Paul Graham Is Not A Public Intellectual
And Y Combinator Should Die In A Taint Fire. Here's Why.

Michael O. Church
58 min ago
Zach Tellman recently wrote a brilliant takedown of Paul Graham. For those fortunate enough not to know what Y Combinator (YC) is, it’s a venture capital fund that specializes in inexperienced founders. It almost certainly didn’t invent a single one of the sleazy business practices for which Silicon Valley is known, but it has a track record of legitimizing corporate capitalism and selling bad career choices to the young and impressionable.

Paul Graham is YC’s founder and he appears to be the sort of man who writes pro-billionaire essays during a pandemic, in a country where said pandemic’s severity was increased by two orders of magnitude by pro-billionaire policies, and thinks it somehow makes him contrarian.

Graham seems to think people dislike billionaires because of juvenile envy. We’re not smart enough to see the 27-dimensional chess game they’re playing. It looks like they’re cheating at Monopoly, which even five-year-olds know how to do, but we’re wrong. Why? Because we’re stupid. Why? Because if we were smart, we’d be billionaires. In Paul Graham’s world, it’s still the 1970s and those of us who don’t like billionaires— by which, I mean those of us who dislike extreme wealth inequality, not necessarily that we dislike them all as people— are spoiled children sitting in coach on a flight to Paris, seeing the people in first class getting slightly better food and having a whiny introduction to the fact that Life Isn’t Fair. No, buddy. That ain’t it. I don’t envy billionaires at all— I don’t want to trade places and get a better seat in the disgusting world they’ve built. Rather, I want to tear down the world they’ve built so we can all have something better. Huge difference, pal.

I have some history with Paul Graham. I met him in 2007; I doubt he remembers me. He seemed like a nice guy. I have no personal reason to dislike him; he has not, to my knowledge, personally harmed me. Some of his dirtbag acolytes have, but that’s a topic for another time. I give Paul Graham the benefit of the doubt on that one. However, he has spent the entirety of his cultural life defending the indefensible, cheerleading an economic system that has impoverished an entire world to enrich an incestuous community of investors in the suburbs of San Francisco.

My first exposure to Paul Graham was in the mid-2000s. I was, I confess, then a fanboy. I encountered three of his essays, “Great Hackers”, “The Python Paradox”, and “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”. At the time, I was basically still a kid and, for typical reasons of immaturity, I really bought into what he was selling. In order to understand his neo-Randian message, let’s look at his “Nerds” essay.

Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

So, let’s talk about this. No one gets bullied in American culture because he is smart; people get bullied because they are different. It is as true in elementary school as it is in high school. It is more true in the typical workplace than it is in high school.

Why so? I could write thousands of words about American culture— what’s good about it, and what’s bad— but I’ll focus strictly on corporate culture. It phases changes between individualism and collectivism at will; it invokes language of individual responsibility when it wishes to isolate a target, but falls back on collectivist language (“team player”) to rein anyone whose excellence becomes a threat to leadership. It’s protean; it’s shifty.

There are a large number of positive contributions of American culture to the world, but one of the negative ones, I think, is the conception of “cool”. Essentially, status-affirming indifference is valued, whereas sincerity is gauche. This, taken to its illogical extreme, leads to a culture of people treating others shabbily to prove they “don’t care”.

Nerds, by definition, are the opposite of “cool”. They care about things: programming languages, role-playing games, literature. They stand out for this. They also get punished for it in, say, a corporate environment.

There are some fascinating American cultures— plural— with a lot of virtues to speak of. Diversity has in fact made us better as a nation. Unfortunately, we no longer have a mainstream culture. Instead of substance, there is commerce. Virtue and sincerity are punished. You are out there to buy or sell something and you do best to project high social status— to be “above it all”.

Graham seems to think this is limited to high school. No. It’s just as bad in college, despite the promises these expensive institutions offer about being somehow superior because “the dumbs” and “the poors” have been filtered out. Then, it gets far, far worse in the corporate workplace. Being unpopular in high school means you don’t get invited to parties that aren’t all that great in the first place. Being bad at office politics means you lose your income and your health insurance.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders are oblivious to this; now they they are the bullies, they believe there are no bullies.

Graham continues (italic inset mine):

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? [citation needed] It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

Though I can’t separate Paul Graham these days from the toxic sludge of Y Combinator and Hacker News, these paragraphs are mostly solid, except for one thing: he really doesn’t know what “the real world” is. He never experienced it. He raised venture capital in the 1990s when anyone could. He sold a bunch of Lisp code to Yahoo. Good for him. He got to experience what most of us wish was the real world, as the real world.

I won’t knock him for his privilege, or for having taken advantage of the opportunity when I would have done the same. I just find it upsetting that he tries to assert that his experience was somehow normal.

