ME-ism: An Emergent, Dangerous Silicon Valley Elite Political Ideology

A play in four acts devoted to what Politico calls, “Silicon Valley’s idiosyncratic political futurism” that has been developing for a long time.  

Act 1: Setting the Stage

Act 2: ME-ism In The Wild

Act 3: Charts

Act 4: An Invitation to Reimagine

Act 1: Setting the Stage

Characters: 

• Billionaire Silicon Valley CEO/Founder and now Investor

• Leader of a Bay Area Non-Profit devoted to fighting Poverty

• Me 

Setting:  The following exchange took place at a nice home in a nice San Francisco neighborhood with mainly wealthy folks concerned about homelessness.  The evening featured a panel of experts on homelessness, housing, poverty and health.

When: Recently

The Exchange (a Very Closely Paraphrased Actual Conversation):

Billionaire CEO/Investor: “When people cannot afford to live in San Francisco, that is not a political or societal problem.  That's their problem.”   

Me: “Do you enjoy things like eating out, public schools, parks?  Do you benefit from the services of lower income folks who help you with everyday needs?”

Billionaire CEO/Investor: “I know where you’re going with this.  Those people should just live <insert name of a far away town>.”  The billionaire then gestured to the speaker of the event we were attending, a person who leads an organization focused on poverty, and said, “I mean you live in <insert name of the far away town> and it’s fine for you, right?”  

Non-Profit Leader: “No.  I make it work.  I have a two hour commute both ways.  But I don’t think it is OK that San Francisco is increasingly blocked to all but the super wealthy who rely on a stressed class of people for many of their services.  The people that provide these services are tired from arduous and long commutes and often struggling with housing, food, and/or care (child/elder/health) insecurity themselves while they give that security to wealthy folks. I do think we need to think hard about what the future of our city looks like and how we ensure people of different incomes can coexist.”

Me: “This is not only the ‘poorest of the poor.’  It is working poor, some of whom likely work at the companies you - and I for that matter - have led or invested in.”

Spitting mad now, CEO turns to me.

Billionaire CEO/Investor: “You are economically illiterate* and that simply isn’t the case. Everyone in this country is better off than any time they’ve been in history.  Some people just earn more and that’s a consequence of free market capitalism, the best economic system ever created.”

* This was the exact phrase  

****************End Scene*******************

This event took place around the time Marc Andreesen, a billionaire fund manager, wrote a blog post applauding something called tech-optimism and decrying anyone who wants to deal with the unintended, negative consequences of technologies.  In his post, you can almost hear him roaring: “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator.”  

It also happened as Elon Musk’s enmity turned toward diversity, equity and inclusion which he said is "just another word for racism … shame on anyone who uses it."  Not surprising, but a particularly vitriolic cherry atop the huge billionaire-driven shade on all things Environmental, Social, and Governance that Musk, Andreessen and Peter Thiel have been throwing for a long time.

Wow.  

I was starting to feel like a character in a new take on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead - 2024 Edition. What was with this Weird Libertarian Machismo Stuff (to use a technical term, WLMS for short)?

I became curious about this super aggressive defense of capitalism overall and technology in particular.  

My curiosity stemmed from what I see as large, ill-founded philosophical leaps based on shaky logic chains from people who otherwise seem data and reason backed.  It became concern when I saw it informing support for candidates and Political Action Committees that openly support oppression of entire categories of human beings and denial of climate science.

To summarize the thinking: it’s an ideology I will describe as “ME-ism.”  Simply put, believers of ME-ism are “all in for me and people like me - money-motivated and focused on growing personal wealth through unchecked market participation.”  

Act 2: ME-ism In the Wild

Image credit: Midjourney

The evangelicals of this ideology are mostly male billionaires (for real or on paper) who founded or fund companies (private and public).  They’re small in number but powerful in influence. They have experienced admirable commercial success by building businesses and/or investing.  ME-ists have achieved compounding economic growth for themselves and, sometimes, for many others.  They are extremely savvy about their specific domains.  And when their podcasts and blogs focus on those domains, one can often learn a great deal.

The problem comes when their business success bleeds into a near mythical conviction in their own supreme mind, body and spirit.  It grows when this myth informs a worldview that says they made it without assistance so everyone else can if they try hard enough.  And it explodes into real danger when this worldview shapes their political views and they use their own small sample size and experience as a universal truth that drives their political funding and support.  

This led many ME-ists to support Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign. 

