Silicon Valley – and its various satellites around the country, including whatever software design culture that exists in the Twin Cities – has trended left of center for a long, long time (although not forever; it used to be fairly libertarian – a change that’s been a net loss for everyone).<\/p>\n
That’s changed, of course; when James Damore was fired at Google for the high crime of pointing out the patently obvious<\/a> about Google’s internal political culture – think Arthur Miller’s\u00a0The Crucible<\/em> – it surprised absolutely nobody that’d been following the way the Bay Area’s software development culture has been evolving.<\/p>\n An engineer at Facebook has started a conservative group.\u00a0 \u00a0Which is big news.\u00a0 David French notes:<\/p>\n …the\u00a0internal conservative revolt at Facebook<\/a>\u00a0may \u2014 just may \u2014 represent one of the most consequential news developments of the year. A senior engineer named Brian Amerige posted a\u00a0short statement<\/a>\u00a0on Facebook\u2019s internal message board. It began with words that will ring true to employees at hundreds of major American corporations and academic institutions:<\/p>\n We are a political monoculture that\u2019s intolerant of different views.\u200b We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack \u2014 often in mobs \u2014 anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in \u200b*obe\u200b and \u200b*ist\u200b at each other, attacking each other\u2019s character rather than their ideas.<\/p>\n We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what\u2019s around them politically.\u200b HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I\u2019ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they \u2014 not their ideas \u2014 will be attacked. They know that all the talk of \u201copenness to different perspectives\u201d does not apply to causes of \u201csocial justice,\u201d immigration, \u201cdiversity,\u201d and \u201cequality.\u201d On this issues [sic<\/em>], you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Amerige invited colleagues to join a group called \u201cFB\u2019ers for Political Diversity\u201d and \u2014 as the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reports \u2014 more than 100 employees have joined. It\u2019s a small fraction of the Facebook workforce, but it\u2019s enough that it can\u2019t be easily squelched.<\/p>\n Indeed, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reports that angry colleagues have already tried to appeal to Facebook to shut down the group. So far, they\u2019ve failed<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is something I wrestle with daily – at work (I work at a place with a bit of a political monoculture, as luck would have it, and suffice to say I’m not in the majority) and elsewhere in my life (I’ve changed my church affiliation, and the world of dating is rife with people who just can not tolerate the idea of being around someone whose politics challenge their own).\u00a0 Like most conservatives, I want my politics to stay in my mind, my news, and at the polling station; I don’t\u00a0want\u00a0<\/em>it to eat my entire life.<\/p>\n Which is of course what Big Left wants, and needs; to divide and conquer an inchoate mass of individuals.<\/p>\n And so this is something to follow – and, let’s be honest, emulate in our daily lives.<\/p>\n Much more to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Silicon Valley – and its various satellites around the country, including whatever software design culture that exists in the Twin Cities – has trended left of center for a long, long time (although not forever; it used to be fairly libertarian – a change that’s been a net loss for everyone). That’s changed, of course; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[327,24,308,377],"tags":[397],"class_list":["post-67842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-activism","category-culture-war","category-entitled-america","category-the-second-civil-war","tag-the-real-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67842"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67877,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67842\/revisions\/67877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}