There are really 3 different rightward moves that have to be considered here. There's the movement of the insane VC class (Andreessen, Sacks, Musk), which has proceeded exactly as you say. There's the movement of the "normie" billionaires (eg Zuckerberg) where I think both the post-Obama anti-neoliberal turn of the Democrats and the simple success of Trump are also relevant. And then there's a shift among white and Asian guys in tech, driven by a lot of different things (hostility to tech on the left, disagreement on cultural issues with people in the workplace, pandemic policies).
Almost everyone I know who is a white or Asian guy in tech doesn't like Musk. My sample size is pretty small, but of the people I know the rightward turn is based mostly on crime and disorder and the perception that Democrats don't care about it.
But also, I live in SF and everyone I know who works in tech still voted for Democrats? I think the noise the VC/management class makes online gives a very distorted perception.
And as you say, I think both Ganz and Yglesias (but not Smith, who notably lives here too) underrate the extent to which both public disorder and incredibly stupid local politics in San Francisco / the Bay Area left people really disillusioned.
I think X was the glue to bring them together and an accelerator. The algos were feeding them shit, increasingly fascist and racist shit, all day long. I think they genuinely believed a lot of what they were seeing, or they finally felt they could comfortably express some long held beliefs. But, they also noticed that when you post with the algo (fascist lite content), you get boosted. I'm sure Sacks enjoyed his popularity boost. Now, they see themselves as public figures in "the discourse", not just SF. Algos inflating their egos. They have their normal jobs, and they probably still enjoy schmoozing around traditional, elite liberal circles in these cities, but they also have their circus conductor online personalities. It feels like a new type of power, regardless of how much of an ecochamber X is, for some of these lesser known VC leaders. Sort of easily tapping into discourse power like they couldn't before, and X's new algorithms only rewarded one ideology.
I don't know that tech was ever progressive. These are guys who huff Ayn Rand, Heinlein,Larry Niven and especially Vernor Vinge. They were libertarians who were socially liberal on issues that let them lead hedonistic lifestyles, but agnostic everything else. Gay rights, trans folks, feminism, that stuff doesn't get them laid.
Here's my off-the-cuff spouting: in former times, male programmers were, as I, nerdy, perhaps even aspie, guys who knew they had to adapt to social norms to be acceptable at work and maybe find a girlfriend. Now they are of the same feedstock but they see a much easier and online-available—that is to say infantile and pseudo-fascist—set of norms to which to conform…and the absence of a girlfriend just proves that women are too inferior to appreciate them in their wonderfulness. (And an L.L.M. can produce ever-better-tailored onan-fodder, quite possibly leading them down expectational by-ways from whose vantage-points no real woman can look good.)
(I assume other-than–cis-het-white-male coders to be less degradable into assholes, but that might just be wishful thinking—I'm still waiting for female executives to find their own awfulness to match sexual harassment, apart from sexual harassment…I mean _novel_ awfulness.)
The social libertarianism tracked well with the Democratic Party and also the broader culture (e.g. South Park) up until the 2010s, when marginalized groups and economic discontent became more prominent and the Democrats began to split along those lines (Hillary vs Bernie) and Republicans were radicalized toward the right. Labor had been de-prioritized by the Democrats since the Clinton years so Silicon Valley didn't have a problem with them until social and economic justice began gaining steam.
In my insider perceptions (a bit outdated, as I retired some years ago) this is a good description of part of the high-tech workforce, associated of course with the managerial class. The tendency among the tech workers - at least in software - was toward the liberal-Democratic worldview.
Well, tech. managers often seem to resent their need for tech. workers: either they never coded and consider such 'f-gg-ty bullshit for nerds', or they used to and felt like everyone below them can't do it anywhere near as well as they used to do and demand too much—'If they were any good they would have started their own firms just like me.' (Missing the pleasures of coding, perhaps over-much out of nostalgia for when their bodies worked better, likely helps feed that resentment.)
In small start-ups, there is generally less distinction and greater solidarity, but any larger and a class-structure gets generated.
