Silicon Valley's Secretive, Orgiastic Side

You're right, I should have toned down the first sentence a little bit. I hope that young women working in Silicon Valley will read this article and make better decisions for themselves. Each new generation has to learn the ways of the world all over again. But some of them will read this article and make exactly the same decisions, because there are reasons why these parties are thrown and why people, with their eyes open, attend.

What I was trying to say was: The article is overblown in its tone, and that's important for reasons I'll get to at the end.

There are other, much worse things going on in the world, some of which Emily Chang has admirably broken as news.[1] It probably would have worked better if the orgy angle had been woven into a chapter of The Circle. I don't find much in it that surprises me. And given its lack of concrete details, it doesn't strike me as particularly newsworthy. I try to read things that I hope will surprise me and that I might learn from. This book chapter tells me that rich, powerful people behave in Silicon Valley much as they do in other parts of the world (Wall Street, for example), and much as they have done in other times (the Marquis de Sade's books are one example among many).

Personally, I don't find the article to be neutral or non-judgmental. Quite the opposite. It is part of a book titled "Brotopia", and it advances a thesis that Silicon Valley is dominated by emotionally immature or egotistical men who use their relative wealth and power to prey on young women. These sex parties are cast as part of a gender war with two sides: straight males vs straight females. That's a vast oversimplification, making a lot of noise about a very small sample of the humans who constitute the tech community. The only reason why this doesn't fall into the cateogory of "things we can assume happen weekly" is that it's Silicon Valley.

I could name at least one powerful lesbian in tech who left her wife to shack up with a female employee. I'm quite positive that some gay men in tech find opportunities to prey on male interns just as much as the revanchist straight male geeks in the article manage to live out their adolescent fantasies by acting like players. But neither of those fit the direction of Emily Chang's outrage (which is also the dominant direction of outrage in liberal circles). That tells me either that Chang is not reporting this story as diligently as she could, or that she's ignoring significant information to advance a point in this debate. The villain's role has been cast.

Emily Chang is a professional journalist, and she knows how to maintain a journalist's neutral tone while letting her sources drive home her point. If you look at the most emotionally powerful quotes (take that of Elisabeth Sheff, for example [2]) or language like "sport fucking", you can tell which side Chang is on. She's portraying the males here as powerful, predatory and ridiculous all at once:

"Furthermore, these elite founders, C.E.O.’s, and V.C.’s see themselves as more influential than most hot-shit bankers, actors, and athletes will ever be."

All the voices in the piece are Chang's, because she selected them to tell this story, which is a very particular story out of all the threads she could pick. And those voices land heavily in the judging camp.

She lets Founder X make a fool of himself between double quotes, just as she did with Tom Perkins. Is Founder X a fool? Probably. Is he typical of male entrepreneurs? Not in my experience. Did he think he was speaking to a sympathetic ear? Probably. That's how journalists get people to say embarrassing things. They use their sources, just like their sources use them to gain publicity. Just like the men and women at these orgies are using each other. And that's a fundamental part of human interactions that she sounds really judgey about.[3]

My chief concern is that this article is part of a prurient and puritanical movement to police sexuality in America, a movement that has gone far beyond condemning acts of coercion or workplace sexual harassment (both of which I, too, condemn), and drifted into condemning the gray area of fluid power dynamics juxtaposed with consent.

Masha Gessen has talked about it more articulately than I can:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-wa...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-da...

If we become too easily outraged and rigid in the way we judge sexual behavior publicly, we will simply become a society of hypocrites and rule breakers who can't talk about or understand real humans. A lot of things already can't be discussed calmly -- eppur si muove, as the man said.

Good journalism pushes us to look at things in new ways that deepen our understanding of the world. This article didn't do that for me.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-inve...

[2] “That’s exploitation. That’s old-school, fucked-up masculine arrogance and borderline prostitution,” she said. “The men don’t have to prostitute themselves, because they have the money. . . . ‘I should be able to have sex with a woman because I’m a rich guy.’ That is not even one particle progressive; that is the same tired bullshit. It’s trying to blend the new and keeping the old attitudes, and those old attitudes are based in patriarchy, so they come at the expense of women.”

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbN8jqDhHO8

It may not be a popular opinion, but why are these tech founders and VCs always judged and pointed at by reporters and such? I mean yeah, if they engage in illegal behaviour (sexual asssault) and stuff there should be punishment as with any other citizen. But in any other case, why don’t tech reporters focus on the tech? Rather than on the morals or sex lifes of the founders? It seems to me that founders are now under public scrutiny as if their company sold morals.

I think the crucial mistake most commenters/assessors on HN are making is in somehow equating SV with engineer and social introvert types. Of course those people aren't going to sex parties!

But SV has over the years adopted the money-hungry, the investors and startup-flippers, as the core demographic by which it continues and grows. And these people are always in search of that next high. If that next high can be taboo and paid for with an exclusive amount of money, they'll be there.

SV is no longer defined by its engineers. We see this in the hypergrowth cycles, in the "you can't engineer yourself out of a societal problem" phenomenon, in the fact that you can't get anywhere in SV without getting on your knees in front of a VC board.

Sure it's technically possible. If you were a woman would you want to have sex with Henry Kissinger?

Drugs, alcohol, and whores are cheap compared to the value you can extract from people using them. This article was fun to read; there have been lots of hit pieces coming out this year on SV, can't say it's undeserved either. Nothing here is shocking or unexpected, pederasty would be shocking -- no names which takes a whole lot of fun out of it for the spectators.

Theres no baiting going on at all. Male/Female relations in the workplace is a pertinent topic...but if you don't want differing opinions on the subject thats fine. Ill stick to the "women are repressed" narrative from here on out. Thank you for correcting my faulty thoughts.