Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC's Tech Scene Is Not
wired.comI don’t think it’s possible to be more insufferable than the All-In gang (David Sachs, etc), even Friedberg has gone anti-science (Natural gas? Really) and MAGA. Calicanis moved to Texas. These aren’t Silicon Valley people.
It's all well and good to deny that this group represents SV, but I do think they're more representative of the leadership class than most would like to admit. They were among the first people to call out that layoffs were coming. Even if their reasoning was bad, they're well connected enough to understand the vibe among the wealthiest people in the area. Within two years of that prediction, and after Musk had laid off 80% of Twitter, hundreds of thousands of tech workers had lost their jobs.
Even if the podcast makes it obvious that these men are clueless dilettantes, they were still lucky enough to have invested money into the right companies at the right time. They are well connected and rich. They're part of the private group chats that people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen are using to shape the vibe, and like it or not, people like this have a lot of influence over the business culture in the valley.
What's most puzzling to me is how at this point a larger part of SV hasn't distanced itself with All-in Podcast-adjacent people a lot more vocally. I think the lasting power of that region hinges on some important voices doing that sooner rather than later, because they're actively damaging the whole brand of SV at this point.
Yeah it's weird that people who agree with each other don't distance themselves from each other.
Everyone in Silicon Valley agrees with the All-in Podcast clowns? Nah. PG himself has had beef with David Sacks. It's just surprisingly quiet.
By silicon valley, they mostly mean the usual suspects (VC loudmouth posters like Maguire), whose opinions can be dismissed as tedious noise. I found this bit telling though:
> A handful of questions focused on how a Mamdani mayoralty would affect the tech industry. Borthwick says he asked Mamdani how he would respond to the risk that artificial intelligence poses to jobs—in particular, entry-level white-collar jobs—over the next several years. “I'm kind of amazed that this has not become already a campaign issue,” Borthwick says. He says that Mamdani “admitted that this hasn't been a focus of the campaign, but would need to be a focus if he was elected.” But overall, Borthwick didn’t feel Mamdani’s answer was specific enough.
I continue to be amazed by how many tech-oriented people assume this possibility is a matter of when, not if. What evidence is there that it has displaced workers? Competence on benchmark tests does not imply competence at creating complete solutions for complex, bespoke systems. These sci-fi speculations increasingly feel like self-absorbed delusions of grandeur.
Zohran's run one of the smartest, most focused campaigns Ive ever seen. Honestly at this point his competition is in a race to the bottom, I'd say most NY'ers, even the millionaires, like him. It seems most of the people with issues with him are billionaires or people that live in the suburbs.
+1. Philanthropist Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of Renaissance Technologies founder James Simons, gave $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani last week. It's nice to know there are some decent wealthy people out there still.
I think a lot of people in the 'less than a billion' range probably understand that raising the floor of the quality of life in the place they live is a net boon for everyone and that they wont really miss the extra couple thousand a year they pay in to make that happen. The problem really always seems to be the ultra-hyper-mega-wealthy.
> Gemini cofounders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan have also posted about Mamdani with some combination of anger, fear, and dread since his primary win.
Yes, Garry Tan's message is disappointing: https://archive.ph/o/mTmBP/https://x.com/garrytan/status/193...
I for one am shocked that the man responsible for one of the more visible apparatus for neoliberal capital allocation, one responsible for such luminaries as doordash, with which you can rent a poor person to bring you treats, has some shitty opinions about someone who actually wants to improve his community.
> Silicon Valley
In this case, does that mean something more like "an exclusive clique of lucky tech-bros that converge on political views in their private channels"?
As a larger region/industry, I can't see why SV would "panic" about a city mayor of a different city in another state thousands of miles away, no matter how populous the city is.
I imagine that is indeed what it means. It's probably like using "Washington" to describe the higher-ups in the US government. It doesn't really refer to the ordinary people who live there.
The "panicking" people mentioned in the article all seem to be more politically oriented than tech. No one thinks Linda Yaccarino is a tech-bro or in Silicon Valley.
Its just a bunch of people that see "socialist" and panic.
they dont even know what it means, its just the big scary word.
Either that or they understand exactly what it means, the actual reality of it as compared to the "sounds nice in theory..."
What's the reality of having a mayor who is described as socialist?
Well I guess he is "described" as a socialist in the same way the sky is "described" as blue. Your question is easy to answer...look at all of human history and around the world right now to see what you get when the far left gets their hands on the levers of power.
