Post money Silicon Valley Lotharios
There are many amusing stereotypical personalities in Silly Con valley. Steve Sailer coined the phrase “Silicon Valley Adventuress” for the very obvious type of women who try various kinds of shakedowns on tech firms and their executives. There’s the more obvious “Divorce Tick” kind of woman; someone who marries a clueless but rich nerdoid and relieves him of his extra wealth. These are often hilarious to watch at work, even when it’s pointed at you: the divorce ticks often talk these nerds into open relationships. Dude always thinks it means hot threesomes with her friends; generally the way that works out she gets sex whenever she wants from the pool boy or whatever, and he gets bupkiss because he’s a ridiculous nerd with a hot wife who cheats on him. Divorce happens with mathematical certainty when she’s maximized her profits. The free market and regulatory capture can be an awesome thing to watch at work. It’s a shame nobody has written a novel on the sorts of people who populate the place: it’s filled with all manner of amusing characters. I’ve written about the blonde grifter and insecure Indian guy with a sports car before: you’ll literally meet dozens of those if you spend any time there. There needs to be a Flaubert of Silicon Valley Divorce Ticks and Adventuresses and grouchy Harpeet with Becky in the Porsche. The TV show by Mike Judge captures the vibe and some of the superficial personalities, but it’s only skin deep: the actual place, like anything made of actual people is much more weird.
One of the varieties of Silicon Valley character is the post-money Lothario. While people have written about the Adventuresses and to a lesser extent, Divorce Ticks, nobody to my knowledge has written about the post-money Lothario. He should be considered as delicately amusing, as he’s generally even more of a boob than the garden variety sociopaths and their victims mentioned above.
Nerds are as sexually ambitious as anyone else. Nerds suck at being charismatic though; otherwise they’d get jobs talking people out of their money instead of actually trying to create value by doing tedious engineering work. At some point, usually around middle age, the successful ones end up making enough money to be competitive with chads. Some of them get married and live happily ever after. Some of them get married and some divorce tick removes half of their money, and they live less happily ever after. Others decide to become womanizers in their middle age. This isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s as old as time. It’s at least as old as the 1500s where Cranach the elder was making hilarious paintings of the phenomenon.
Note her hand is in his pocket
Beyond the fact that this sort of thing is ridiculous, I don’t have anything against it. Young women have to make their way in the world, and old nerds need love too (feel free to send digits, ladies).
What boggles my mind is one of two situations. One is the situation in which the man makes the woman his protege. This is ridiculous because sucking an old guy’s crusty dick is not actually good training for entrepreneurial work, no matter how smart and helpful the old dude is. Sure you can get him to invest in your startup: you still have to make it work by yourself, and if you’re the type of person to suck a dick for a venture investment, you’re probably no good at actually executing a profitable business. Women who do this are highly unlikely to actually act the role of the protege or Ganymede or whatever. Your average women being what they are, probably thinks her benefactor is ridiculous and a fool. He actually is, though he’s probably giving her decent advice, and she should probably listen. Men involved in this sort of relationship may be hard headed captains of industry, but when the blood flows to their nether regions, they go soft about the cerebral cortex and don’t realize the girl is probably just an ambitious sperm spittoon.
This is an annoying phenomenon for actually productive people as many startups, mid-trajectory ventures and most of all, old companies often have to deal with the fallout. It really, really sucks when you end up with some kind of lame prostitute as your boss in your management chain. I’ve never experienced this, as it’s rare I work for anybody who isn’t me, but you can see it when it happens. Anyone who has worked in such a firm has encountered this whether they realize it or not. It even happened at the national labs. Some of these “couples” go beyond this and the women attempt to start their own companies. Most famous example of this is, of course, Eric Schmidt. I feel bad picking on him as he’s a friend of several of my friends, but it’s not like nobody knows about it. That’s what you get for making too much money; plenty of other retards have behaved in this way but aren’t as rich and famous and subject to scrutiny, he will have to suffice for visual aid. Such investments are inevitably disastrous of course. Maybe it doesn’t matter if they can afford it, but I think it ends up bothering them, because these fools for love think they were doing a good deed, rather than overpaying a prostitute.
