[rhizome]

Who is the "we" he's speaking to here? I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for? Gavin de Becker and "forced teaming" comes to mind.

Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self-evident, which makes me think his (et al) motivation is competitively strategic, and specifically political. Vagueness is construed against the writer, especially when it's intentional.

If he is indeed speaking to the DSA and ersatz-unionization ideas floating around, why not join forces with people who are already working on this? Fragmentation? Disruption? Narratology?

We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country

Evergreen take, but you still can't solve a people problem with technology.

[coldtea]

>Who is the "we" he's speaking to here?

"Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post.

>I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for?

The tech community.

[jerf]

The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?

(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there is a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)

I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.

[coldtea]

>The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?

When they write "For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, ..."

they obviously mean the tech community.

And they ARE members of the tech community (regardless of if they are also members of a subset, like SV-liberal tech community or anything similar).

[jerf]

And if they were setting out to be a union in the conventional sense, that would be fine. But as a weird undefined vaguely amorphous "We're a union that's going to do political things", it matters whether the Silicon Valley liberals are going to be making all the decisions.

I said this on another thing that got lost on /new recently, but either form a PAC or form a union, but don't try to do both.

I very much expect this to be structurally non-viable. Once the union has to make positive decisions about what to push for even the apparent political unity in Silicon Valley will be revealed to be less strong than it seems when you're merely looking at the fact that "I don't know anyone who voted for Trump", let alone what happens if you try to extend it out of Silicon Valley. (And if this is supposed to be unionesque, you'll have to almost immediately as plenty of SV companies have major non-SV offices.) There are unions that were politically active, but they always combined it with a very strong message to their members that their primary task was watching out for their members. Starting right out of the gate with "Our first priority is political activism" means that you can pretty much guarantee the leadership will end up detached from the membership in a small number of years. Something may emerge from that process, but it won't be a group of people that has anything like a quorum of the "tech community"... it'll just be a PAC.

[angersock]

> The tech community.

The SF/SV tech community defined by high-growth startups, maybe. I don't think he is qualified to say a damned thing about the actual practicing developers.