Yeah, we were plagued by [checks notes] the New Deal followed by multiple decades of American prosperity and the growth of the middle class.
One of the more interesting parts of that story is that in that time, the fascists actually tried a takeover of the US government, executing on a plan to sideline the President and replace him with a shadow government.
Fortunately, they failed. They tried to recruit a populist veteran into their ranks who had no particular love for a government that had abused its World War I veterans... But had less love for a bunch of (essentially) early-twentieth-century technocrats that had profited off the sacrifices of the veterans. He refused to keep the conspiracy and blew the lid off it, and his reputation was both public enough and spotless enough that the conspirators couldn't either silence him or tarnish him.
Wikipedia overview is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
There are better scholarly sources for the details, but an entertaining source for a summary is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-insurrectio...
(The conspirators were never prosecuted. One hypothesis as to why is that Roosevelt saw an opportunity and co-opted the plot: some of his New Deal policies were facing pushback and he might have put on the table for the conspirators "You can dodge a treason trial if you just back the new policy with your capital and your political will").
(p.s: I probably shouldn't extrapolate this historical anecdote to the modern era, but this story does give me reason to wonder if a rule like "In the industrial era, massive inequality due to under-regulated capitalism leads to attempts at reform, and those attempts breed counter-reform in the form of fascists and their sycophants formed by those who perceive they have the most to lose in reform..." might hold water).
"I probably shouldn't extrapolate this historical anecdote to the modern era..." yes cherry-picked history taken in isolation is utterly meaningless.
Just for balance here's some cherries I've picked on the left side of the political spectrum:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
How do these people relate to Democratic Socialists in the United States of America in the twenty-first century, since that's the political affiliation of the person we're actually talking about?
Taken to its extreme, any system of government is bad. The people you list there have one thing in common and it's not socialism: they were all malignant narcissists. A malignant narcissist in charge of any government -- left or right wing, communist or capitalist -- will create chaos, death, and destruction. Witness now, the American government falling into fascism under the leadership of yet another malignant narcissist. If things keep going this way, the US will suffer the same fate as the USSR. Not because the US fell to socialism, but because it fell to narcissistic authoritarianism.
Mamandi, for his part, is not a malignant narcissist, so New York should probably not turn out like Soviet Russia. The US as a whole on the other hand may not be so lucky.
I see European quality of life, not some imagined demons.
Surely you understand that the word socialism means a lot of different things to different people?
You argument is that this is "just generally bad"? Or somehow a socialist mayor will be the downfall of western civilization or something? It seems like if his policies are bad, he won't be reelected and you'll have a more succinct example to point to than "all of human history". The great thing about a mayor is that they have very limited ability to impact civil rights, Giuliani notwithstanding.
Well this rather small level of nuanced thinking you are suggesting is never applied to conservatives is it? So we'll take the same approach with liberals.
What you are saying is effectively dog-whistling in support of Stalinism. And that means you support the killing millions of people.
Clearly you are evil and your career should be destroyed.
Look how smart and virtuous I am everybody!
In the US, "socialist" describes the people supporting Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. So in the US, socialism would be a net positive.
That seems like a reductive defence of a platform that is pitching rent control and socialized housing without addressing underlying demand. Which is basically the recipe the entire western world has used for half a century and has resulted in the worst housing price inflation in history.
The hard truth is that New York isn't even remotely dense enough for the demand. The entirety of lower Manhattan from Canal St. to midtown is "low" density. As is everything above 59th. And this is codified. So no wonder NYC housing prices are out of control. NYC should look like Sao Paulo based on demand.
He's been very clear about addressing underlying demand through increased supply.
I'll break it down for you.
For a long time, neoliberals like Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have run the Democratic party. They have enjoyed soaking up the progressive votes from the more left parts of the party, but they have done everything possible to prevent those elements from rising too high in the power structure. You saw it in 2016 when the party leadership coalesced around Hillary to nudge out Bernie, and again in 2020 when they did the same with Biden after Bernie won Nevada.
Neoliberals and the left have a lot of tension. The left believes that liberals, due to their affinity for corporations, will side with fascists over socialists when it comes time to choose sides.
To date, liberals have proven that correct. The result has been for my lifetime that no matter which party is in power, corporations are treated favorably.
But times are changing. The neoliberals are getting old, and it's time for them to retire and pass the torch. My whole life, I'm 40, Democratic leadership have been pro corporation liberal boomers: Clinton, Gore, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer... they held onto power as long as they could, but time is ticking and it's time for millennials to takeover.