Sean: Your view that tech was never progressive is spot on. (No one who thinks Ayn Rand had anything to offer other than turgid prose cannot lay claim to having an enlightened social outlook). Today’s tech bros are the spiritual heirs of the hippies, few, if any, of whom had any real interest in doing anything to rid capitalism of its rough edges, let alone replace it with something more socially democratic, or socialist. They were, as you say, a cadre who simply wanted to be “free” to do whatever they wanted without having any obligations to anyone else.
Couldn’t this all be a bit of a recapitulation of the Robber Baron Era, where unprecedented wealth was accumulated in the hands of a relatively few extraordinarily wealthy people? And with that enormous wealth, they, like Musk, developed their “Visions of Grandeur” and of how they wanted to reshape the world even further for their purposes. The Rockefellers, Melons, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, etc., etc., come to mind. And they, too, effected a sort of de facto global financial elite that took different pathways to imposing their ideas and will — some more authoritarian than others.
Our American-based plutocrats generally are just doing that plutocratic thing these folks do to clear away roadblocks (regulations, popular opposition, etc.) that are in the way of conquering their markets. But some, like Musk, have far more megalomaniacal aspirations. I believe he really wants to rule the land and then the world — and beyond into the solar system!
I, following Michael A Alexander, don’t believe that neoliberalism has ended, though it is certainly being challenged. And yes, there is a palpable uncertainty that capitalists hate clearly made evident and more intense by Trump’s extraordinary capture of the mantle of populist insurrection. I believe most of our plutocrats are primarily looking to establish a new stability from which to pursue even more wealth and market share, etc. They are on board the project of clearing away many of the hurdles to this identified by Project 2025.
But Musk and a few others have a more ambitious agenda that is fundamentally in great friction with the rest. Musk wants the actual dictatorial power that Trump’s narcissism has been suggestive of. He wants to use this period of uncertainty and chaos to have the new stability be in the form that Orban has achieved — and being a child of S. African Apartheid, I have no doubt that he would naturally aspire beyond that to more or a Putin-like dictatorship.
Therefore, both within and around the Trump Administration, I expect there is going to be a lot of very intense infighting. I don’t think the majority of a Silicon Valley or any other major interest group capable of moving major pieces on our chess board wants Musk or anyone else to create a dictatorship. So the fight over our future could end-up being a “normal” contest between different cohorts of the capitalist elite; or it could be an abnormal clash of very different world views leading to a great deal more domestic conflict than we’ve seen for at least a century.
I’ve said for some time that Trump is the set-up guy, but Musk is preparing to be the closer. Keeping Musk off the field is going to be critical to our collective future.
Thank you for writing this. There is a lot I can say about this as someone who trained as an academic historian but has subsequently become a programmer. Maybe I'll write a post on my substack about my particular perspective on how my own experience providing labor in this economy connects with the above.
That said, I can say a bit right now.
Basically, programming work and certain associated jobs in the tech sector have been a great way to make a lot of money for those who don't control the means of production in our economy. As an experienced programmer living in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, and maybe a few other places, you WILL make well over $100,000, very possibly more. There simply haven't been enough people with the skills to do this work. Hence all the political effort spent trying to enable H1B visas to get immigrant programmers; hence the Code school boom (which I took advantage of 10 years ago).
I don't know if this is true anymore (or at least it is becoming less true), but one of the best things someone struggling could have done over the last 10-15 years was "learn to code". Not everyone is capable of being a decent programmer, but far more people are than are currently doing the job. It isn't rocket science; its just a trade like being an electrician, but with more mathy/academic concepts thrown in. Its not trivial to become at least a decent programmer -- probably takes 2-3 years of experience/learning -- but its also well within the capability of millions and millions of people who don't currently do it.
Its also true that many programmers -- but perhaps more importantly, project managers, designers, marketers, etc. --- are probably not strictly speaking needed, certainly at very mature platforms like Twitter. And I think Musk et al sort of know this, and want to break the relative power this class of well-paid labor has.
There IS a cost to doing this. Observing X/Twitter, I can see it is company that has gutted its product development/marketing staff. It feels chaotic, ramshackle. But this doesn't matter much for something like Twitter which was a very mature platform. You don't really need many employees if you just want to maintain what it can do already--really you just need enough money to throw at AWS or Azure to keep the servers running.
