John, this is extremely astute, thank you. It's grounding to think more deeply about unfolding events - beats lying on the floor in a fetal position by a mile!
As someone who resided in the Bay Area from 1988-2010, I want to agree with Ziggy about the longstanding racism and idiocy (in the classical sense) of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Due to the Haight Ashbury of it all, people associate the Bay Area with left radicalism - and of course its legacy as the queer capital of the world enhances that reputation. Yet when I arrived there in 1988, I was shocked by how racially segregated the queer community was. In the ensuing years, I came to understand the tech management class as operating with a thin veneer of "liberalism" which masked a contempt for working people, a reflexive rejection of any kind of systemic political analysis, and extreme discomfort with Black people. Indeed, we left the Bay Area in large part because my wife is African American, and -- Ph.D and CEO that she is -- was regularly followed in stores and otherwise singled out for humiliation.
Silicon Valley has long operated from the premise that history is utterly irrelevant to its undertakings, enabling levels of misogyny and racism in the workplace that conventional businesses in liberal cities would not tolerate. Its CEOs may have performatively hobnobbed with Dem leadership, but their culture has always been radically libertarian, white supremacist, and breathtakingly hostile to women.
This is an interesting observation. I personally feel Silicon Valley/SF tech is particularly unique in this way. Seattle tech is different. Maybe because the companies here are more staid and corporate. Especially Microsoft, but really Amazon too. This has in turn led to the creation of a tech culture that is less high on its own supply, more willing to be a corporate good citizen, etc.
The more I learn about Leland Stanford, the more I see his right wing radicalism shaping Silicon Valley. I also suspect that false assumptions about Bay Area culture enable a unique level of non-accountability.
I lived in San Francisco 2017-2021. Most of the Black people who lived there were unhoused. My Black friend told me she had to dress nice and wear her wig every day before she left the house or people would assume she was unhoused and treat her even worse than the default. It's literally, empirically one of the most residentially racially segregated cities in America.
Many (most?) unhoused people in SF are Black, but please don't assert that most Black people in SF are unhoused - that's demographically incorrect. They're just the most visible Black people there, because they're literally on the street. Everything else you say is entirely true!
There's a great pop history book about SF from 1967-1977 (the Summer of Love to the assassination of Harvey Milk) called Season of the Witch which explains how the Fillmore - known in earlier times as the Harlem of the West - was destroyed by the boulevard SF built so that white people could drive from the outskirts to downtown without encountering Black folks. Among the outcomes was a shattered community vulnerable to Jim Jones. I highly recommend it - an excellent read or audiobook that also covers Patty Hearst, the Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, and much more. I'd lived in SF for 20 years when I read it, and it was a revelation.
I mostly buy into your analysis, with one exception. Peter Thiel was Peter Thiel well before 2016. So were Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, and Scott Adams (the "Dilbert" guy). The current ideology of tech-lords was pre-formed. Then the Democratic Party and "tech"* workers turned on their industry. Non-ideological people like Mark Zuckerberg and (dare I say?) Elon Musk then allied with the ideologues. Malefactors of great wealth always find fascism a convenient ideology when it is popular enough.
*(I hate the marketing gimmick word "tech." A stone axe is a technology; "tech" is a business method. The "tech" industry is the creation of middleman choke points, enabled by the Internet. The word "tech" only legitimates this industry.)
I account for this! I say for "the most part." In previous writing of talked about the reactionary vanguard. And I talk about Thiel's project of persuading fellow members of his class that dictatorship as necessary. https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-enigma-of-peter-thiel
Exceptionally helpful, thank you. It offers a frame for what I have gotten stuck on: why do so many on the right assert, and apparently feel, that the US has had an upsurge in radical leftism? It seemed like an absurd, ungrounded fixation. The most I could see was that Bernie Sanders rallied a portion of Democrats to the idea of trying to get back to FDR-style redistribution. Plus the rather reasonable ideas that cops shouldn't get to execute Black people, and powerful men should have to find bed partners like everyone else does and stop trying to coerce their underlings through the threat of demoting or firing them.
