#minimizers

https://substack.com/@sarahkendzior/note/c-213651119

Conspirituality Podcast had an episode called “Stanford Has Fallen”, about the right-wing covid contrarian symposium that took place on the anniversary of the Great Barrington Declaration. The podcast hosts wondered aloud about what it is about Stanford. One of them suggested its proximity to Silicon Valley - but that’s putting the cart before the horse. (Please excuse the pun.) Footnote number 1 on my piece on this Stanford right wing event because I think that explains it - it’s a quote from Malcolm Harris on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast which details the rather eugenics history of Stanford. Leland Stanford had a horse farm and it was sort of a precursor to fossil fuel - this was long before cars, when horses were used for work and transportation. And Stanford University was founded upon that horse farm, and they took the ideas of horse breeding and applied it to kids and students and thus the origins of an ideology that of course would wind you up platforming pandemic deniers.

Tech Won’t Save Us podcast — 23 02 16 #155 The Untold History of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris  That was a little part of this much broader effort to scientifically improve the horse that Stanford is making. But the way that they went about doing this was very ‘Bionomicist’ before the concept, which is that, at the time, selling trotting horses, you sell them not based on their performance, necessarily. You’re trying to sell semen — seed — from horses that will yield great racers. To do that, to know which seed yields great racers, you have to develop two generations of horses, which is very slow. This is not a very capitalist-friendly industry, the trotting horse racing production industry. At the same time, horses that pulled stuff were the most important commodity in America at the time. These are engines that, for all intents and purposes, meant agriculture, military, transportation — crucial. The Great Epizootic, I think is the 1870s, where all the nation’s horses got infected with flu, and it totally fucked up the whole country, really, really badly. Half of Boston burns down because you can’t do fire engines without horses, and the horses were too sick. So Stanford, like a good tech thinker, is like: If I could improve the value of every horse by $100, there are 13 million horses, that’s $1.3 billion dollars. (...) Instead of waiting till the horses are older to start training them to race really fast, we’re going to start training them as soon as they’re born. We’re going to try to start racing colts, and the ones that show us that they’re fast, we’re going to focus more and more attention and resources on them. We’re going to build the fastest, youngest, horses in the world, And they do. They do this very quickly. It’s funny that it becomes, very quickly, not just an inspiration for other horse breeders, who are mad that this rich asshole has totally transformed their whole sport, but have to admit that he did do it. But also for education reformers who are looking at the training of young horses and saying: We need to do this for kids! The kindergarten movement is happening at the same time in Germany, and is coming to the United States. One of the reformers cites the Stanford Stock Farm and says: These kind of resources early is what we need for children. So the Stanfords ended up supporting, not just what they called their kindergarten track, which was the first kindergarten in California that was a kindergarten track for these horses — so a shrunk down track for little horses. They also go on to support the first kindergarten for humans, as well. So very quickly you make this jump between horse stock capital to human capital — and as horses get replaced pretty quickly in the 20th century with motor power — you see this transition from focusing on horses to focusing on people and the power of invention. How do you inculcate the youngest, fastest inventors, the youngest, fastest technicians and engineers? (emphasis added)

The connections between Silicon Valley, tech tycoons, and public health adversaries, is why I keep pointing out the connections between this tech tycoon right-wing agenda and the campaign against public health. It’s the same problem. Sadly a lot of people don’t recognize this and this toxic brew even has been infiltrating public health advocacy and disability activists. There was a covid issue non-profit org in 2022 that was not connected to any activists I knew, but did one letter campaign about covid funding. They had some funding, with at least one full-time employee president, but was completely in a silo away from any other public health people, even though some of us joined their discord, which still exists today, though pretty quiet. I remember I was on the mailing list and got the email saying they were closing up at the end of 2022, coincidentally around the time FTX filed for bankruptcy, and in listening to some podcasts about SBF, I found out he had been funding “covid projects” through some PAC. I don’t know if these were connected, but I did know that FTX’s bankruptcy was trying to clawback donations, something that happens in these cases, especially fraud, and charities and non-profits get stung in the process. So two reasons not to ignore that set, and not get mixed up with them. They’re against public health, they want to burn tires to fuel this stuff, and though they have a lot of money, sometimes it’s ill-gotten. And many critics call cryptocurrencies “pyramid schemes” after all. An interesting connection: SBF’s father and mother both work for Stanford, coincidentally.

Trust is hard to come by in the tech tycoon sphere… unless by trust you mean monopoly power.