A fellow billionaire, Vivek’s views can be summarized as:

• Let’s keep women and children down and out (evident through anti-choice, anti-gun control policy perspectives)

• Let’s advance an "America First" foreign policy (don’t worry about the global world order except as it relates to free and unfettered trade to support low-cost goods and labor)

• Let’s love tech, but disagree with the science consensus on COVID vaccines and human-caused climate change (after all, who is the government to tell me to get a vaccine and oil / gas is a big industry)

• Let’s oppose government regulations of any kind (wait … except for the regulation of women and LGBTQIA+ folks to make their own healthcare decisions … those regulations are just fine)

And though Vivek is out of the race, he is still politically active.  Ramaswamy’s American Exceptionalism Political Action Committee donor list (the PAC has raised $8.6 million) provides a sneak peak into a few Valley ME-ists.  The PAC’s Core beliefs:

“... the same values that built the greatest nation in the world from the ground up are under attack. Faith, patriotism, and hard work are drying up and vanishing—in their place rise the new secular cults of Woke-ism, COVID-ism, and Climate-ism. The high priests of this most unholy trilogy have infested the American government and private sector; they celebrate victimhood in place of excellence and identity politics in place of achievement. They kill jobs, weaken our national security, destroy the middle class, and sow division—and declare unending war on any and all who would stand in their way.”

I see only one woman on that list of donors.  And it’s a pretty safe bet that since Vivek is out, the monetary support has shifted to Trump and not Hayley.  You can search that on the FEC website, but what I now deeply understand after my own Senate race - there are lots of ways to contribute without attribution to a candidate.  

To the three most frequently asked follow-up questions of this group, they have talking points at the ready.

First, what about natural or systemic barriers to enter the arena (ex: disabilities, historical barriers against Black people and women in this country)? 

Their answer is to point to the exceptions as the rules and discredit history.  Many of these folks started as not wealthy and became wealthy, so - voila - anyone can do it.  Moreover, those who are struggling are simply not fit for survival in our capitalist ecosystem. Again - read Apex predator domination post or the American Exceptional PAC description for more on this thinking.  

Second, what about the idea that free market trickle down theory (that Reagan espoused in the 80s and these folks seem to be reigniting) has been disproven by the economic insecurity and affordability crisis faced by the majority of Americans?

Their answer: that is fake news.  Everything has gotten better thanks to technology, everyone’s pocket book has grown, and if people do not have enough for what they need, they are not being smart money managers.  And if they really want to achieve financial security, they need to put some money into the markets.  This Atlantic article description of Peter Thiel is a good description of ME-ists I speak with and observe:  “[They long] for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity.”

Finally, what about the planet and the fact that it’s heating up and threatening to disrupt everything?

Image credit: https://probablefutures.org/stability/

Their answer:  Again, fake news.  As Vivek posted on X and oft repeated: “Time for Drill Baby Drill to make a comeback.”

The problem with all these talking points is that they’re based on flawed logic. 

Act 3: Charts

ME-ists love charts (the all-in podcast is a great place to see this in action; I’ll let you decide who of the crew is a ME-ist, but the whole talk show represents this shift of something that started as reasoned debate over key issues and business stories, and is now often propaganda on behalf of another group of elites - Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at the top of the list).  

Let’s look at three charts to shore up some core logic behind the notion that markets, as they have been, are good for all people, our national economy, and the planet.

CHART 1: Pay-Productivity Tracker

Refuting unfettered markets drive GDP growth and that is undeniably good for the economy and anyone in the economy.

Here is the chart on economic productivity of the country and people’s compensation.  The gap between these two is large and growing.  

Pay is a good proxy for individual earnings, given stock ownership is concentrated in the higher income ranges.

Two important call outs about this chart.

First: on why the gap is so big and how the economy can be growing faster than people’s individual earnings.

To answer this, I’ll summarize a study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) - here.

Starting in the late 1970s policy makers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity so the economy kept growing as worker pay grew to a much lesser degree. 

1. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. 

2. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. 

3. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. 

4. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered.

5. Anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of antitrust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

Second: on why we should care since both the economy and people’s earnings seem to be growing, albeit at different rates.

We should care because if you look at the trend lines, you see another important piece of information. After 1979, when the policy protections for workers were dismantled, productivity grew at a significantly slower pace relative to previous decades. However, because pay growth for typical workers decelerated even more markedly, a large wedge between productivity and pay emerged. 

The growing gap amid slowing productivity growth suggests (I don’t know if that’s correlation or causation, but the graphs show it happened and we know the policy environment surrounding that time) that the same set of policies that suppressed pay growth for the vast majority of workers over the last 40 years were also associated with a slowdown in overall economic growth. 

