Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, has a new book called Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. He posted a sample chapter from the book, about Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on Silicon Valley. He's a funny writer!
Welcome to Silicon Valley. A libertarian stronghold at the very end of America. (Literally.) Silicon Valley, and specifically the venture capital firms of Silicon Valley, are mostly run by old white men who read Ayn Rand in high school, thought it was great, and never changed their minds. (This is where I need to be fair and let you know that not all venture capitalists are monsters. In fact, I’m friends with a few who are lovely people. They are very much the exceptions. Also, every VC who reads this book will think this parenthetical is about them.) In the words of the late great Ann Richards, they were, “born on third base and think they hit a triple.”
For those of you not familiar with Ayn Rand, she wrote crappy books about the power of individual achievement while she collected social security and started some pseudo-philosophy called “objectivism”, which can be summed up in five words: I got mine, fuck you. The old white men of Silicon Valley all have giant Ayn Rand back tattoos. (Look, it’s a chapter about venture capitalism inside an ethics book. I gotta tell a joke once in a while, for all our benefit.)
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Palmer Luckey (previously) the alt-right financier who was made a billionaire by Mark Zuckerberg's decision to acquire his VR startup Oculus, is now running a Peter-Thiel-backed surveillance startup called Anduril Industries, which has won a contract to contribute to Project Maven, the Pentagon's controversial AI-for-drones system (Google's involvement in Project Maven sparked an employee uprising that ended with the relevant executives leaving the company and the contract being allowed to lapse).
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Libertycon is the annual conference of Students for Liberty, a libertarian youth group, held in DC; at this year's conference, Google was the $25,000 platinum sponsor, while Facebook and Microsoft were each $10,000 sponsors.
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In 1970, Chile elected Salvador Allende, a socialist, to office; he instituted sweeping reforms aimed at ending the corrupt rule of a small, monied, brutal elite; in 1973, the dictator Augusto Pinochet led a US-backed military coup that involved horrific torture and mass executions of political enemies.
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The Seasteading Institute is a group of libertarian separatists who dreamed of building an autonomous, contract-governed mini-state on a set of floating platforms in the south Tahiti lagoon of Atimaono; only one problem: they didn't renew their contract with French Polynesia to build their platforms.
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Libertarian wisdom holds that "the answer to bad speech is more speech," but if you're a Peter Thiel libertarian (that is, the kind of "freedom lover" who doesn't think women should vote, wants to spy on everyone in the world, and secretly wields power to censor the free press), then "the answer to bad speech is secretly backing lawsuits by washed-up pro-wrestlers in order to kill a media outlet whose reporting you don't like."
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Director Frank Capra said "It's a Wonderful Life" was designed to "strengthen the individual’s belief in himself" and "to combat a modern trend toward atheism." But the FBI's 13,533-page Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry classed the movie as a secret work of Communist propaganda, "written by Communist sympathizers...to instigate class warfare" and "demonize bankers."
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Reason Editor-in-Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward received a commemorative Johnson-Weld 2016 Libertarian Party Presidential Campaign plate in the mail.
Yoni Mazuz wonders:
The Libertarian moment of enlightenment is when you realize it's a giant ashtray. Read the rest
