Patrick McKenzie

The tech industry, both at the level of like App Amagoo Facesoft, which is my funny sardonic way to refer to like some of the most powerful institutions in the world, and many other places that hire, you know, many number of smart engineers who can build the world's least impressive inventory tracking system.

felt political pressure in the wake of the January 6th events in the United States.

This is another thing that's gone down the rabbit hole, but in the immediate wake of the January 6th events, people in positions of authority very clearly tried to lay that at the feet of the tech companies.

And internally in the tech companies, their policy teams, the teams that are supposed to make the company legible to government and avoid government yanking its permission to do business,

And their communications teams, PR departments, told everyone in the company, like, mission number one right now, do not get in the newspaper for any reason.

We are putting our heads down.

And when people in those companies who work on public health, and a thing that might not be obvious to most people in the world is that, like App Emigu Booksoft, they're literally like teams of people who their job is public health, because they are the operating system of the world right now, and the operating system of the world needs public health care.

And those teams said, hey, we've got this thing.

And other people in the company might have overruled them and said it would be really, really bad right now to have the tech industry saying we're better at the government's job than the government is.

So shut that down.

Okay.

So that's so insane.

It is absolutely insane.

The local incentives, like, it makes sense in the meeting when you're saying it, and you are not in that meeting projecting, I'm going to cause tens of thousands of people to die at the margin by making this call.

And yet, that call was made.

could happen.

One, if you build the thing, this has sometimes been called the Copenhagen principle of culpability.

If you build the thing, various actors in our system will assume, okay, now your responsibility for not just the consequences of the thing you built, but for the totality of consequences of everything associated with the American vaccination effort.

So you built the thing.

Oh, you big tech geniuses.