Well, fuck. Now that the US election is over, we have a fascist firmly ensconced in the most powerful political position in the world. I've spent most of the last few days in a pit of misery, and I'm only just starting to claw my way out of it: I'm a trans woman, and I'm genuinely scared. I think I'll be writing quite a lot more than usual in the days to come. But for some reason (and I'm as surprised by this as anyone else), today I wanted to write about how the tech industry acculturates us. Looking at so much of my time immersed in tech and in the tech industry, I can't help but see tech acculturation as the distorted mirror of the fascist regime that we're now staring down the barrel of. The work culture, the way we talk and think... so much of it points inexorably towards Donald Trump's election win as the necessary consequence of it.
The tech world, by and large, thinks in ways that aren't exactly fascist, but that are very easy to push into fascism with just a little work. We're primed to believe that there are large, innate differences between people that explain outcomes and differences in wealth and power. We believe strongly in action over thought and reflection, and we believe that the strong and capable have a natural right to make the weak and incapable suffer. We laud obscene concentrations of power, money and influence and the "Great Men" that have all of it, and we seem to think that kindness, empathy and care for others are luxuries, affectations or signs of weakness.
The myth of the startup and the founder-from-nothing seems to me to be at the core of most of this problem. We have consistently been told stories about founders in the tech world who came from nothing to write some amazing software, build a huge empire and be adored the world over. As a result of this, we in the tech industry are all deeply, deeply addicted to the idea of the Great Man: the heroic genius who, single-handedly and because of his innate talents as opposed to anything he might have done, changed the world and brought great gifts to the society that he's a part of. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and even Bill Gates (hated by many of the techies in our sphere, but surprisingly beloved outside it)... these names have become a litany of technical saints whose presence we are blessed by, and I'm sure you can think of plenty of other entries that go on this list.
This goes beyond just hagiography. The 10x developer is another example of this idea in action: the idea that some developers, for one reason or another, are just innately ten times more productive than others. While I do believe that 10x engineers observably exist, most people labelled as 10x engineers simply aren't, and the ones that are (Linus Torvalds and John Carmack are my two personal examples) absolutely do not fit the profile of how we tend to picture 10x developers in the world: they've consistently thought and cared about their work and built new things rather than the traditional picture of just churning out code widgets as fast as possible (as an aside, I've seen a disturbing number of people who should know better take this view of software development: most of the best developers I know are actually among the slowest). Assumptions that some people are much, much better than other are deeply baked into the very structure of the tech industry.
The issue is that coupled with the myth of meritocracy, it's increasingly seen as right that in the words of the Athenians during the siege of Melos "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". The Great Men deserve to do what they will because they are innately better, and the rest of us are simply clay for them to play with at their will. And to be admitted into this culture, you have to profess alignment with its values. To gain employment, you must succeed at Leetcode and (crucially) act as though Leetcode problems are a valid way of judging merit. To be promoted, you must signal affiliation with your managers, showing them that you think what they think and that you believe what they believe, be that in the technical sphere or in politics (which a startling number of tech managers seem to think is something that can be solved technocratically). To gain funding for a start-up, you must give off vibes to the venture capitalists that signify that you're one of them, that you look like a successful founder and that you'll align neatly with the values of your investors. All of these things are constructed around the idea that there is one type of superior person who can be objectively identified, and that these are the people at the top of the social ladder.
All this, in the end, eliminates any space for love and care as virtues that should be encouraged: at best, they're left as weird affectations that the strong are allowed to have if they feel like it, and that in the weak are seen as defects preventing them from succeeding. It's basically unforgivable in many spaces to say that a developer's work doesn't matter because they're mean or cruel, or because they sexually harass their female colleagues. Certainly, many tech teams have a track record of keeping people like that on staff well beyond the point at which any reasonable organisation would have fired them. And when you're a person who benefits from this arrangement in your workplace, it's all too easy to extend these views to wider politics.
It's thus perhaps unsurprising that so many of the most successful people in tech are just outright bigoted. Elon Musk is perhaps the type example: racist, sexist and transphobic, he's turned Twitter into a cesspool of fascists and significantly contributed to the election result through the sheer amount of disinformation he created and boosted. Peter Thiel is avowedly anti-democratic and was directly responsible for the installation of JD Vance as Trump's running mate. And even just a little further away from the very top echelon, there's a disturbing number of race scientists and slavery apologists in the tech world.
It's inevitable that when enough of your leaders and people whom you look up to express these views, you start drifting towards them yourself: perhaps not as whole-heartedly as they themselves do, but it's very hard, in this kind of environment, not to get the idea that people are ranked in value into your head. The idea that action for action's sake is a good thing, or in the parlance of the start-up world, "move fast and break things" also starts seeping in at the expense of such boring things as care and quality. Finally, the valorisation of the start-up struggle, and the idea that the struggle to survive is virtuous in and of itself seeps in by degrees. But these are all fascist ideas. And of course, with how much the tech industry has been valorised in the media, this cannot help but move, slowly but inexorably, into the rest of the economy.
It'd be bad enough, I think, if this was all the damage that this culture did. Unfortunately, it isn't. The values of our culture inexorably leak out into the things we build, and all these baseline assumptions that subtly push our engineers towards fascism have deeply influenced the direction of our technical work, and not for the better.
This shakes out the most clearly when we look at technical work and software engineering through the lens of prestige. The highest-prestige work in social media happens on what I'd broadly call ideological technologies: technologies that primarily exist and are being worked on in order to buttress the prior ideological commitments of the people building them, almost as much or more than they are to turn a profit. OpenAI is perhaps the most obvious example of this: the GPT range of products are fundamentally anti-intellectual in the sense that they aim to replace thinking or mental labour itself. This dovetails extremely well with the fascist cult of action-over-intellect, and the enthusiasm for a technology that lets us do so much stuff without ever having to stop and think. Similarly, much of social media is built around the idea that humans are fundamentally rational individuals unaffected by the communities they're embedded in: just atomised people in the void, competing for likes and acting without care or thought for anyone else. While it's very tempting for founders and investors to believe that myth about themselves, it just isn't really true: we are deeply affected by what we see and what we think the community thinks, and we're deeply social beings. But of course, it's convenient to believe that the people taken in by social media disinformation, abuse or any of the many other evils on these platforms are simply foolish and irresponsible, and thus deserve what they get. In general, these are the platforms that get money, that get prestige and that are the most adulated: technologies that mostly exist to reproduce the social structures most convenient to the people building them.
Meanwhile, the boring but vital work of building things like healthcare software, websites for government departments and software with real, direct uses is relegated to engineers who are seen as less capable and that simply can't do better. Sometimes these genuinely are bad developers, but more often than not they're simply members of minoritised groups, engineers who can't get with the ideological program of the tech industry or simply people who've burnt out. They are, however, often disillusioned, disengaged and resentful of the opportunities denied them, and this inevitably leaks out into their work. Government and healthcare software (you know, the stuff that's meant to help stop people from starving or dying of preventable illnesses) is consistently bad, often breaks and is usually out of date, none of which is really acceptable. But after all, this software is written by the weak, for the weak, and we can't reasonably expect anyone actually important to care about it.
In short, the culture of the tech industry tends towards fascism, and this culture has seeped out into the wider world and the technology that we've built. It's no surprise that people have started thinking like fascists, and that this abhorrent outcome is the result. I don't know what to do or say: my thoughts are still fairly scattered. But we're deeply sick, and if we wish to have any hope of changing this situation, we have to stop thinking like this.