“I am special, look at me. I will remain special. I won’t allow you to stop me from being special.” broadly speaking.

(this is not to say skill and effort are not needed to become very wealthy and powerful, but most of it is luck, based on the evidence)

One caveat I’d carve out is for parents. I have friends who had kids in the San Francisco system. It’s rough every way, but nevertheless, there is a noticeable preference for certain races and attributes. (I say this as someone who would have probably been in one of the “good” groups.)

I don’t think Andreessen is motivated by this because he is a thoroughly selfish creature. But it may be animating his supporters.

The shitty half-assed way companies implemented it, helped make it really unpopular.

It's wild that so much emotion, fear and anger can be stirred up with a topic that has not touched them.

> not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

I have friends in academia who had in the recent past been told not to hire any more "white guys".

Examples abound to justify DEI phobia.

You say that because you lack the tribal mindset. While people who do have the tribal mindset, if they see another person of the same demographic as them being mistreated, will automatically interpret it as a personal threat to themselves and their friends, and as evidence of discrimination against their group - regardless of the facts of the case.

Every single admissions committee, scholarship, grant, employment opportunity, corporate leadership development program, conference speaker selection or other opportunity for advancement in my entire life have given preferential treatment to racial minority or female applicants.

It's so insane to suggest people haven't personally experienced it. If you've ever applied to a competitive admissions university, applied for a scholarship, applied for a grant or applied for a job as a straight white guy, then you've done so knowing that even if you're the best candidate on merit you might still lose out on diversity.

The recruiters and HR at my current employer openly discuss preference for "diverse" candidates, and in some cases don't even give phone screens to white male applicants for key roles. This is common throughout the tech industry, and it's even more pronounced in academia and the arts. It's obvious in admissions to medical school, business school or law school.

Maybe some people are oblivious to how strong the DEI or formerly "affirmative action" forces have been in their life, or just know better than to admit it out loud in polite company, but that doesn't mean that they haven't missed out on jobs or other opportunities because of it.

Possibly what terrified them most was the Work From Home movement and Quiet Quitting. Both were real workers asserting their needs for a sane un-exploitated life and a fair deal.

Both of those emerged from COVID, with the hard proof that commuting daily to an office was not only not required, it is actively counterproductive for profitable business. It was proof that RTO was at best an outmoded model preserved primarily as a means of control over the workers, even "respected" educated knowledge workers.

To people with $billions who see both their wealth and their personal identity as being able to exploit people and extract their resources to their own purposes at will, this is an existential threat.

So, yes, their self-victimization is bullsh*t, and merely another play in the Oligarch's playbook.

(Edit: clarifying by inserting missing words)

It is no surprise that we saw one of the largest increases in worker power (especially in tech) between mid 2020 and 2022 and that the bosses went nuts in reaction to this. Remote work. Compensation increases. Tons of new benefits. The bosses tried to push back against this with the "quiet quitting" stuff and crying that everybody was actually working two jobs and stealing from the bosses based on a small number of anecdotes. But this didn't really stick.

Then came AI. Finally, a way to stick it to those noisy workers. Magical. The bosses can do all of the stuff they want without paying people (or by paying people in vastly cheaper regions by augmenting them with AI). This is why the narrative around AI is "we need to lay people off to pay for training AI" and "we need to lay people off because people should be more efficient by using AI" rather than "now that our workers are more efficient we can do more and hire more." You see this now with CEOs saying in public that AI is going to completely upend job markets.