Paul Graham has been saying a lot of dumb things, of late, and since he’s rich, those things get taken more seriously than they deserve. I’ve decided that his recent essay on “Refragmentation” is worth some kind of comment. He documents some noted historical changes that have been to his personal benefit, and quite accurately, then poses reasons for those changes that are self-serving and bizarre.

What is “refragmentation”? As far as I can tell, it’s the unwind of the organizational high era in the mid-20th century. In 1950, organizations were strong and respected. Large corporations were beloved, the U.S. government was held in high regard– it had just beaten the Nazis, after all– and people could expect lifelong employment at their companies. There was, in some way, a sense of national unity (unless you were black, or gay, or a woman who wanted more than the cookie-cutter housewife life) that some people miss in the present day. Economic inequality was low, and so was social inequality. Top students from public schools in Michigan actually could go to Harvard without getting recommendations from U.S. Senators. There are some things to miss about this era, and there’s quote a lot not to miss. I’d rather be in this time, but how that period is viewed may be somewhat irrelevant, because there’s no hope of going back to it.

In 2016, organizations are viewed as feeble, narrow-minded, and corrupt. We don’t really trust schools to teach, or our politicians to serve our interests rather than their own, and we certainly don’t trust our employers to look out for our economic interests. Unions and the middle-class jobs they’ve created have been on the wane for decades, and most of our Democrats are right-wingers compared to Eisenhower and even Nixon. In a time of organizational malaise, people burrow into small cultural islands that are mostly expressions of discontent. When I was a teenager, we had the “goths” and the “skaters” and the “nerds” and the “emo kids”. In adulthood, we have apocalyptic religious movements (the percentage of Americans who believe the End Times will occur in their lives is shockingly high) and anti-vaccine crusaders and wing-nuts from the left and the right. There’s good and bad in this. To the good, we’ve abandoned the notion that conformity is a virtue. To the bad, we’ve lost all sense of unity and all hope in our ability to solve collective problems, like healthcare. Rather than build a strong national system like Britain’s NHS, we’ve kept this hodge-podge of muck alive and, with an individual mandate to buy the lousy product on offer, made it worse and far more expensive.

Is this a refragmentation? Culturally, it appears that we’ve experienced one, and culturally, it’s arguably a good thing. Who wants to listen to the same 40 pop songs over and over? I don’t. The self-serve, find-your-own-tribe culture of the 2010s is certainly an improvement over the centralized one of, say, 1950s television.

There are benefits to “fragmentation”, which is why we see strength in systems that enable it. The United States began as a federalistic country with a weak national government, most powers left to the states, in order to allow experimentation and local sensibility rather than central mandate. There are also use cases that mandate unity and coordination. Ultimately, some compromise will be found. Case in point: time zones. Before the railroads were built, time was a local affair with major cities defining “12:00” as solar noon and smaller cities using the time of the nearest metropolis. This was, needless to say, a mess. It means that 11:00 in New York will be 10:37 in Pittsburgh and 11:12 in Boston, and who wants to keep track of all that? Time zones allowed each location to keep a locally relevant time, one usually within 30 minutes of what would be accurate, while imposing enough conformity to prevent total chaos, as would exist in the most fragmented policy toward time.

What I see in the corporate world, on the other hand, is malfragmentation. By this, I mean that there is a system that preserves the negatives of the old organizational high era, while losing its benefits.

This “worst of both worlds” dynamic shouldn’t be surprising, when one considers what post-1980 corporate capitalism really is. It’s neither capitalism nor socialism, but a hybrid that gives the benefits of both systems to a well-connected elite– a social elite often called “the 1 percent”, but arguably even smaller– and the negatives of each to the rest. Take air travel, for one example of this hybridization: we get Soviet quality of service and reliability, but capitalism’s price volatility and nickel-and-diming. Corporate life is much the same. Every corporation has a politburo called “management” whose job is to extract as much work as possible (“from each, according to his ability”) from the workers while paying as little as possible (“to each, according to his need”). Internally, these companies run themselves like command economies, with centrally-planned headcount allowances and top-down initiatives. Yet, the workers (unlike executives) are left completely exposed to the vicissitudes of the market, being laid off (or, in many of these sleazy tech companies that refuse to admit to a layoff, fired “for performance”) as soon as the organization judges it to be convenient. The global elite has managed to give itself capitalism’s upside and socialism’s protection against failure (with their connections, they will always be protected from their own incompetence) while leaving the rest of society with the detriments of the two systems. This chimeric merging of two ideologies or cultural movements is something that they’re good at. They’ve done it before. And so it is with malfragmentation.

