Low Rung Tech Tribalism

Silicon Valley’s tribal boosterism has been bad for tech and bad for the world.

I recently criticized Reddit for clamping down on third party clients. I pointed out that having raised a lot of money at a high valuation required the company to become more extractive in an attempt to produce a return for investors. Twitter had gone down the exact same path years earlier with bad results, where undermining the third party ecosystem ultimately resulted in lower growth and engagement for the network. This prompted an outburst from Paul Graham who called it a “diss” and adding that he “expected better from [me] in both the moral and intellectual departments.”

Comments like the one by Paul are a perfect example of a low rung tribal approach to tech. In “What’s Our Problem” Tim Urban introduces the concept of a vertical axis of debate which distinguishes between high rung (intellectual) and low rung (tribal) approaches. This axis is as important, if not more important, than the horizontal left versus right axis in politics or the entrepreneurship/markets versus government/regulation axis in tech. Progress ultimately depends on actually seeking the right answers and only the high rung approach does that.

Low rung tech boosterism again and again shows how tribal it is. There is a pervasive attitude of “you are either with us or you are against us.” Criticism is called a “diss” and followed by a barely veiled insult. Paul has a long history of such low rung boosterism. This was true for criticism of other iconic companies such as Uber and Airbnb also. For example, at one point Paul tweeted that “Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.”

Now it is obviously true that some cities opposed Uber because of corruption / regulatory capture by the local taxi industry. At the same time there were and are valid reasons to regulate ride hailing apps, including congestion and safety. A statement such as Paul’s doesn’t invite a discussion, instead it serves to suppresses any criticism of Uber. After all, who wants to be seen as corrupt or being allied with corruption against something “obviously good”? Tellingly, Paul never replied to anyone who suggested that his statement was too extreme.

The net effect of this low rung tech tribalism is a sense that tech elites are insular and believe themselves to be above criticism, with no need to engage in debate. The latest example of this is Marc Andreessen’s absolutist dismissal of any criticism or questions about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on society. My tweet thread suggesting that Marc’s arguments were overly broad and arrogant promptly earned me a block.

In this context I find myself frequently returning to Martin Gurri’s excellent “Revolt of the Public.” A key point that Gurri makes is that elites have done much to undermine their own credibility, a point also made in the earlier “Revolt of the Elites” by Christopher Lasch. When elites, who are obviously benefiting from a system, dismiss any criticism of that system as invalid or “Communist,” they are abdicating their responsibility.

The cost of low rung tech boosterism isn’t just a decline in public trust. It has also encouraged some founders’ belief that they can be completely oblivious to the needs of their employees or their communities. If your investors and industry leaders tell you that you are doing great, no matter what, then clearly your employees or communities must be wrong and should be ignored. This has been directly harmful to the potential of these platforms, which in turn is bad for the world at large which is heavily influenced by what happens on these platforms.

If you want to rise to the moral obligations of leadership, then you need to find the intellectual capacity to engage with criticism. That is the high rung path to progress. It turns out to be a particularly hard path for people who are extremely financially successful as they often allow themselves to be surrounded by sycophants both IRL and online.

PS A valid criticism of my original tweet about Reddit was that I shouldn’t have mentioned anything from a pitch meeting. And I agree with that.