Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Inflation and the ‘Die Techie Scum’ Rage

kevin-rose-protest

 

Why are protesters in San Francisco attacking members of the new class of techno-entrepreneur?

To quote from their manifesto:

It has now come to the point where even Diet Coke advertisements are referencing the influx of techies and their startups. With venture capital in their pockets, these wealthy professionals with few attachments are able to pay hyper inflated rents and property prices, displacing long time residents and increasing the cost of living. Tech-workers on average earn four times the wages of a normal service worker.

Venture capitalists enable these tech-workers by funding their startups. With the success of each startup, more and more ambitious tech-workers flock to the city and displace underemployed service workers to the cities at the far reaches of the BART line. These workers must then commute back to San Francisco or Oakland every morning, in most cases to perform menial tasks for the entitled scum who drove them out in the first place.

Which brings us back to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com and current venture partner at Google Ventures. He has already helped Google acquire Nextdoor.com and invested his own money in Foursquare, hoping to cash out when a giant buys it. We are here today because a few of the thousands low-paid, underemployed service workers got fed up with Kevin Rose treating them like the shit one scrapes from their boot, not even worthy of eye contact or the basic pleasantries generally taken for granted in our culture.

Techies, because of the amount of time they spend staring into screens, tend to have poor eye contact skills. The autistic stereotype makes sense for startup workers who rarely socialize with other people except from behind screens, during stand-up meetings, or with the assistance of alcohol after hours.

They’re not rude, they’re just socially inept, which is close to the same as rude, but not quite as intentional.

This is a fight not just over money, but status.

In the Bay Area, one rarely just ‘gets coffee’ with a friend. An invitation to get coffee is really an invitation to discuss some business venture. These are the reasons why they don’t make eye contact with their baristas: but it so offends people that it has become a recurring theme in the complaints.

It’s funny that these protesters bring up Kevin Rose’s app Oink, because they are probably the only people to remember it in at least a couple years.

It should be obvious to anyone that the current boom in software has been driven by low interest rates and money-printing on the part of worldwide central banks. Part of the reason why this has been concealed is that, unlike the more recent housing bubble in the US, the inflation (creation of credit and cash) has been channeled mostly into stock markets both public and private.

Because most Americans are reprobates incapable of saving much money, this has isolated most of the gains through printing to the upper middle class and higher.

Venture capital benefits through a system of diversification in which large investors like pension funds, university endowments, and insurance companies devote a sliver of their allocations to VC firms. These VC firms then invest some of this money into startups, most of which fail.

 

kevin rose businessweek cover
Rose in headier times, before he failed upward.

The population of San Francisco is just over 800,000. This has made it fairly easy for a significant portion of the people there to be displaced by a relatively small number of small, wealthy companies moving there. This combined with an anti-development attitude and a Communist-leaning local government has made it difficult for the city to absorb the gold rush influx.

The general anger is understandable. The way in which it’s being expressed by protesters would not be tolerated in a civilized country, but the US is not a civilized country. The protest problem is just a symptom of more significant issues within the political structure.

Protesters are employing similar methods targeted to other individuals and companies, using social media to increase the targeting accuracy.

This is all an effect of an inflationary monetary system combined with a culture that encourages both envy, victim-worshiping, and uncritical acceptance of the structure and its distorting impacts on society. Almost no one active in business and politics today has a first hand experience of the pre-Nixon monetary system, much less the pre-Federal Reserve system. The mores and business practices of today are profoundly different from those that came before the major structural shifts.

The new class attracts resentment precisely because they gain access to the ‘new money’ years before those with fewer political connections do. Part of this is a democratic ritual that has been with the US since the founding, owing to the anti-inheritance laws that ensured that permanent classes would not develop into a new aristocracy (which Tocqueville commented on extensively in his travels during the post-revolution period).

The leveling effect that Keynsian policies are intended to have (by disrupting entrenched fortunes and cycling through business classes) has the unintended consequence of decimating the middle class, empowering new classes of foreigners, and crunching the proletariat. What has happened is that the former middle class gets trapped in the tax policies designed to reduce the large fortunes, while the large fortunes purchase exceptions, and the poor lose all security.

This is what the new class means by ‘disruption’ — they are disrupting the former entrenched businesses using a new wave of credit that has trickled to them through limited partners to the hands of venture capitalists to be invested in the little pirates who lengthen the capital structure.

We see this literally in the case of ‘software as a service’ and ‘cloud computing’ companies who cause capital equipment to be distributed around the world rather than being concentrated within geographical areas. Hidden security costs threaten the stability of this premature extension.

In the Bay Area, these protests represent a failure of governance, and a classic democratic failure mode. As the hot money leaks from the coastal cities into the rest of the country, we will see similar dynamics play out all over, until foreign policy breakdowns force the final reckoning upon the Americans.

Rather than pick up pennies in front of the steamroller off this inevitable event, it is better to prepare for the dissolution.

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Spinning Free Northerner’s Winning Conservative Strategy

Free Northerner published an article today about how he would spend $142 million on a one-shot campaign to do as much damage to the professional left as possible. This post will make no sense until you go and read it.