Under malfragmentation, the working people are constantly divided. Sometimes the divisions are based on age or social class or (in the lower social classes) race, and sometimes they’re based on internal organizational factors, like the decision that one set of workers is “the star team” and that the rest are underperformers. To be blunt about it, workers are often at fault for their own fragmentation, since they’ll often create the separations on their own, without external help. Let’s use programming, since it’s what I’m most familiar with. You have open-plan jockeys and “brogrammers” who want to drive out the “old fogeys” who insist on doing things properly, you have flamewars on Twitter about whether technology is hostile or is not hostile toward minorities, you have lifelong learners complaining about philistines who don’t have side projects and stopped learning at 22 and the philistines whining about the lifelong learners attending too many conferences, you have Java programmers bashing Rubyists and vice versa, and so on. All of these tiresome battles distract us from fighting our real enemy: the colonizers who decided, at some point, that programmers should be treated as business subordinates. I’m not a fan of Java (on its technical merits) or brogrammers (ick) but let’s put that stuff aside and focus on the war that actually matters.

The fragmentation within programming culture suits the needs of our colonizers, because it prevents us from banding together to overthrow them. Ultimately, we don’t need the executive types; we could do their jobs easily and better than they do their jobs, and they’re not smart enough to do ours. Yet, with all of our cultural divisions and bike-shedding conflicts, we end up pulling each other down. Rather than face the enemy head-on, we cling to designations that make us superior (“I’m an $XLANG programmer, unlike those stupid $YLANG-ists”) and tacitly assert that the rest of us deserve to be lowly business subordinates. In the Philippines, this is given the name of “crab mentality”, referring to the tendency of trapped crabs in a bucket to be unable to escape because, as soon as one seems to be getting out, the others pull it back in. It’s absurd, self-defeating, and keeps us mired in mediocrity.

So what makes this malfragmentation rather than simply fragmentation? Our class enemies aren’t divided. They’re quite united. They share notes, constantly, whether about wages or which individuals to put on “union risk” blacklists that can make employment in Silicon Valley very difficult. Venture capitalists have created such a strong culture of co-funding, social proof, and note-sharing (“let’s make a list of the senior boys with the cutest butts!”) that each entrepreneur only gets one real shot at making his entree into the founder class. I’ve experienced much of this nonsense first-hand, such as when an investor in Quora (almost certainly associated with Y Combinator) threatened that Quora would become “unfundable” unless they banned me immediately from the site. (This was in retaliation toward my tongue-in-cheek invitation of Paul Graham to a rap battle.) The bad guys work together, and fragmentation is for the proles. That’s how malfragmentation works.

You see the malfragmentatory tendency within organizations, indicating that it might be some natural pattern of human behavior. The “protect our own” impulse is very strong, and many groups in authority prefer to “handle matters internally” (which sometimes means, “not at all”). The mid-2010s protests against police brutality have been sparked, in large part, due to a public that is fed up with police departments that seem willing to protect their worst officers. Corporate management is similar, both within and between companies. A negative reference from a manager is often fatal to one’s job candidacy, not because what was said in that reference is believed to be true (a rational person knows that it’s usually not) but because a person who scuffled with a manager is likely to be viewed negatively by other managers, even in different companies. Managers protect their own, and programmers are the opposite– almost too eager to rat each other out to management over tabs-versus-spaces nonsense– and that’s why programmers end up on the bottom.

