A California legislator “accused” me of being a billionaire this week, which is just good TV, frankly, and I of course could not help myself from telling that story. But there were a few other things worth covering as well. Feel free to jump down to the clown car conclusion, or take the scenic route that starts right here. 👇🏻

The ethics of being defamed. Last week, in yet another casually atomic blog post, Coinbase pre-empted what they felt to be a hit piece coming from the New York Times. It was both a challenge to the media, and an S.O.S. to the technology industry. Tribal lines were drawn, and so began the next heated chapter in this never-ending drama that is the relationship between the press — in some sense led by the Times — and tech.

With nothing more to speak of than a topic, tech influencers rushed to the defense of Coinbase, assuming the Times’ piece was a lie, a distortion, an attack. Journalists across Twitter, who had likewise not read the piece, defended the reporter, the reporting, the concept of reporting. These more general defenses quickly gave way to (for some reason) an animated conversation on the strategic merit of the Coinbase move — as if the press were on the sidelines rooting for a successful corporate PR strategy — which itself finally gave way to the meat of the tizzy: Coinbase, the press said, had shattered its trust with the media. A code of ethics had been breached. A pernicious double standard had revealed itself.

Separate from the question of strategy, a topic Isaac expanded on, and on which I found myself conflicted — sure, the Coinbase move guaranteed a story, but which story, exactly, and on whose terms? — there was the question, really, of some unwritten set of rules. Here, we’re alluding to the journalistic code of ethics, which certainly is real. It just has nothing to do with the fraught relationship between tech and the press, which has existed now for years. It also has nothing to do, in general, with anyone outside of media, and for good reason.

Writers are incentivized to abide by their ethical framework, which is not some idealistic set of feel-good platitudes. The journalistic code of ethics helps journalists do their job, which is ostensibly to publish true stories in the public interest. The practice of reaching out to subjects of a story before a story is published, the institution of the “off the record chat,” and the refusal to reveal their sources could each as well be termed “steps” in the journalistic process rather than “principles,” as without the trust engendered from the public by each of these steps journalism in its current form really isn’t possible. None of this has anything to do with the subject of a story.

Any behavior on the part of a person being written about to pre-emptively shape a narrative, or to fight back against some story they perceive to be unjust, is not a “double-standard,” because while journalists and the people they’re writing about may often be in conflict, they’re not playing the same game. And certainly no one needs the permission of a journalist to write about their own life. What we’re observing in this most recent Coinbase dust-up is simply the rational, self-interested behavior of two parties in conflict, which is clearly understood by the journalists engaged on the question of what makes the most tactical sense for Coinbase.

So what is this really about?

Business.

Coinbase pre-empted what the Times hoped would be a blockbuster story. Tech’s furious reaction would have driven traffic to the piece, which writers all want and media companies actually need to survive. Yes, many incredible journalists are still trying to disseminate true stories in the public interest, which is the holy ground atop which all “journalists” stand. But journalism is a business, and even when there isn’t much money in play there’s status on the line. Status leads to money, especially in this hyper-social influencer environment, and breaking stories is the path.

Widespread adoption of the Coinbase strategy threatens the media’s ability to break stories, and so by extension its readership. If technology companies are now also media companies, we’re all in competition with each other, this entire conversation is actually a conversation about the power to shape cultural narratives, and, in this, tech has the upper hand.

Venture capital, a scary “new” kind of funding. In another example of the trust-based, definitely-healthy relationship between the media and tech, The New Yorker deigned to explain venture capital to the world last week. They wondered: what exactly is this “new,” seventy-year-old funding model? And why is it so fucking evil?

Mainly, The New Yorker focused on venture capital’s role in creating companies like Theranos and WeWork, ignoring recent, spectacularly-important companies, both in terms of technological achievement and net benefit to mankind, like SpaceX, Tesla, DeepMind, Moderna, Stripe, not to mention legendary companies that have essentially architected our contemporary world like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Genentech, and Amazon. The piece was instantly applauded by tech journalists, professionals covering our industry who frankly should have known better, and enthusiastically amplified across Twitter.

Benedict Evans provided one of the earlier, cogent rebuttals to the piece in a thread that begins here:

It’s worth clicking through and reading the whole argument, but the crux of his point is simply: venture capital is objectively not even responsible for companies like Theranos (a favorite accusation of the media, which itself created that company), and The New Yorker should really consider basic factchecking before publishing something that might influence people.

And oh boy, was this story influential!

Lorena Gonzalez vs. Reality. I honestly wasn’t looking to be a major player in this week’s wire. While I often reference my own tweets in the weekly round-up, it’s only because Twitter is a briefer medium, with less room for nuance, and it’s easy to come off harsher on that platform than I otherwise would in conversation. As someone who unfortunately craves understanding, this bothers me. Here, I’ve appreciated the opportunity to show people I’m not (always) just shooting my mouth off — and thanks again for following along. I’ve spent these last six months trying to find some bit of nuance, or at least a novel frame, when writing longer-form on what are often emotionally-charged topics in politics, culture, and tech. This is still important to me. But Saturday night a California legislator slid into my mentions with guns blazing, and in the iconic words of my favorite cross-dressing shaman RuPaul:

So let’s get into it.