And millennials are decidedly less pro corporation. We are not like our parents, we are not going to treat corporations like our parents did. For my whole adulthood, we've been told by the boomer generation that our ideas about society and governance are not good, and progressive ideals are unelectable. AOC began a wave of congressional elections that proved them wrong, at least for local congressional elections. Then we started to see rising stars like Buttigieg get top leadership positions in government. Now, Mamdani represents the next milestone -- a progressive millennial at a high executive position for a huge city like NYC.
So that's what this race is about and why it has national implications. It's progressive versus neoliberal, and if the progressive wins, it's going to be harder in the future to claim that progressives are unelectable. If he (god forbid) ends up doing a good job, then it's going to be harder to claim progressive policies are wrongheaded.
It's also millennial versus boomer. Cuomo and Adams are both boomers. It's probably not lost on a lot of people that if they lose, it might be the last time a boomer will ever be elected as Mayor in NYC. Mamdani's election would really be the end of the post 9/11 era for New York and the start of something new for the city.
So why is SV anxious? Mamdani is a harbinger for a new age. It means the neoliberal boomers are going to the wayside, and the progressive millennials are coming to power. Which, if you listen to what they have to say about billionaires, might make you nervous if you're a billionaire.
Too bad most of this is meaningless, and the actual policy is the only thing standing between America and another 50 years of housing crises. When the so called progressive millennial is pitching rent control as the solution to housing in the largest city in the US you already know it's fucking Joever.
Social policy is popular among millennials, that doesn't make it good. Mamdani and his followers are wilfully ignorant to the root causes of the issues NYC is facing.
You should probably learn more about his housing policy.
We are on HN, which daily shouts about MVP and finding market fit.
Young progressives can iterate. Old people cannot, conservatives cannot.
I agree with you about the 50 years: it started in 1980, if I had to pick a specific year, so, good news!
shrug British Columbia (where Vancouver is located) has rent control and people continue to live normally.
Billionaires don't like it when politicians put a target on them.
Billionaires (or Landlords) have been hiding behind class war for thousand years. They continue to find ways to divide and conquer.
The moment a popular politicians start to poke em a little bit is the moment where they will react swiftly
I live in Vancouver. People do not live normally here lmao. I pay $2300 for 430sqft in a city where the median household income is $82,000.
I’m surprised you chose Vancouver for your argument. Are you aware this is one of the worst housing markets in North America for exactly the same reason as NYC?
The one thing BC is doing correctly right now is getting rid of a lot of the market controls and introducing a lot more ways to build new housing, without any explicit focus on “affordable housing” (because that’s a tar pit.) These changes (by a social-forward party like the NDP no less) are what are easing pressure on the market, though it is still deeply unaffordable.
> Are you aware this is one of the worst housing markets in North America for exactly the same reason as NYC?
That's because you pointed out rent control in your earlier argument. It's not the end-all-be-all. I don't know why you picked that specifically knowing that Vancouver has rent control and to some degree it's fine.
His platform is more than rent control no?
> The one thing BC is doing correctly right now is getting rid of a lot of the market controls
BC got rid of Airbnb and that's one factor among many others that influence the pricing today: high interest rate, Trump tariff, China econ not doing well hence not a lot of Mainland China money flowing to Vancouver like it used to be. All these contribute to weaker demand.
The getting rid of zoning, while I fully support it for my own benefit, is yet to be seen IMO.
Great comment, regret I only have one upvote. Won't be appreciated here unfortunately.
I think that this is actually separate classes of people. This article is using "silicon valley" to talk about a small (but very influential) group of very wealthy investor types, and "new york tech scene" to mostly talk about NYC founders and not investors. Plenty of finance guys in NYC are very upset about Mamdani's primary win.
I'm a silicon valley founder but definitely not investor and I'm quite optimistic about Mamdani's approach to measuring where problems are and then pitch complicated fixes in a way that can be understood by average voters. The "socialism" label doesn't bother me. I know a lot of people in silicon valley rank and file engineers and technical founders who think similarly privately.
It's the elite billionaires that are afraid because they want to keep their place at the top with minimum effort.
Their assets continue to generate generational wealth and once that concept is taken away, they lost the only leverage for power: wealth.
It's a funny ideology that's like "We're going to end scarcity and implement UBI, but also, be scared of socialism."