Elites coalesce, and the proles fragment, and when this matter is brought up, skeptics accuse the person making this sort of statement as harboring a “Conspiracy Theory”. Now, here’s the thing about conspiracy. It exists. No, there’s no Illuminati and there’s no “room where they all meet”. That’s a fantasy. If there were a “room where they all meet”, one could plant a bomb in said room and liberate humanity from its shadowy overlords and icy manipulators… and that’s obviously not the case. The upper-case-C “Conspiracy” doesn’t exist, while lower-case-c conspiracies form and dissolve all the time. Of course, the people forming these don’t think of themselves as “conspirators”, because most of them don’t have any sense of right or wrong in the first place; to them, they’re just trading favors and working together. What we call “abuses of power”, they just call, “power”. Although they are individually far too selfish to pull off the grand Conspiracies of folklore, and there’s plenty of in-fighting within any elite, they’re more than capable when circumstances need them to work together to put down the proles.

It’s easy to understand why elites coalesce: they have something to defend, and their episodes of cooperation don’t require absurd loyalty to a “Conspiracy” when mere selfishness (the desire to stay within, or get further into, an in-crowd) suffices. Why, on the other hand, are proles driven toward fragmentation? Do their overseers deliberately encourage it? To some degree, that happens, but that sort of influence doesn’t seem to be needed. They’ll fragment on their own. This seems to happen because of a culture whose individualism is borne of a sort of social defeatism. We’ve given up on making the collective lot better, so we’ve accepted the low status of the worker as a permanent affair, and we fragment ourselves out of a desire for differentiation. We might accept that programmers in some other language “deserve” to be Scrum-drones on 0.05%, because we’re $XLANG programmers and so much smarter. We’ve given up on the idea that programming might deserve to be a genuine profession where Scrum-drones don’t even get in.

I’ve written before about how Paul Graham is bad for the world. The irony of his piece on “Refragmentation” is that he’s an ultimate source of malfragmentation. He has coalesced the startup world’s founder class, making it far easier for those included in the Y Combinator in-crowd to share social resources (such as contacts into the investor class) and how-to advice on pulling off the unethical business practices for which VC-funded startups are so well known. He decries the old establishment because he wasn’t a part of it, while proposing that the even-worse proto-establishment that has emerged in Silicon Valley is somehow superior because, on paper, it “looks” distributed and “fragmented”. There is an appearance of competition between sub-sectors of the elite that keeps the worker class from figuring out what’s really going on.

This ties in, ultimately, to something much larger than Paul Graham: the Silicon Valley brand. There’s a bill of pretty rotten goods being sold, in order to exploit the middle-class myth that achieving wealth requires starting one’s own business. Of course, achieving extreme wealth almost certainly does require that, but (a) most people would like to strive for reasonable comfort, first, and worry about wealth later, and (b) very few people (meaning, less than 1 percent) who start businesses achieve that status. Thus, a “tech founder” career is sold to people who don’t know any better. In the two-class (investors vs. everyone else) Silicon Valley, it was many founders who were the marks; but in the post-2000 three-class Valley (investors, founders, workers) the game is being played against the workers, with the founders’ assistance. Founders, even if they fail, are permitted to achieve moderate wealth (through acqui-hires and executive sinecures at their investors’ portfolio companies) as a “performance” bonus if they keep up the ruse; they are, in the post-modern meta-company of Silicon Valley, its middle managers. It’s the employees who are being conned, being told that they’re 2-4 years from entree into the founder class when, realistically, they’re about as likely to become “founder material” as they are to win the Powerball. Not only will writing great code never get a programmer introduced to investors, but it will encourage the founders to make sure such an introduction never happens, lest they lose him to another company, or to his own.

The malfragmented Silicon Valley has its worker class laboring under the illusion that they’re working for independent, emerging small businesses when, in fact, they’re working for one of the worst big companies– the Sand Hill Road investor class and the puppet-leader founder class– to have come along in quite a long time. It’s one that carries the negatives of old-style corporate oligopoly, but abandons the positives (such as the employer-side obligations of the old “social contract”). It’s unclear to me whether this ruse is sustainable, and I hope that it isn’t.