Will Shaw

I don't think people really understand the fight between Paul Graham and Palmer Luckey which played out this week. To the general public, from a casual perspective, it seemed like two rich guys getting in a heated, impulsive debate on Twitter, dragging out for days. It's not. Paul is worth ~$2.5 billion. Palmer is worth ~$5 billion. Nothing these guys do is impulsive. They've been sitting on this for years. They were arguing in private for months, maybe years, before Palmer decided this week was the correct window of opportunity to make a public attack. Paul Graham is one of the intellectual fulcrum points of Silicon Valley. He funds everyone. He sets the tone. He shapes the agenda. Entry-level professionals mimic his style, his worldview, his mannerisms, the way Paul talks. Everyone parrots his beliefs and policies and essays, as chameleon strivers who are trying to get ahead and climb the social ladder. All of Silicon Valley revolves around a handful of key figures, and Paul Graham was (perceived as) one of the intellectual titans who the entire industry orbited as sycophants. Palmer challenged all that. Paul is an elite, Palmer is an elite, and Palmer Luckey chose to publicly challenge the status quo; the elite consensus; the perceived legitimacy of incumbent elits and their institutions. And he did this for a reason: Palmer is aiming to take the role of Paul Graham, of being the new intellectual godfather of Silicon Valley, based around a new set of ideas: reindustrialization, patriotism, protectionism... rather than America as a deracinated cosmopolitan economic zone to be strip-mined by Third World foreigners. It's much bigger than a Twitter argument. Palmer was publicly demonstrating that the Emperor had no clothes, and that he was strong enough to MOG Paul Graham and get away with it, while other Silicon Valley tech workers would be terrified of making an enemy who could suffocate future business ventures and block potential funding. Palmer Luckey is the face of a new military-industrialist consensus which is seeking to hire American workers for American jobs, to build factories and weapons at home, to remilitarize and reindustrialize, to get away from asset inflation and FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) as a sterile, parasitic rent-seeking economic system. That's the subtext for all of this. It's a public signal of a rising counterelite challenging a stagnant, ossified status quo which can no longer justify or defend their own claim to power.