Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

the conservative claim to being "silenced" is a reflection of privilege. for instance, the icon here is Peter Thiel, a billionaire who complains about being victimized because people tell him he's in the wrong.

you will and should face ostracism and other consequences for saying, believing, and doing things that people find abhorrent or evil. free speech means you're free to believe those things, and everybody else is free to call you evil, and coordinate accordingly.

conservatism in the United States has enabled the murder of countless children, both through the NRA's fanaticism re assault weapons, and through the weird effective impunity police have re criminal prosecution, even after killing children. conservatism in the US has enabled the destruction of the environment. the Trump campaign and presidency have seen a rapid escalation of hate crimes, and after Charlottesville the president explicitly defended the white supremacists in attendance.

there is so much blood on the hands of the conservative movement. so much racism. so much sexism. so much fear-mongering and rabble-rousing. how could you possibly expect to do that kind of thing without facing CRITICISM? how could you possibly be the victims here?

So pro-choice activists are bigots if they're in deeply conservative parts of the US?

If it's implausible for someone to imagine expressing their beliefs without being labelled a bigot then it's just as much a statement about the environment they're in as it is about the beliefs in question.

I am 44 and visit the Bay Area from time to time. I have the same feeling on various levels.

Anything older than two years has disappeared into a vortex. I mean I remember when the peninsula was the center of the tech industry - I mean Facebook came out of Palo Alto in 2004, it wasn't that long ago. Now the peninsula is the home of Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and other dinosaurs founded between the 1960s and 1980s, and now Facebook is considered a dinosaur next to upstarts like Snapchat.

People travel from Market Street to their startup office. Everyone has a Macbook. Everything is done on Slack. Food is delivered to the communal tables at 1 PM via one of the dozens of online services that exist that make startup life simpler. If your laptop is HP, if you actually send e-mails from time to time, if you still use IRC and Freenode (or heaven forbid, EFnet) - dinosaur.

I've been on the Internet since the 1980s. One reason for lacking techno-utopianism is I see what has happened. I see how Verizon/AT&T the monopolies seized control of what I guess they always controlled on some level. I see how they destroyed Usenet. I see the NSA monitoring what Americans are doing 24/7/365, and storing it forever in a Utah data center they are still building. I see intelligent conversations between academics fade away for alt-right 4chan "raids". There was always some dull-headed and anarchic forces on the net but now they have taken over. I see the collaboration and massive amount of free man-hours given to build the net being seized and expropriated by large corporations. I see people burned out with 80/90 hour week startup death marches, then get burned on options for Zynga/Skype option clawbacks, then have their marriages and families and lives fall apart - 40/50 something unemployable burnouts with broken families. While the VCs and bigcorp majority stockholders make out like bandits.

It is one reason experienced people are shunted aside - it is easier to sucker some kid in their 20s to throw a decade away slaving for peanuts for super angels, VCs and their LPs. All the while having the founders talking about the importance of company culture, as if you're in some cult - which on some level - you are.

Thiel's real problem is that he doesn't have "conservative" views as much as he has totalitarian and abusive views. He feels might makes right, and that wealth makes might. He's in a group that feel they should be free from restrictions of normal people, and that corporate oligarchy is fine as long as they're on top. He's openly elitist, and THAT is something SV doesn't look nicely upon.

To understand what is going on here please read Rand's article "Anatomy of Comprise" in her anthology "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and her article "The Establishing of an Establishment" in her anthology "Philosophy: Who Needs It."

Rand wrote; "It is precisely those ends ([sacrifice]-collectivism-statism) that ought to be rejected. But if neither party chooses to do it, the logic of events created by their common basic principles will keep dragging them both further and further to the left. If and when the "conservatives" are kicked out of the game altogether, the same conflict will continue between the "liberals" and the avowed socialists; when the socialists win, the conflict will continue between the socialists and the communists; when the communists win, the ultimate goal of [sacrifice] will be achieved; universal immolation."

In short we are witnessing the end of the Rep party as they are kicked off the social/political stage because they stand for nothing except watered-down ideas/goals of the Dems/Left. Who needs them?

Trump was never a Rep and used the Rep party for a self-aggrandizement, and big FU "Ill show you" to the NY Dems who rebuffed Trump in the '90s when he wanted leadership positions for all the money he was donating.

What Thiel, et. al. don't understand is that they are objecting to the left/liberal Establishment propagated by Academia and based on collectivism/sacrifice as political and moral ideals shared by both parties. The only way to end this process is for Thiel or the Reps to stand up for individualism and selfishness or their protests will be a footnote in history.