Someone once explained the Las Vegas gambling complex as “Disneyland for adults”, and the metaphor makes a fair amount of sense. The place sells a fantasy– expensive shows, garish hotels (often cheap or free if “comped”) and general luxury– and this suspension of reality enables people to take financial risks they’d usually avoid, giving the casino an edge. Comparing Silicon Valley to Vegas, also, makes a lot of sense. Even more than a Wall Street trading floor, it’s casino capitalism. Shall we search for some kind of transitivity? Yes, indeed. Is it possible that Silicon Valley is a sort of “Disneyland”? I think so.

It starts with Stanford and Palo Alto. The roads are lined with palm trees that do not grow there naturally, and cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece to plant. The whole landscape is designed and fake. In a clumsy attempt to lift terminology from Southern aristocrats, Stanford’s nickname is “the Farm”. At Harvard or Princeton, there’s a certain sense of noblesse oblige that students are expected to carry with them. A number of Ivy Leaguers eschew investment banking in favor of a program like Teach for America. Not so much at Stanford, which has never tempered itself with Edwardian gravity (by, for example, encouraging students to read literature from civilizations that have since died out) in the way that East Coast and Midwestern colleges have. The rallying cry is, “Go raise VC.” Then, they enter a net of pipelines: Stanford undergrad to startup, startup to EIR gig, EIR to founder, founder to venture capitalist. The miraculous thing about is that progress on this “entrepreneurial” path is assured. One never needs to take any risk to do it! Start in the right place, don’t offend the bosses-I-mean-investors, and there are three options: succeed, fail up, or fail diagonal-up. Since they live in an artificial world in which real loss isn’t possible for them, but one that also limits them from true innovation, they perform a sort of Disney-fied entrepreneurship. They’re the Disneypreneurs.

Just as private-sector bureaucrats (corporate executives) who love to call themselves “job creators” (and who only seem to agree on anything when they’re doing the opposite) are anything but entrepreneurs, I tend to think of these kids as not real entrepreneurs. Well, because I’m right, I should say it more forcefully. They aren’t entrepreneurs. They take no risk. They don’t even have to leave their suburban, no-winter environment. They don’t put up capital. They don’t risk sullying their reputations by investing their time in industries the future might despise; instead, they focus on boring consumer-web plays. They don’t go to foreign countries where they might not have all the creature comforts of the California suburbs. They don’t do the nuts-and-bolts operational grunt work that real entrepreneurs have to face (e.g. payroll, taxes) when they start new businesses, because their backers arrange it all for them. Even failure won’t disrupt their careers. If they fail, instead of making their $50-million payday sin this bubble cycle, they’ll have to settle for a piddling $750,000 personal take in an “acqui-hire”, a year in an upper-middle-management position, and an EIR gig. VC-backed “founders” take no real risk, but get rewarded immensely when things go their way. Heads, they win. Tails, they don’t lose.

Any time someone sets up a “heads I win, tails I-don’t-lose” arrangement, there’s a good bet that someone else is losing. Who? To some extent, it’s the passive capitalists whose funds are disbursed by VCs. Between careerist agents (VC partners) seeking social connection and status, and fresh-faced Disneypreneurs looking to justify their otherwise unreasonable career progress (due to their young age, questionable experience, and mediocrity of talent) what is left for the passive capitalist is a return inferior to that offered by a vanilla index fund. However, there’s another set of losers for whom I often prefer to speak, their plight being less well-understood: the engineers. Venture capitalists risk other peoples’ money. Founders risk losing access to the VCs if they do something really unethical. Engineers risk their careers. They’ve got more skin in the game, and yet their rewards are dismal.

If it’s such a raw deal to be a lowly engineer in a VC-funded startup (and it is) then why do so many people willingly take that offer? They might overestimate their upside potential, because they don’t know what questions to ask (such as, “If my 0.02% is really guaranteed to be worth $1 million in two years, then why do venture capitalists value the whole business at only $40 million?”). They might underestimate the passage of time and the need to establish a career before ageism starts hitting them. Most 22-year-olds don’t know what a huge loss it is not to get out of entry-level drudgery by 30. However, I think a big part of why it is so easy to swindle so many highly talented young people is the Disneyfication. The “cool” technology company, the Hooli, provides a halfway house for people just out of college. At Hooli, no one will make you show up for work at 9:00, or tell you not to wear sexist T-shirts, or expect you to interact decently with people too unlike you. You don’t even have to leave the suburbs of California. You won’t have to give up your car for Manhattan, your dryer for Budapest, your need to wear sandals in December for Chicago, or your drug habit for Singapore. It’s comfortable. There is no obvious social risk. Even the mean-spirited, psychotic policy of “stack ranking” is dressed-up as a successor to academic grading. (Differences glossed over are (a) that there’s no semblance of “meritocracy” in stack ranking; it’s pure politics, and a professor who graded as unfairly as the median corporate manager would be fired; (b) academic grading is mostly for the student’s benefit while stack-ranking scores are invariably to the worker’s detriment; and (c) universities genuinely try to support failing students while corporations use dishonest paperwork designed to limit lawsuit risk.) The comfort offered to the engineer by the Disney-fied tech world, which is actually more ruthlessly corporate (and far more undignified) than the worst of Wall Street, is completely superficial.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that it’s not real. Occasionally I’m asked whether I believe in God. Well, God exists. Supernatural beings may not, and the fictional characters featured in religious texts are almost certainly (if taken literally) pure nonsense, but the idea of God has had a huge effect on the world. It cannot be ignored. It’s real. The same of Silicon Valley’s style of “entrepreneurship”. Silicon Valley breathes and grows because, every year, an upper class of founders and proto-founders are given a safe, painless path to “entrepreneurial glory” and a much larger working class of delusional engineers are convinced to follow them. It really looks like entrepreneurship.

