When You Change Political Parties Because Some Online Rando Is Mean To You

The world is changing, it’s impossible for me not to come back to how tech is mirroring and amplifying those changes. Whether you care that Mark Zuckerberg randomly got into MMA or not, what these guys do influences our politics, our culture, and these very platforms we like to write our little newsletters on. So forgive me if I overly focus on Mark Zuckerberg’s $900,000 watch for a minute.

It constantly astounds me how far the culture in Silicon Valley has swung from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and so much of that shift was simply because the right was not only willing accept, but embrace, their little goals. Their goals are both boring (unfettered monopoly) and petty (being mad they don’t have the broad cultural approval they all thought they’d get from being a tech titan). But what’s astounding to me is how much their pettiness is driving their actions over the boring stuff: Zuckerberg, as you probably know, is gutting DEI, content moderation, adding UFC’s Dana White to the board of Meta, and saying business needs to be more “masculine”, as if the opposite is somehow bad for society.

But one thing that hurt the feelings of another tech billionaire and Trump convert, Marc Andreesen, was the fact that his idea of “the deal” – make a lot of money, donate most of that money, then everybody claps – is now dead. You made billions in tech? Now, people will get mad at you online even when you announce you’re donating 99% of your wealth. I’m paraphrasing what Marc said here, but it very much appears that he’s mad at some random strangers complaining about people like him online. And this is one reason why he completely changed political parties.

I will concede one point to Marc there – donating 99% of your wealth isn’t the worst thing you can do with your money. The thing is, these random people online aren’t necessarily a skilled debaters trying to engage in a match with you, Marc. They’re people who are just upset at what capitalism allows you to do at our expense, and they’re going to shit on you no matter what band-aid you try to put over it. They all hate you, Marc. People on the right, too. Maybe it’s time for self-reflection instead of betting on the guy who wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico?

What it feels like – and maybe this is entirely the fault of social media amplifying the tiniest voices – is that the pendulum swung 5 degrees to the left, and insecure tech billionaires reacted by swinging 45 degrees to the right. They didn’t want to feel bad about being wealthy, or powerful, and they’re mad that the cost of living as a megawealthy person is having a few people make very joking, completely unseries jokes about guillotining you.

Just like any random redpilled incel on Reddit, the Marc/ks are mad that you’re making them feel guilty for just being who they are. Cause when you have everything the world could ever offer you, I guess guilt is that one lingering feeling that is hard to solve with money. Unless, of course, you use that money to install a president that will absolve you of that guilt. And may or may not shield your investments from antitrust hearings in the future.

For a brief moment in the 2010s, I believed that most of these tech billionaires would use their power to promote democracy and fairness in a system that offered them such an opportunity in the first place, but it turned out that protecting their own little feelings was way more important than democracy or any other value they once claimed to hold dear.

Look: It’s a weird time for men. I get it. When we talk about the male loneliness epidemic or any of the other challenges men are facing as middle and working-class people, men are facing real economic challenges, and there are fewer cultural spaces where they feel welcome that aren’t on the redpilled right. These problems are real, and need to be dealt with. But seeing this same set of behaviors and beliefs at the highest echelons of power is only making it more clear that the root of this is not just about “economic insecurity” - it’s about power – power that was lost and is now being reclaimed. Nobody wants to feel guilty about having power. Nobody wants to feel like there is a responsibility that comes with privilege. To the tech titans, it’s a zero-sum game apparently; one has to throw out the idea of responsibility, guilt, or shame altogether in order to feel whole. They can’t just have power. They have to have admiration, and we’re gonna give it to them whether we like it or not.