For this reason, I'm not sure Musk's bet with Twitter is applicable in the industry as a whole. AI is a big development, but it is not ready for prime time. Its nowhere near totally replacing human programmers currently - it still requires constant supervision and guidance from experience engineers to do anything beyond the most rudimentary tasks. That said, there is evidence that it can replace some of what very junior progammers can do, who would be doing these types of rudimentary tasks under strict supervision of more tenured staff.
AI is just the specific manifestation of the deeper imperative in capitalism to improve labor productivity and reduce Labor costs. It was always going to come in some fashion. Will the sum effects on tech labor look like deindustrialization or more like the introduction of the personal computer? It's impossible to say, but the tendency to replace expensive labor is pretty strong...
When thinking about Silicon Valley, Ch. 15 of Marx's "Capital" comes to mind:
"...Thus, apart from the dearness of the machines made in this way, a circumstance that is ever present to the mind of the capitalist, the expansion of industries carried on by means of machinery, and the invasion by machinery of fresh branches of production, were dependent on the growth of a class of workmen, who, owing to the almost artistic nature of their employment, could increase their numbers only gradually, and not by leaps and bounds..."
The broader theoretical framework of "Capital" seems totally busted but in some of these chapters his observations are really astute.
The high-salaried SWEs seem like exactly this class of knowledge workers. And indeed, VCs and startup founders fantasize that someday soon you will not need to hire expensive engineers and give them equity. You'll just need capital for the LLM.
The odd thing is that really since the 1950s, programming has just kept getting automated and "capitalized" -- far far more than any other area of "knowledge work" -- but this always just results in expanding its scope to different applications and areas of the economy. Hence Andreessen's famous slogan "software is eating the world". Among knowledge workers the programmers could remain sort of artisanal since new techniques constantly need to be invented.
But it can't last forever and it seems like some well-informed people are betting it's finally over. I am actually not so sure, and I don't think that's just wishful thinking.
"In this class war, the Silicon Valley capitalist class has forged an alliance with the reactionary mob...," although saying they fear "pauperization" is a sympathetic reading, to say the least.
'16 was revenge of the reactionary mob (violent bigots) and '24 is revenge of the neoliberal elite (billionaires). The mob fears demographic changes and the neoliberals fear Lina Khan, or state reforms driven by the big challenges of climate change.
Looks like the latter are now keen on a massive shock doctrine of voodoo "free market" economics; Musk flirting with Argentina, etc. Once these policies begin to take effect it is likely the violent bigots won't like the economic outcomes and their consent will dwindle, right. So then what?
How about police state crackdowns, that's what the republican half of the country voted for anyway? Sorry, but I, currently anyway, don't see the democratic resilience in conservative elites in America that we're seeing now in South Korea. Quite the opposite.
More like to me we're waiting for the violent bigots, the base, to wake-up and realize they've been had, taken for another ride by the richies. And they won't be happy, again.
Your back-of-the-envelope analysis seems strong to me when it comes to the oligarchs who bet on Trump in this election. You cause me to think about AI and how it promises to disrupt and marginalize the professional managerial class in much the same way that robot technologies disrupted and marginalized the manufacturing middle class, and also about how tariffs and international trade factor into the equation of what sort of diversity of interests may be embedded within the technological oligarchy. Enormous valuations on Wall Street ultimately depend on the idea that someone is going to buy actual goods, whether it is the government using taxes to buy rockets and satellites or doctors buying Teslas. Held to a certain light, technology can start to look like a pyramid scheme, in which efficiencies created by using machines instead of people eventually hollow out the consumer base that capitalism depends on. Musk hasn’t proven that he can actually make X work in financial terms, just political ones. Google and Amazon depend on selling actual things to people who can afford to buy them. Just some thoughts. This essay is really suggestive, thank you!
Farrell has been so strong throughout this season of blaming. Still reading your piece with interest. Broke away to tell you how pleased to see you quoting him.
“ The tech capitalists also have a natural set of allies in the family-owned capitalist class that has always struggled against both organized labor and the onus of federal regulations.”