The other annoying one is the full on playboy nerd. Schmidt kind of did this too, or at least was fairly active in his romantic adventures in the past. To be clear I’m not picking on him, Larry Ellison was even more notorious for it (generally speaking, Larry is the only interesting silicon valley member of club billionaire: no h8 -also thanks in advance for fixing Star Trek muh nig nog), though since Larry is adept at buying media organizations, people don’t talk about it as much in the funny papers. Anyway both these guys have cut a wide and not entirely disreputable swathe through local adventuress vaginas. That’s just nature, naturing, life in balance. It’s the dudes who go all grody on it. I had a series of booty calls while I was still in grad school to these very fancy loft apartments. Apparently the girls I was smashing had the keys to these places from Silicon Valley Lotharios, and were part of their harems. As a poor grad student I was all in favor of free hookers who thought I was more interesting than the guy with the fancy house, and appreciated their hospitality, high thread count sheets and fine taste in alcoholic beverages. The stories I heard was that these dudes were off porking prostitutes, so it was OK to drink his booze and pork his allegedly not-prostitute (according to them) women in his house. Later on, I (more or less) aged out of being That Guy, and ended up knowing similar characters whose lives and fortunes were dedicated to playing space invaders with different kinds of women, pretty much as avocation, hobby and meaning of life. You ever meet a 50 year old who is really into coke or weed or mushrooms or whatever? Kind of pathetic, right? Same difference; hoes are also a vice.
Carravagio noted this happens to younger men as well
I guess I was lucky in some ways, in that I always did reasonably well with ladies. Even went through a chad phase where I was avidly pursued, due to absurdly modest local fame, requiring little effort on my part. Despite my advanced state of disintegration into my constituent elementary particles, I still occasionally get the hairy eyeball from comely and fertile ones. As such, these sorts of degenerate “bro I had a threesome with a blue haired asian and a redhead” antics aren’t impressive to me at all, or my idea of the good life. It’s just lame shit I did before I could afford more interesting hobbies, like telescopes or having machine tools in my spare bedroom. Doing such things at my age, which a lot of these guys continue to do, seems downright tedious. It’s just not a good use of my time, and I’m not as wealthy or accomplished as a lot of these assholes, so from a time value of money point of view I don’t know WTF they are thinking. I don’t know how they can do it, in the same sense I don’t know how a heroin junkie can stick the spike in their arm as their meaning for life.
Look we all love the poosy, it’s great. Women fucking you because you’re a rich asshole is not the same thing as young love, or being popular because you’re an actual charismatic chad rather than some chode who gets in the newspaper for being awfully rich. Being a balding, flabby dot com deci-to-centi millionaire who spends most of his time arranging threesomes with Stanford educated sl00ts you met on a website for “arrangements” is just lame shit. Join the liftwaffe, lift weights, become freeking hyooge, learn ancient greek, become a great martial artist, start right wing death squads: you’ll probably have a better romantic life than buying stanford educated prostitutes, or spending half your time managing your polycule. End sermon; I know you faggots won’t change, and I won’t stop making fun of you.
If you want to live some kind of baller lifestyle that nobody will fault you for, look to mafiosos or wealthy Russians for your model of the good life. Having a “goomah” who was a gymnast or ballerina or something is based. Porking a bunch of money grubbing sluts who are too lazy to be a good wife or goomah to a rich guy or whatever is just lame.
Related: marriage advice from the likes of me (never married, therefore winning at life) on Man’s World.
Don’t go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales
Contra Professor Katz, I have known more people ruined by drugs. Mostly because I didn’t spend my life as a physics professor as he did. But I can see why he said it, because you’d see a lot of ruined lives in gradual school. It is an essay that should occur to people in light of the incidents at Brown and MIT. I reproduce Professor Katz famous essay in full below, since it seems to have been censored by his employers and otherwise fallen off the internet outside of archive links.
Higher education in general is now a glorified IQ test. Grad school is a harder IQ test. Unfortunately now that we send virtually everyone to college, the average IQ of a college graduate is, as one might predict, average. So, to distinguish oneself, something like going to grad school in physics is signalling about two standard deviations above average. I assume this number is going down as well. I don’t think schooling is an inherent good. For most people it’s just marking time and social signalling. Sure, some people make the most of school and are enriched by it (I certainly was), but the romantic view is the rare exception, not the rule. Most people who go to school simply want a desk job.
