Daily Balajisms – Communism vs Wokeism

Redistribution of capital vs redistribution of status. State vs Network.

Balaji Srinivasan says that Communism was about redistribution of capital and the wokeism is about redistribution of status. The main arena shifted from the factory floor to social media.

Communists wanted to capture the state, wokes operate primarily on the network and outside the state. They can temporarily animate a politician who starts to speak their buzzwords, but it is a network-centric phenomenon.

Twitter is something between Library and Liberia, jokes Balaji. A global fight club of intellectual elites. People may think that they fight for a cause on twitter, but actually they are being twitter maximalists – boosting the number of their followers and likes.

The issue is that twitter is a zero-sum environment with a global leaderboard of individuals. It doesn’t have team dashboards, like corporate sales teams do. This can lead into virtue-signaling spirals and all kind of dangerous behavior, like escalating tensions between nuclear powers for clicks and status.

In the communist regimes, both factory owners and workers might have ended up in gulag. Their zero-sum conflict about redistribution of resources turned into a negative-sum situation, where they both lost. What started as zero-sum, ended up negative-sum. From evil to stupid.

Communists in practice acted like Genghis Khan with an ideological overlay, says Balaji. Ideology was just a cover for stealing and violence. They might have been for “peace, land and bread” and against the death penalty in principle. But in practice, once they got into power, they executed their enemies without trial, or after nasty show trials.

After Covid and remote work, there is an exodus of tech talent from Blue cities like San Francisco, where street crime and open drugs scenes is making people leave. The demise of such cities is caused by ideology, not the lack of resources. San Francisco is one of the worst governed cities in the world, thinks Balaji, relatively to its wealth created by tech. It is a case of a resource curse. Like Venezuela, it is also a case of an anarcho-tyranny.  

Conservatives are often too risk-averse and want to just grill with their families and friends. Libertarians are too focused on individual sovereignty. Progressives are too zero-sum and competitive.

Pragmatists and technological progressives are positive-sum. Because tech founders have the first-hand experience of how technology can grow the proverbial pie and move the Pareto-frontier. Instead of trade-offs one gets synergies. Tesla can be cheaper, safer, and faster than ICE competitors.  

Balaji describes his ideology as “win and help win”. His brand of technological progressivism and transhumanism is called optimalism and he contrasts it with maximalism.  

There is tech America and woke America, says Balaji. Tech and woke grew in tandem since the era of personal computing and the internet. Both movements are turning constants into variables. The first is about tech innovations and the second is about moral innovations. In the past these went hand in hand. Tech innovations enable moral innovations, and vice versa.

True charity is investment, says Balaji. Tech is empowering people, and even those founders who don’t get any investment are improving their skills. It’s like a running race, where only one person wins, but everyone gets a workout. Woke ideology is disempowering. Because it is a competition for status of who is the greatest victim. Everyone gets weaker in the process.