On Google's Monopoly and Palestine

The Dangers of Losing by Winning

I believe Peter Thiel is correct that the end goal of every business is to achieve a monopoly. Given that monopolies are technically illegal, Thiel observes that bad businesses pretend to be monopolies to fool investors and good businesses poor-mouth about competition to avoid being prosecuted for their effective monopolistic practices.

This means that the closest thing to a Nobel Prize in business is being convicted in federal court of operating a monopoly: that your market power is so pervasive and undeniable that the federal government’s limited prosecutorial resources were invested to take you down. On Monday, Google was found liable in federal court for operating a monopoly in search. Sergey and Larry, you have made an impressive journey from your magical late-‘90s algorithm running on computers in your garage and beaten the final boss of capitalism. Hopefully, Bill Gates, the previous tech winner of this prize, called and extended his congratulations.

A question Google must be asking themselves, however, is whether they could have achieved the higher prize of operating their monopoly without being prosecuted. The answer, I believe, is yes had Google played the broader political game better. The misfortune of much of Big Tech is that, post-Trump, they have alienated their natural defenders in the Republican Party. The Google prosecution was a rare exercise in contemporary bipartisanship, with players as opposed as Merrick Garland and Ken Paxton gloating over Monday’s ruling.

Leftist Alliances Are Unstable for the Competent and Successful

Sergey and Larry are not, to put it delicately, believers in human equality. In early interviews, they were notorious for demanding applicants’ high school SAT scores as a proxy for IQ instead of accepting university credentials at face value. The core innovations at Google were delivered by what they called “10x engineers,” as they believed that the smartest people could produce ten times as much value as slightly less intelligent employees. I don’t doubt that’s true for software operating at such scale and speed.

Probably for social and practical reasons, Google made an early alliance with the Left. Though most tech founders are natural libertarians, as a company grows the founding nerds end up getting bullied by HR people¹ into submitting to the prevailing narrative. Leftist activists will grow an internal network of aligned employees, and if one doesn’t avoid hiring these people, it’s much more dangerous liability-wise to attempt to control their destructive internal behavior, fire them, or even fail to promote them. Practically, I’m sure it seemed clever for a Silicon Valley monopoly to ally with the Left, the natural enforcers of anti-trust law, given Republicans were kneejerk simps for big business who would support their interests anyway. At the time, Barack Obama was a tech-friendly candidate, the sort of neoliberal who, it seemed, would mostly feed empty red meat to the base rhetorically but allow regime-aligned “woke capitalists” free rein on bottom-line issues.

The problem with this strategy is that the Left has been evolving towards a more perfect version of itself, a process other thinkers have labeled bioleninism, short for Biological Leninism. The most stable arrangement for a left-wing movement is a proletariat consisting of those who would have no chance of any kind of significant status in any non-Left, naturally ordered political arrangement. Marx’s original proletariat, the “working class,” was simply too functional and thus had too much to lose from destroying ~90% of a society’s economic and social capital. So the most biologically stable proletariat is one consisting of various paraphiliacs, criminals, addicts, unemployables, and the mentally ill, the population of which grows as Leftist cultural destruction is more perfectly achieved in society. As previously discussed in this column, a growing body of research shows that Leftist beliefs are associated with increased mutational load.

This is not to say that the most prominent Leftists are unintelligent. The proletariat, in all Left movements, is led and manipulated by a class of intellectuals. In the American Left, this leadership has been split between pragmatists — think Michael Bloomberg or Bill Clinton — and true believers. For a long time, especially early in the bioleninizing process, the pragmatists held the upper hand and could push through policies of functional hypocrisy, for example, liberalism on social issues but tough on crime. Increasingly, however, the biological proletariat is too dumb to understand the necessity of this hypocrisy for a functional society, or too resentful of their misfortunes that they would prefer to see it burn anyway. This gave more control of the Left to the true believer wing of their intellectual caste, frustrated victims of elite overproduction, who are also willing to burn society down out of spite or a belief that utopia can emerge from the resulting chaos.

For capitalist clients of the neoliberal Left, this creates a huge problem in that true believers are now increasingly in charge of policy. Simultaneously, Donald Trump, for all his flaws, finally taught most Republicans how not to be pathetic simps and understand that power, and the friend-enemy distinction, must come before free market ideology; without power first, ideas are impotent. And having alienated Republicans through intense censorship and manipulation of content, Google and much of Big Tech find themselves without any friends in power, a most dangerous position in a political democracy.

The Palestine Parallel

An almost identical process has played out for the American Jewish leaders seeking to protect Israel. Like poor military strategists, they have, politically, been fighting the “last war” for almost 80 years. Traumatized by the lessons of Nazi Germany, activists pursued a dual strategy of “never again” by anathematizing right-wing movements across the Western world while carving out a Jewish ethnostate in the Middle East, a contradiction that should have been obvious, but for blinding chauvinism.

