Back in March, I asked in my Taki’s Magazine column “Diversity
Versus Debate”:
Does the increasing campus hysteria and
antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly
grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules,
will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?
With the tech industry
already immense, and soon to attempt to take over the auto industry with
self-driving cars, those are trillion-dollar questions.
We may have gotten a hint of an answer this week
whether blue-state America’s worsening climate of science denialism will
backfire on the giant tech quasi-monopolies when Google CEO Sundar Pichai
publicly fired a software engineer for writing a carefully argued memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.”
The brilliant young coder is James Damore, a
former doctoral student in systems biology at Harvard. In case you are
wondering what systems biology is,
here’s Harvard’s explanation:
Systems Biology aims to explain how higher
level properties of complex biological systems arise from the interactions
among their parts. This field requires a fusion of concepts from many
disciplines, including biology, computer science, applied mathematics, physics and
engineering.
Ironically, Damore was fired for defending Google against the
libel that only rampant sexism can explain why the second-richest company in
the world doesn’t employ 50 percent women in technical jobs (much as Larry
Summers was forced out as president of Harvard a decade ago in
sizable measure for defending Harvard from similar charges).
“The New Sensitivity is a perpetual motion
machine for extracting payoffs that has evolved over decades of trial and
error.”
In response, the Google CEO argued,
in effect, that Google’s female employees, being highly emotional and not very
logical women, can’t be expected to not take personally abstract masculine
concepts such as “averages.”
It’s not punching
down for the Indian-born CEO of Google (who was paid $200
million last year) to fire a twentysomething coder, it’s
punching up because the victim’s a white male, just as it wasn’t punching down
for Apple CEO Tim Cook to attack an Indiana pizza maker because Tim is gay. (In
today’s zeitgeist, the billionaire always wins.)
Granted, all of this sounds
ridiculous, which it is. If Google’s CEO actually believed that his firm was
leaving money on the table by not employing enough women (or black or Hispanic)
engineers due to sexism, it would be his fiduciary duty to hire far more.
But of course he has zero
intention of doing much of that.
Why can’t Google, with all
its money, find as many women as men?
For one reason, because coding doesn’t much
appeal to women. My wife, for instance, used to be a computer programmer. She
was good at it, but it’s a boring job if you find people more interesting than
things. Further, American programmers used to be rather well paid, but then
the H-1B visa
program allowed employers to substitute cheaper Asian men for American women.
Google became the second-most
valuable company in the world (following only Apple, an especially
white-male-led company) largely on the strength of its hardworking white and
Asian male workforce. For Google to blow up $655 billion in market
capitalization by taking seriously the current year’s Narrative about how
diversity is our strength would be insane.
On the other hand, $655
billion inevitably attracts parasites.
It’s important to understand
the recent political history to have a sense of where things are headed.
The firing of Damore for telling the truth
reflects a general trend pushed by the government for a generation for shutting
down free expression at work. Veteran legal analyst Walter
Olson noted yesterday:
...Government pressure on employers to ban
speech consisted less of direct you-must-ban mandates and more of litigation
incentives. Legal or HR will counsel employer that allowing the bad speech to
go undisciplined might be a Title VII offense, or evidence of one…. So as a way
of evading responsibility it’s kind of brilliant. Those in power can blame
private actors who in turn feel their hands tied.
Olson goes on:
...Hostile-environment law is not
content-neutral. It plays favorites on topics and on sides of topics…. And
speech cited in suits against employers was “frequently not at all obscene but
often highly political and analytic in content.” Meanwhile, a search then [in
1997] found not “a single case in which feminist assertions have been ruled to
contribute to a hostile environment.”
In truth, feminism is hostility.
A few decades ago, you could
waste some money on affirmative action hires, give them nice titles and
offices, and often they’d happily let the real workers get back to work.
But today’s quota kids have
been trained to sniff out microaggressions against their amour propre. If
anybody like Damore objects, it’s proof of sexism, racism, or whatever else the
government’s out to crush. The New Sensitivity is a perpetual motion machine
for extracting payoffs that has evolved over decades of trial and error.
Yet for the longest time,
Silicon Valley considered itself not subject to the civil rights bureaucracies
and social pressures that pester the more uncool parts of the business world.
Why? Because it was high-tech
and thus it was good. Disparate impact in hiring must be the result of old bad
prejudices, so, obviously, futuristic tech companies shouldn’t have to worry
about not hiring many women or blacks.
For decades, therefore, when Jesse
Jackson intermittently tried to shake down Silicon Valley, he
was routinely sent packing with a pittance and scoffing laughter. As recently
as 2011,
I pointed out that Silicon Valley largely ignored the diversity demands that
intimidated the rest of corporate America.
Moreover, the first Obama
administration was no more going to persecute Silicon Valley for not following
its multiculturalism rules before the 2012 election than it would Hollywood or
the universities. There were campaign contributions to collect.
Amusingly, the liberal elites who financed
Obama’s reelection in 2012 had no idea that Obama’s turnout strategy of
unifying his ungainly coalition of the fringes by ginning up hatred against
cishet white males would rebound against them in the ensuing years.
Once the president was reelected, however, the
real Obama could safely come out. Just as I had predicted in my 2008 book America’s
Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” Obama’s
first term was pretty sensible and his second term pretty…authentic.
The second Obama
administration was free to point its resentful allies at the rich prizes in the
tech industry, the entertainment industry, and academia.
Ironically, after decades of globalism, there
isn’t much left to loot among Trump’s base, so now the lucrative blue-state
institutions are in the crosshairs. All these highly Democratic industries have
since been getting cannibalized by fellow Democrats in the ongoing meltdown of
liberalism, what archaeologists might someday call the Late
Obama Age Collapse. We are still watching progressives claw each
other’s eyes out as they fail to peacefully divvy up the plunder.
If we are lucky, historians won’t take quite as
long to document how most of the bizarre cultural panics and hate hoaxes of the
past few years, such as the Haven
Monahan rape fable and World
War T, were inspired, if not outright rigged in advance, by
collusion between the Obama administration and its volunteer PR interns in the
media.
For example, by 2014, The New York Times was running a long
series of articles with hate-driven headlines like:
A subsequent show trial intended to demonstrate
that Silicon Valley was now open for pillaging was the discrimination lawsuit
against a venture capital firm filed by Ellen Pao, an adventuress married to
disgraced gay financier Buddy
Fletcher. It was given immense publicity in the press. The
New York Times “reported”:
At stake is any hope that Silicon Valley can
claim to be a progressive place.
But the trial proved a fiasco
and the jury gave Pao the boot.
You might think that this
would stop the momentum, but little does. There is just too much money
involved.
Let me close with one
question about Google’s personnel policy: Compared with how you felt last week,
how do you feel today about someday entrusting your life to a Google
self-driving car?
Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights.
