It seems neither uncommon nor unexpected that if you charge a group with eliminating an evil that’s really hard to eliminate, they usually end up mildly tweaking the evil into a form that benefits them, then devoting most of their energy to punishing people who complain.

(The whole — long — post is a masterpiece of Scott Alexanderness. Read it alongside Ligotti, and the cross-echoes are notable. Extreme liberals are horroristic maniacs who haven’t yet given up for good.)

I have a few quibbles — Vaisyas aren’t ‘activists’ (because business isn’t politics), and the Catholic slant of NRx is more complicated than this essay makes it out to be (because cladistics). These kind of qualifications aren’t decisive in themselves.

The decisive reservation has to do with the social function of code specialists. Perhaps this tweet makes the point best:

Prose is just code that doesn't compile. (Ignore if you're not a tech entrepreneur).

— Naval Ravikant (@naval) May 30, 2014

‘Silicon Valley’ changes the meaning of ‘Brahmin’ — if we’re still going to use that word. Most simply, the long-established distinction between literate and industrial elites loses its security in the epoch of programming, or digitization. NRx washes back from a social horizon at which the sign and its operationalization have become de-segmented, necessitating a seismic re-configuration of class identities.

The Brahmin priest caste, like the digital elite, specializes in signs, but they are signs of exhortation, rather than of intrinsic efficiency. Is not the Cathedral precisely a name for that apparatus of signs — (non-STEM) academia, media, bureaucracy, politics … — which cannot in principle ever compile? The Cathedral is a secular religion, which has to preach because it does not work.

When NRx insists upon a division within ‘progress’ between techno-economics (which works) and socio-politics (which decays), it opens a rift that splits the Brahmins, rather than further separating them from social inferiors. NRx, at its core, is a ‘Brahmin’ civil war.

The population of San Francisco is just over 800,000. This has made it fairly easy for a significant portion of the people there to be displaced by a relatively small number of small, wealthy companies moving there. This combined with an anti-development attitude and a Communist-leaning local government has made it difficult for the city to absorb the gold rush influx.

The general anger is understandable. The way in which it’s being expressed by protesters would not be tolerated in a civilized country, but the US is not a civilized country. The protest problem is just a symptom of more significant issues within the political structure.

Nerds are the new Jews (and a disproportionate number of them are still the old Jews). It hurts to be stupid, and it’s obviously their fault.