This seems like a really telling/interesting phenomenon to me - I think you could argue that “small business tyrants” were foundational to Trump’s first two elections, and I’m not surprised that the SV elite would be envious of the ability to run their (often public!) companies that way. I’ve already seen plenty of SV types crowing that Trump’s win was an endorsement of the SV brand of big business libertarianism, even though a lot of “normal” Trump supporters seem to want some sort of Trumpian command economy!
I have seen some of this expressed on Twitter by Musk fanboys accounts that appear to be inauthentic, leading me to believe this is the narrative Elon wishes to promote. That is, Musk is waging a war on the ‘managerial class’ infected by woke ideology that is supposedly imposing bureaucracy on the private sector.
Woke ideology meanwhile is a stand in for cultural marxism which is a stand in for “those commies”
I'm also wondering how much Democratic pro-worker politics shattered SV liberalism. Democrats went after big tech monopolies and VCs acted like Warren was going to guillotine them. It's normal for people to follow their material interests.
The Democrats may have grifters but generally dislike MLMs, scams, pyramid schemes, so crypto and NFTs were always going to end up in their targets. Republicans haven't found a scam they don't love, they are natural allies with SV vaporware peddlers.
My understanding is that the liberal in neoliberal is the liberalism on which our war for independence was fought: no state would interfere with one's accumulation of wealth.
Presuming that is at all correct -- and it certainly looks that way from the last five decades or so -- neoliberalism is alive, well and had a spectacular victory in November.
So query: what is the bases for the claims that neoliberalism is dead? That it's pissing off the populations in liberal democracies to the point that right wing extremists get elected -- who then serve neoliberals well enough. Clearly, it looks like I must be missing something, but what?
As for Silicon Valley's apparent shift: dunno about the people actually working on things but the Powers That Be are the VCs -- the money guys.
The Hewlett Packard geniuses at work in the garage thing is ancient history. The latest big thing out of the Valley has been what's needed to make the gig economy possible. The gig economy, of course, is a way to exploit workers even more; nothing liberal there.
The other innovation is a business sucking VC money with which, as Job 1, is ensuring there'll be as little competition as possible, preferably none, of course -- it's the secret origin of Uber.
So. That people engaged in that crap would be presumed to be some sort of libs or allied with the national Democratic party makes no sense other than synching with a fact and context-lite scenario.
John I first heard of your work through Know Your Enemy and have since read your book and subscribed here to your substack. I like the way you think but sometimes feel I don't have the social theory credentials to fully understand all of your arguments. Can you recommend me some works that will help me understand Marx, Gramsci, and more theoretical background so I can understand better?
It is hard to imagine this avant-garde building a long-lasting hegemonic vision.
The closest we got to the capital V vision is some woo about "propagating the light of consciousness/extending the lifespan of civilization/inter-planetary colonization" from Musk and co but that won't stick in suburban America where ketamine is not the stimulant of choice.
Andreessen cohort is basically about "don't you dare touching our pyramid schemes" which is in a sense more popular, standing on top of the long MLM/prosperity gospel tradition, but by definition will never be satisfying.
Thiel's ideology of "democracy can't get anything done, the solution is the dictatorship with me pulling the strings" is compelling but it is also unclear to the masses what it is that Thiel wants to build, and insofar as Americans like fascism, they hardly like "leather uniform vampiric Nazism" aesthetic.
Bezos/Musk etc. are not ideologues and will just participate in whatever loyalty display is asked of them.
one thing i'll say-what Musk has done with Twitter can't be seen as a business model, when the company's value and revenue have cratered since he's taken over. Thats not to say his take over hasnt been worth it to him, but its not a way to run a business as a business
No, but what he has bought is a business where as they used to say, he can ‘buy ink [not] by the barrel but by the container load’. That makes him uniquely dangerous and very powerful.
There are really 3 different rightward moves that have to be considered here. There's the movement of the insane VC class (Andreessen, Sacks, Musk), which has proceeded exactly as you say. There's the movement of the "normie" billionaires (eg Zuckerberg) where I think both the post-Obama anti-neoliberal turn of the Democrats and the simple success of Trump are also relevant. And then there's a shift among white and Asian guys in tech, driven by a lot of different things (hostility to tech on the left, disagreement on cultural issues with people in the workplace, pandemic policies).
