Venture-Backed Conspiracies

I regret to inform you that Paul Graham, investor and founder of the startup training program Y Combinator, has published a new essay: "The Origins of Wokeness." You can tell the political bent of his screed by the invocation of "woke," no doubt. But at this stage, I'm not sure we even need to see this sort of thing in writing – it's become abundantly clear that Silicon Valley has fully embraced reactionary politics.

"Wokeness," Graham claims, is a "mind virus," the latest version of "political correctness" which he says emerged from universities – surprise, surprise – in the 1980s. Those origins are not in their math or engineering departments, of course. "Obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences." Obviously. These are fields that are too "soft" and too feminized – intellectually inadequate to prepare students for a high-tech future, as we're often told, and yet somehow also so incredibly powerful that they can bend all of society to suit their outrageous political demands, all while making it dangerous for rich white men like Graham to openly speak their minds.

"I saw political correctness arise," he tells us. He was there. "When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it."

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