> We're going to end scarcity and implement UBI,
I don't think that I've ever heard anyone in SV, at least not anyone with any real power, honestly suggest that. They don't want to pay people more than they absolutely have to now, and that's with most labor being done by humans. When humans stop being the engine of economic growth, why would those people suddenly want to implement UBI and end scarcity?
It's a fugazi meant to make you think that the people doing things have considered all of the angles, but they haven't.
Sam Altman says it all the time. If Sam Altman "doesn't have any real power" than the phrase doesn't mean anything.
How close is a bill implementing UBI to being passed in Congress?
It seems like as soon as any particular set of ideas starts to attract a dedicated following said group abandons reason in favor of dogmatism, lack of consistency be damned.
Compare and contrast the following and you might find that this human tendency isn't new and isn't likely to change, but it can be gamed and guided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
I was aware of that one, but this one, while being entirely obvious, is quite thought-provoking:
A more honest way of writing this might be ”we’re going to test UBI because it’s untested, but Mamdani is scary bc rent control has been shown over and over again to be bad for cities.”
I think you're right that this is what people believe. But as far as I've been able to tell, Mamdani's platform does not include anything about rent control.
The closest position he's advocating for is to freeze the rent stabilization rate for 5 years while massively ramping up the construction of new apartments to bring rental costs down.
Much of the pushback about Mamdani seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference betwene "rent control" and "rent stabilization". I think it's extremely rare to see a politician understand the supply/demand aspect of housing costs so well. He really seems to understand these dynamics, certainly better than anyone he's running against.
Is that difference relevant here? I'm not familiar with the difference, but looking it up real quick, they seem to be extremely similar. They both act as price controls, which implies the same sorts of economic consequences.
Yes. Rent control is what most people are familiar with (grandma living in a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village paying $200 / month, locked in since the 1970's). Rent stabilization is just a regulation that puts some type of reasonable cap on how much landlords can increase the rent every year, usually around 3-5% per year.
This is especially relevant in this election, as Cuomo is attacking Mamdani for living in a rent stabilized apartment, suggesting it's hypocritical because he can afford a more expensive apartment. This is deliberately trying to muddy the distinction between "rent stabilized" and "rent controlled" (about half of NY apartments are rent stabilized, and there is absolutely no cultural expectation that people move out when they get a raise, or whatever nonsense Cuomo's suggesting).
I'm still not sure what the important distinction is. Are you saying it's that rent control freezes the price entirely, while rent stabilization allows it to increase? That doesn't seem to be right from what I'm seeing; "rent control" includes systems where the rent can increase. NYC apparently has both and NYC rent control does allow for (capped) rent increases, according to the NYC government: https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/01/fact-sheet...
While rent controlled apartments can increase the rent, it's extremely limited, usually based on the landlord's expenses and not market conditions.
Rent stabilization is roughly based on the inflation rate, so, while tenants who've lived in one place for a while might be getting something approximately considered a "sweet deal", it's not the ridiculous scenario rent control can produce. One other relevant distinction, rent controlled units can be passed down to family, keeping the same rent rate. Rent stabilized apartments can also be passed down, but it's the same as if a new tenant was taking over—the price can be reset back to market rate.
rent control is a huge part of New York City, and has been around for ages. Hasn't been so bad for it, last I checked city is still doing pretty good.
Finding an apartment in NYC is still terrible but we don't have a way to duplicate the Earth and remove rent control and re do the last 50 years. If there were no rent control, who's to say how things would look like today? $500/month studio apartments in mega highrises because we also deregulated zoning and housing regulations in this hypothetical.
I don't think that Silicon Valley's / NY Tech's primary concern about Mamdani is rent control. You think NY Tech CEO's are pro rent control for a reason Silicon Valley CEO's aren't?
Two separate sets of people maybe; I think this article is using "silicon valley" to talk about a small (but very influential) group of very wealthy investor types, and "new york tech scene" to mostly talk about NYC founders.
It's actually very straight-forward. UBI still means that most people's money eventually flows to the rent-seekers (Billionaires). Socialism (and I know this is not the Socialism Mamdani is proposing), means that most people own the means of production and rent-seeking isn't possible.
Ending scarcity and funding UBI is uniquely possible in a capitalist society, where there is excess wealth generation. In the UK we use our capitalist excess wealth to fund socialised healthcare.
But don't mistake socialised service provision for socialism
Socialism implies state control of the means of production.