I started checking out Substacks in hopes of hearing someone on the right or in the middle politically express why there were so sure we were so infected by Marxists and wild-eyed youth (when the students I teach seem absorbed most of all by the feeling they may not get a foothold in the middle class after all, so by god they will keep their heads down and work their asses off).
I never heard anything that made much sense. But this frame potentially allows a lot of pieces to fall into place.
Because they went through the 0-to-1 shift of never needing to pay attention to what anyone else thought to bathing in performative radicalism on Twitter all day every day.
John, as a former striving millennial who witnessed this shift first hand, you’ve completely sold me on the anti-woke movement as a class war. That’s exactly what happened - I can’t believe I didn’t appreciate what I was experiencing.
The thing is, the progressive excesses within these companies *was* annoying to your average employee, but looking back, it was incredible how much the c suite was on its heels.
If I could pinpoint a moment that the tide began to turn, I guess the return to office movement in 2022. CEOs felt like they could be honest with each other about their desire to crack the whip and they weren’t met with nearly as much resistance as they would have in 2018, for instance.
mckenzie wark theorizes a postcapitalist (though still capitalistic and feudalistic in crucial ways) system of *vectoralism* in which a vectoralist class like the silicon valley baasskap focuses increasingly on controlling avenues of communication and coordination rather than means or sites of production, where factories increasingly cease to be as critical as centralized ownership over platforms and networks
the vectoralist class seeks to enclose and commodify the digital commons, restrict and manipulate information flows, and rent-seek atop an intellectual property regime
I just can't help always reducing the focus to Dorsey-era Twitter. Combining a critical mass of academics, activists, political staffers, politicians themselves, political journalists, shitposters, and the mass rabble into an algorithmic status-seeking hothouse that was singular and finite and collapsed all of those different societal roles into the same thing.
The powerful and influential in left-of-center society spent all damn day on this thing for a decade. Twitter really was real life in that sense.
What Trump 2.0 has built into a fractious, incoherent narrow majority is, at base, a popular front against the ideological formation 2010's Twitter incubated.
I don't know where that points us going forward, but as I look backward that's about the only thing that feels certain and solid.
This is not central to your point, but... One reason not to "take it directly from the horse's mouth" is that Andreessen is clearly lying in that interview with Douthat. Andreessen tries to portray himself as a "good responsible democrat" up to and including 2016, but he was publicly supporting the GOP in 2012: https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-hero-marc-andreessen-is-backing-romney-2012-3
Do you think that another factor could be that this long previous era of essentially free borrowing made our tech overlords complacent? Many of these guys just got lucky once and have not been able to produce anything new that people actually want (e.g., Zuckerburg and the metaverse). When interest rates were zero or near zero, burning huge piles of cash was maybe not as big of a deal but now they are under real pressure and its causing them to crack up? Just a thought.
This is a great piece. I wonder if t describes primarily the surface level manifestation we are seeing as there has always been a reactionary spirit in many of the players taking a lead now: Musk, Andreesseen, Thiel, et al. At it's core, this seems to be a conflict between those who have a lived ethics devoted to the individual versus the social. Your piece clearly highlights how the very machinery that has given power to those with an individualist ethics has a primary use as a bullhorn for a social ethics, and therefore must be reigned in and controlled by the former. That need for control coupled to their reactionary spirit demands the current crisis. But, as you highlight, there are other forces at play...
This is very helpful. I will need to read it several times to really internalize it. That Marc Andreessen character has always struck me as a bad seed. I heard Sam Harris interviewing him once and thought, "This guy is a total reactionary. Why is he on Sam's podcast?" I could hardly stand to listen to him talk.