I only know about physics grad school, so my comments should be taken in that light. It is a very intense process for most people. There are a number of checkpoints where it can all come to naught, including at the very end of the procedure. Prelim exams, qualifier exams, pre-defense presentations, dissertation defenses. I knew guys who spent 10 years on a Ph.D. in physics and didn’t actually get a Ph.D. in the end because their research didn’t pan out, or their committees thought they were dicks. Most grad students aren’t even paid a living wage for these years, so you actually go into debt for the privilege of gaining what amounts to a certificate in return for a half decade or more of quasi-slavery. You can’t even put the title on your drivers license afterwords. For myself, I crushed it in the early years, but I got sidelined by “peace dividend” funding issues in the mid-90s, personal life issues, financial issues (I took time off to do some tech consulting so I didn’t become homeless), political issues, and towards the end of the process I even developed health issues: carpal tunnel syndrome and an insane condition called idiopathic stabbing headaches (which was a combination of unhealthy lifestyle and …. sulphites, and was as debilitating as it sounded). No fully sane person puts themselves through this kind of thing. I realized I was stuck in the sunk cost fallacy maybe halfway through, but figured I should finish what I started, and managed to squeak by. I was one of the lucky ones who actually had the opportunity to stay in the field, but looking at the careers of people who looked like me, it had basically zero appeal.
Anyway, some people who go to grad school go down a dark path. Imagine being a talented physics student, talented enough to end up in grad school at Brown, and ending up selling fruit (or whatever) in Florida on a visa lottery. Of course conspiriod nitwits are all over this; disappointed it wasn’t an antifa attack on college republicans, we have people saying it was all about the Professor’s research into limitless free energy (his research was nothing of the sort). One that it was Operation Gladio mind control operation, based on absolutely nothing. Also covering up magnetic pole reversals. To say nothing of flying saucers. Nah, pretty sure it was just some guy who cracked after his life was ruined by physics grad school, just like Professor Katz said. If you want to ask hard questions, ask questions like why it was someone talented enough to go to Ivy League physics grad school came to see mass murder as a rational decision. He wasn’t the only example; and there are no wiki pages for grad students who self-delete. Also why, despite all the allegedly socially useful higher education going on these days, so many people believe stupid shit like the men in black deleted a physicist and staged a mass shooting because muh flying saucers.
Lots of people have pointed out the sheer pointlessness of academic careers in current year. Few have pointed out how nasty it can be. It wasn’t particularly nasty to me, but people making this decision should go into the process with eyes open. Or, like, do something else which is actually socially useful, like start a business.
Professor Katz’s essay:
Don’t Become a Scientist!
Jonathan I. Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.
[my last name]@wuphys.wustl.edu
Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!
Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.
Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.
American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in “holding pattern” postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don’t pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists’ Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn’t get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that’s not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.
Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.
Of course, you don’t go into science to get rich. So you choose not to go to medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns two to three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a good senior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won’t get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else’s ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? The longer you spend in science the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be to prospective employers in other fields.
Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; some university (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences) will be so impressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two years out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labor means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a very long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appear to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find that the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and that they must struggle with the rest.
Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They’re not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.
What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven’t yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.
If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when they themselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. They could reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand, but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310368
Against the nerds
One of the delusions of modern times is that we need a nerd clerisy to help us run things. We’re presently at the end of the post-WW-2 order (or the post-broadcasting order), sort of nervously contemplating what happens next. There has been an active clerisy of nerdoids in place since the 1930s before the war: FDR implemented this idea of a nerdoid clerisy in its current form. Herbert Hoover offered a different nerdoid clerisy -he was an excellent engineer and administrator and was more effective than what replaced him. FDRs nerds were arguably a failure from the start: FDR’s clerisy put the “Great” in “Great Depression.”
You know who didn’t have a Great Depression? Knuckle dragging anti-intellectual fascisti, that’s who: people who were sans clerisy. Literal beer hall philosophers. The US clerisy did take credit for winning WW-2. Whether or not they did anything useful is questionable: the Russians did most of the actual fighting. The US had the foresight to build nukes and ramp up military production to help the Russians kill our enemies (and themselves -an important unspoken goal of WW2) for us. Some of this plan was executed by various kinds of bureaucrat-nerd, but few to none of the important decisions were made by such people, who probably supported the communists on principle. Nukes would have been built without Oppenheimer, but probably wouldn’t have without the mostly unsung Leslie Groves who did all of the important leadership work, including hiring Oppenheimer.
I bet Groves gave Oppie noogies when out of range of the cameras: the weak should fear the strong
Groves was 0% nerd race; he was an Army engineer, a type of cultured thug who has existed since the late Stone Age. He had zero tolerance for nerdoid bullshit, and you can see how hard he mogs Oppie in the photo above. Groves is the type of man leaders have relied on for all of human history, and quite a few centuries before. Groves, to put it in American terms, was more of a Captain of the Football team than he was a nerd. The same can be said of other technical work done in Radar. Nerds had little to do with American victory in a “calling the shots” sense. They helped: but only because they were told what to do and kept under strict control by the Captain of the Football team. Subsequently, nerds and their bureaucracies flourished in the US, essentially cargo-culting what happened in WW-2, leaving out the all-important urgency and accountability to the Captain of the Football team who mercilessly bullycided them into producing results on a timeline, as is correct and proper.