TAKE-AWAY: Economic growth became both SLOWER and more RADICALLY UNEQUAL starting in the 1980s and the policy choices at that time contributed to that slow down and inequality.

CHART 2: De-averaging and Examining Real Mean Income Cumulative Growth

Refuting “everyone is better off” as a result of GDP rising.

When I say radically unequal, I mean really really unequal.  To give us a better idea of the underlying trends in household incomes, here is a chart from analytics and research company Vetta Fi Advisors, of the real percentage growth since 1967.  

This chart reflects how much money an individual makes after adjusting for inflation by quintile of earning bracket.  

Note in particular the growing spread between the top quintile (and especially the top 5%) and the others, especially since the mid-1980s during the Reagan administration, the era of Supply Side Economics (aka "Reaganomics" and Trickle-Down Economics that I mentioned earlier).   

Importantly, the Economic Policy Institutes explains: it is not just low- and middle-income households who suffer in this grip of rising inequality, but the economy as a whole. “In addition to shunting more and more income growth away from low- and middle-income households, rising inequality also hurts the macroeconomy. Most obviously, the rise in inequality slows aggregate household spending by redistributing income from households with higher propensities to spend their current income (i.e., lower-income households) and toward households with higher propensities to save (i.e., higher-income households).”

So ME-ists claim to hate redistribution, but that’s what’s happened here.  And spending falls as inequality redistributes income from lower-income households (that need to spend more of their income to meet living expenses) to higher-income families (that have the luxury to save money).

TAKE-AWAY: Rising inequality is bad for constrains overall economic growth by reducing economy wide spending.  

CHART 3: Global Temperature History

Refuting the idea that anyone will maintain growing, stable wealth in the face of human-caused climate change.

Finally, let’s look at the planet.  This chart on global temperature comes from Probable Futures, started by financial analyst Spencer Glendon.  It explains how continuing to produce greenhouse gasses drives higher temperatures than ever before, disrupting the climate and everything built upon it.

Glendon explains, “As climate impacts intensify, cities in temperate climates will see livability becoming increasingly challenged, with some areas facing daytime temperatures so high that being and working outdoors will be unsafe. Rising sea levels, salination of groundwater, and the expansion of arid terrain will burden governments with the need for expensive infrastructure improvements. These changes will affect agriculture and economic productivity and will drive migration to more-habitable areas.”

Glendon stresses in his work that industry is leaning into extreme risk and financial models, including those used by insurers, bond-rating agencies, and secondary mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have not accounted for the real impact of climate changes. “We built a complex financial system based on outdated assumptions.”  

For rational finance folks, it is simply irrational to ignore science in thinking about what future values of any asset will be. [For more on this, read “Discount rates: A boring thing you should know about (with otters!) Unless you're an economics geek, you've probably never heard of "discount rates." Behind that technical term, however, hides a social and ethical debate at the heart of climate policy, David Roberts explains.”]

Take-away: The science is clear on how humans’ current approach to building our world is destabilizing it, including the capital markets.

Act 4: An Invitation to Reimagine

Image credit: Midjourney

So what do I propose instead?

I want WE-ism. I want it to be about us.  Not you, not me. Not them.

I am for a reimagined capitalism and more effective government.  

I believe market based solutions and technology can play a big part in addressing inequality and planetary instability.  When accounting for people as assets and carbon emissions as costs in financial statements (read more from climate expert and author Alicia Seiger’s work on this here), we will adequately capture the value of humans in producing capital and the liability of carbon in deteriorating it over time.  

I understand the trepidation with government regulation coming out of the current Congress which has shown itself to be woefully ill-prepared to navigate the modern economy while advancing goals that protect our planet, our safety, our financial prosperity.

As we reimagine the future, we must be clear-eyed about the reality of the current system.  

50 years of economic, policy, and climate history show that without the right checks and balances by a well-run government in partnership with courageous and thoughtful leaders in the private sector (especially tech), unfettered market conditions drive inequality and climate instability that is bad for humans and the broader economy. That history leaves us with this present:

A country where 33% of households with children 50% of Black and Brown households experience food, shelter, care insecurity.

A country where, today, there are more jobs than people to fill them but as AI comes into sharper focus, we’ll likely have more people than jobs in key industries and parts of the country.