As a boomer life-long Democrat, I have been at times a bit taken aback myself by the far left of the Democratic party. I did not support Bernie Sanders in the primaries, not because I thought he was wrong, but because I did not think he could win the general election. Some of my Democrat friends here in the rural South were very angry at me about that. The same has happened over the Israel/Gaza war: because I think that Israel had a right to strike back against Hamas, and inevitably then at Gazan civilians, I am considered un-woke by some in my local Democratic party. So I understand to some degree the shock and surprise of the owner class when they encounter the New New Left of the Democratic party, even though I was part of the original New Left.
That said, so-called "moderate" Democrats believe in engaging with the more radicalized wing of our party, and we can't fire them any more than Mark Andreessen can, nor would we want to. I hope we can build a coalition that can reshape the US into a more socialist and tolerant place. They may not realize it, but it's totally in the interest of the tech oligarchs for that to happen. How rich do they really need to be?
This is an entirely different subject, but he was on Sam's podcast because he is one of them. Sam has always used an excuse of being the most rational person in the room to normalize neo-reactionary ideas like race-science to the left. Oh, and he did a great job of demonizing the left (your 'radicals') to the left (your 'moderates') so that this coalition you talk about can't be built from the start.
Agree about Sam, to some extent. I wouldn't say he's a total reactionary, but sometimes he seems too critical of the left wing of the Democratic party. I don't agree with him about everything, but I still find his podcast useful. To be fair, he didn't seem to like Mark Andreessen very much either.
1. 'I don’t think the technological advances—the forces of production—are quite to the point that makes the types of people—the relations of production—they need to help administer and accumulate their wealth simply superfluous.' And it's incredibly unlikely that they ever will be - what they're after is 'humans, but without that messy humanity'. What can be automated already has been - what they're trying to do is not to replace the grunt worker, but the person who designs and supervises the automation to begin with.
2. I have my doubts about the revolutionary nature of the Internet/social media, but it doesn't have to be to engender this kind of reaction - all that matters is that the people who control it THINK it's revolutionary. These are 'their' systems, and Other People are organizing against and complaining about them ON them - that's a world-shattering sense of violation, of loss of control. I think a key development here is that they're not just trying to replace or automate workers, but consumers. They want nothing they don't top-down operate to matter in their perfect order
The 'business model' for genAI is as such - you rip off as much existing data and feed it into a model; you present the model to the people who produced the existing data as a 'new thing' and let them 'use' it, thereby further feeding data into it; eventually the model should evolve to the point where the people who produced the data aren't needed in any form, either as source material or customers
"These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them."
Hey, It does feel like a dialectic as old as the bourgeoisie revolution. Capital creates republican gov and then resents and attacks it when it grows independent interests of its own; they create an organized labor force and then resent and attack it when it grows its own independent interests, etc.
So in one sense this process could be like the perfectly normal ambivalence or mixed feelings of a parent dealing with the growing independence of a child and give or take some tears and struggle this usually works out and people continue to get together for the holidays. But what about when it doesn't and it becomes pathological, alienating, tyrannical, abusive, even violently destructive?
I'm spitballing, as always, but I think Big Tech passed this threshold into pathology around 2010, the ungrateful electorate in 2016, and the two have fully converged (or momentarily, anyway), Billionaires and Bigots, in 2024.
And maybe Marx's problem was that he conceives of a permanent, revolutionary, resolution to class conflict, or the dialectic, instead of some always tentative, negotiated, balance of power reforms that head off fascist rule and the other terrible illiberal shit we're dealing with now.
Anyway, I slogged through the first volume of Capital once and had no problem understanding why Marx might grow frustrated with the intransigence of capital and fantasize about a revolutionary communist utopia. But I couldn't entirely understand his painstaking theory of labor value formulations and always felt like he was trying to reduce to formula something that wasn't reducible like that.
I think this could be a bit over complicated mainly.
I learned about facebook in 2007-2008 when it was a relatively new product. I was in my last year of my Masters program and I can't remember if you still needed a university email address or not to use it. I don't think you did. This was also the time when subprime collapsed the economy and Obama was in political ascendance.
