Dude, You Do Know That You Are Not White, Don't You?

My Name is Clayton Bigsby Balaji Srinivasan former general partner at Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) is proposing that the tech bros ethnically cleanse San Francisco. 

I'm not joking here.  He is espousiong the fever dreams of the Neo-Nazis, and folks like Elon Musk.  (But I repeat myself)

He has a dream of a San Francisco where the police would enforce restricted neighborhoods, the same sort that kept his parents out of some neighborhoods in his native Long Island.

He also suggests that a clothing color based system of apartheid be enforced.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

If you think that this is best described as, "A ton of fascist-chic cosplay," you get the picture.

The important thing to note here is that Mr. Srinivasan is considered to be one of the great minds in the Silly-Con Valley/Venture Capital ecosphere, and he is nuttier than a fruitcake:

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

Yet more evidence that Andressen, who made his initial fortune on the Netscape browser, which was largely based on code lifted from the Mosaic browser, is just a delusional moron who got lucky.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

………

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

Dude, learn your history.  The shirt is supposed to be brown, not gray.

Also, how badly was this psychopath bullied in middle school for him to publicly tell such stories of nerd revenge pr0n?

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

This sounds an awful lot like Elon Musk's argument against a union at Tesla, where he  said that because there was free frozen yogurt, there was no need for a union. (Again, as Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

This will not work.  Police and their unions are way smarter about working conditions than are tech workers. 

That's not a problem though, because he is suggesting bribing the police:

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

But it gets even weirder:

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they’ll march through the city together.

“A huge win would be a Gray Pride parade with 50,000 Grays,” said Srinivasan. “That would start to say: ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ You have the A.I. Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation.... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers.… You have the police at the Gray Pride parade. They’re flying the Anduril drones …”

………

Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter.

Be forced by the courts to buy it and then destroy its value?

Seriously though, this someone with serious mental issues who is viewed as a prophet by his followers, just like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite, David Koresh, etc.

What is concerning here is not that this guy is a delusional wannabee cult leader, but rather that he is idolized by some of the richest and most powerful men in the nation, men who are trying to take over the government of San Francisco and make Srinivasan's vision real.

It's every white supremacist's wet dream, and these white supremacists, including those sympathetic cops he intends to recruit, will not view him, or people who look like him, kindly.