Pull Request 👎

Today, I received a “pull request” in my inbox from a well-known Silicon Valley person named Antonio Garcia-Martinez. As a technical founder of a startup, my inbox is often full of pull requests from the engineers on my team. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the idea (from github) is you submit some code that, if accepted, the maintainer of a software package will “pull” into the main repository. The process of getting feedback on a pull request is like the editorial process in journalism or peer reviews in scientific publications: a way for the community to ensure that the code meets their quality standards and aligns with the goals of the project.

As with any pull request, I figured I would go through and make some comments to help the author get this into a form that might get accepted.

Lest that sound unjustifiably boastful, let’s take regional stock of ourselves: the most valuable companies in the world — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon — are on this side of the continent, crammed roughly between the asphalt ribbon of Highway 5 and the coast. The non-West Coast companies on that list are Alibaba and Tencent, staring at us menacingly from the other side of our pond.

Why are these Chinese companies menacing? Are they mad that you think the Pacific Ocean is “our pond” or is this a cultural stereotype?

Why then must we open the pages of The New York Times to read media anachronisms droning on about West Coast companies they seem incapable of understanding, much less building?

Many wonderful publications cover Silicon Valley so well from afar. How about Stratechery, written in Taiwan? Also, I don’t recall you attacking the Times for struggling to understand tech when they praised your book as “a guide to the spirit of Silicon Valley.”

In short, why is our story being told by people whose values are different than ours, whose economic interests conflict with ours, and whose eventual futures are very different than ours?

Given that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and that Michael Bloomberg (a tech entrepreneur) controls Bloomberg, this argument makes little sense. The media is and probably always has been a tool of the elite to preserve and expand their power.

In the East, everything about your upbringing, tax bracket, and religion may be reliably inferred from which town on Long Island you ‘summered’ in. In the East, your every claim to status in a stagnant firmament of prestige is dissected and dog-whistled for public consumption in your Times wedding announcement (should you be so lucky).

Have you actually been to New York, or are you trying to extrapolate from the Style section of the Times? New Yorkers, even the elites, are a diverse bunch. Just thinking of my close friends who go to the Hamptons, I immediately come up with a Canadian Jew and his tech entrepreneur wife; an Indian-American lawyer who grew up in South Carolina; a Black construction executive and his wife, a Black lawyer. I’m pretty sure that last couple were the only ones with a wedding announcement in the Times, though I only saw it because I just looked.

What’s special about New York is that we’re elite at a lot of things, not just building tech companies. A close friend of mine is an elite museum executive. I suspect she doesn’t make that much money, but she is connected to some of the most interesting and creative people in the world, and brings important art and ideas to New York. We have elite hipsters— maybe not Portland quality, but close. How about music and musicals? Ever hear of Hamilton? Written by a New Yorker. Where does Lin-Manuel Miranda weekend? Who the hell cares. Although he does have a Times wedding announcement, so maybe you’re on to something there. Nothing says “stagnant firmament of prestige” like a Puertoriqqueño.

In the West, elites make their fortunes in building things (rather than collecting rents), and then rejoice in turning around and funding the nascent startups that challenge the very companies that made them wealthy, just for the goddamned lulz of it.

Just a reminder that the same East Coast elites you are criticizing are often the descendants of the nation’s greatest generation of builders, the Carnegies and Mellons and Rockefellers and Morgans. Also to remember: history has a funny way of remembering the dark side of these great figures. Bragging about the fortune that Mark Zuckerberg has made “building things” might be premature. That’s not to say that the West Coast doesn’t have extraordinary entrepreneurs — it does, including many of my personal heroes and mentors. I have so much respect for Tim Cook and Satya Nadella as ethical stewards of the incredible companies that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates built. I admire and appreciate Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz for their extraordinary leadership and committment to building a bright future. I even think you understate your point: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are building freaking space ships!

It’s unquestionable that the past 30 or 40 years have created an ecosystem, especially in Seattle and the Bay Area, where there is a critical mass of talent and capital that facilitates extraordinary tech companies. That’s amazing and wonderful, and the world benefits from the innovation as much as it worries about the ethical, privacy, and anti-trust implications of the tech giants. What’s up, though, with this West Coast exceptionalism? Couldn’t this have happened in, say, Austin, had certain things played out a different way 60 years ago? And what’s to say that the next big technological revolution will happen there?

In the West, dropping out of a storied institution to actually create something is more lauded than having graduated from it.

Just asking, then why are there so many Stanford and Harvard MBAs working at Silicon Valley tech companies?

In the West, hard-fought and daring failure is more noble and marketable than steadfast respectability.

Funny how your whole thesis rests on five incredibly successful companies, not five bold failures. Who validates your thesis, Kamala Harris bowing out of the primaries or Elizabeth Warren fighting it out? You have your coasts wrong on that one.

What I want to know is how Silicon Valley maintains its edge, its sense of frontier, now that the true American elite is in the Valley. You’ve made it. We’re all really happy for you, we truly are, and we would really appreciate it if you would clean up your privacy mess and cut your grass.

The West Coast knows about building on the abandoned wreckage of the East Coast, whether ships or institutions: it’s what we’ve always done.

This references the Jack London story “Make Westing”, where the captain sacrifices everything to make progress westward toward San Francisco. The crucial moment in the story: the captain murders a man who accuses him of murder. “In the afternoon, alone in his room, he doctored up the log. A smile of satisfaction slowly dawned on his black and hairy face. Well, anyway, he had made his westing and fooled God.”

This is absolutely the right story to reference in context of the tech giants. Westing at all costs. Doctoring the log and fooling God. Well, Antonio, you can’t fool us, not by doctoring history and not with a pull request. This moment isn’t about East vs West, or tech vs the rest, or even about whose elites are the most obnoxious.

We have real issues to talk about. California is literally burning. The nation is polarized. We are on the brink of an economic war with China that will tear the world apart. Climate change is a thing. We have a pandemic to deal with.

The last thing we need right now is a pull request that will pull us apart. We need to pull together. Please revise and resubmit.