Morons like him are the reason I almost never talk about working in tech to most people. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that the bubble a large number of VCs/"tech bros" (for lack of a better term) exist in is psychologically harmful.
its so embarassing that the types of people like balaji represent us as an industry. my friends outside of tech world now treat being a software developer as a red flag
insane, and childlike in its binary vision of what humanity is. it's like YA fiction. The notion that grown adults in 2024 in San Francisco, of all places, would be down with wearing a uniform in daily life, is so out to lunch I am presuming/hoping he means it as some kind of joke.
Originally described in 2014 as: "typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins- style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time"
But since then the tech world went off the deep end into anti-wokeness and the left has (rightfully imo) come to resent tech and tech companies so they've moved to be on the side of the "red tribe"
Most of the 'gray tribe' stuff I remember was them being performatively over-upset with anyone left of Republicans, and mysteriously quiet about Republicans. A whole lot of 'both sides are the same' on drugs and war.
So basically, they were Republican kids from Republican families too embarressed to admit that to themselves or others.
For gay rights, see Log Cabin Republicans, out and proud gay Republicans, so basic acceptance of gay people having a right to exist doesn't make you automatically Blue.
The funny thing is, the red tribe hates them anyway. Trump isn't a tech guy, he's a politically untreatable NPD[1] case, and he only values sycophants that will stay consistently loyal to him. Big Tech banning Trump off social media[0] means that, whether they wanted to or not, they took the blue tribe's side.
And of course, blue tribe hates them, too. Grey tribe's social progressiveness is mostly an accident. They're perfectly fine selling weapons to war criminals just as much as they're fine selling lattes at a gay pride parade. And the shit they did to build up and then tear down red tribe's electoral chances could easily just be applied to blue tribe this time around.
[0] After four years of deliberately exempting him from their own moderation rules, of course
> Grey tribe's social progressiveness is mostly an accident
It’s not an accident. It’s rooted in the counter culture moment that was that basis for Silicon Valley moving beyond weapons manufacturing and embracing the internet.
Counter-culture was a blue tribe thing. The grey tribe latched onto it and redirected it away from their own economic interests, which paved the way for neoliberalism and deindustrialization.
> Think about how many times Hacker News commenters decide to start spouting patently fascist bullshit. Now keep in mind this guy used to be part of YCombinator, the company that runs Hacker News.
Um, don't assume a political commonality between YCombinator-the-organization and Hacker-News-the-community-of-posters. Most of us here have an affinity for tech, but politically, we're all over the map. (For that matter, the majority here thinks the openly fascist are dangerously insane.)
> “Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”
Politicians do this today. Deep blue politicians in New York have the police in their pocket just as much as in any red state.
> “A huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers … You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones…”
> Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”).
This is literally what a gay pride march is.
> While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses … There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.”
but I do think that your explanations make sense,
or rather- while I think he is earnest in wanted a new state ruled by "Grey Tribe", given the book listed at the top he wrote: The Network State: How To Start a New Country, but these specific complaints do feel like he's doing a mean Haha gotcha, how would it feel now ?? sort of style
Or I guess put another way, I think he is both earnestly wanting it but also choosing these examples to be a comparison so it seems "fair"