The results of socialism, we witnessed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere during the 20th century: scarcity of goods and services
Eventually a socialist state runs out of private wealth to seize, and it becomes completely corrupt and totalitarian due to its monopoly over the means of production. And then the people rise up and demand a the restoration of a free society where people can own the fruits of their labour.
In all the actual examples I can think of, the totalitarianism came first. Eastern Europe mostly had socialism imposed by an occupying force, and that same force also imposed totalitarian governments. In other places, Communists took over, set up a totalitarian government, and then proceeded to implement whatever they thought socialism/communism entails.
>Socialism implies state control of the means of production.
Socialism literally implies the opposite. That's why it's called socialism. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production. Under fascism, the government and the state collaborate to own the means of production. Under socialism, the means of production are socially (collectively) owned. In the most extreme interpretation of socialism, communism, the goal is the elimination of the state entirely.
Granted, historically, communist states tended to centralize power rather than work towards their own elimination because that's the inherent evil of governments, particularly revolutionary governments. But to claim that socialism presupposes authoritarianism is to expose the fact that everything you know about socialism comes from capitalist propaganda.
>And then the people rise up and demand a the restoration of a free society where people can own the fruits of their labour.
(╯°□°)╯ ┻━┻ That's socialism!
> Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production
What are "capitalists" and by which rules of capitalism do they hold a monopoly on the means of production?
I live in a capitalist country (the UK), I'm an ordinary member of the public, and I'm free to start a business, own it, and therefore own a means of production.
Which UK citizens are unable to own the means of production?
Since it’s unworkable, in practice, for “everyone” to own something, socialism inevitably means state ownership.
There’s no getting around this.
If everyone owns something, no one owns it.
Socialism inevitably means state ownership only because states make themselves inevitable, not because state ownership is an inherent property of socialism per se. Plenty of examples exist of socialism working at a smaller scale, such as with worker owned cooperatives. If you're a programmer, you might own your own means of production. Free software is socialist in principle - all of that code is collectively owned.
But when the monopoly on violence gets involved, socialism often gets co-opted to serve the interests of the state rather than the people. I would argue that authoritarianism and and the creation of an elite centralizing and controlling wealth and resources for itself is as much a fail state for capitalism as it is for socialism, that it's just a different bunch of pigs feeding at the trough.
And to refer to your earlier comment, socialized provision of services is absolutely a form of socialism. If those services aren't being run for a profit under market principles, made available only to consumers who can afford it, and that profit isn't being captured to increase the wealth of private ownership, then it's a form of socialism.
In the US we have Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are ostensibly socialist programs (certainly they were denounced as such when created.) One might argue that they aren't truly socialist since they don't collectivize the means of production but they certainly aren't capitalist in principle.
Of course it also helps to remember that "socialism" encompasses a wide spectrum of ideology and theory, and that if you get five socialists in a room and ask for a definition of socialism you'll wind up with seven manifestos and a fistfight. There are socialists who will argue for Soviet and Chinese style central control, and will point out (as capitalists will about capitalism) that socialism brought those states out of grinding poverty and vastly improved their peoples' quality of life, and others who abhor the violence and oppression of authoritarian socialism, believing it can only be achieved through nonviolence and voluntarism.
Point being that absolutist phrases like "socialism inevitably means state ownership" don't work as a useful critique because they don't consider the flexibility and adaptability of socialism as a concept. They tend to be thought-terminating cliches, like "capitalism is the worst system, except for all others," which serve to to normalize the premise that criticism of capitalism is futile because no useful alternatives to capitalism can possibly exist.
I live in Silicon Valley. I don't notice any panic.
He's terrible though. Is that "panic".
Yes. That's panic.
So assessing someone's ability to govern is "panic".
How about the voters?
Is any negative assessment of the candidate "panic"?
it is when youre wrong
Yes. That's panic.
So voters should not assess a candidate.
Should they go into the voting booth without looking and randomly pull levers?
Voters vote on who they like, not if they can govern.
whats the matter californian, scared of a little wealth tax?
Given that California's top tax rate is 13.3% to New York City's 14.8%, I'm not sure whos supposed to be scared.
You're thinking of income tax. Wealth tax is a tax on, well, wealth, rather than just on what you earn. I don't think any US jurisdiction currently has a wealth tax.
Property taxes - which exist in all 50 states — are a wealth tax.
Actually I think Zohrans policy is the same as the one enacted in Massachussetss in 2022, the 'millionaires tax'. Its provided 2 billion to the state and theres still more millionaires in the state than there was when it was implemented. I hope we do this in NYC!