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[...] in the US, heritage is mobilized as an individualistic, institutional myth. It would have us believe that by reviving our family narratives and traditions, by demanding representational equity, indeed, by raising "awareness" of our ethnic differences, we can address, even eradicate, the scourge of racial inequality.

Heritage would have us believe that if we receive truly equal opportunities, we can finally excel and secure the better futures we seek. From best-of Asian-American lists, governmental grants, and foundation awards to affirmative action, heritage works best when it's visible, and often presents as progress toward a miraculous meritocracy. [...] heritage, as part of a societal belief in the narrative of "it gets better," would have us look away. It would proclaim that racial equality alone can eradicate everything from poverty to violence, when in fact it's nothing but part of a Band-Aid solution to the problems of late-stage capitalism. [...]

Identity - we worship at its shrine even as it keeps us docile, all the while declaring itself infallible because of its authenticity.

It’s nice that my billionaire calls me. He’s not contractually obligated to, but he does it anyway. Talk about down-to-earth! I feel privileged to know someone like him, and it’s an honor to be kept in the loop. Some billionaires lock themselves away in their mansions, but mine makes a point of rubbing elbows with people of a lower station. I really respect him for that. It humanizes wealth, makes it seem concrete and attainable. Which is important in a meritocracy. That way the have-nots know their striving isn’t in vain.

[...] We are told these jobs are unskilled, but the work is actually skilled; we are told it is often pointless and superfluous, and yet many workers find it to be meaningful. Unskilled jobs may be miserable and alienating, but it is the task of critical thinkers to ask: To what extent is this a regrettable, inevitable reality rather than a socially constructed phenomenon? To what extent does the category of unskilled work bolster the idea that we live in a meritocracy and therefore justify egregious exploitation? If the meritocracy is illusory, then so is the idea of unskilled work.

“Meritocracy”: a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature. It was the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees; for startups full of men who looked strikingly similar to the CEO; for investors undisturbed by the allocation of 96 percent of venture capital to men; for billionaires who still believed they were underdogs because their wealth was bound up in equity.

I understood why the idea appealed, especially at a time of great economic insecurity, and especially for a generation that had come of age around the financial collapse. Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious—namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.

In more mainstream forms, such attempts to define whiteness as pathology often focus on the character traits that accrue to “unearned” privilege. (As soon as we say “unearned,” we have baked in the idea of meritocracy—which is some white bullshit.) The white person, especially the white man, is inescapably mediocre, as if by hereditary taint. She or he or they are entitled, neurotic, fragile, narcissistic, vain. He is named Bryce or Heath or Connor and wears shorts in the winter—so severed is he, at a basic level, from the truth of things. (Perhaps he just doesn’t care if his knees are cold.) She is named Karen unless her hair is good.

This approach, too, has a crude descriptive power. Stereotypes often do. In an extension of this process, “white” becomes a name for certain varieties of bad politics: the conservative, the nationalist, the NIMBY progressive, the can’t-we-talk-about-this-later socialist, the you-looked-at-me-so-I’m-calling-the-cops feminist. In all these cases, “white” functions as a name for a kind of secular American freedom: freedom-from that has become freedom-over. It’s the freedom of the minor aristocrat—this being the type of person who gave us far too much of the Enlightenment political thought that permeates our institutions—or the freedom of the children of the southern rich, the group that disproportionately, has given us that bizarre and misnamed American political tendency known as “libertarianism.” (The word has a far nobler meaning in European contexts.) The libertarian is, spiritually speaking, a plantation owner’s son. He wants his taxes lowered, his employees free to work for free, and—with an eye toward those employees’ daughters—his age of consent abolished. His freedom requires that no one else be free of him. But all of these are positions, not traits. Many whitened people reject them, and many people of color buy into one or another of them. Given that the forms and shapes of exploitation are likely to shift in a world that America no longer dominates, this is important to keep in mind.

