Trying to keep up with the tech Joneses I get a email from Benedict Evans that tells me about the latest and greatest in the tech universe. A couple of days ago his email had two links that illustrate the cultural contradictions in the culture of Tech Land.
One of the links is about Apple, and the extraordinary vision and determination at Apple: "Apple's Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View." Stephen Sinovsky, a Microsoft veteran, compares and contrasts Apple's execution that seems to care little for its installed base, but goes where others fear to tread. While Microsoft is all about serving its corporate customers that want a stable platform. Apple's approach is:
- Fearless multi-year strategy
- Clear unified planning/prioritization
- Wildly unprecedented execution
In other words, "the people at Apple are amazing. Yes everyone says that and believes that but boy everyone at Apple is the world’s best at their thing." And when Apple changes the technology, as they are now moving their Macbook laptops off Intel, they change it. If you want to come along, great.
But at Microsoft, Sinovsky says,
It is literally impossible to end something at Microsoft. I can’t tell you how many times I (or we) tried. A running joke was how long the Excel team kept doing bug fixes on OS/2 Excel for a European bank. It was long after no one used OS/2 (except that bank).
So, Apple is like explorers in the desert. They just go on, fearlessly and creatively.
But then all these techies are all-in on woke politics. Read about Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. He's commenting on "a good deal of employee backlash to Mark's decision to leave President Trump's posts about Minnesota protesters up." Says he:
Obviously the events of the last few weeks have had a disproportionately negative impact on anyone who's personally experienced or been afraid of experiencing violence at the hands of police, discrimination, bias either in the world or at work. We've been having a lot of hard conversations over the last few weeks with lots of people who are sharing their story, their experience, how these events have touched or triggered them and wanting to know that the company sides with them as individuals, sides with the ideals of better racial justice and equality, and that we're doing whatever we can to further connection and cohesiveness in the world. It's been a tumultuous few weeks, and I think understandably so, particularly for friends and colleagues in the Black community.
See, I don't believe this. I don't believe that anyone working at Facebook has seriously experienced "violence at the hands of police." I just don't. Because people that work at Facebook are good little girls and boys that never blotted their copybooks in their lives. The are absolute team players, dedicated to the sort of culture they have at Apple: to be the best in the world at what they do. I think that Facebook employees feel all this triggering and racial justice and equality because that is what good little girls and boys in the educated Gentry are taught in their Woke Bible classes.
Because the guys that need to beware of police violence are guys like the drugged George Floyd with a violent criminal record and children from several women left behind. Or the drunk Rayshard Brooks, who broke away from police when he realized that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned.
It is a fatuous conceit for the good little girls and good little boys at Facebook to imagine themselves in danger from police violence. It is virtue signaling. It is social-moralizing. It is nice church ladies gasping to each other about the horrors of life in the lower orders.
The fact is that we have police to isolate the function of keeping order, and keeping the lower orders from breaking the peace in the city; that is what it takes for ordinary commerce to proceed in peace. Or, to put it in a less anodyne way, we have police to do the dirty work of knocking the heads of knuckleheads so we don't have to.
The alternative is, well, the Montagues and Capulets of Verona. No police there, so you have the notables of each big family keeping order. Only, there is the problem of the notables of the other families in town, and you know what they are all about. In our modern era with police, the notables aren't in conflict with each other. But instead we have the criminal gangs of the ethnic groups presently in the middle of adapting to life in the city and not yet transitioned to the middle class. So, back in the day, we had the young swells of the Montagues and Capulets having a bit of a rumble. In Leonard Bernstein's time we had the Sharks and the Jets going at it. Now we have black gangs and Salvadorean gangs and young punks blowing each other away in cities like Chicago every weekend. And now Seattle.
But our wokey corporate good little boys and good little girls literally know nothing of all this. How could they? They spend their lives on video games and social media. And instead of actually reading a book, they get nothing beyond the woke ideological indoctrination they get at school from the educated Gentry.
The tech people are brilliant when it comes to stuff they know, like tech. They are utterly clueless when it comes to culture and politics. And the "internal contradictions" of the current woke culture are going to bite them, sooner or later.
Want to know why? It arises out of my maxim, that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." The educated Gentry has been executing on a monstrous program of injustice, injustice to ordinary Commoners so they can feel good about bringing justice to the traditionally marginalized. They are absolutely blind to the truth that, when you are patting yourself on the back for fighting for justice, you haven't really thought that maybe, yes maybe, your noble quest to bend the arc of history towards justice may instead be creating new injustice, and doing the opposite of what you imagine.
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