After American victory, nerds proliferated like cockroaches, and to this proliferation was attributed a lot of the postwar American financial and industrial dominance. American financial and industrial dominance was more readily attributed to the fact that it held the world’s gold and the only functioning factories that hadn’t been bombed to cinders. The proliferation of nerds and nerd institutions was a result of prosperity; not a driver of it. You can make new nerds more easily than we do now should we happen to need more; the sciences did better when a Ph.D. was unnecessary or a brief apprenticeship. This compared to the present system where science nerds aren’t even paper productive almost until their 30s, and are often still kissing ass and publishing bullshit papers to get tenure in their 40s.
A historical example of astounding governmental success: the East India company (the US was modeled after it; the flag anyway). None of the men in it were nerds. All of them were Leslie Grove types. British gentlemen, while often superbly educated in the classics and in technical fields, were not nerds. The British elite were known by continentals to be anti-intellectual. Then you go look at the situation where nerds run everything: Wiemar Germany, current year, any random 1000 years of shitty Chinese history, peak Gosplan Soviet times. Nerd leadership isn’t good. Nerds belong in the laboratory. If they’re not in the laboratory they should be bullycided. Even when in the lab they need to be held accountable for producing good results; nerds will always tell you some bullshit story about their fuckups. That includes bureaucrat nerds pushing bits and paper. Do something useful with matter or GTFO. Nerds like Robert McNamera come up with failson do-everything products like the F-111, the golden dodo-bird of its time. Not-nerds who put their ass on the line like John Boyd come up with the F-16; after almost 40 years, still the backbone of Western air forces.
The same is true in tech leadership. Most of the leaders of nerds who matter are not really nerds, even if they fake it for the troops. Zuck does Brazool Jiu Jitsu and kills goats: he ain’t doing leetcode pull requests. Elon was a street fighter before he developed his interest in payment systems and rockets, and his personal life is more like Andrew Tates than that of a nerd. The nerds who founded google and kept it an engineering company in its early days hired a womanizing chad to make it a useful company, and speaking of Larry types, Larry Ellison is both a womanizing saleschad and lunatic jet pilot rather than a nerd. Look at the most prominent actual nerd entrepreneur in recent history: Sam Bankman Fiend. Archetypical nerd; he even worked at uber-nerdy Jane Street and had filthy sex orgies with other ugly nerdoids. Nerds need to be bullycided. It’s good for them, good for the organizations they work for.
Being intelligent isn’t the same as being a nerd. Though nerdism is touted as being a sort of definition of intelligence: it isn’t. Being a nerd is being a disembodied brain; a king of abstraction. Being a nerd is a lifestyle open to obvious stupidians. Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos; they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd. If something is declared “stupid” the nerd won’t give it a second thought. If other nerds like a thing, or are declared “expert,” even the 200 IQ nerd will go along with it, because being a nerd is his identity. This is why the football star is superior to the nerd: his life isn’t made of abstractions -it’s made of winning, which is something that happens when you’re right, not when you do the proper nerd-correct thing to sit at the nerd table in high school. Right now there are probably a hundreds thousand nerds trying to predict the stock market with ChatGPT (aka autocomplete). That’s what a nerd does: acts on propaganda as if it is real information. Chad either exploits a bunch of ChatGPT specialists and flips it as a business to a greater fool, or invents a new branch of mathematics to beat the market the way Ed Thorp did.
Objectivity is another thing the nerd lacks. Nerds are masters of dogma. They’re good at putting dogma into their brains: that’s in one sense what “book learning” is -you have a sort of resonator in your noggin that easily latches into patterns. People who are good at tests are good at absorbing propaganda. They’re bad at noticing the thing they absorbed is propaganda; that takes another personality type. One that nerds associate with “stupid people” who bullied them in high school. You know, the ones who should be their bosses.
