The ethics of VC —Woke, woker, wokest (#16)

I am sure Elon Musk sharing an audio-stage with Trump a couple of weeks ago was not the event of the decade — and not because of the ‘technical difficulties’, caused by cyberattack or otherwise. But it was worth listening to, however hard to follow it was, because of the revelations about some of the ideological underpinnings driving both a presidential candidate and a strong fraction of the tech-world.

We have known for a while that Silicon Valley has its dark sides. The old guard from Musk to Thiel hasn’t hidden behind bushes with their often convoluted anti-immigrant, eugenicist, pro-weapon and anti-diversity-means-pro-meritocracy stances. Thiel in fact has shifted much of his attention away from tech and towards politics since 2020 based on this agenda.

But on the weekend I fell into a hole tracking the most recent developments on the ‘right wing tech’ front and stumbled over both completely new names and scary tendencies influencing the next generation.

Let’s establish a monarchy in the US, everyone? Electric tags for ‘the unproductive’? Or even better: digitally-enhanced solitary confinement?

I want to pick up from the Trump/Elon conversation first to connect the pieces back to the old guard, before I’ll introduce you to two of the new guys, Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania.

The old guard, conserving away

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are the most well-know and among the most outspoken of the anti-progressive tech elite. Their belief in meritocracy (as explicitly opposed to diversity) and hatred of taxes go back to their university days. Both are billionaires and both have large groups of influential followers and hierarchies of ‘influencers’ across VC and the wider tech ecosystem; among those are the infamous All-In podcast crew — Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg — and Thiel’s Founders Fund. Thiel and Musk are also the most important people in the PayPal mafia — despite Musk being absent from the infamous Fortune cover — which adds Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Sequoia’s Roelof Botha and Khosla’s Keith Rabois to the wider network of influence.

At the latest since his last techno-utopian ramble, Marc Andreessen is in that camp, too. He crowned ESG, responsibility, ethics, risk management and trust and safety as his explicit enemies. Horowitz, his business partner is less easily placed as a big supporter of black culture and hip hop; but then came their recent official backing of Trump’s 2024 run. All their DEI efforts, including the cultural leadership funds? CSR, fanfare and narrative?

The ‘ruling VC generation’, thinking on progressive change in tech, be it in the form of sustainability or DEI, is best conceptualised in Ramaswamy’s 2020 book Woke, Inc. And I admit: anti-woke capitalism, the movement the book captures, isn’t all insane; Ramaswamy’s critique of skin-deep diversity (diversity as limited to only gender and race) is sensible; similarly, creating spaces of real debate (as opposed to only ‘safe spaces’) and anti-woke critics’ issues with cancel culture are understandable, especially in educational contexts.

What we heard in the Trump/Elon chat on anti-immigration and meritocracy is where things start to go awry. Much of tech was built (and continues to be run) by immigrants; can we write the critique off as simple power-grabbing populism? It’s too dangerous for that. Similarly, a re-focus on meritocracy as explicitly opposed to diversity is what we’ve come from (and which systematically excluded large swaths of the population from everything, most importantly power and wealth). Going back to ‘the old system’ is quite obviously about ‘protecting the critics’ as (mostly) white men who feel left out of DEI efforts.

This rationale for the anti-woke agenda is in fact what one of the new tech-whisperers, Richard Hanania, admits himself — but it gets worse.

The next generation is worse

In his twenties, Hanania was an offensive self-professed racist and troll; however, he recently turned to more ‘moderate’ right wing thoughts (at times even defending migration and the diversity it brings to the US). He published the book-length explanation of his updated thoughts ‘The Origins of Woke’ just this year. The book is a reasonable history of the anti-DEI/ESG movement pegging ‘wokeness’ (narrowly defined as affirmative action and gender/race quotas) directly to American civil rights law. While the book is unreadable for its academic denseness, the argument is not completely outrageous. Only his conclusions are (we need to do away with civil rights).

While 10 years ago, Hanian was insecure, self-obsessed, radical and as a result quite unpopular, even among the most out-there Republicans, he is now salonfaehig. Sure, he still is a free speech guy and believes both facial recognition and DNA surveillance are useful tools to control populations. But his recent writings on woke-capitalism almost appear nuanced (and also much less convoluted than Curtis Yarvin as I’ll explain below). In short, his ideology now is most strongly linked to to (his self-defined) first strand of anti-wokism, pro-market libertarianism, and seems less motivated by the other one: wokism as anti-white-male.

What he argues in the book is a quasi-academised version of a simple libertarian belief: the market will restore meritocracy (à la ‘black doctors are worse doctors and nobody wants a bad doctor’). If we just let the market do that (via executive orders and lawsuits), it will turn out that woke capitalism just isn’t that powerful a movement. Whether Hanian really believes in this moderate stance of pro-market anti-wokeness — or is hiding pseudo-scientific eugenicist thoughts with the backing of such VCs as Andreessen and Sachs is highly debated. The dangerous thoughts he believed in ten years all but disappeared?

Compared to Curtis Yarvin, however, whom The Information just two weeks ago published this expose about (two years after this Vox portrait), Hanania-now is definitely moderate. People like Thiel and vice-presidential Republican candidate J.D. Vance refer to Yarvin; he is only one level removed from the ‘old guard’. And the things he says and writes are scary.

