My Thinking Only Seems Magical Because Reality Has Not Been Sufficiently Optimized to Match It

“Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.”

As with the word “implicitly” in that first tweet, the word “obviously” serves here as a proxy for an entire unexamined worldview — the tip of a technocratic, Rand-ian ideological iceberg that regards what “works” (as defined first by engineering achievement and second by success in the market) as self-evidently correct. It’s a software engineer’s view of capitalism as a kind of genetic algorithm, gradually advancing society through a massively parallel search for product-market fit. Regulators, politicians, pearl-clutching social commentators and other unenlightened busy bodies who would seek to place limits on this process are bugs in the system, perverting its just course. Never mind that we’ve seen this algorithm operating at full efficiency before and found that, left unchecked, it tends to exhibit some problematic biases (toward income inequality, exploitation of labor, and disregard for public safety to name a few). Silicon Valley is different because unlike the robber barons of the last industrial revolution, the Titans of Silicon Valley are “smart” (a word used almost totemistically by Graham and his acolytes) and thus implicitly benevolent. The kind of haughty sentiment evinced by these two statements has long been a staple of tech’s response to criticism. In their reductive glibness, blinkered certainty, and “us-against-them” mentality they’re a prime example of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism as “thought-terminating cliches.”

Awl pal Buzz Andersen has a newsletter, and it is called Thinkpiece Dot Club.