Tuesday Collapsing Valley Open Comments

Malcolm Kyeyune is a very interesting guy.  He is a Swedish citizen, appears to be of Ghanian descent and has described himself in the past as a Marxist, although he doesn’t think or write like one.

The Email Caste’s Last Stand

“Tech companies ran off the cliff long ago.”

Most discussions of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter have focused on its political implications. In many accounts, Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral”—that is, against the dominance of professionals who have sought to make the internet more restrictive. Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.

and,

Here, one is reminded of a social dynamic that took hold in the leadup to the French Revolution. In the latter half of the 18th century, France was trying to reform its increasingly dysfunctional army, and some of the reformers made an issue of the fact that commoners couldn’t get promoted to higher positions. Surely, a properly meritocratic army would be more efficient than one that saw itself as a place to park the listless, and often talentless, sons of the nobility. But all attempts to make the army accept non-nobles in commanding positions were defeated. The problem was that France now had a large class of impoverished nobles, for which some sort of exclusive jobs program was absolutely necessary. They didn’t have diversified business interests like the court nobility at Versailles; all they had was their noble privilege, and if the French state abolished the last areas where that privilege meant something, they would truly be lost.

A similar dynamic is operative in America today. The people who worked “on climate” at Twitter, now being given the ax by the perfidious Elon Musk, are openly complaining that they won’t be able to find jobs anywhere else in this economy. They are, of course, right to worry. One of the biggest and least-talked-about social questions in the West is how to economically provide for our own modern version of France’s impecunious nobles: that is, how to prop up high-status people who can’t really do much economically productive work.