1y ago

The Nation: Silicon Valley is fully MAGA-Pilled

www.thenation.com

It’s Official: Silicon Valley Is Fully MAGA-Pilled

Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the "Tech Right" as they're being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there's more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.

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My career curve from naive and vaguely libertarian computer programming intern to radicalized full-stack anarchist has taught me that most people in this industry are just the worst. Deeply insular people with massive chips on their shoulders, genius and martyr complexes, fully bought into this idea that the "nerds" should be in charge.
I can't stand talking to most people in my field. They are so myopically focused on either whatever computer puzzle is in front of them or whatever overcomplex scheme of cryptocurrency, third-tier stock options, and investment portfolios they fantasize will make them rich too. The outright worship of tech moguls and their money and their "big ideas."
The dirty secret is that tech people have always sucked. The radical thinkers, the FOSS people who put careers on the line so people could have functioning computers, those saints who believed computers could actually improve the lives of human beings, those true heroes of the field continue unsung, unfunded; they were always the exploited minority in computing.
- vaguely libertarian computer programming intern to radicalized full-stack anarchist
  I just have to ask, is full-stack here referring to the programmer path, or is it "full-stack anarchist"? If the latter, I need an explainer of which part of anarchism is the back-end and which the front, and also where can I find the job postings.
  
  Haha, sadly just full-stack dev, just wanted it to sound cool!
  Now that I'm thinking about it though, is front end vs back end useful specialization or a kind of implied hierarchy? (True anarchist programmers never even use trees because we don't believe in hierarchy!)
  As for the job postings, someone was seeking members for a gamedev co-op on Lemmy the other day! Maybe the anarchist jobs are coming soon!
- Worth pointing out this is usually dev. They've always had a high cunt quotient
- So technically you went from economic liberal to an actual libertarian. Good onya. More tech people should.
  Also nothing makes self-identifying libertarian saltier. Then pointing out that they're just liberals with extra steps. We're talking drop the mask / non-aggression principle sort of takes.
  
  Hah, yeah I suppose so!
  Also, and this is wild I know, I live in New Orleans and somehow did not know about Joseph Déjacque! So thanks for the links, I've got some books to add to my reading material it seems.
A bunch of rich people with questionable morals like having easily influenceable people in power. Especially now that it is legal for presidents to take bribes.
Silicon valley isn't what it used to be
- Silicon Valley is fundamentally the same as it's always been, it's just a bigger scale
  
  Specifically, the nerdy-hippy-freethinker cohort did not flourish at anywhere close to the same scale as the get-rich-quick segment of the population as this modern gold rush emerged.
  Most tech bros would be stock brokers if born a couple decades earlier.
  
  With a whole lot more power
Turns out frat bros are pretty alt right. Shocker.
- Alt right is so passé. Radical right is where it's at.
John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf's book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.
You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive
The "tech right" has always been a thing. It's why I refuse to work for corporate tech, it's a boys club full of misogynistic man-children who believe they are deservedly a part of the upper echelon of society, better than everyone else. It's exhausting.
- From my experience, most software corpo employees are just tired parents with mortgages. Like the vast, vast majority. The higher up the pyramid you look the more cultish the vibes, though.
  
  my experience is also primarily with tired parents with mortages… who blame minorities for their unhappiness (so they vote right-wing) and get all of their social and emotional fulfilment from work (so they willingly buy into the C-suite cult).
  they are also usually so tech illiterate that they have the vibe of someone who never learned a trade and fell for the 'learn to code' advice at some point in their life.
  
  I would love to work in that world. My experience is likely tainted by the jobs I got (past tense as I no longer work in tech; I'm in non-profit work now) having a lot of Junior devs straight out of college (and some interns still in college) so they hadn't yet experienced enough of life to break out of these childish mentalities.
Socially illiterate businessmen with god complexes are in favor of less regulation
Yeah no shit.
The media again builds a virtual public consisting of billionaires of a variety of positions and ask you "which one do you agree with?" This is a strategy to push the public closer to the beliefs of billionaires.
I don't know who these fucking people are. The real public in California still supports Biden by a 25% margin.
- It’s the rich, trust fund babies in the middle management spots that failed through business school. They are Musk-derivative type people that have been ruining the gaming industry, really have nothing to do with tech. Much more the MBA stains.
There's a thread of Randian ideology that underlies the beginnings of the computer industry. Adam Curtis talks about it in his documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (very much worth watching).
- Absolutely. In fact in one major survey of the values of the counterculture conducted back in the 1960s Ayn Rand was listed as one of people's major influences. There were different strands to the counterculture, one communitarian but the other about self actualisation and the individual. Both positioned themselves in opposition to the state, but differed significantly in what kind of future they wanted.
Nothing changed, they're just mask-off now.
A few of the tech conferences that are more corporate, often lean conservative. Not like right wing "hell yeah MAGA", but like clearly focused on enterprise technology, FAANG (Or whatever we call it now), and tech bros.
The tech conferences focused on developers/non-corporate tech often lean towards liberal. Lots of Trans rights. Lots of LGBT flags. Lots of diversity of speakers and attendees. Usually also very open-source friendly and lots of bashing of major tech companies.
I wonder if this is the whole of the tech silicon valley, or just the rich assholes at the top.
- I think it's definitely worth distinguishing between different classes of workers in Silicon Valley. It's hard to talk about tech ideology in a fully encompassing way because there are for sure dissenting voices. I think to some degree you can say it is the intersection of tech and wealth ideologies but there's definitely people that aren't wealthy that also espouse similar thinking so... tricky!
  I adopt the handy framing of Silicon valley as a mindset rather than a place to help with this. There's a great photography book called Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan that is all photos and stories of the precarious workers that don't necessarily work in tech. I keep it out in my office to remind me that silicon Valley is not just the rich assholes.
This American Psycho spinoff sucks: “I’m in MAGAs and asshatisms”
So this is the reason behind the news of M$ dropping their DEI team...
I wonder how Bill Gates will cope with the fact that a lot of MAGA chuds are anti-vaxxers.
- Bill Gates
  Just a reminder that he's not associated with M$FT dealings in any way anymore.
  It's all mask-off for Satya though, he used to at least play a reasonable persona.
  
  MAGAts will still likely cry "fuck Bill Gates" a lot though, and might still have a hard time buying non-luxury (non-Apple) PCs due to that.
- i'm sure a quick look at stock prices will sweeten the pill.
  
  If they're not getting horribly boycotted. After a certain point, MAGA chuds won't mass buy copies of Hogwarts Legacy style shovelware to dump it onto key reselling sites for cheap, to trigger the libs.

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