In a quest to take over SF's government, techbro CEO reinvents fascism

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues”

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon’s building?”

“Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.”

Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they’re ... unwelcome,” he said. “Just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, like, push out all Blues.” The idea, he added, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

[Badger]

What an astonishing pos. The fact people take this unrepentant dystopian Vision of a Madman as something ideal is scary as frick.

But San Francisco has been lax on shoplifters and modifying their zoning code, so I guess it's all okay.  

[Storr]

This guy sounds like a crackpot cult leader, but I guess having a lot of money gives you legitimacy.

[Joe Republic]

[GM Team Member and Deputy PPT WB]

this sounds like one of those guys who'd be a schitzo path for a country in HOI4's Red Flood or Kaiserredux.

[Tintrlvr]

Blues, Grays and Reds has been libertarian-adjacent-techie code speech for a while, I think originating on Slate Star Codex (but maybe it's older and SSC popularized it).

This guy just sounds like an idiot.

[Beet]

In the future, everyone is going to have a chip in their brains that makes your life more convenient and reduces crime but which also gives tech bros complete knowledge, understanding, and control of all your senses, thoughts, and emotions, and AI will know you better than you know yourself. This is inevitable.

[omar04]

Srinivasan has advocated for the network state for a while now; see the book by that name that he published in 2022. I've listened to a couple of podcast interviews of him done in the past (Sam Harris and part of Lex Fridman's 8 hour episode) and most of the time Srinivasan is lecturing on his far out positions rather than justifying them and having a real discussion with the host.

[DaleCooper]

All these techies are criminals and fraudsters. This guy will be arrested for something eventually if he doesn't OD first.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

I don't think the comparison with Emperor Norton is quite apt. Mr. Srinivasan (or rather, his paid agents) would have locked him up, and demanded that the public agree it was the right thing to do.

[John Dule]

Literal Robocop dystopia.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Honestly I think a lot of these tech bro deep blue western towns could easily slid into eco fascism

[It’s so Joever]

I am all for some mild local technocratic authoritarianism, but the main problem with this vision is it seems to ignore the role non tech workers play in governance. I get the idea and think it’s not a bad start, but the main problem I have is this seems more like a Silicon Valley fever dream and less like a true Singapore style governance system which would ultimately be positive for San Francisco and  various other cities.

[DrScholl]

I'm shocked more people aren't praising this guy as "shaking things up" and "telling like it is" on here. Nonsensical babbling seems to sell well with a lot of right-leaning people.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't think the comparison with Emperor Norton is quite apt. Mr. Srinivasan (or rather, his paid agents) would have locked him up, and demanded that the public agree it was the right thing to do.

It's also just plain insulting to the legacy of a great American.

[Badger]

The difference is Emperor Norton was both nearly broke - his uniform was paid for by an appropriation from the San Francisco city council - and effectively harmless. This other guy could be poisonous for the body politic and needs to be condemned as such.

[Jerry]

I visited San Francisco last year and while I do not condone this kind of rhetoric espoused by this CEO, I can comprehend what he was trying to get at. The city was quite messy. A lot of homeless, a lot of drugs, and a lot of hills. Is this the best San Francisco can do? The trolley was also a very underwhelming experience.

This isn't an endorsement of fascism. But maybe we should not be too quick to deride people who are offering interesting solutions?

[wnwnwn]

In a partisian election, so would be so dommed.

#WWC.over.TeachBros
#Fetterman2028
#UnionSolidarityForever!
#FarmRights

[John Dule]

I visited San Francisco last year and while I do not condone this kind of rhetoric espoused by this CEO, I can comprehend what he was trying to get at. The city was quite messy. A lot of homeless, a lot of drugs, and a lot of hills. Is this the best San Francisco can do? The trolley was also a very underwhelming experience.

This isn't an endorsement of fascism. But maybe we should not be too quick to deride people who are offering interesting final solutions?

FTFY

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

T*chbro is a slur.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Push out the Blues and replace them with Grays? What kind of neo-Confederate bulls—t is this?! And in San Francisco, no less!

[All Along The Watchtower]

In all seriousness this reads like a satire of the likes of Thiel and Andreessen. Good Lord.

[Vosem]

I am a member (have attended meetups and such) of an organization whose ideology is that people with common values, particularly ideological or religious values, should use DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) to coordinate moving to particular cities, then lobby those cities to officially use a currency issued by that DAO, and then control those cities through monetary policy.* People involved in the movement have a wide array of ideologies they want to see promoted (including some far-left ones; transgender people are very overrepresented), but it is most commonly some flavor of far-right. (Let a thousand Zionisms bloom!)

I think advocating for crypto kind of obviously means having a very materialist view (you probably think making lots of money is good, to care deeply about what the money should be), but less obviously it has a streak which is anti-majoritarian ('we can create our own society which will influence everyone, regardless of how people vote') and a streak which is strongly utopian, and in the 21st century utopian worldviews are much more common on the far-right than the far-left.

A global meetup of organizations at least sort of in alignment with this vision was held in Amsterdam last year; there is a lot of diversity on specifics because the whole point is that this is meant to promote all ideologies, but you get some common themes.

*Not everyone would endorse every detail of that, and you could simplify it to 'people should organize themselves to create new strongly ideological societies', but most of the suggestions for those societies would involve cryptocurrency or blockchain in some way as part of the governing mechanism.

Srinivasan is probably the most prominent person actually pushing a vision like this, although I don't think the stuff actually happening in 'network state'-inspired organizations is very much like the stuff being discussed in this thread at the moment (there's much more of an emphasis on secession and trying to create new things, rather than try to recreate San Francisco from the ground up, though that absolutely does logically follow from the general premises). I think he's also become quite a bit more deranged since COVID happened -- my understanding as of late 2022 was that he had abandoned the United States for Singapore, though perhaps he's back.

But I do think it's a valid observation that an eventual effect of modern communications technology combined with a growing economy will be to enable rapid cases of ethnogenesis followed by population movements; Srinivasan wants a 'tech Zionism' but what his work proposes (and I think judging by the variety of projects at network state events he's aware of this) is an 'everything Zionism', where over time all ideological projects shift from trying to change the communities they exist in towards trying to set up new communities (and, yes, sometimes in ways that overtake existing communities in pretty radical ways).

[Electric Circus]

Imagine a large language model trained on mid-naughts Slate Star Codex stamping on a human face, forever.

[TechbroMBA]

Gray Power!