Decency, democracy, & the new Californian ideology

Soft Power-sanctioned reads

Ramon Casas, Joven decadente, 1899

My favorite method of procrastination is reading articles, and I’ve been trying to find a way to make it a little less self-indulgent, and a little more useful to the world. I usually subject my colleagues to a deluge of links in my Slack channel (hi, sorry!) but I’ve realized that this is the very reason people have a blog: to share our wayward thoughts.

So now I’m subjecting you to this! I’ll be sharing some of my favorite reads ~weekly, sometimes with a podcast or video or artwork sprinkled in between. They’ll usually touch on the themes I explore here: technology and humanity, culture and philosophy. I hope these spark some interesting ideas of your own, or just serve as good mental fodder. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

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Staying Decent in an Indecent Society (Ian Buruma, Liberties Journal)

I think a lot about how to live in a society that is imperfect and unjust without compromising my integrity; to recognize that living without crumbling means I cannot constantly see, hold, or heal all the world’s pain; to accept what I cannot change and try to do my best where I can.

This essay explores how different artists and writers resisted indecent regimes while attempting to preserve their dignity, their voice, and in some instances, their lives. The examples show that the question of Exit or Voice is a gradient, not a binary: we decide how we ought to live through our own values, privileges, affinities, and circumstances, knowing that each choice carries its own compromises, and that we must live learn to live with them:

Whether people can be classified as heroes or villains is less interesting to me than the question whether a person can remain decent in an indecent society. Is it at all possible, apart from joining the resistance, which puts one’s own life and that of others at risk, to remain uncorrupted by a criminal regime? What constitutes an indecent society was succinctly defined by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit in his superb book The Decent Society. An indecent society, in his view, is one whose official institutions are designed to humiliate people, often a minority. A decent society is not quite the same thing as a civilized society. In Margalit’s words, a “civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which the institutions do not humiliate people.”

The novelist Frank Thiess took Mann’s criticism personally. He responded by coining the phrase “inner emigration.” Living through the darkest times at home and shielding oneself from the criminal state by withdrawing into one’s private thoughts was surely more heroic, he argued, than lecturing one’s compatriots from the comfort of Californian exile.

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But if inner emigration is excusable in a dictatorship, where speaking out carries lethal dangers, there is little excuse of it when speech is still free. Anticipatory obedience is not the way to stay decent. Citizens must protest, in any way they can, against attempts to break down the institutions that protect liberal democracy, especially when men and women leading those institutions, including the president himself, use them to humiliate people.

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The AI democracy debate is weirdly narrow by

Henry Farrell

And the accompanying paper, AI and Democratic Publics, in the Knight First Amendment Institute, that goes more in-depth

There’s a lot of talk about AI and democracy, often focused on how AI can improve deliberation and representation, or create processes by which a broader subset of the population will have a say in how AI is built and governed. But many of these well-meaning efforts mistake representative input for a meaningful exercise of democracy. Real democracy is about having genuine power over the systems that shape our lives, not simply being consulted while others retain control.

Farrell and Hahne assert that current debates around AI and democracy — which often involve convening broadly representative groups for “deliberative discussions” — amount to trying to create a democracy without politics. Without avenues for the negotiation and exercise of power (i.e. politics), mere deliberation, however representative, is a shallow exercise in collecting opinions that avoids engaging with the messy realities of conflict and power inherent to a healthy democracy:

Such proposals don’t have much to do with real life democracy. Actually existing democracy, bluntly put, involves actors struggling over power and resources. That isn’t enormously attractive much of the time, but such is politics. Given how human beings are, the great hope for democracy is not that it will replace power struggles with disinterested political debate. It is that it can, under the right circumstances, moderate that struggle so that it does not collapse into chaos, but instead produces civil peace, greater fairness and some good policies and other benefits, albeit with great pain and a lot of mess.

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Rewriting the Californian Ideology (Nadia Asparouhova, American Affairs)

Pair this with the OG “The Californian Ideology” essay from 1995

As Silicon Valley becomes more entangled and influential in different arenas (see: JD Vance, DOGE), it’s important to try to understand the (oft-competing) values and ideologies shaping it. This piece is a great examination of this adolescent industry and how it’s evolved since its baby post-Cold War years of “countercultural libertarianism and capitalist ambition.”

A great taxonomy of tech subcultures/ideologies:

We started with an observation: after the backlash in the mid-to-late 2010s, “tech” as a cohesive social bloc cracked apart into a rich assortment of subcultures. Now, we see movements like: progress, which focuses on the economic and technological drivers of social progress, and began with an editorial piece written by Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen; abundance, a cousin movement that tends to emphasize social well-being and distributive outcomes, driven by the likes of media figures Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein; the New Right, who prioritize family, local communities, and strong leadership, and whose views influenced Vice President Vance; American dynamism, which emphasizes reviving public infrastructure and institu­tions that strengthen American values, spurred by a growing community of aerospace, defense, and manufacturing companies in Los Angeles and Orange County; effective altruism, a carryover from the early 2010s, rooted in rationalist and utilitarian approaches to giving; tech ethicists, who fight algorithmic bias and misinformation; and the network state, incubated by entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, who advocates for building new, digital-first nation-states.

What inspired me to move to San Francisco and work in startups, even if I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time, was precisely this:

As the scholar Tanner Greer once put it, Silicon Valley is built upon the cultural pillars of both intellect and action: “This is a culture where insight, intelligence, and knowledge are treasured—but treasured as tools of action, not goods in and of themselves.”⁹ The proliferation of tech subcultures today can be explained, perhaps, as itself a reflection of these values: a relentless commitment to experimentation in hopes of bringing forth a better future, just as America’s founding fathers embraced federalism, which enabled states to serve as laboratories of democracy.

But intellect and action are not enough without a healthy dose of heart. And in a world where machines become more capable of thinking and doing, I believe this is where we humans will stand apart.

My hope is to help inject a little more heart into Silicon Valley — to remind us that we’re not just intelligent automatons imposing our agency on the world, but thinking, feeling, dreaming beings who contain, as my friend

Molly Mielke McCarthy

wrote, “all manner of superfluous, silly, and soft parts that make [us] so much more than a tool.”

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My recent pieces:

On what empowerment actually means:

A defense of meaningful work:

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