Lorena Gonzalez, a classically-presenting bad politician, read the above-discussed classically-presenting bad New Yorker article, and shared the piece with her almost forty-thousand followers.

A belief like this from a state legislator would be concerning even if that legislator didn’t have a history of reckless legislation. But Gonzalez is something of a central figure in California’s spiraling dystopia. For folks just tuning in, she is the architect of AB 5, the catastrophic piece of legislation that, on passing, effectively made independent-contracting work illegal in the state of California. Had it been enforced as written, it would have abolished literally millions of jobs with a single stroke of Gavin Newsom’s pen. Gavin of course signed the bill, because he is a uniquely terrible governor, and this precipitated a predictable, statewide panic and confusion. Our own representatives couldn’t really mean this law as written, could they? They couldn’t really have intended for job destruction at this scale. Right? AB 5 was either idiotic or evil, and both in degrees too extreme to believe. Literally, I mean, people did not believe it. But pick your poison, because one of these explanations is correct, and it’s frankly unclear which is worse for the state.

What I’m trying to say is I unfortunately couldn’t help myself:

Gonzalez responded:

And this is when I decided I had time for a flame war.

“Harassment.”

Let it marinate for a minute: an elected official accusing a citizen in her state of harassment for criticizing her legislative work, and not for the first time. In this most recent case, Gonzalez was sure to gender the accusation, and include “VC” as a placeholder for power, venture capital being her favorite scapegoat. Throughout the AB 5 drama, she couldn’t target the thousands of people begging her to repeal her bill, as this would have been terrible optics (though it didn’t stop her from gaslighting workers). But venture capitalists, with that terrifying word right there in the name — capitalism — elicited a useful disgust on the part of her allies in the media. The entire exchange, then, was thus reduced: I, the villain, was engaged in something no different than threatening a helpless woman on the street, and with the further implication that Gonzalez, a real fount of state power, were speaking truth to it rather than actually running our trash fire government. This is… insane.

Responding to your political representatives, people who are meant to be working for you, and holding them to account for work they’ve done that is actually harming your state is not harassment. It is not “trolling.” It is not “bro culture.” And by the way, Gonzalez? Not a dictator. It is acceptable to question her. Some of you may find this shocking, but in America we’re even allowed to insult our politicians. Welcome to democracy, Lorena. This is what it looks like.

From here, we went back forth… okay a lot. The truth is, I couldn’t believe Lorena’s responses, and when I don’t understand something I can’t let it go. If you’d like to have your mind blown you can work back from the entire conversation here. Or, save yourself a little time and skip to the animated documentary:

But I’d like to focus on the point at which the entire exchange exploded into something more or less incomprehensible. Gonzalez — again, because it really does beg repeating, an elected representative in my state — “accused” me of being a billionaire, further implying I made my billions after harming the very people she had herself attempted to put out of work.

As she was immediately ratio’d by an ocean of people following along, almost all of whom were as shocked by her stupidity as I was, she found an old tweet of mine to prove the fact that she was right:

The tweet was, of course, a joke, and so the internet, which loves nothing more than an opportunity to meme, went absolutely wild.

You might be wondering why any of this matters. Who cares that Gonzalez’s natural assumption is all of her detractors are billionaires? Why does it matter that she thinks making a lot of money requires principally the oppression of entire classes of people? “Apologetics” of course implies Gonzalez believes wealth is by its nature wrong. So what? And why should we care, given this former position, that Gonzalez is not only incapable of reading a joke, but seems to believe it’s possible to make a billion dollars blogging? Yes, that this person is running our government is funny, at least in the extremely dark British sense of that word, but do we really need to pay it so much attention?

Gonzalez is obviously not very smart, but she is relentless, and she is committed to a cause. She conceives of our world in the Marxian terms of heroes — “workers,” aka labor, which she unaccountably considers herself — and villains — the “capital class,” including the founders of companies, executives, and of course venture capitalists. She will continue to target the technology industry with legislation designed to dismantle it until she succeeds. I engage with people like Gonzalez, and in the way I do, because I’m hoping with enough light shed on the unhinged antics of our state leaders smart people will be moved to get involved. Because we need to do something.

If Lorena’s recent episode proves anything, it’s that we have someone here in power who doesn’t understand the industries she’s trying to regulate. She also doesn’t seem to maintain even a basic conception of numbers. Money, where does it come from? How does it grow? Who has it, what are they doing with it, and what happens if the evil “capital class” vanishes?

My exchange with Lorena received a lot of attention Saturday, and we all had a good laugh. The woman made an incredible fool of herself, without a doubt, and exposing the foolishness of our leaders is a great American pastime. But who really lost this exchange?

At the end of the night, I was still not actually a billionaire. And Lorena? Even after proving her undeniable idiocy, her incompetence, her I think low-key impulse towards authoritarianism, Gonzalez went to bed a legislator. She will be a legislator for years. A fire tweet or two is not going to fix our government.

So what do we really have to be laughing about?

-SOLANA