Tech 2.0 was a newer industry and it was scrappy and run by young or youngish guys and there was not much critique of social media back then.
Now it is a very mature and wealthy industry and they all became Republicans.
Another way of doing it is that these guys were used to being praised and never criticized and they ended up creating their own social undoing because social media is not the land of the courier and the yesman. It is the land of Boaty McBoatface and the never ending peanut gallery. I think these guys all shocked themselves at one point by making their own social media post and getting mocked instead of the constant praise they are used to.
Though I’m not American, I am one of those progressive engineers working for a large American tech firm run by one of the tech oligarchs (not Musk) close to Trump. I think your thesis is fascinating, but I’m not sure about the actual dynamics. Our work overlords obviously don’t share our politics, but it’s never been an existential threat to them. And by the way, many of their employees aren’t even in America — ~40% for some — and they’re already used to working under more severe labour and commercial regulation than in the US; we’re talking about American companies that hire engineers in Sweden! Very few of them are mad ideologues like Musk or Thiel (think Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon), and while they do try to maximise profit, they don’t strive for world domination and aren’t angry that it’s not within their reach. They’re not brilliant risk-taking investors who foresee world events. They’re mostly boring executives trying to minimise risk. They don’t like rocking the boat too much, and they don’t try to understand social forces in more depth than anticipating demand for their products.
What does scare them is if world domination may be within the reach of one of their competitors, and what could be an existential threat to them is Elon Musk and his unhinged, boat-rocking behaviour. *He* may well be driven by what you say, while the rest either don’t want to be left behind or fear retribution in some form from Musk if they don’t play along (he’s too crazy for them to anticipate what he may do).
John, this is extremely astute, thank you. It's grounding to think more deeply about unfolding events - beats lying on the floor in a fetal position by a mile!
As someone who resided in the Bay Area from 1988-2010, I want to agree with Ziggy about the longstanding racism and idiocy (in the classical sense) of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Due to the Haight Ashbury of it all, people associate the Bay Area with left radicalism - and of course its legacy as the queer capital of the world enhances that reputation. Yet when I arrived there in 1988, I was shocked by how racially segregated the queer community was. In the ensuing years, I came to understand the tech management class as operating with a thin veneer of "liberalism" which masked a contempt for working people, a reflexive rejection of any kind of systemic political analysis, and extreme discomfort with Black people. Indeed, we left the Bay Area in large part because my wife is African American, and -- Ph.D and CEO that she is -- was regularly followed in stores and otherwise singled out for humiliation.
Silicon Valley has long operated from the premise that history is utterly irrelevant to its undertakings, enabling levels of misogyny and racism in the workplace that conventional businesses in liberal cities would not tolerate. Its CEOs may have performatively hobnobbed with Dem leadership, but their culture has always been radically libertarian, white supremacist, and breathtakingly hostile to women.
Yeah good points
This is an interesting observation. I personally feel Silicon Valley/SF tech is particularly unique in this way. Seattle tech is different. Maybe because the companies here are more staid and corporate. Especially Microsoft, but really Amazon too. This has in turn led to the creation of a tech culture that is less high on its own supply, more willing to be a corporate good citizen, etc.
The more I learn about Leland Stanford, the more I see his right wing radicalism shaping Silicon Valley. I also suspect that false assumptions about Bay Area culture enable a unique level of non-accountability.
Have you read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris? It traces exactly this culture from Leland Stanford to the present day.
I've seen that book in bookstores, and I've been tempted to buy it. Maybe I should go ahead and get it.
I lived in San Francisco 2017-2021. Most of the Black people who lived there were unhoused. My Black friend told me she had to dress nice and wear her wig every day before she left the house or people would assume she was unhoused and treat her even worse than the default. It's literally, empirically one of the most residentially racially segregated cities in America.
Many (most?) unhoused people in SF are Black, but please don't assert that most Black people in SF are unhoused - that's demographically incorrect. They're just the most visible Black people there, because they're literally on the street. Everything else you say is entirely true!
