Zersetzung, Silicon Valley and Shockley's Revenge
Zersetzung, Silicon Valley and Shockley's Revenge
What a conventional history misses about our allegedly most productive region
There’s the conventional history about Silicon Valley—and then there’s the real history.
We’re getting close to that real history in some of the writings I’ve published here exploring the various members of the PayPal mafia and denizens of Silicon Valley. This site is well read by some of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a leadership I intend to get to bend the knee or be replaced.
The selection of highly intelligent largely white (and later largely Jewish and Chinese) men is the untold story of Silicon Valley. Or so argues Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023).
For what it’s worth I recommend Palo Alto which is good on the history, especially the early days of Stanford, but tends to overfit some of the material to fits Harris’s worldview.
The implication here is that I’m somehow bad for wanting the United States to enforce immigration law — something every other serious country does — and therefore deserving of jailing, or perhaps suiciding, in the same way as Aaron Swartz, the cofounder of Reddit. (I’ve repeatedly and explicitly been against jailing Swartz, Ross Ulbricht, and other young nonviolent hacker types but that’s for another time.)
What I find interesting here is the view that wanting to have facial recognition necessarily leads to an anti-immigrant future. It’s compelling but doesn’t logically follow.
For example: if the state had a tighter, firmer control on immigration it could well be the case that the United States would take more immigrant guest workers rather than fewer simply because we’d know who and where they are. We need only to look at how Australia, Canada, or the Gulf States do immigration to see that that could well work.
I agree with David Frum: if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will. We’re entering a period where the enemies of the United States use migration as a weapon—as a means of disrupting and disturbing our already strained social welfare system.
If there’s a real critique of Clearview or Palantir it’s that these technology companies don’t quite deliver on their promises or even have tech that works all that well.
My grievances aside, I’d recommend Palo Alto.
Harris’s history gets it mostly right, though, I think he has a tendency to push too hard and not hard enough. His section on Shockley is very good.
“The team Shockley recruited quickly realized that the man wasn’t a normal boss. He put them through rounds of psychological examination, sifting through this best-of-the-best collection with a woven basket of IQ tests. The gold separated from the rest, he believed. What he ended up with was a strong and diverse collection of young white male scientists. Shockley’s team reflected the leveling effects of the FDR–WWII years, the result of which was that a Jewish refugee and a midwestern preacher’s son could look across the table at each other as colleagues in a California semiconductor company. Compulsory universal military service and the New Deal shuffled America’s deck of white men, losing distinctions based on ethnicity and home geography. They all trained on the government’s dime, and Shockley planned to use the military’s investment in these men to produce semiconductors for a new generation of missile weapons, in effect selling the government’s investment back to itself. It was one military-industrial-academic transistor block: the Solid State.”
“Among Shockley’s recruits, the most famous group was a team Shockley later tarred as “the traitorous eight.” It comprised the preacher’s son (Robert Noyce) and the Jewish refugee (Eugene Kleiner), as well as Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, and Jay Last. They were all in their late twenties and early thirties, accomplished in their own specialties, and strong believers in the technology. Moore was the only NorCal local, which meant the rest of the men were ambitious and adventurous enough to take a risk in California rather than settling into the comfy confines of academic-industrial Big Science, which was still an East Coast affair. Shockley offered the opportunity to play rebellious little brother, within the traditional hierarchy of prestige but without the stultifying pressure of life in a massive organization. But at Shockley Labs they ran smack into the downside risks of moving to California to work for a start-up. William Shockley was an awful boss, unbearable.” [Emphasis mine]
Ultimately these management struggles fell to Sherman Fairchild, the heir of IBM, to put the transistor into production and the silicon into Silicon Valley. Shockley talked and studied his navel IQ but the heir of IBM and his Jewish allies —both Arthur Rock and Eugene Kleiner were Jews— got it done.
If you want to think about it in an anti-Semitic way, the WASPs who gave us Bell Labs and the transistor ultimately fell to the Jews who took down that British-born Shockley with the help of WASP heir Sherman Fairchild.
Still Shockley may have lost the company but he built the model. We can rightly call this Shockley’s Revenge.
What was once a project of selection — William Shockley would write to find the smartest people in the country — became a formula and then a racket, propelled by foreign cash, most of which from China or Saudi Arabia, and usually handled by Israelis. We should rightly ask ourselves, in light of Ubiome (Stanford), Theranos (Stanford), and FTX (MIT) how smart these guys actually were.
Harris posits that Silicon Valley was a eugenics project and not much has changed. This is provocative, to be sure, and not entirely wrong. But I think it’s insufficient.
The question is always which elites will govern you, and whose elites.
My contention is that the Stanford-Yale-Harvard elite isn’t very elite at all. It’s not selected so much as appointed. Our institutions of higher learning were captured by the flood of Chinese and Arab cash. Those few Americans who could get in were often the children of mobsters or of Corporate America but I repeat myself. They, too, were complicit in selling out the country to rich foreigners.
In recent years I’ve come to rethink a lot of the supposed meritocracy.
That the meritocracy project of Richard Hernnstein (co-author, with Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve) didn’t work or, perhaps worked all too well.
That the “meritocracy” may well have been a cover for Jewish-Chinese takeover of institutions of higher learning, a takeover which began with the Chinese bailing out America in 2008, and which is being repelled now.
That we’re now in the era where the WASPs and their allies have returned once more.
To some extent the meritocracy is really the rise of the nepo babies and there may be no escaping it, if we’re honest and looking at the genetics. There’s something to the “natural aristocracy” envisioned by Thomas Jefferson in his famous letters to John Adams.
Nor I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my friend (and son of novelist Saul Bellow) Adam Bellow and publisher of The Bell Curve, authored In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (2003). Both books are part of the same political project — the justification for a new elite to take over America and keep perpetuating itself.
Implicit in the eugenicist thinking is this notion:
If you can select for some bloodlines, you’ll select against other bloodlines. If you believe in good bloodlines, you logically believe in bad bloodlines.
This, too, is a story of Silicon Valley.
Indeed many of the immigrant founders of Silicon Valley didn’t build that on their own. They, too, were selected.
****
Let’s say you’re going to take over a country but you don’t want people to know. You want a silent occupation, a stealth occupation.
You'd identify the major, powerful families. Maybe you use Ancestry.com. You control that, after all, thanks to your investments through Blackstone.
And then you set about making these families’ and their kids’ lives very, very difficult.
You restrict them from getting contracts from government firms and from having their children get into the universities to which you and your allies have donated. You call this the meritocracy. You make them feel as if their lack of success is because of them.
For those who nevertheless manage to find some measure of success, you buy them. If you can’t buy them, you begin the process of what the Stasis called Zersetzung, a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.
Wikipedia has it right:
Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities. People were commonly targeted on a pre-emptive and preventative basis, to limit or stop politically incorrect activities that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind "a facade of social normality" in a form of "silent repression"
Do such things happen now? Of course they do. The children are detected early, and thanks to social media, spotted, accessed, processed, groomers.
These blacklists restrict who gets access to the capital needed to build the future.
You push propaganda that the immigrants are better. Why they’re even better than the native-born population. Maybe even more American than they are!
You restrict the foreign capital you control from going to the native-born population.
The real story is the capital flows between China and America and how China appointed the foreign children to superintend their investments. China built these people up as a kind of new founding. You know their names. Levchin. Thiel. Sacks. Nosek. Khosla. Musk. Pan.
These are the leaders to be appointed over you. They are the new “founders” of America.
This worked. Until it didn’t.