The comment section has criticized him for it, so I will try not to jump on the bandwagon of people telling him that it can’t be done. I will instead explain how much his laudable goals are likely to cost, and what the likely challenges are going to be. At the end, I will suggest some more practical models for the near term.

Political advertising in the US is heavily regulated.

It is less regulated as it relates to issue advertising relative to candidate-based advertising. Message-based ads are basically unrestricted so long as you disclose what entity they’re coming from upon the ad itself. One reason why the political ad budgets often become so high is because it is inherently oppositional advertising.

In the private sector, advertisers look to own and then maintain a monopoly on a particular product that satisfies a particular unique selling proposition. It is usually a losing proposition to run a competitive ad campaign against a rival unless you truly possess a special advantage.

In politics, if you’re attempting to get your candidate to win over the competitor, you need to overcome all the competitors gunning for the same seat.

Given that Free Northerner isn’t looking to win any elections, but instead to run essentially a war propaganda campaign, the calculus becomes different: It becomes less about competing for an electoral seat and more about creating conditions favorable conditions for secession.

Some bullets:

  • The salary estimations are off. You will not poach private sector talent earning $150,000+ per year offering such low pay. $2 million for a tech team gets you about four years of burn rate with a startup-scale team who will not necessarily have the execution capability that you would want. Because this would be marketing based you would run out of budget almost immediately and would need to devote most efforts to raising funds to raise more funds — the usual non-profit death cycle.
  • Further, there are almost no right-wingers in PR/media/advertising with the digital talent to volunteer during election times, which is what Obama benefited supremely from, especially through alliances at Facebook.
  • The left is performing better in elections because it has access to top digital talent. The right is a gerentocracy that relies upon AM radio, a cable TV network, and direct mail. The web talent is laughably bad. Open up the Daily Caller on a mobile device and count how many seconds it takes to load. PJMedia nor Breitbart even have  responsive websites. Right wing wonder boy Drudge has not even bothered to update his antiquated page, demonstrating the retrograde attitude to design that is endemic on the right wing.

The left dominates the education system, the newspapers, the entertainment industry, the information technology industry, and advertising. This immediately chokes off most of your potential recruits, especially in the younger generation.

You can reach more people through FB than through some network cable slot…

Facebook’s CPMs vary based on whom you are targeting, but they trend within a similar band as Fox News (usually lower). Running unpaid campaigns on Facebook is going to become increasingly less viable as they reduce organic reach for Pages, a development that has been ongoing for two years. If you scroll down to this 2013 Pew Cable survey, you’ll see that Fox News average CPM is just above $4. I would expect to pay that much or a little less for a non-retargeted, premium Facebook audience segment on the news feed.

Late night FNC is probably significantly cheaper than a Facebook campaign, and targets a wealthier (albeit older) audience. You can get significantly cheaper space on FB and elsewhere through retargeting, though — getting good rates on the internet requires skill & expertise. And skill & expertise do not come cheap.

In communications, people who are nonprofessionals get raped with higher rates and tend to not realize how and why they are being ultra-fucked. This is the case with every medium. They are all complex and opaque and figure out ways to screw the inexperienced & inept as efficiently as possible.

Create a small fund (say $500k) that the aforementioned bloggers (or just regular Joes) can apply to have expenses paid for doing investigative work on a potential anti-leftist/Democrat lead.

Again, this does not go far. Investigative journalism becomes expensive rapidly, especially because of travel costs and other non-obvious expenses. Further, the cost of promoting a story once you publish it is nontrivial. The NYT, WaPo, and other publications will spend more than $500k on a single investigative feature.

Similarly, PIs are expensive (I know because I worked as a ghetto unlicensed corporate PI for a little while). Lawyers bid their rates beyond what ordinary people can afford — although it does not take much other than inordinate patience, autism, and a lack of ethics to train up someone into becoming a good one.

Rates for PIs start at maybe $50/hour, and investigations are both tedious and inordinately time-consuming. It is not a good task for volunteers for this reason.

Next, hire a couple dozen ideologically conservative reporters at $50k a piece (plus investigative expenses)

Nickel-and-diming the front line talent is one of the reasons why every conservative media operation that is not owned by Rupert Murdoch is a clown show. You get what you pay for. I really mean this. Nickel-and-diming wears down even the most promising talent, prevents them from being able to develop experience, causes churn, and produces drama within the organization.

There are also almost no ideologically conservative reporters. I know of one family of conservative reporters of any obvious talent, and they all earn more money than that from the pockets of people named Koch, Anschutz, and Murdoch.

Create a legal war team. $20M

This quote is too low.

As Kate always says, failing to show up for a riot is a failed conservative policy. Hire a bunch of young conservative/Republicans (at low wages) as organizers. Anytime leftists protest, the hired organizers would create a counter-protest. They would then organize their own protests. Do what leftists have learned; don’t protest in public streets, target.

The warm bodies are cheap, but the organizational talent (and more importantly, the press relations team) is where the funding goes. Warm bodies can be trained to raise money from people or get into fights and march around, but a good press release costs $7,500 a pop, with more significant coverage going for more like $50,000 a pop, not including the advertising support.