Read his blog and listen to his podcast outpouring (more on that below) and in every single one of them, another frightening idea comes up: most boldly, Yarvin wants to establish a monarchy in the US and fire all career-bureaucrats; he isn’t opposed to racist, anti-immigration, pro-slavery (and eugenicist) thoughts. He despises ‘the cathedral’, by which he means established media and education institutions. He also wants to ‘tag’ anyone who isn’t productive or wealthy — and ultimately ‘reprocess’ these people or put them into ‘modular data hotels’ (aka solitary confinement cells with screens in front of them).

I found his ramblings almost impossible to follow (does anyone need a 2h podcast ever?) and often missing any analytical quality. As he admits himself: all he broadcasts is just his own opinion. While he doesn’t have any credentials (or ever really ‘worked’), he feels compelled to still ‘pretend-justify’ his writings by often unrelated, endless, mostly historical references and an impenetrable jargonistic language. It makes him sound smart without delivering on the substance beyond his self described ‘neoreactionary’ ideology.

How does this affect VC land?

Erik Torenberg, Village Global founder and until recently CEO of community startup OnDeck, is one of the prominent (new generation) Silicon Valley figures explicitly platforming ideas from figures like Hanania and Yarvin. In fact, Torenberg seems to have shifted most of his attention to doing this kind of distribution when he left OnDeck and started podcast and newsletter company Turpentine.

He began with a big name podcast, Upstream, in 2023 with guests from Andreessen (in his typical fashion pontificating on everything under the moon) and Sachs (mostly on free speech) to crypto-king Balaji, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein and anti-DEI-turned-failed-presidential-candidate Ramswamy (among others questioning climate science on the show). He also hosts a less high-profile podcast ‘Moments of Zen’ (MoZ) where both Hanania and Yarvin appeared (the latter twice, including in the most watched episode!).

In one episode of MoZ, Torenberg and his co-host Dan Romero, take an hour and a half to talk the listener through which ideas from Yarvin and Balaji changed their life. Affirmative action is a recurring topic of conversation as are ‘disenfranchised men’ and the Israel-Palestine war (as seemingly the only world-political topic of interest). Many conversations also have a very strong American-nationalist stance (with VC guests like Joe Lonsdale and Katie Boyle pushing their version thereof (one of less than a handful women among the 100+ guests).

It isn’t as clear as in the rambling and writings of people like Hanian and Yarvin how Torenberg really thinks about some of the more out-there topics. In the end he ‘only’ hosts conversations. Is he sympathetic to (potentially eugenic) evolutionary pseudo-science? Sure. Does he really like Trump? No, but he also really doesn’t like Greta (the victim). He definitely doesn’t like that we’re now focused more on avoiding evil than promoting ‘the good’; our obsession with equality is lowering the ceiling (i.e. prevents genius and produces a ‘spiritual gap’). He calls this — leaning on another slightly less widely read tech-whisperer Brett Andersen slave mentality which he connects directly to the rise of Christianity over the last 2 millennia (sic.). Egalitarianism is the ultimate evil.

And when it comes to DEI, one of his recent posts lays out his personal history with the concept quite clearly: he liked the idea of ‘being inclusive’ at first (which Village Global is testament of) but then equity was shoe-horned in (meaning quotas, for him as for Hanania, and hence communism). He stopped engaging when the ‘artificial elevation’ of people of certain identities started. These people have been underperforming ever since, so overall ‘quality’ started to decrease in tech.

We shouldn’t even measure diversity, he says; it isn’t discrimination and bias that lead to different outcomes. Certain people (Asians) have just been working harder (at taking standardised tests). Inequality is normal and we can’t close the gap. DEI is an industry, he argues, that shouldn’t exist.

Why do VCs (and tech people) care at all?

What I find most concerning is why VCs like Torenberg — and by extension Andreessen, Thiel and others — care about people like Hanania and Yarvin.

Isn’t it, to start with, annoying for them, the efficiency-obsessed optimisers, to listen to 2h podcasts, mostly consisting of poorly connected ramblings? Perhaps it’s okay if you’re talking? Aren’t VCs and tech people concerned about someone’s inability to express thoughts in clear, analytical language? Why do they, arguing so hard for meritocracy, believe in self-ascribed trolls who have never been inside any of the systems they critique?

Hanian himself admits in his ‘repentance’ post that put him on the moderate path he’s been sailing since: “I’m convinced that most of them [critics, trolls, complainers] are just projecting their personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world, just as I once did.” Isn’t this the worst possible motivation for someone to express their angry opinion and the least convincing argument to follow those same beliefs?

And then I am left with another question: these new ‘public intellectuals’ barely have any new ideas at all; the monarchy (or philosopher king) isn’t exactly a new concept and neither is meritocracy. Why do VCs need the badly regurgitated version of a third-hand influencer to catch on to these ideas? Wouldn’t Plato (who I couldn’t find a single reference to…) fall plainly into Andreessen’s referencing scheme?

At the latest since the Elon/Trump chat I am convinced there is more brewing in tech-ideology-land than we regularly think of. We need to understand people like Hanania and Yarvin — if only because some of their ideas are so dangerous that even if only one of them catches on, we need to be prepared.