I should say one thing off the bat: Disneypreneurs are not the same thing as wantrapreneurs. You see more of the second type, especially on the East Coast, and it’s easy to conflate the two, but the socioeconomic distance is vast. The wantrapreneur can talk a big game, but lacks the drive, vision, and focus to ever amount to anything. He’s the sort of person who’s too arrogant to work for someone else, but can’t come up with a convincing reason why anyone should work for him, and doesn’t have the socioeconomic advantages that’d enable him to get away with bullshit. Except in the most egregious bubble times, he wouldn’t successfully raise venture capital, not because VCs are discerning but because the wantrapreneur usually lacks sufficient vision to learn how to do even that. Quite sadly, wantrapreneurs sometimes do find acolytes among the desperate and the clueless. They “network” a lot, sometimes find friends or relatives clueless enough to bankroll them, and produce little. Almost everyone has met at least one. There’s no barrier to entry in becoming a wantrapreneur.

Like a wantrapreneur, Disneypreneurs lack drive, talent, and willingness to sacrifice. The difference is that they still win. All the fucking time. Even when they lose, they win. Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) and Lucas Duplan (Clinkle) are just two examples, but Sean Parker is probably the most impressive. If you peek behind the curtain, he’s never actually succeeded at anything, but he’s a billionaire. They float from one manufactured success to another, build impressive reputations despite adding very little value to anything. They’re given the resources to take big risks and, when they fail, their backers make sure they fail up. Being dropped into a $250,000/year VP role at a more successful portfolio company? That’s the worst-case outcome. Losers get executive positions and EIR gigs, break-evens get acqui-hired into upper-six-figure roles, and winners get made.

One might ask: how does one become a Disneypreneur? I think the answer is clear: if you’re asking, you probably can’t. If you’re under 18, your best bet is to get into Stanford and hope your parents have the cardiac fortitude to see the tuition bill and not keel over. If you’re older, you might try out the (admirably straightforward, and more open to middle-class outsiders than traditional VC) Y Combinator. However, I think that it’s obvious that most people are never going to have the option of Disneypreneurship, and there’s a clear reason for that. Disneypreneurship exists to launder money (and connections, and prestige, and power; but those are highly correlated and usually mutually transferrable) for the upper classes, frank parasitism from inherited wealth being still socially unacceptable. The children of the elites must seem to work under the same rules as everyone else. The undeserving, mean-reverting progeny of the elite must be made to appear like they’ve earned the status and wealth their parents will bequeath upon them.

Elite schools were once intended toward this end. They were a prestige (multiple meanings intended) that appeared, from the outside, to be a meritocracy. However, this capacity was demolished by an often-disparaged instrument, the S.A.T. Sometimes, I’ll hear a knee-jerk leftist complain about the exam’s role in educational inequality, citing (correctly) the ability of professional tutoring (“test prep”, a socially useless service) to improve scores. In reality, the S.A.T. isn’t creating or increasing socioeconomic injustices in terms of access to education; it merely measures some of them. The S.A.T. was invented with liberal intentions, and (in fact) succeeded. After its inception in the 1920s, “too many” Jews were admitted to Ivy League colleges, and much of the “extracurricular” nonsense involved in U.S. college admissions was invented in a reaction to that. Over the following ninety years, there’s been a not-quite-monotonic movement toward meritocracy in college admissions. If I had to guess, college admissions are a lot more meritocratic than 90 years ago (and, if I’m wrong, it’s not because the admissions process is classist but because it’s so noise-ridden, thanks to technology enabling the application of a student to 15-30 colleges; 15 years ago, five applications was considered high). The ability-to-pay factor, however, keeps this meritocracy from being realized. Ties are, observably, broken on merit and there is enough meritocracy in the process to threaten the existing elite. The age in which a shared country-club membership of parent and admissions officer ensured a favorable decision is over. Now that assurance requires a building, which even the elite cannot always afford.

These changes, and the internationalization of the college process, and those pesky leftists who insist on meritocracy and diversity, have left the ruling classes unwilling to trust elite colleges to launder their money. They’ve shifted their focus to the first few years after college: first jobs. However, most of these well-connected parasites don’t know how to work and certainly can’t bear the thought of their children suffering the indignity of actually having to earn anything, so they have to bump their progeny automatically to unaccountable upper-management ranks. The problem is that very few people are going to respect a talentless 22-year-old who pulls family connections to get what he wants, and who gets his own company out of some family-level favor. Only a California software engineer would be clueless enough to follow someone like that– if that person calls himself “a founder”.