There's a great pop history book about SF from 1967-1977 (the Summer of Love to the assassination of Harvey Milk) called Season of the Witch which explains how the Fillmore - known in earlier times as the Harlem of the West - was destroyed by the boulevard SF built so that white people could drive from the outskirts to downtown without encountering Black folks. Among the outcomes was a shattered community vulnerable to Jim Jones. I highly recommend it - an excellent read or audiobook that also covers Patty Hearst, the Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, and much more. I'd lived in SF for 20 years when I read it, and it was a revelation.
I actually read it last year and it was so so good. I read and loved The Devil's Chessboard first.
I mostly buy into your analysis, with one exception. Peter Thiel was Peter Thiel well before 2016. So were Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, and Scott Adams (the "Dilbert" guy). The current ideology of tech-lords was pre-formed. Then the Democratic Party and "tech"* workers turned on their industry. Non-ideological people like Mark Zuckerberg and (dare I say?) Elon Musk then allied with the ideologues. Malefactors of great wealth always find fascism a convenient ideology when it is popular enough.
*(I hate the marketing gimmick word "tech." A stone axe is a technology; "tech" is a business method. The "tech" industry is the creation of middleman choke points, enabled by the Internet. The word "tech" only legitimates this industry.)
I account for this! I say for "the most part." In previous writing of talked about the reactionary vanguard. And I talk about Thiel's project of persuading fellow members of his class that dictatorship as necessary. https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-enigma-of-peter-thiel
Exceptionally helpful, thank you. It offers a frame for what I have gotten stuck on: why do so many on the right assert, and apparently feel, that the US has had an upsurge in radical leftism? It seemed like an absurd, ungrounded fixation. The most I could see was that Bernie Sanders rallied a portion of Democrats to the idea of trying to get back to FDR-style redistribution. Plus the rather reasonable ideas that cops shouldn't get to execute Black people, and powerful men should have to find bed partners like everyone else does and stop trying to coerce their underlings through the threat of demoting or firing them.
I started checking out Substacks in hopes of hearing someone on the right or in the middle politically express why there were so sure we were so infected by Marxists and wild-eyed youth (when the students I teach seem absorbed most of all by the feeling they may not get a foothold in the middle class after all, so by god they will keep their heads down and work their asses off).
I never heard anything that made much sense. But this frame potentially allows a lot of pieces to fall into place.
Because they went through the 0-to-1 shift of never needing to pay attention to what anyone else thought to bathing in performative radicalism on Twitter all day every day.
John, as a former striving millennial who witnessed this shift first hand, you’ve completely sold me on the anti-woke movement as a class war. That’s exactly what happened - I can’t believe I didn’t appreciate what I was experiencing.
The thing is, the progressive excesses within these companies *was* annoying to your average employee, but looking back, it was incredible how much the c suite was on its heels.
If I could pinpoint a moment that the tide began to turn, I guess the return to office movement in 2022. CEOs felt like they could be honest with each other about their desire to crack the whip and they weren’t met with nearly as much resistance as they would have in 2018, for instance.
mckenzie wark theorizes a postcapitalist (though still capitalistic and feudalistic in crucial ways) system of *vectoralism* in which a vectoralist class like the silicon valley baasskap focuses increasingly on controlling avenues of communication and coordination rather than means or sites of production, where factories increasingly cease to be as critical as centralized ownership over platforms and networks
the vectoralist class seeks to enclose and commodify the digital commons, restrict and manipulate information flows, and rent-seek atop an intellectual property regime
Well, here’s your next book.
haha, I already had another idea but maybe!
Hell, write 'em both!
I just can't help always reducing the focus to Dorsey-era Twitter. Combining a critical mass of academics, activists, political staffers, politicians themselves, political journalists, shitposters, and the mass rabble into an algorithmic status-seeking hothouse that was singular and finite and collapsed all of those different societal roles into the same thing.
The powerful and influential in left-of-center society spent all damn day on this thing for a decade. Twitter really was real life in that sense.
