Silicon Valley
Two Antithetical Billionaires
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob. He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT. Bankman-Fried mocked society’s bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking …
The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness “Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” —Sam Bankman-Fried The FTX …
The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left Read More »
The Tentacles of the Social Media Octopus
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness A shared theme in all dystopian explorations of future and current totalitarian regimes—whether China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba—is government control of all media information, fueled by electronic surveillance. A skeptical public learns to say one thing publicly but quite another privately. It nervously nods yes at the news …
The Selfish Californian
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly. But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of …
Tearing Down the Silicon Valley Wall
Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time? …
The World Doesn’t Care About Groupthink
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests. “All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus The adage “nothing last forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.” Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley A decade …
The Valley of the Shadow
How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a …
Technology and Wisdom
Tech advancements make it too easy to forget age-old realities. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Americans now have more computer power in their smart phones than did the Pentagon in all its computer banks just 30 years ago. We board a sophisticated jet and assume that the flight is no more dangerous than …
Meet the Richerals
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The new millennium has also given us a new American profile — the hip richeral. Richerals are, of course, well off. But they are even more cool and liberal. The two facts are not so much incompatible, as complementary. For some, big money allows three things: wealth’s cocoon enables …