Graham continues (emphasis mine):

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

This is where Graham diverges into STB territory. I don’t begrudge Mr. Graham his wealth and privilege. I’m a leftist— I support radical politics toward the end of allowing more people to have that kind of economic freedom, not fewer— so how could I? Unfortunately, 99 percent of Americans have no choice but to work in “groups of adults […] in the real world” that exist not for a useful common purpose, but toward the end of… executive and shareholder compensation. That’s not an inspiring mission.

The supremacy of the capital-owning class is not something outsiders to said class hold real enthusiasm for— they just have to fake it, because it’s part of the job, and their incomes will be turned off if they stop smiling. The “leaders” (bosses) tend to be those who can ascend organizational ladders unencumbered by conscience, and who are energized by the intrigue and backstabbing that most people find enervating.

Paul Graham evidently doesn’t think much of the American high school. It has “no purpose”, he says. Having also gone to an American high school, I disagree. The purpose was education. I mean, I had great teachers and I had not-so-great teachers, and certainly there were kids who didn’t care to learn, but to say that high school has no purpose is off the mark.

I’ve had a number of friends from other countries ask me if American high school is as terrible as what they see on TV or in film. The answer is: No. It’s boring. Until you have a car, there isn’t a whole lot to do out in suburbia. However, the outright cruelty of 13 Reasons Why and Gossip Girl and Cruel Intentions are extremely uncommon. I was a nerd and invisible to women until I was about 20, but I wasn’t bullied. Most of the “jocks” were stand-up people who worked hard because they wanted to be good at something— in that regard, much like me.

To the extent that there’s an above-baseline amount of backstabbing and cruelty in American high schools, I suspect that it’s because of Hollywood portrayals of what a teenager is supposed to be, rather than the reverse.

At any rate, let’s examine Graham’s argument. He points out that there’s a fair amount of cruelty in high schools, in prisons, and among high-society wives due to boredom. I buy that. It’s not “lack of purpose” that is the issue, but a confluence of two factors: (1) confinement, and (2) low social status.

High school is rough because it’s usually a closed campus. The classes serve a purpose; the lunchroom and study halls are babysitting. Kids are there because the labor market doesn’t want them and because they’re considered too young to safely leave adult supervision. That’s a clear case of low social status due to age. Prisoners are there because of criminal convictions and, in the US, suffer a permanent reduction of opportunity (since employers are allowed to discriminate against ex-felons) that is usually disproportionate to the offense. Society wives are rich, but they’re women in a milieu that, even today, is regressive and patriarchal. It’s not the lack of effect or greater purpose that leads to the culture of vapid cruelty; it’s the confinement and the sense of being unwanted. We see this among animals in factory farms. Even though cannibalism is rare in nature, it becomes common under the stress of extremely cramped living conditions the animals cannot escape.

The corporate environment is exactly the sort of purposeless environment Paul Graham ought to hate. Its common purpose is enrichment of high-status ingrates who operate at a remove from the peasants who do the actual work. Most of the work has no social value; it’s not important at all. When it comes to performance–control tradeoffs, bosses favor the latter, because high performance that a manager cannot control is a threat, not a boon. The confinement is obvious: people have to spend 40 hours in a box every week, even though they often have less than 5 hours per week of real work to do. They increasingly have to work in cubicle or open-plan environments where they are visible from behind— not only stressful, but universally recognized as a sign of low status. They’re miserable, because they know that they only have to put up with this nonsense because of their low social status. People end up in “regular” (non-executive) corporate jobs for a variety of reasons— low socioeconomic status of origin, wrong educational choices, and bad luck— but the system is set up to tell them it’s their fault. They’re told they should expect no better than these demeaning jobs because they “aren’t entrepreneurial”— whatever the fuck that means, because the private-sector apparatchiks who boss them around aren’t entrepreneurs— enough for a better spot. What do you get? Not the nerd paradise Graham wants to believe the corporate world is, but what the corporate world actually is— the same inferno of intrigue, backstabbing, and wasted effort. From the filth-infested halls of 18th-century Versailles to the 21st-century tech company, there really has been no progress in this.

Paul Graham, of course, isn’t responsible for the corporate world being what it is. He didn’t write the rules. My issue with him is that he has taken his privileged experience of “the real world”, an experience that even an ounce of perspective would tell him was atypical, and used it to peddle the false hope on which corporate capitalism runs. All we have to do, says Paul Graham, is learn Lisp and “make something people want” and then the world will be ours.

The man gets a lot wrong, but does this disqualify Graham as a “serious” public intellectual? Not necessarily. In my opinion, Chris Hitchens got a lot wrong in the 2000s but, even then, he was an intellectual force. He was a truth-seeker, and you knew what his motivations and premises were. Sometimes I found his arguments and their conclusions disagreeable, but he never tried to pass a sales pitch off as a dispassionate dissertation.

