How Silicon Valley Became The Man
A great example of this on the ground in Mountain View where I live today is Google. Google treats its engineers extremely well, offers extremely flexible work spaces, has built essentially a culture of collaboration and creativity that looks very communal and very wonderful, even as around those engineers it has cafeteria workers who are making something very close to minimum wage, and often lack the ability to get proper health insurance. That’s the kind of old communal mindset right there, where you bring together a kind of elite, give them a shared mindset, all the resources they need to live in that mindset, and yet surround them with folks who are relatively impoverished, often racially different, certainly members of a different class. In that sense, the communes were already The Man. And we’ve inherited their legacy.
Long but good.
just read the front page but i think about that stuff a lot more since i lost my house. i'll never have another one. it's heartbreaking and i'm this close to bitter about it without warning.
when i'm a good dog
they sometimes throw me a bone in
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of course you knew that was pink floyd
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Good read. I found this interesting:
"Communes ended up being places that were deeply racially divided, even though none of them would ever cop to being explicitly racist or wouldn’t even want to be. Gender norms were incredibly conservative on communes. I don’t know how many photographs I’ve looked at of young women, pregnant, barefoot, carrying loaves of bread"
I have to agree with the idea that without bureaucracy then things tend to fall into a small group of charismatic people taking the lead and the rest following.
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