What Trump 2.0 has built into a fractious, incoherent narrow majority is, at base, a popular front against the ideological formation 2010's Twitter incubated.
I don't know where that points us going forward, but as I look backward that's about the only thing that feels certain and solid.
This is not central to your point, but... One reason not to "take it directly from the horse's mouth" is that Andreessen is clearly lying in that interview with Douthat. Andreessen tries to portray himself as a "good responsible democrat" up to and including 2016, but he was publicly supporting the GOP in 2012: https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-hero-marc-andreessen-is-backing-romney-2012-3
Do you think that another factor could be that this long previous era of essentially free borrowing made our tech overlords complacent? Many of these guys just got lucky once and have not been able to produce anything new that people actually want (e.g., Zuckerburg and the metaverse). When interest rates were zero or near zero, burning huge piles of cash was maybe not as big of a deal but now they are under real pressure and its causing them to crack up? Just a thought.
Terrific. Set off quite a few cerebral fireworks even from this damp squib of an aging brain. Will take some time to fully process.
This is a great piece. I wonder if t describes primarily the surface level manifestation we are seeing as there has always been a reactionary spirit in many of the players taking a lead now: Musk, Andreesseen, Thiel, et al. At it's core, this seems to be a conflict between those who have a lived ethics devoted to the individual versus the social. Your piece clearly highlights how the very machinery that has given power to those with an individualist ethics has a primary use as a bullhorn for a social ethics, and therefore must be reigned in and controlled by the former. That need for control coupled to their reactionary spirit demands the current crisis. But, as you highlight, there are other forces at play...
Yeah I think with the names you mention, they were never progressive. Its just they weren't highly polticized before (with the exception of Thiel).
This is very helpful. I will need to read it several times to really internalize it. That Marc Andreessen character has always struck me as a bad seed. I heard Sam Harris interviewing him once and thought, "This guy is a total reactionary. Why is he on Sam's podcast?" I could hardly stand to listen to him talk.
As a boomer life-long Democrat, I have been at times a bit taken aback myself by the far left of the Democratic party. I did not support Bernie Sanders in the primaries, not because I thought he was wrong, but because I did not think he could win the general election. Some of my Democrat friends here in the rural South were very angry at me about that. The same has happened over the Israel/Gaza war: because I think that Israel had a right to strike back against Hamas, and inevitably then at Gazan civilians, I am considered un-woke by some in my local Democratic party. So I understand to some degree the shock and surprise of the owner class when they encounter the New New Left of the Democratic party, even though I was part of the original New Left.
That said, so-called "moderate" Democrats believe in engaging with the more radicalized wing of our party, and we can't fire them any more than Mark Andreessen can, nor would we want to. I hope we can build a coalition that can reshape the US into a more socialist and tolerant place. They may not realize it, but it's totally in the interest of the tech oligarchs for that to happen. How rich do they really need to be?
This is an entirely different subject, but he was on Sam's podcast because he is one of them. Sam has always used an excuse of being the most rational person in the room to normalize neo-reactionary ideas like race-science to the left. Oh, and he did a great job of demonizing the left (your 'radicals') to the left (your 'moderates') so that this coalition you talk about can't be built from the start.
Agree about Sam, to some extent. I wouldn't say he's a total reactionary, but sometimes he seems too critical of the left wing of the Democratic party. I don't agree with him about everything, but I still find his podcast useful. To be fair, he didn't seem to like Mark Andreessen very much either.
Two comments:
1. 'I don’t think the technological advances—the forces of production—are quite to the point that makes the types of people—the relations of production—they need to help administer and accumulate their wealth simply superfluous.' And it's incredibly unlikely that they ever will be - what they're after is 'humans, but without that messy humanity'. What can be automated already has been - what they're trying to do is not to replace the grunt worker, but the person who designs and supervises the automation to begin with.