I guess my interpretation is that the VC class is leading?
Almost everyone I know who is a white or Asian guy in tech doesn't like Musk. My sample size is pretty small, but of the people I know the rightward turn is based mostly on crime and disorder and the perception that Democrats don't care about it.
But also, I live in SF and everyone I know who works in tech still voted for Democrats? I think the noise the VC/management class makes online gives a very distorted perception.
And as you say, I think both Ganz and Yglesias (but not Smith, who notably lives here too) underrate the extent to which both public disorder and incredibly stupid local politics in San Francisco / the Bay Area left people really disillusioned.
Yeah I think there's some leading (Zuck is obviously somewhat influenced by Musk) but also I think they are somewhat separate tendencies.
yeah I think that sounds right
I think X was the glue to bring them together and an accelerator. The algos were feeding them shit, increasingly fascist and racist shit, all day long. I think they genuinely believed a lot of what they were seeing, or they finally felt they could comfortably express some long held beliefs. But, they also noticed that when you post with the algo (fascist lite content), you get boosted. I'm sure Sacks enjoyed his popularity boost. Now, they see themselves as public figures in "the discourse", not just SF. Algos inflating their egos. They have their normal jobs, and they probably still enjoy schmoozing around traditional, elite liberal circles in these cities, but they also have their circus conductor online personalities. It feels like a new type of power, regardless of how much of an ecochamber X is, for some of these lesser known VC leaders. Sort of easily tapping into discourse power like they couldn't before, and X's new algorithms only rewarded one ideology.
I don't know that tech was ever progressive. These are guys who huff Ayn Rand, Heinlein,Larry Niven and especially Vernor Vinge. They were libertarians who were socially liberal on issues that let them lead hedonistic lifestyles, but agnostic everything else. Gay rights, trans folks, feminism, that stuff doesn't get them laid.
Here's my off-the-cuff spouting: in former times, male programmers were, as I, nerdy, perhaps even aspie, guys who knew they had to adapt to social norms to be acceptable at work and maybe find a girlfriend. Now they are of the same feedstock but they see a much easier and online-available—that is to say infantile and pseudo-fascist—set of norms to which to conform…and the absence of a girlfriend just proves that women are too inferior to appreciate them in their wonderfulness. (And an L.L.M. can produce ever-better-tailored onan-fodder, quite possibly leading them down expectational by-ways from whose vantage-points no real woman can look good.)
(I assume other-than–cis-het-white-male coders to be less degradable into assholes, but that might just be wishful thinking—I'm still waiting for female executives to find their own awfulness to match sexual harassment, apart from sexual harassment…I mean _novel_ awfulness.)
The social libertarianism tracked well with the Democratic Party and also the broader culture (e.g. South Park) up until the 2010s, when marginalized groups and economic discontent became more prominent and the Democrats began to split along those lines (Hillary vs Bernie) and Republicans were radicalized toward the right. Labor had been de-prioritized by the Democrats since the Clinton years so Silicon Valley didn't have a problem with them until social and economic justice began gaining steam.
Well, if we could just limit the huffing to the works of the pre-{Virginia Gerstenfeld} Heinlein, we'd be fine.
In my insider perceptions (a bit outdated, as I retired some years ago) this is a good description of part of the high-tech workforce, associated of course with the managerial class. The tendency among the tech workers - at least in software - was toward the liberal-Democratic worldview.
Yeah, tech workers are dyed in the wool progressive neoliberal
Well, tech. managers often seem to resent their need for tech. workers: either they never coded and consider such 'f-gg-ty bullshit for nerds', or they used to and felt like everyone below them can't do it anywhere near as well as they used to do and demand too much—'If they were any good they would have started their own firms just like me.' (Missing the pleasures of coding, perhaps over-much out of nostalgia for when their bodies worked better, likely helps feed that resentment.)
In small start-ups, there is generally less distinction and greater solidarity, but any larger and a class-structure gets generated.