[...] it was the last time they could say what they wanted in the workplace. The last time they could behave like savages, go home feeling proud and tired at the same time. The last time they could fuck somebody in the linen closet and have it not mean anything too serious, or stay out all night and wake up on the floor. The last time they found themselves close to people from every corner of the world, of every race, proclivity, religion and background. The restaurant business is perhaps the last meritocracy -- where what we do is all that matters. [...]

Propelled by these epic feats—clever software, endurance, nutty work hours—the PayPal crew developed a proud sense of having won the gold ring in the meritocracy of Silicon Valley. While most other high-tech firms were collapsing in the dot-com bust of the early ’00s, PayPal was soaring. It successfully went public, then was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, making its founders remarkably wealthy. PayPal, the vice president Keith Rabois proclaimed, was a “perfect validation of merit.” As he told the journalist Emily Chang: “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley. . . . We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years. We were literal nobodies. People wouldn’t talk to us.”

The dot-­com boom busted shortly ­after it began due to overconfidence and failed investment strategies (perhaps something akin to the mass tech layoffs transpiring at the time of this writing in 2023). While the crash led to a decrease in rental and home prices in the Bay Area, it also impelled the restructuring of surviving companies into more robust cap­i­tal­ist machines led by Apple, Cisco, and Intel. Google and Facebook became rising stars, and then—in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis which wrecked the slow gains made by ­people of color to build equity and secure stable housing across the region—­Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and sharing economy start-­ups headquartered in San Francisco blossomed overnight. Twitter/X also launched in San Francisco, nestled into what soon became known as the Twitter Tax Break Zone, where tech companies avoid paying city taxes. As Wendy Liu offers of Tech 2.0 dreams:

Silicon Valley is more than a region in northern California that has become synonymous with the high-­tech industry. It is a dream. It is the dream of a world with new rules and new rulers, based on the princi­ples of meritocracy and efficiency and hacking your way to the top. It is the dream of the win-­win: innovation that generates profit through frictionless experiences and synergistic efficiencies, not exploitation. It is the dream that a hacker playground with unimaginable wealth and minimal outside supervision is indisputably making the world a better place. But what may be a dream for a select few is steadily becoming a nightmare for every­one ­else.

But there’s a serious point in there too. In raging against Thatcher, our generation is, among other things, raging against the forces that shaped us—but rage as we might, they did still shape us, and they continue to do so. Brand himself is a case in point, as he well knows: he can lament the neoliberal erosion of the “unseen bond” of community all he wants, but at the end of the day he’s not exactly Mother Teresa. He admits to feeling nostalgia for the Thatcher years, bound up as they are with his childhood, yet “what is more troubling,” he owns, “is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and [Thatcher’s] neoliberal inculcation begins.”

Might something similar be true for all of us who grew up in the neoliberal era? If so, might not our loathing of Thatcher—or its positive correlate, our longing for the primordial community she supposedly shattered—be rooted in anxieties about our own moral stature? It certainly rings true of me; I am, undeniably, one of Thatcher’s inheritors. The bequest began in an oddly symbolic way: when I was seven or so, the other kids used to call me Thatcher on account of the similarity in our surnames (better that, admittedly, than a subsequent sobriquet that began with “f” and rhymed with “sucker”). Later on, in the complacent, pre-post-imperial environment of an elite boarding school, I came to rebel against the whole of Torydom; by blood I’m half-Indian and a quarter Irish and as a thirteen year-old I was sure that gave me the nobility of the oppressed. But it’s hard to maintain your victim status when you’re on your way “up” to Oxford, and although many do seem to pull it off I wasn’t equal to the challenge. As I gradually realized that I was and probably always would be on the winning side of Thatcher’s great divide, I came to feel complicit in the cruelty of her supposed meritocracy. Privilege may not have been a gift that I ever asked for, but it was a gift I would receive nonetheless. Just as my younger self used to bristle at the accusation that I was spoiled, unanswerable as it was, so my eyes still water at Billy Bragg’s reproach to Thatcher and her plummy progeny: “Just because you’re going forwards / Doesn’t mean I’m going backwards / Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy.”