Interesting observation. I recently learned from a Fresh Air interview with Heather McGhee about Hinton Rowan Helper, a white racist Southerner abolitionist. He wrote a book analyzing the way chattel slavery harmed working-class whites and white society, the essential dynamic being:

the wealth of the plantation class did not depend on the labor of the white working class, nor their ability to buy product from the plantation class (cotton and tobacco were shipped north and globally); as a result the plantation (ruling) class had no incentive to invest in society; Helper quantified this by looking at number of libraries, schools, etc. in the North vs the deep South.

Obviously I don't want to claim the horrors of slavery are comparable to the effects of tech companies on the economy... but I wonder if the same _essential dynamic_ is there:

- wealth equating to political power

- an industry driven to remove any reliance on an educated populous or satisfied workforce (through automation, and the secondary effects of automation as in the way Uber etc. offloads risk onto drivers/society)

- an industry for whom the populous are not customers but "the product"

Both are extraordinary, it's not obvious to me who should win the "most well-behaved protest movement" award

I think this is a poor framing for the rest of your comment, which is essentially a feminist critique of patriarchy and capitalism, and how patriarchy/capitalism is a harmful structure to men as well. Progressives are totally on board with this.

I've got a degree in classical performance (and deeply love and respect that tradition), but more often collaborate musically with people who don't come from that background. Most will say with a little embarrassment that they wish they knew more "music theory". It's difficult to communicate to, say, and indie songwriter how I think theory might help them (to communicate, or analyze their own or others' music), and ways it's probably totally irrelevant (depending on genre, functional harmony is really not very useful).

And that's still just western music traditions. Study Indonesian music and you can see how many ideas about music are encoded even into the notation of western art music.

The only time I saw the two owners was when I started and when the take me out to lunch when they abruptly (but not unexpectedly) let me go.

At that meal one of the two was really excited about a new project: some turn-key restaurant idea, and how he'd only hire "hot waitresses".

> The Buckley type is just articulating and explaining concrete social phenomena on the ground.

"Explaining", or "dressing up"? You're speaking in good faith, but personally I don't think that's the case for most of the rank-and-file, or the people who represent them.

I wonder who is this platonic Conservative you're describing in these comments; the ghost of William F. Buckley?