Sean: Your view that tech was never progressive is spot on. (No one who thinks Ayn Rand had anything to offer other than turgid prose cannot lay claim to having an enlightened social outlook). Today’s tech bros are the spiritual heirs of the hippies, few, if any, of whom had any real interest in doing anything to rid capitalism of its rough edges, let alone replace it with something more socially democratic, or socialist. They were, as you say, a cadre who simply wanted to be “free” to do whatever they wanted without having any obligations to anyone else.
Couldn’t this all be a bit of a recapitulation of the Robber Baron Era, where unprecedented wealth was accumulated in the hands of a relatively few extraordinarily wealthy people? And with that enormous wealth, they, like Musk, developed their “Visions of Grandeur” and of how they wanted to reshape the world even further for their purposes. The Rockefellers, Melons, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, etc., etc., come to mind. And they, too, effected a sort of de facto global financial elite that took different pathways to imposing their ideas and will — some more authoritarian than others.
Our American-based plutocrats generally are just doing that plutocratic thing these folks do to clear away roadblocks (regulations, popular opposition, etc.) that are in the way of conquering their markets. But some, like Musk, have far more megalomaniacal aspirations. I believe he really wants to rule the land and then the world — and beyond into the solar system!
I, following Michael A Alexander, don’t believe that neoliberalism has ended, though it is certainly being challenged. And yes, there is a palpable uncertainty that capitalists hate clearly made evident and more intense by Trump’s extraordinary capture of the mantle of populist insurrection. I believe most of our plutocrats are primarily looking to establish a new stability from which to pursue even more wealth and market share, etc. They are on board the project of clearing away many of the hurdles to this identified by Project 2025.
But Musk and a few others have a more ambitious agenda that is fundamentally in great friction with the rest. Musk wants the actual dictatorial power that Trump’s narcissism has been suggestive of. He wants to use this period of uncertainty and chaos to have the new stability be in the form that Orban has achieved — and being a child of S. African Apartheid, I have no doubt that he would naturally aspire beyond that to more or a Putin-like dictatorship.
Therefore, both within and around the Trump Administration, I expect there is going to be a lot of very intense infighting. I don’t think the majority of a Silicon Valley or any other major interest group capable of moving major pieces on our chess board wants Musk or anyone else to create a dictatorship. So the fight over our future could end-up being a “normal” contest between different cohorts of the capitalist elite; or it could be an abnormal clash of very different world views leading to a great deal more domestic conflict than we’ve seen for at least a century.
I’ve said for some time that Trump is the set-up guy, but Musk is preparing to be the closer. Keeping Musk off the field is going to be critical to our collective future.
Here’s a link to Michael Alexander I meant to insert in my comment: https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
Thank you for writing this. There is a lot I can say about this as someone who trained as an academic historian but has subsequently become a programmer. Maybe I'll write a post on my substack about my particular perspective on how my own experience providing labor in this economy connects with the above.
That said, I can say a bit right now.
Basically, programming work and certain associated jobs in the tech sector have been a great way to make a lot of money for those who don't control the means of production in our economy. As an experienced programmer living in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, and maybe a few other places, you WILL make well over $100,000, very possibly more. There simply haven't been enough people with the skills to do this work. Hence all the political effort spent trying to enable H1B visas to get immigrant programmers; hence the Code school boom (which I took advantage of 10 years ago).
I don't know if this is true anymore (or at least it is becoming less true), but one of the best things someone struggling could have done over the last 10-15 years was "learn to code". Not everyone is capable of being a decent programmer, but far more people are than are currently doing the job. It isn't rocket science; its just a trade like being an electrician, but with more mathy/academic concepts thrown in. Its not trivial to become at least a decent programmer -- probably takes 2-3 years of experience/learning -- but its also well within the capability of millions and millions of people who don't currently do it.
Its also true that many programmers -- but perhaps more importantly, project managers, designers, marketers, etc. --- are probably not strictly speaking needed, certainly at very mature platforms like Twitter. And I think Musk et al sort of know this, and want to break the relative power this class of well-paid labor has.