So thorough (and frankly impressive from a value-neutral perspective) were their efforts that Western Civilization itself was seen as the ultimate incubator of fascism, particularly traditional religious families with strong fathers, according to psychoanalytic pseudoscience like The Authoritarian Personality. Much of the sexual and social revolutions that followed WWII were given moral impetus by the assumption that, to use Charles Haywood’s phrase, liberation from “all bonds not continuously chosen” would eliminate any future potential for fascism to rise in the West. Even pornographers found a moral high horse.

Like Google, Israel boosters found a natural ally in the Republican Party’s base, and like Google, that base would support Israel for nothing in return, due to not only ideological but, for many, also religious commitments, due to the extraordinary but weirdly incidental rise of theologically ahistorical dispensationalism among conservative American Christians in the latter 1800s². Given the extreme social sanctions for any expression of antisemitism in the era from 1945 to around 2012, this strategy was effective, at least politically, for much of the postwar period³.

The anti-Israel reaction to the attacks of October 7th, 2023 reveal the rotten roots of these contradicting approaches. The Biological Left, while still committed to “anti-fascism,” sees Israel as fascist because she is, while unique, still more a part of Western Civilization than not. Since modern Jews are genetically 80% European, on average, the Left correctly perceives them as white, which means they can only ever be oppressors, and Palestinians can only ever be victims.

Meanwhile, the very online young right is aware of the raw deal conservatives have gotten over the years, the hypocrisy of ethnonationalism for me but not for thee, and largely lack the religious commitments to Israel typical of the geriatric audience of Fox News. Like Google, elite supporters of Israel find themselves with few friends in a democracy.

The smartest and most entrepreneurial American Jewish supporters of Israel, like Bill Ackman, now understand the short-sighted foolishness of promoting race-based communism to own the czars when a century of freedom in America has made Jewish people the world’s most successful ethnic group. Ackman is unusually prescient as a professional trader, and knows the optimal move when he changes his thesis is to unwind the position as quickly as possible.

Noblesse Oblige

The rich, competent, and successful have a moral duty to pay it forward, regardless of personal beliefs, and to support conservative culture and policies that undergird the ecology of wealth. Napoleon was onto something when he said, “religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich,” and more precisely, “society cannot exist without unequal fortunes, and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion.”

As I discussed in my piece on Napoleon, and will briefly summarize here, democracy is an equilibrium form of government because despite its obvious deficiencies it confers, in its manufacturing of manipulated consent, the greatest legitimacy on the state⁴. Law and order are necessary for wealth production, and law and order is everywhere and always the credible threat of violence. We all sleep soundly in our beds because men with guns threaten violence upon those who would drag us out of them. Christopher Nolan wasn’t far from the mark in depicting the state of nature:

Given the necessity of law and order, one way to think of voters is as shadow shareholders in any enterprise. Those who most reliably support property rights must be paid a dividend of sorts. This might mean accepting higher wages, or policies to protect high-paying jobs from overseas competition⁵, to avoid diluting the common good with cheap labor likely to undermine political support for property rights, and it also means supporting cultural and religious structures that produce the sort of well-adjusted people who will support property rights into the future.

I’m afraid, unfortunately, that this is a relatively small slice of humanity. If Jordan Peterson is correct in his dogma that antisemitism is always due to envy, then the almost universal antisemitism of the Third World is also a proxy for their cultural hostility to policies that allow a sustainable environment for wealth creation, once they migrate here and begin to vote.

The working class Republican “chud” may not be someone an elite capitalist would want to socialize with, but the fact the guy is happy to see the capitalist succeed, and unlike more verbally interesting Left intellectuals with fake masters degrees, he doesn’t resent wealth and won’t celebrate when the successful are defenestrated by the mob; while he may not be the most interesting dinner companion, he is the capitalist’s natural and stable political ally. Sustainability-minded capitalists want that guy to have a stake in the system with a living wage, dignified manufacturing job, and a pension. They should also want him going to a conservative church where he’s taught to respect his employer and that coveting is a sin.

If democracy is inevitable, then economically, politics is a hidden factor of production. The value of workers is not only their production minus their wage but the voting preferences they express in allowing capitalists to keep their profits.

Recovery

Both strategies are of the genus I describe internally to my teams as “if you win, you lose.” Typically these are strategies that save or make a bit of money by skirting a rule but have catastrophic consequences if noticed, and the more such a strategy scales, the more made at the margin, but the higher the odds of getting caught, like the proverbial picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Shortcuts are tempting but often add cumulative “risk debt” as they scale. Promoting the Left and annoying the Right has undermined, in two independent domains, the political basis of both tech monopolies and Israel’s ethnonationalism.

For both Big Tech and those interested in the survival of Israel, recovery from bad political strategies will require actions exceeding in enthusiasm and demonstrated loyalty to a new coalition than those that would have been required absent previous strategic mistakes. For the guy who got caught cheating on his wife, flowers and chocolates aren’t going to do the trick anymore. Their interests are late to the party, and younger, smarter opportunists have taken all the cheap bids on offer. Elon’s monopolies are going to be fine, World War II might as well be Roman history for Gen Z, and young religious conservatives perceive dispensationalism as wrong, cringe, and passe’. It’s pay to play now.