2. I have my doubts about the revolutionary nature of the Internet/social media, but it doesn't have to be to engender this kind of reaction - all that matters is that the people who control it THINK it's revolutionary. These are 'their' systems, and Other People are organizing against and complaining about them ON them - that's a world-shattering sense of violation, of loss of control. I think a key development here is that they're not just trying to replace or automate workers, but consumers. They want nothing they don't top-down operate to matter in their perfect order
The 'business model' for genAI is as such - you rip off as much existing data and feed it into a model; you present the model to the people who produced the existing data as a 'new thing' and let them 'use' it, thereby further feeding data into it; eventually the model should evolve to the point where the people who produced the data aren't needed in any form, either as source material or customers
"These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them."
Hey, It does feel like a dialectic as old as the bourgeoisie revolution. Capital creates republican gov and then resents and attacks it when it grows independent interests of its own; they create an organized labor force and then resent and attack it when it grows its own independent interests, etc.
So in one sense this process could be like the perfectly normal ambivalence or mixed feelings of a parent dealing with the growing independence of a child and give or take some tears and struggle this usually works out and people continue to get together for the holidays. But what about when it doesn't and it becomes pathological, alienating, tyrannical, abusive, even violently destructive?
I'm spitballing, as always, but I think Big Tech passed this threshold into pathology around 2010, the ungrateful electorate in 2016, and the two have fully converged (or momentarily, anyway), Billionaires and Bigots, in 2024.
And maybe Marx's problem was that he conceives of a permanent, revolutionary, resolution to class conflict, or the dialectic, instead of some always tentative, negotiated, balance of power reforms that head off fascist rule and the other terrible illiberal shit we're dealing with now.
Anyway, I slogged through the first volume of Capital once and had no problem understanding why Marx might grow frustrated with the intransigence of capital and fantasize about a revolutionary communist utopia. But I couldn't entirely understand his painstaking theory of labor value formulations and always felt like he was trying to reduce to formula something that wasn't reducible like that.
Thanks for our historical reflections.
I think this could be a bit over complicated mainly.
I learned about facebook in 2007-2008 when it was a relatively new product. I was in my last year of my Masters program and I can't remember if you still needed a university email address or not to use it. I don't think you did. This was also the time when subprime collapsed the economy and Obama was in political ascendance.
Tech 2.0 was a newer industry and it was scrappy and run by young or youngish guys and there was not much critique of social media back then.
Now it is a very mature and wealthy industry and they all became Republicans.
Another way of doing it is that these guys were used to being praised and never criticized and they ended up creating their own social undoing because social media is not the land of the courier and the yesman. It is the land of Boaty McBoatface and the never ending peanut gallery. I think these guys all shocked themselves at one point by making their own social media post and getting mocked instead of the constant praise they are used to.
It is not nearly complicated enough!
Though I’m not American, I am one of those progressive engineers working for a large American tech firm run by one of the tech oligarchs (not Musk) close to Trump. I think your thesis is fascinating, but I’m not sure about the actual dynamics. Our work overlords obviously don’t share our politics, but it’s never been an existential threat to them. And by the way, many of their employees aren’t even in America — ~40% for some — and they’re already used to working under more severe labour and commercial regulation than in the US; we’re talking about American companies that hire engineers in Sweden! Very few of them are mad ideologues like Musk or Thiel (think Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon), and while they do try to maximise profit, they don’t strive for world domination and aren’t angry that it’s not within their reach. They’re not brilliant risk-taking investors who foresee world events. They’re mostly boring executives trying to minimise risk. They don’t like rocking the boat too much, and they don’t try to understand social forces in more depth than anticipating demand for their products.
What does scare them is if world domination may be within the reach of one of their competitors, and what could be an existential threat to them is Elon Musk and his unhinged, boat-rocking behaviour. *He* may well be driven by what you say, while the rest either don’t want to be left behind or fear retribution in some form from Musk if they don’t play along (he’s too crazy for them to anticipate what he may do).
Well I sort of account for that elsewhere. I point out that there's a difference between these radical vanguardist types and staid executives.