Paul Graham is, foremost, a salesman. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s his job. If he wasn’t able to sell YC-backed companies and the Y Combinator brand, he’d lose everything he put into them. Most of these companies have nothing else to distinguish them apart from being chosen by a guy with a reputation (accurate or not) for spotting talent among the extremely inexperienced.

Y Combinator lives or dies on its ability to place— that is, to get its companies bought by larger corporations, so their founders can get seven-figure sign-on bonuses and executive jobs, and so their engineers can get severances (pending liquidation preferences, vesting and cliff, and whether Triton is in retrograde). If Paul Graham ceases to be well-liked by the people in position to buy (or not buy) YC-backed startups, YC can no longer place and that will end it— venture-funded startups are not built to be able to survive the scrutiny an IPO requires.

Thus, Paul Graham has no choice but to sell capitalism. If he stopped doing it, no one would want to buy YC-backed companies, and then there would be Y Combinator. I don’t fault him for doing so, but it creates a conflict of interest.

You can be a salesperson and an intellectual, just as you can be a truck driver and an intellectual, or a physician and an intellectual. It is impossible, however, to be a public salesperson and a public intellectual. The jobs conflict. Is your goal to find truth— and help others find truth? Or, is it to influence public opinion in an economically advantageous way? Pick one, you can’t have both. They are 24/7 jobs.

It’s fashionable, and not untrue, to complain of corruption in the media. So many journalists live or die on “access”, which leaves them unable to do actual journalism. You can’t become well-connected and serve the public at the same time; you pick one, or you pick the other, or you get neither. There’s an innate conflict of interest, because to be “well connected” is a euphemism for the ability to gain access, favor, and information from those who operate against the public interest in everything they do.All of this said, there are limits to the degree of ethical compromise traditional (non-technology) media will tolerate. There are lines journalists (except in the tech press) cannot cross. If you write for the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and hold a position in a company you’re covering, you’re expected to disclose it. If an artist offers you $25,000 for a favorable review, you’re expected to refuse. That’s not how it works in Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley is “post-ethics”.

I attended a talk in which Marvin Minsky said he only read science fiction because the entire rest of literature was “the seven deadly sins, over and over again”. Now, I’d be the last to trash science fiction; but I’m not a fan of his view of, you know, the entire rest of literature. Still, this is how techies think. Everything but robots and science is trash, to them. The Singularity is going to happen in 20 years (this was true 20 years ago, and 20 years before that) and after that, the computers are going to produce so much general wealth that we will all be post-scarcity, post-nationalist, post-mortality beings. Given that, all of our art and ethics and religion and politics are so petty, we don’t need them at all. They get in the way. The techie’s argument is: sure, I’ll screw you over today, but 20 years from now you’re going to be immortal because of me.

In the adult world, the word corruption exists; in the tech world, that’s just the savvy use of a social connection. In the adult world, to write news coverage of a business you have a financial interest in, is called a conflict of interest. In the tech world, it makes you a Renaissance Man. In the adult world, we refer to the Establishment’s useful idiots as stooges; in the tech world, they’re called “thought leaders” and they speak at TED or Davos.

Paul Graham seems to be like Ayn Rand, but with the reason most Silicon Valley techies would never listen to her (that she’s a woman) fixed. The glut of disingenuous pseudo-intellectualism has helped Silicon Valley lead our culture to dark places. Squeezing workers and breaking “inconvenient” laws has been dressed up as “innovation” or “disruption” that we will have to tolerate if we want to remain “economically competitive”— but what’s the point of being “competitive” if our standard of living falls apart? Replacing the American middle class with day labor is “the sharing economy”. Y Combinator itself has done some pretty odious things, although much of what I know is non-public and has to stay that way. Of course, we can’t ignore the platform Y Combinator gave to Peter Thiel, who helped legitimize Trump and Trumpism in 2016. It is not a large logical leap to go from the post-truth, post-ethics culture of Silicon Valley— the corporation’s authoritarianism of limited, internal scope that is not yet fascist— into the old-style might-makes-right culture of mob bosses, old-style oligarchs, and authoritarian governments.

Paul Graham has hawked a lot of ideas in his life. Some of these ideas are charismatic. If you’re a 22-year-old with a lot of technical talent but a mediocre track record of social success, it’s a really appealing idea that you can become a tech baller by learning Lisp. I know the charisma of this ideology first-hand, because I bought into the startup mythos and the career snake oil Paul Graham was selling (and is still selling). I have suffered for it. God, have I suffered for it.

I don’t really have a personal reason to dislike Paul Graham. I’ve been harmed by people he has influenced, but not to my knowledge by him, and I don’t think he has evil intentions. Nevertheless, through Y Combinator and its post-ethics culture, he has had a negative effect on the world. He isn’t old, and he has plenty of time to change that— I’d like to see him do it.