As the slowest news cycle in history continues, this was actually a front page story:
Snapchat is paying college grads a ridiculous amount of money to work there
This is what the left is thinking when they read this story:
‘Why does web 2.0 refuse to burst! These valuations are too high and the media said it was a bubble, so why won’t it pop? Everyone is getting rich but me. America is supposed to be in decline and capitalism is supposed to be dead because Z3r0h3dge and the rest of the left said so. This is not supposed to be happening.’
It’s happening because we’re in an intellectual enlightenment in what is the greatest economic and wealth creation boom ever. Future historians will look back on this century as being a technological renaissance like the Renaissance Age, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution. High-IQ college grads making six-figures a year in web 2.0 is an example of how the free market, through Social Darwinism 2.0, is selecting for high-IQ – all while the left still insists, in vain, that capitalism is dead and America is in decline. How can capitalism be dead when so many people are getting so rich so quickly, when so much wealth is being created, and when America’s economy is running circles around the rest of the world? It doesn’t add up. It’s like telling me the sky is purple , but I can clearly see it’s blue. The left wants to believe in crisis because they are losers who achieved nothing in life, so rather than bring the world up and acknowledge the positives, they look for reasons, however improbable, for things to get worse.
Second, the left looks for reasons to delegitimize exceptionalism at the individual (high-IQ, capitalism exceptionlism) and national level (American economic exceptionalism). If someone is a veritable overnight success at an intellectual endeavor, borrowing from Obama’s ‘you didn’t build that’, the left will look for excuses for how that person isn’t really exceptional; maybe he had a lot of really good parenting, 10000 hours of practice, ‘we’re in a tech bubble’, crony capitalism, etc. Never simply saying, ‘He succeeded because he is really smart and talented’ or ‘His success makes him a better person’. It’s this constant uphill battle with empirical reality that makes one a leftist.
No one in Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 cares too much about the national debt, about wealth inequality being too high, or about how most of the jobs created since 2009 are in the low-paying service sector. The box of cereal analogous to the US economy was shaken in 2008, and all the high-IQ cornflakes rose to the top, where they will remain. It won’t end badly. There won’t be another shake-up (that results in high-IQ people being buried). Snapchat will be valued at $50 billion soon. Uber: $130 billion. Tinder: $10 billion. Air B&B: $60 billion. Pinterest : $10 billion.
Related: The World is Getting Safer, So Why Does this Make Libs Mad?