It has been a couple years since my startup exit has given my ego and bank account just enough boosts to make me believe I can be useful to the world. Slowly but surely I sense that there is a crossroads ahead and I’m not sure if I will survive it. That is because, like my naive and idealistic parents, I don’t have much patience for compromise when it comes to my best hopes and dreams for black people. Indeed this is the case for all people, but it is particularly poignant because I find most people can’t see black people as all people. That wouldn’t be so bad - everybody expects the residual friction of racial theories on American society. The problem is that in philanthropy, I believe most people consider black people to be a special case, including black people themselves. We’re all wrong, but we’re marching confidently.
LA STEAM
My vision is very simple. In light of the recent and continuing loss of reason and principle in higher education, I’m aiming to bring some level of competence and confidence in networking average American families into the realm of STEAM, science, technology, engineering, arts and math. I am doing this specifically for peasant families in Los Angeles County, people who even at this very late date, might not know the first thing about the existence of Sun Microsystems. I don’t care what race they are. I specifically care that young American students of modest means and limited connections can catch the fever that I share with the inventive and innovative spirits of my companions, peers and inspirational figures in the tech world. I want to deliver access with energy. I want kids and parents to be augmented by a network, culture and infrastructure of this fundamental aspect of Western civilization - of intellectual humility, reason, humor and discovery. I want it to be as familiar and accessible to them as football.
I believe this vision is necessary because a nation that cannot sustain an adequately self-sufficient population of people dedicated to mastering and maintaining its technical infrastructure will fail one of two ways. Either the top crushes down or the bottom falls out.
Top Crushes Down
In the first scenario, the road to ruin is characterized by a kind of romance with technology which is best analogized to that great novel All’s Quiet on the Western Front. I can see in our market exhortations about tech bros and billionaires that scads of naive young people envision marching to the beat of technical drums in a market that is controlled by a few tech giants. Consider the way Wall Street talks about The Magnificent Seven (the cabal formerly known as FAANG). Now compare them to the five dominant military contractors in that industrial complex. Sure, all the tech is there, but none of us peasants get to decide jack, and the mediocrity of so much of it is stunning. Imagine you’re like me and you’ve managed to learn and forget six or seven different programming and scripting languages all of which are obsolete.
The top crushes down in the same way any authoritarian system does. It captures the gorilla fraction of the market, fixes competition among its most powerful components and dictates the proprietary standards against which all ‘progress’ is measured. Then some corruption destroys a part of it, and suddenly we wake up with no Savings & Loan industry and every credit card charges 24% interest. The spirit of innovation is sacrificed, but it’s all we have. Dissent is seen as disloyalty. In go the youth into the weaponized TikTok meatgrinder of the future, working from dark rooms in night mode, complicit in the prison they are building for all of us.
The panoptic dystopia needs little further introduction or description. It is our Black Mirror future. Everybody is included but nobody is safe.
Bottom Falls Out
In the second scenario, all goes well for those who are connected and many are. But the connections are jealously held. Faith in the fairness of the system falls to a trickle until the absurdity of its seniority becomes a joke, like the appearance of a new Presidential candidate by someone named Bush. Or someone named Gates, now tells us what to do about not software, but diet, exercise and foreign policy. Suddenly the people realize that there is no way to get the benefits of all that because it’s a closed shop. We shrug our shoulders and decide that it’s all over our peasant heads.
Like the Millennials who don’t care about getting out of the house, driving cars and puzzling over the nature of internal combustion engines, the everyday American just gives up on cows and buys the almond milk. All they can do is reckon that the systems and powers that be don’t work for them and lie beyond comprehension. They drop out of everything in protest and in ignorance. They no longer get paid to think.
The bottom falls out. The Rulers and Elites grasp desperately to what they’ve spent their entire lives cultivating. The landscape is dotted with libraries but nobody reads. University music professors find themselves giving away cellos, kettle drums and french horns. They sit on the curb over the weekend for the Monday morning trash collection.