Nerds become in love with their ideas, even when they’re wrong. Architecture astronauts, mRNA enthusiasts, marxists and other schools of economics, diet loons, snake-oil pharmaceutical salesmen, “experts” in most fields -these are ideologies that people can’t course correct without losing face. Since being “smart” is all a nerd has, they stick with shitty ideas even unto their actual deaths. Actually intelligent people play with ideas, consider where they might be useful and where they might break down. Ideas are like wrenches; they’re not useful in every situation, and you have to pick the right one for the job. You have to put down the wrong wrench and pick a screwdriver sometimes. That’s why you need a General Groves to manage the nerds: your legions of shrieking nerd wrench-enthusiasts can be helpful in putting together a car, they need to be bullycided into not using a wrench to install rivets or screws. The other useful management technique is to pair them with machinists who will make fun of them for trying to use a wrench for everything: the China Lake approach.
It’s OK to be a nerd; nerds can serve a purpose. We can even admire the nerd if he’s actually capable of rational thought. It’s not OK to give nerds leadership positions. You need people who played sports or who killed people for a living, or otherwise interacted with matter and the real world. The cleric doesn’t order the warrior in a functioning society; it’s the other way around.
Examples of nerd failure:
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia
https://collabfund.com/blog/the-dumber-side-of-smart-people/
Calling a bureaucrat by its name
I find it delicately amusing how many “white collar” people are incapable of admitting that they are bureaucrats. Call it being a clerk, a functionary or a bureaucrat; if you have a job which says “management” and involves people reporting to you, and you reporting what they tell you to other people, you are a bureaucratic brick in a pyramid. Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats. Such people are not engineers in any normal definition of the word; they’re dealing with plumbing and protocol and social problems which come about from large groups of people. The fact that such people have to do their work with a programming language simply indicates that they are a low level bureaucrat. This is analogous to working as a policeman; a policeman is a sort of low level bureaucrat within the legal system who might get his hands dirty. Low level bureaucrats have to deal with real problems, but just as a policeman is not a peace engineer or social scientist, but more of a low level bureaucrat craftsman of applied psychology, the low level bureaucrat software developer is a low level bureaucrat craftsman dealing with programming uncertainty.
Google used to run well with a few hundred people: now it’s almost 200,000 people. Even as recently as 2018 it was only 100,000 people. For size comparison; consider the US Department of Energy: they run the national labs, control nuclear weapons work, direct research into alternative energy technologies and do all manner of things with only 90,000 people. DoE is explicitly a bureaucracy which employs scientists. Do you think the extra 100,000 people Google hired over the last 5 years are actual engineers, or any kind of innovator? I’m willing to bet they’re all bureaucrats, and any of them would say “I work at a tech company doing tech things” and be indignant at being described as what they are: bureaucrats. Many such cases: bureaucratic mushrooms have been springing up all over the tech world.
Entrepreneurial ventures can involve real engineering, though they mostly don’t. Embedded systems: sometimes real engineering, these days though, it’s mostly protocol bureaucracy. I prefer my car’s wiring harness to be designed by bureaucrats with the potential to lose their jobs rather than creative or innovative engineers. If I was in the jet fighter business I might feel differently, though Lockheed doesn’t. The actual entrepreneurs at the tech company startup: they’re probably sales or marketing people. Bureaucrat plumbers don’t count unless they’re building something innovative or unique, which almost none of them are.
The Bureaucrats of Medicine by Jose Perez
As a social class, bureaucrats seem to want to think of themselves as innovators, creative people. The mandarin is always over-impressed with his own intelligence, even if his role doesn’t involve using it. The apotheosis of Steve Jobs is particularly ironic: the man was 100% bureaucrat master race. I can picture that vile hippy scumblebum yelling at court eunuchs and cutting the hands off of money-changers as an administrator in the Syrian part of the Byzantine empire. Jobs was an arch bureaucrat; he innovated absolutely nothing, but he was excellent at running a bureaucracy and making it do useful things through terror and bullying. He was also a good salesman. Woz was the main innovator and probably has two standard deviations more intellectual horsepower than Jobs did. Nobody gives a fuck about him because he was ugly and had the charisma of overcooked yams -plus nobody understands what he did, and there aren’t a large social class of innovators to appreciate him the way there is a large social class of bureaucrats who lionize Jobs. Jobs sold the innovator look to the bugman bureaucrat just like Joe Rogan selling questionable nootropics to Rust developers.
