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0 pointsKalium11y ago0 comments

A lot of Silicon Valley culture and counter-culture alike are built on having no empathy for engineers. The investors see them as useful workers, and the counter-culturalists see them as inhuman invaders. Nobody gives a flip, and when confronted the universal response is a dismissive "Oh, they'll be fine".

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michaelochurch11y ago· 2 in thread

First Estate: investors and well-connected serial founders who can raise money on a drop and get injected at VP levels in tech giants on a phone call. They dominate SV culture.

Second Estate: true technologists. Programmers and designers and makers.

Third Estate: everyday people. Often pissed off (justifiably) about the arrogance of the Valley's tech barons. Tend to protest Google buses, making it hard for Second Estaters to get to work (while being slightly amusing to First Estate assholes). They're the "counter-culture" you describe, along with the regular people who are getting annoyed by tech's arrogance. A few of them are the anti-vax NIMBY assholes who are even more execrable than the tech barons, but most of them are just normal people.

Silicon Valley is dominated by the First Estate. The Second Estate is misled to think it's in charge by workplaces with ball pits, but has no real power or hope of advancement or financial upside except in extreme long-tail cases. So much of the narrative has been II vs. III. That's because the First Estate doesn't want the Second and Third Estate to get together and realize that they don't need the First.

See, the Second Estate has weak organizational and social skills, and has been systematically infantilized ("Agile"/Scrum) to keep it that way. We could learn a lot from Third Estaters (who are often just as smart as we are) in politics, government, law, labor activism, etc. But we've been told by the VC elite to reject such people as parasitic future-averse peons, and they've been told that we're a bunch of socially inept, prematurely affluent assholes. This artificial II/III cleavage works to their benefit, and it hurts us, by making us dependent on the First Estate for funding and approval.

KaliumOP11y ago

I've been studying and listening to what you describe as the Third Estate. I'm honestly not convinced they have good lessons to teach about politics, law, or labor activism. They have excellent lessons to teach about how those things worked decades ago, but have failed to update. Their decline in power and affluence is in part a result of applying old models to poorly matched modern scenarios.

Some of the ideas are useful, though. But not the ones where you add pain the lives of people and expect it to engender sympathy towards you.

The First Estate has more value and utility than your typical Marxist eat-the-rich analysis would suggest. Further, the Second and Third don't have as much in common as a naive analysis might suggest.

raspasov11y ago

For someone who hasn't lived in SV you seem to know a lot about it :).

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