Particularly for the post-Trump, desimped Republican Party, easy reconciliation and cheap grace will be difficult. To paraphrase Ibram X. Kendi, the only remedy to past bias is present bias. The only remedy to present bias is future bias. Tune the algorithms to program the NPCs to deliver a blowout Republican victory and these monopolies may endure. Fire the SJWs in overstaffed bureaucracies, Elon-style, when they complain about the new plan. Start cultivating a sustainable culture of competency, and stop promoting and importing degeneracy that creates resentful losers who hate the successful.

But mostly, it’s time to get out the checkbooks. Luckily, Trump is a realist who loves to negotiate. I’m thinking he’ll land on something like 2-3x what was donated last cycle to those who turned on their patrons. More importantly, there is an opportunity to form a durable coalition of natural allies rather than an unstable one dependent on knife-balancing manipulation of functional hypocrisy.

1. One of the reasons I believe a law degree is good preparation for leading a business is that most business people are overly cautious around legal issues they don’t really understand, and most are too cheap to pay for early strategic legal advice. In this vacuum, HR people serve as internal lawyers on personnel issues, without the benefit of a good lawyer’s intelligence, practicality, cynicism, or all-important attorney-client privilege. Most HR folks aren’t very smart compared to technical founders and are true believers in “public policy,” working against the interests of the company in hiring the best to maximize NPV profit. One certainly can’t have the kind of conversation with them that one could have with a good lawyer, all protected by privilege. “Here’s what I would like to do, but it doesn’t sound legal, so how do we make this legal by other means and achieve the same outcome and what are the true risks if we take an aggressive approach?”

2. Christian prophecy enthusiasts forget that the establishment of Israel was a self-fulfilling prophecy, not some completely independent confirmation of their historically novel theological system. Most American Christians were already eager to see a Jewish state by 1880 or so due to the influence of the Scofield Bible, so they could be “raptured” soon and fantasize about escaping the pains of death, and this pre-existing American political support for Israel is what enabled her to survive. The details of this end-times mythology involve a lot of death and destruction centering around Israel, certainly exceeding that of WWII, so it’s perhaps understandable that Jewish leaders were a little creeped out by Christian Zionists’ self-interested philosemitism. That said, to let someone else’s religious fixations compromise a functional, nearly cost-free realpolitik strategic advantage shows a lack of diplomatic maturity.

3. I am skeptical of conspiracy theories about this because it’s not so obvious there was much of a master plan. The efforts of Leftists to undermine the family and traditional notions of patriotism and nationhood had early effects on alienating much of the Jewish community from supporting Israel, an effect that is increasingly salient as memories and personal testimonies of the 1940s fade. High intermarriage rates of left-aligned Jewish individuals, as high as 50-75%, reduced the ranks of culturally influential people who identified as Jews, with many conservative rabbis saying the phenomenon — a direct consequence of a secularizing society making intermarriage more practical — is functionally equivalent to genocide.

An effective conspiracy would have been to have lavished their most loyal and rigidly committed supporters — low-church evangelical dispensationalists who literally believe God will curse them if they don’t unconditionally support Israel — with funds and social status, while restricting immigration, and thus political power, from the almost universally antisemitic Third World, the opposite of the strategy actually pursued. The most solid base for Israel to survive for centuries is a Christian, largely evangelical America with a religious commitment to its survival, and a non-secular, highly religious society such that intermarriage rates among American Jews would have been minimized.

What seems to have happened is that two contradictory strategies got pursued at once, and the first generation of sexual liberation, played against the background of a still-religious society, is a lot of fun for a lot of people and thus had its own independent momentum. Transgression against norms and corruption of the innocent only gives a thrill when there’s a standard of transgression and fresh supply of innocents from a traditional culture, and is boring and bland otherwise. In musical terms, the blues scale only sounds gritty and cool on top of a major scale base.

4. Ideally, it would be most stable if suffrage were restricted to the classes of people capable of deadly, organized violence, aggregating the preferences of those capable of creating instability in repeated, simulated combat, i.e. elections. A reasonable proxy might be the ability to meet the Army’s active combat Ranger minimum standard of 6+ unassisted pull-ups along with an ASVAB score indicating a ~90+ IQ. If those incapable of effective organized violence decide elections at the margin by either sheer numbers or fraud, contrary to the preferences of the capable, the resulting reservoir of potential revolutionary energy could bring catastrophic consequences.

5. Not to mention the strategic defense value vis-a-vis foreign enemies of keeping domestic manufacturing capability for the necessaries of military production, which is synonymous with all but the most frivolous industries. The degeneration of responsible leadership in the US is illustrated by the fact that Russia, with 1/14 our GDP, manufactures at least triple the ammunition of the US and Europe combined, with similar numbers for other defense-related industries.