National campaigns would run to the millions rapidly — this first two numbers would be for a small local area to a mid-sized metro. Good permits also cost money and require bribes to local politicians, plus relationship-building.

The Need to Focus and Self-Sustain

Because resources are constrained, and we do not have anywhere near the fundraising operation that even the world’s shittiest PAC does, you have to focus on activities that are self-funding. The single most effective online right wing political campaign that I have witnessed was the seemingly-spontaneous response of ‘Molon Labe’ to Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign.

In 2013, Steve Vaus recorded a short song that recalled a battle in Texas. Almost immediately, the obscure Latin term ‘molon labe’ immediately exploded on Google Trends. This occurred simultaneous to when Bloomberg’s organization pushed the slogan ‘Demand a Plan’ through his network of celebrities and politicians.

The results shocked me at the time.
As you can see, the response annihilated Bloomberg’s ad and press campaigns, which had the benefit of an enormous amount of earned media that is not available at any price (free write-ups in the Times, write-ups on the Times op-ed page, appearances on the Sunday shows, the whole nine yards).

Petty vendors earned a mint selling t-shirts and posters based on the tagline, which communicated an effective message: “if you come to confiscate our guns, we will fight to the death.” This is a clear example of capitalizing on the local firepower superiority of the right wing. And it defeated a far more expensive press and ad campaign pushed by the entire left elite working in concert — advertising, media, information technology, and even investment banking.

It also exploited a clear division that has been critical in Connecticut: the left can ram legislation through, but when they ask policemen to die to enforce new laws, those policemen will not obey orders. Knowing this pressure point, the right can continually bait the left into over-reaching beyond the point to which it can actually exercise real power.

This is doubtless the sort of reaction that has worked and will continue to work to rile the barbarian horde, to make it more expensive to govern effectively by demotic means.

Some quick points:

  • Changing the minds of people costs resources. Getting people to take actions costs resources.
  • Changing people a lot costs more money than you probably have or are capable of raising within the time frame in which you want to enact the change.
  • Encouraging people to make small changes is much cheaper than encouraging them to make large changes.

The conservative political machine is good at sustaining itself, but just lacks the sheer resources of the left.

Facing an enemy with far greater material resources, it is necessary instead to use unorthodox methods rather than direct confrontation to disrupt and destroy the systempunkts within their economic machinery.

Direct confrontation can be easily contained by the left: it is like a frontal assault on a fixed position with a predictable result.

The left can trivially contain any direct attack, because it is politically well-fortified against such attacks. It is like trying to attack Rommel’s tank divisions with a bunch of drunk amateurs driving golf carts. They will break at the first sight of the Panzers, and it is not responsible to tell them that they have a chance to win against him.

I am glad Free Northerner has started this discussion, because debating practical actions is more entertaining to me than theorizing, which I have no talent for.

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About the Eich Issue

I am not personally surprised by the Eich’s forced resignation.

The outer right ought to admit to having a shared interest with the rabid mob of the left. At least I perceive it as such: the more that the underground left is permitted to run wild, the more recruits that we gain. It will become easier for us to sell books, earn web traffic, raise funds, and win over more serious people to our general orbit the more events like this occur.

The establishment left’s typical job, in association with the GOP, is to restrain the underground left, to slow its progression, and in turn extract rents from capitalists and some of the more upwardly mobile members of the middle class as its just reward. That Tom Perkins had to turn to a hostile interviewer on Bloomberg TV to beg for restraint rather than just picking up the phone to speak with a Democratic Party leader demonstrates that this relationship has in some way broken down during the Obama era.

KPCB and Tom Perkins personally have done more for the Democratic party than 100 billion Oakland-Occupy black-bloccers. It is most strange that he was forced to humiliate himself in front of a low-tier television lady to embarrass the San Francisco police to do their jobs, rather than simply making a phone call to a friend like a civilized person. If he’s forced to go to the press, it means that the conventional option was unavailable to him.

To the extent that radicals are permitted to predate upon capitalists by a distracted & corrupt political class, manifold opportunities present themselves to those capable of taking initiative. To be precise, the opportunities are in the protection line of business, which many politicians seem to have been keen to neglect in favor of other obligations.

Oddly enough, prospects for the outer right become better as the insanity of the left becomes less containable and more infectious.

Horror is good for certain kinds of businesses.

The Eich resignation resonates because of the widespread pretense in America that it is a sort of open society. It is not. It is a democratic country, a soft-communism country, as Hoppe describes democracy.

When individuals become afraid that their careers will be destroyed upon the whims of the mob, they will become frightened, and will look for protectors.

There are no such protectors present today. It was always a temporary illusion that dissent from the left-orthodoxy was permissible in any sphere of life.  To some extent, the left permits dissent to encourage dissidents to identify themselves, so that they can be marginalized, targeted, and eventually destroyed. It is certainly not to permit said dissenters to have any sort of political influence.

Eich’s $1,000 donation did nothing other than to make himself vulnerable to character assassination by agents of the left. If you want to preserve Western civilization (and perhaps your own skin), you will not achieve your goals by throwing pocket change to the controlled opposition.

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