Plenty people are safe, but most people don’t know or care.
The Poor & Oppressed
The American grievance industry, which operates in parallel to that of philanthropy, charity and Marxist social justice is fine with either one of these failures. That’s because ‘awareness’ is half the game. The rest is social self-congratulation along with a healthy dollop of helplessness. If you’re rich but not that rich, you can shrug your shoulders and reminisce about the good old days.
If the poor and oppressed knew how to work the system, they wouldn’t be poor or oppressed.
The trick, therefore, is to make sure the system works and that it’s easy to learn. In which case, philanthropy and public education can tractably overcome the cynicisms of grievance and Marxism.
That doesn’t change the lazy presumption that America is chock full of so-called ‘minorities’ whose fate is defaulted to be one of oppression and impoverishment. This brings us back to the contradiction that vexes me in this moment.
Imagine four buckets of moolah awaiting a clever and dedicated individual such as myself who might dip into that deep grant pool and make the kind of progress necessary for not just the poor and oppressed, who have their own set of hungers and motivations, but also the bedazzled who have just gotten stupid advice and didn’t know any better. If you’re like me, you’re looking to stop the empty libraries and the Black Mirror. You might call that enlightened self-interest. The problem is the label on the buckets.
More specifically, as I said before, I don’t believe that so-called black people are a special case of people. But I’m not the one filling the buckets in the first place. But if one of those buckets is called ‘Reparations for the Negro Race’, am I going to dip into it? I’m not sure the ends justify those means. Quite frankly I’ve got to believe that the lot of people I’m trying to reach have enough self-respect not to take the money. On the other hand, the bucket called STEAM is kind of small. It’s not as big as the bucket called Entertainment. It feels like I can have reach without integrity or integrity without reach.
My dilemma is that I simply don’t know rich philanthropists who think the way I do. So my burden is to advance my agenda now with the money I can find now, or just have a ton of theoretically good ideas for my constituents with no money. That’s why they call it work.
The smart money can always survive the Bottom Falling Out, because nepotism and chauvinism works. Besides, there’s always some mediocrity to be expected. There’s always slack in the mechanisms of success. It may as well be cousin Chad.
The peasants can always survive the Top Crushing Down, even if it means they have to scatter and behave like night crawly critters. There’s always that fallback position of having no hope and taking it out on your lowly neighbors. It may as well be cousin Pookie.
But I’m going to hold out. The reason is more simple and clear. I have a new job, and I’m meeting people with some money who think the way I do - a few more than when I started writing this piece. It turns out that at least two have had their eye on me for some time now. I guess I have to invent a new term for that kind of money. I have some reason to believe that term will be ‘mine’.
Things are looking up.
A future where Americans give up on cows and drink the almond milk is a frightening one, & I hope it doesn’t come to pass.
I am going to cheat and comment on your
“The Black Privilege Vibe” piece from The Human Race Man’s Home Companion here, because my paid subscription allows me to comment here.
Re: Shelton, WA - did you consider “What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?”.
While the people of Rock Ridge were decidedly hostile to Sheriff Bart, the Waco Kid was welcoming, though puzzled.
Slightly related - I was in Vegas for the Super Bowl the year Rodman had gotten suspended for kicking the cameraman, & staying at the same hotel he was (The Mirage). It was Saturday afternoon, and while walking through the casino, I noticed a huge crowd (hundreds!) of people staring at Rodman as he shot craps at a high limit table.
I know that’s mostly fame (‘96-‘97 Bulls) and height (6’8”), but black was part of it.
Me being from Chicago was certainly part of my thoughts. I wish I had loudly said “Have you never seen a 6 foot 8 black man shooting craps before? Could you please brush the hay out of head & not act like a bunch of farmers in the big city for the first time?”.
Sadly, I just thought it and shared it with my friends.
Once again, I admire what seems (because it is very much in accord with my own thoughts) a clear appraisal Where We're At without giving in to easy cynicism.
Is there some way to draw from the DOE bucket?