There IS a cost to doing this. Observing X/Twitter, I can see it is company that has gutted its product development/marketing staff. It feels chaotic, ramshackle. But this doesn't matter much for something like Twitter which was a very mature platform. You don't really need many employees if you just want to maintain what it can do already--really you just need enough money to throw at AWS or Azure to keep the servers running.
For this reason, I'm not sure Musk's bet with Twitter is applicable in the industry as a whole. AI is a big development, but it is not ready for prime time. Its nowhere near totally replacing human programmers currently - it still requires constant supervision and guidance from experience engineers to do anything beyond the most rudimentary tasks. That said, there is evidence that it can replace some of what very junior progammers can do, who would be doing these types of rudimentary tasks under strict supervision of more tenured staff.
AI is just the specific manifestation of the deeper imperative in capitalism to improve labor productivity and reduce Labor costs. It was always going to come in some fashion. Will the sum effects on tech labor look like deindustrialization or more like the introduction of the personal computer? It's impossible to say, but the tendency to replace expensive labor is pretty strong...
When thinking about Silicon Valley, Ch. 15 of Marx's "Capital" comes to mind:
"...Thus, apart from the dearness of the machines made in this way, a circumstance that is ever present to the mind of the capitalist, the expansion of industries carried on by means of machinery, and the invasion by machinery of fresh branches of production, were dependent on the growth of a class of workmen, who, owing to the almost artistic nature of their employment, could increase their numbers only gradually, and not by leaps and bounds..."
The broader theoretical framework of "Capital" seems totally busted but in some of these chapters his observations are really astute.
The high-salaried SWEs seem like exactly this class of knowledge workers. And indeed, VCs and startup founders fantasize that someday soon you will not need to hire expensive engineers and give them equity. You'll just need capital for the LLM.
The odd thing is that really since the 1950s, programming has just kept getting automated and "capitalized" -- far far more than any other area of "knowledge work" -- but this always just results in expanding its scope to different applications and areas of the economy. Hence Andreessen's famous slogan "software is eating the world". Among knowledge workers the programmers could remain sort of artisanal since new techniques constantly need to be invented.
But it can't last forever and it seems like some well-informed people are betting it's finally over. I am actually not so sure, and I don't think that's just wishful thinking.
"In this class war, the Silicon Valley capitalist class has forged an alliance with the reactionary mob...," although saying they fear "pauperization" is a sympathetic reading, to say the least.
'16 was revenge of the reactionary mob (violent bigots) and '24 is revenge of the neoliberal elite (billionaires). The mob fears demographic changes and the neoliberals fear Lina Khan, or state reforms driven by the big challenges of climate change.
Looks like the latter are now keen on a massive shock doctrine of voodoo "free market" economics; Musk flirting with Argentina, etc. Once these policies begin to take effect it is likely the violent bigots won't like the economic outcomes and their consent will dwindle, right. So then what?
How about police state crackdowns, that's what the republican half of the country voted for anyway? Sorry, but I, currently anyway, don't see the democratic resilience in conservative elites in America that we're seeing now in South Korea. Quite the opposite.
More like to me we're waiting for the violent bigots, the base, to wake-up and realize they've been had, taken for another ride by the richies. And they won't be happy, again.
Your back-of-the-envelope analysis seems strong to me when it comes to the oligarchs who bet on Trump in this election. You cause me to think about AI and how it promises to disrupt and marginalize the professional managerial class in much the same way that robot technologies disrupted and marginalized the manufacturing middle class, and also about how tariffs and international trade factor into the equation of what sort of diversity of interests may be embedded within the technological oligarchy. Enormous valuations on Wall Street ultimately depend on the idea that someone is going to buy actual goods, whether it is the government using taxes to buy rockets and satellites or doctors buying Teslas. Held to a certain light, technology can start to look like a pyramid scheme, in which efficiencies created by using machines instead of people eventually hollow out the consumer base that capitalism depends on. Musk hasn’t proven that he can actually make X work in financial terms, just political ones. Google and Amazon depend on selling actual things to people who can afford to buy them. Just some thoughts. This essay is really suggestive, thank you!
Farrell has been so strong throughout this season of blaming. Still reading your piece with interest. Broke away to tell you how pleased to see you quoting him.