A country that has to contend with two massive looming questions: 

• If today’s low unemployment produces such grave economic fragility for so many, imagine what happens when high or erratic and spiky unemployment emerges - not just for the lowest wage workers, but for middle and upper-wage workers too?  

• If the climate heats up 2 degrees and we have 1 billion global climate refugees, what happens to lives, livelihoods, and the overall economy?

There is no such thing as a rich, unlivable world and no markets or communities will be stable in these conditions.

I’d like the ME-ists to acknowledge this. Rather than defending a WLMS agenda founded on significant logic wobbles, I invite and implore them and others to turn attention and some amount of time, treasure, and talent to the biggest unsolved challenge and opportunity we face as a society:

How do we ACCELERATE economic growth while making it RADICALLY INCLUSIVE knowing this can only happen in more STABLE CLIMATE conditions?

Imagine if that became the shared goal we applied minds across industries and sectors to achieve with the same urgency we apply to building the next generation of Initial Public Offerings?!

Imagine if asking that question did not trigger low-fi conversations on “free markets are great” versus “free markets are bad” or “regulation does not work” versus “we need regulation” or “woke is good” versus “woke is bad” (that last one in particular is such a trope … if you’re not awake, aren’t you asleep?).

Imagine, instead, we came to the prompt with a clean slate and simply used the best data and systems thinking we have to develop a roadmap that we operationalize with incredible leaders in positions to drive outcomes we experience in results versus an ongoing war of words. We’ll stumble, sure, but if we are agreed on the future we are working towards, we’ll be more open to learning from those stumbles and getting stronger as a result.

I believe know WE can do this.  I have thoughts, developed with some truly brilliant people of all backgrounds, on how we get started (stay tuned for next week’s post on how we can catalyze high quality jobs and an education system that prepares people for those). 

However, anything we do begins with humility, curiosity and a growth mindset that is not fixed on your personal experience being the one data point from which to form a political agenda.

It extends to empathy for the lived experiences of others.

Finally, it requires one to truly wrestle with the question of whether increasing the security of *everyone* leads toward or away from the society you want to live in and what might you be willing to change in your own mindset, behaviors, and the systems you influence to make that happen?

**************THE END****************

More Resources on Today’s Topic

• Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance on the “Rise Of Technoauthoritarianism”

• Probable futures climate explainers: https://probablefutures.org/stability/

• Nasdaq’s: Sustainable Leadership: Creating a Climate for Change with Rebecca Henderson and Spencer Glendon

Post-Script

I am commenting on this publicly for four reasons:

1. I think the belief system is misguided and dangerous for people, the planet, and democracy given how much power and money are concentrated in its believers.  These believers are getting increasingly active politically, but they do not represent the majority of people and leaders in Silicon Valley.  We need more smart people with technology backgrounds to get involved in political discussions and funding as a counter-weight. 

2. I believe in being tough on systems and soft on people and I want to debate - openly - the system these people are advocating.  To do that, I have to tell a few stories and mention a couple names to bring to life and define what I assess their beliefs to be.   I do this for illustration and specificity, not to be salacious or petty.  

3. I am seeing a lot of sycophantic behavior in the Valley towards these wealthy idelogues whose “followers'' will praise them in person, then dismiss them behind closed doors.   This is unproductive.  Only denouncing without respectful, data-driven debates that introduce alternate solutions, is disingenuous and feeds a terrible criticism loop that grows distant from critical thinking.  We need to get comfortable being uncomfortable in navigating differences with the out of sight rich and powerful (and I mean the top 1% of wealth holders, because that’s where I see this ideology taking root) in a way that might lead to positive change.  That means not lambasting people for being part of the 1%, just as you would not negatively judge people for being part of the 99%.  It means discussing ideas with respect for different perspectives in order to produce better outcomes.  

4. I want these minds of Silicon Valley, who have helped create transformative technologies, to be as clean in their world and political logic as they are in their business logic.  That starts with addressing this first principle question: what society are we working towards?  Until we address that, we’ll be in a spin cycle of nastiness that I fear will set us all back. 

The Pie Question

My friend and brilliant engineer Kent Beck nailed it when he absorbed all of this in preparation for a session we were leading on Artificial Intelligence. He observed:

“We seem to have a society level Pie Squared problem, where people with big slices actively want to reduce the size of slices of people with small slices instead of working to increase the pie for everyone [in a way that does not just solve for overall Gross Domestic Product, which is indeed growing, but also empowers all people’s ability to fulfill their basic needs and sustains a healthy climate]. Here is the fundamental question: does increasing the security of *everyone* lead toward or away from the society you want to live in?”