Word of the Day: Soi-Disant
Silicon Valley appears to shift 'right', but they were 'right' all along.
adjective
usually disparaging
: self-proclaimed, so-called
threw the soi-disant epic novel aside in disgust
So how does this explain recent tensions between progressives and Silicon Valley? My hypothesis is that we are living in the immediate aftermaths of two intertwined crises. One was a crisis in the U.S. political order - the death of the decades-long neoliberalism that Friedman and others helped usher in. The other was an intellectual crisis in Silicon Valley - the death of what Kevin Munger calls “the Palo Alto Consensus.” As long as neoliberalism shaped the U.S. Democratic party’s understanding of the world, and the Palo Alto Consensus shaped Silicon Valley’s worldview, soi-disant progressivism and Silicon Valley could get on well. When both cratered at more or less the same time, different ideas came into play, and different coalitions began to emerge among both Washington DC Democrats and Silicon Valley. These coalitions don’t have nearly as much in common as the previous coalitions did.
| Henry Farrell, Why did Silicon Valley turn right?