“ The tech capitalists also have a natural set of allies in the family-owned capitalist class that has always struggled against both organized labor and the onus of federal regulations.”
This seems like a really telling/interesting phenomenon to me - I think you could argue that “small business tyrants” were foundational to Trump’s first two elections, and I’m not surprised that the SV elite would be envious of the ability to run their (often public!) companies that way. I’ve already seen plenty of SV types crowing that Trump’s win was an endorsement of the SV brand of big business libertarianism, even though a lot of “normal” Trump supporters seem to want some sort of Trumpian command economy!
Spot on analysis here, thank you
I have seen some of this expressed on Twitter by Musk fanboys accounts that appear to be inauthentic, leading me to believe this is the narrative Elon wishes to promote. That is, Musk is waging a war on the ‘managerial class’ infected by woke ideology that is supposedly imposing bureaucracy on the private sector.
Woke ideology meanwhile is a stand in for cultural marxism which is a stand in for “those commies”
FYSA Henry’s and your analysis overlaps substantially with what Bannon says in his (ideologically incoherent) interview with Douthat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm also wondering how much Democratic pro-worker politics shattered SV liberalism. Democrats went after big tech monopolies and VCs acted like Warren was going to guillotine them. It's normal for people to follow their material interests.
The Democrats may have grifters but generally dislike MLMs, scams, pyramid schemes, so crypto and NFTs were always going to end up in their targets. Republicans haven't found a scam they don't love, they are natural allies with SV vaporware peddlers.
A few things with which I dissent:
My understanding is that the liberal in neoliberal is the liberalism on which our war for independence was fought: no state would interfere with one's accumulation of wealth.
Presuming that is at all correct -- and it certainly looks that way from the last five decades or so -- neoliberalism is alive, well and had a spectacular victory in November.
So query: what is the bases for the claims that neoliberalism is dead? That it's pissing off the populations in liberal democracies to the point that right wing extremists get elected -- who then serve neoliberals well enough. Clearly, it looks like I must be missing something, but what?
As for Silicon Valley's apparent shift: dunno about the people actually working on things but the Powers That Be are the VCs -- the money guys.
The Hewlett Packard geniuses at work in the garage thing is ancient history. The latest big thing out of the Valley has been what's needed to make the gig economy possible. The gig economy, of course, is a way to exploit workers even more; nothing liberal there.
The other innovation is a business sucking VC money with which, as Job 1, is ensuring there'll be as little competition as possible, preferably none, of course -- it's the secret origin of Uber.
So. That people engaged in that crap would be presumed to be some sort of libs or allied with the national Democratic party makes no sense other than synching with a fact and context-lite scenario.
My 2¢.
John I first heard of your work through Know Your Enemy and have since read your book and subscribed here to your substack. I like the way you think but sometimes feel I don't have the social theory credentials to fully understand all of your arguments. Can you recommend me some works that will help me understand Marx, Gramsci, and more theoretical background so I can understand better?
- Arlo
It is hard to imagine this avant-garde building a long-lasting hegemonic vision.
The closest we got to the capital V vision is some woo about "propagating the light of consciousness/extending the lifespan of civilization/inter-planetary colonization" from Musk and co but that won't stick in suburban America where ketamine is not the stimulant of choice.
Andreessen cohort is basically about "don't you dare touching our pyramid schemes" which is in a sense more popular, standing on top of the long MLM/prosperity gospel tradition, but by definition will never be satisfying.
Thiel's ideology of "democracy can't get anything done, the solution is the dictatorship with me pulling the strings" is compelling but it is also unclear to the masses what it is that Thiel wants to build, and insofar as Americans like fascism, they hardly like "leather uniform vampiric Nazism" aesthetic.
Bezos/Musk etc. are not ideologues and will just participate in whatever loyalty display is asked of them.
one thing i'll say-what Musk has done with Twitter can't be seen as a business model, when the company's value and revenue have cratered since he's taken over. Thats not to say his take over hasnt been worth it to him, but its not a way to run a business as a business
No, but what he has bought is a business where as they used to say, he can ‘buy ink [not] by the barrel but by the container load’. That makes him uniquely dangerous and very powerful.