Bureaucrats are socially necessary, and have existed in all of human history since the time of writing; probably such a role existed in prehistoric times from the looks of places like Gobekli Tepe. Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description. Efficient bureaucracies are a wonder to behold and make life better for people who avail themselves of them. Life got better when Lee Kuan Yew built an efficient bureaucracy for Singapore. He held them responsible to their constituents by making them meet with their customers (normal people) on a weekly basis. Companies with efficient bureaucracies provide socially useful services and products that can make life better for everyone. Most companies and countries don’t have efficient bureaucracies though: they’re more collections of sniveling eunuchs, which is why people recoil at being identified as bureaucrats. People typically get promoted by building a bureaucratic pyramid: not by making things work better. Hence the Klein type-3 and 4 organizations.
Dali “The Average Bureaucrat”
Bureaucrats themselves know there is something wrong, even when they don’t realize they are bureaucrats (most of them don’t). There is a lot of chuff out there about meaningless “bullshit” jobs. People know when they’re in one. They know that every day at work is much like the next, no decisions, no agency, no work product beyond virtual and physical paper. They haven’t named the problem though, which is having unaccountable no-agency bureaucratic jobs.
The “expert” class are almost entirely bureaucrats of the most vile and loathsome kind. These are people constrained by their bureaucracies and their own personal cowardice to say only what the bureaucratic borg wants them to say. They have no real agency: even if they were capable of understanding the falsity of something the collective bureaucracy told them, they would be incapable of saying it. Expert bureaucrats are not independent life forms with intellectual agency: they’re like a part of one of those colonial organisms: a sort of human version of the Portuguese Man-o-war jellyfish. Similar to the way corals share a digestive tract, bureaucrat experts share the same feeding tube, and shouldn’t be thought of apart from the inhuman monstrosity they emanate from.
Bureaucrats are so common in Western Civilization they’ve achieved a sort of class consciousness. It’s recognized that HR bureaucrats are a sort of Komissar of an ideology. People mistake this ideology for leftist political views: in reality it is the class politics of the bureaucrat. Actual leftism has different concerns and goals. That’s why so many contemporary “leftists” have weird views which don’t help less fortunate people: it isn’t meant to help poors. It’s meant to serve the interests of upper middle class bureaucrats. Once you see this pattern you can’t unsee it. Bureaucracies create some huge problem, then grow with the excuse they need more people to deal with the problem. Problem never gets solved, but the pyramid grows. People identify various outcroppings of the bureaucrat plague: WEF, various other NGOs, the metastasis of college ‘administrators,’ green ninnies who want us all to eat insects, big pharma, big junk food, the government bureaucracies not obeying lawful commands. I’d posit you can remove any of these problems and nothing will change until you break the class consciousness of the bureaucrat.
There are widespread popular revolts against the evil bureaucratic pyramids: Milei, yellow vests, the recent Dutch elections, the Trucker revolt in Canada, the Bukele revolution in El Salvador; even Elon buying X and firing 75% of the head count. This will continue to spread as long as the bureaucrat remains unaccountable. Bureaucratic reform is the defining problem of our time. Bureaucrats and their NPC enablers have ruined much of what made Western Civilization worthwhile. They’ve corrupted the scientific process, technological development, subverted governments, ruined health, created conditions of anarcho-tyranny in the cities and have generally wrecked most of what they’ve touched. Their proliferation is slowly strangling everything, just as a proliferation of intestinal parasites will weaken and ultimately kill if unchecked. Parasites have no natural predators. You need some kind of medicine to get rid of them. We can study the work of successful bureaucratic reformers; Lee Kuan Yew, St. Peter Damian, Napoleon, Park Chung Hee, Deng Xiaoping, Putin, Marius, St. Ignatius of Loyola: also the unsuccessful would-be reformers such as Nixon. The most important first step, though, is recognizing the bureaucrat.
Naming the bureaucrat is powerful. You might call a bureaucrat a scoundrel, a useless cog in the machine, a coward, a gold brick, a sower of chaos and a parasite and it will be water on a duck’s back. Call him a bureaucrat though, and he’ll recoil in terror. Making them aware of what they are has its own salubrious effects, but identifying the problem is the first step towards curing the issues that plague us.
1900s cartoon from Puck depicting the battle against bureaucracy
I’ve never been a bureaucrat; not once in my long career did anyone consider me to be someone who could tolerate this kind of work. I don’t look at myself as above such things, and I’ve even applied for such jobs in moments of low testosterone or misguided patriotism, but I’m not exactly suited for it. It might be useful to try my hand at being an organizer of bureaucracies. Maybe I will do so later in life when I’m done doing really difficult things, and when our ideas spread enough to make this possible again. Chopping the hands off crooked money changers sounds like a fun retirement project.
Locklin on science 
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