — but operates at corporate boundaries rather than national ones. That’s what “intellectual property” does.
Aside from the manufacturing corporations we just discussed, most of the other profitable industries in the global economy have business models centered on IP: Entertainment, software, electronics, biotech, etc.
So what’s falsely called “free trade” today isn’t a decrease in protectionism. It’s a shift from one kind of protectionism that no longer serves corporate interests, to a new kind of protectionism that better serves them."
Seattle has been growing a lot in the past decade or two. I don't think we can conclude the population in the early 2000s is the same class of people that are there now.
From what I recall mainstream media claimed that many were anarchists from all over the country --most not local. We could look at arrest records from those protests.
Often media make similar claims about the current bands or people who self identify as anarchists and progressive --but ideologically they align more with neoliberalist ideas about free trade of goods, labor etc --with a Marxist bent this time (although I don't think that's been well thought out, given the implications)
