Vulgar, horny and threatening

I've written quite a lot on this website of mine about the tech industry and its many, many defects, but comparatively little about the resistance to it. While this is a reasonable approach (I am enough of an empiricist to believe that observing and understanding phenomena before acting is ), I think we also need to say something about what effective opposition to the industry looks like. So, in the spirit of said commitments, this article examines what effective opposition to the tech industry has thus far looked like.

The modern tech industry is, by the standards of capitalism, unusually dependent on a cult of personality built around a few extremely rich, very stupid white men. While finance, the kinds of consulting services that the Big Four provide and the companies that nominally provide important goods and services all have their high-and-mighty leaders, they generally aren't that well-known, and are on the whole mostly replacable. Tech, however? The Altmans, the Pichais, the Andreesens and the Zuckerbergs of the world are outright celebrities. Moreover, the industry depends on their celebrity in a way that the others don't: they rely heavily on this celebrity to raise money, sell their products and attract workers.

Consequently, attacking the tech industry means stripping these people of their aura of invulnerability: to dismantle the industry of a whole, we need these people to be seen as regular, usually very flawed humans. There are a few ways to do this: one might try and strip away the layers of "being very serious and very clever" that surrounds them and makes people unwilling to challenge them on anything. Alternatively, you could demonstrate that you are obviously, clearly doing things better than them in a way that makes them look a little sad. Finally, you could point out just how weird and inhuman these people are: they don't seem to like the things that people like, enjoy the things that they enjoy or do the things that they do.

In short, there are three major avenues of opposition to the tech industry: the vulgar, the horny and the threatening, mapping to attacks on the tech industry's luminaries from below, horizontally and from above. These are, the three cardinal virtues of resistance to the tech industry's evil and stupidity, and they're what I aim to examine here today.

So, let's start with vulgarity!

Vulgar

An interesting observation to be made about a lot of LLM criticism is that it can be startlingly vulgar. While LLM boosters tend to keep to very neutral-to-positive, quasi-objective language, us detractors swear. We don't mince words, we call things stupid, we insult and in general, we often write in ways which aren't considered to be acceptable in polite business society. In short, we're vulgar.

Now, why would this be the case? Most of us are fairly mild-mannered people in our personal lives: we spend most of it as writers, after all. We don't particularly want to offend or hurt people, and even in our politics, we're usually a lot more moderate than the extreme ends of the left spectrum. Why then, when you get us on the subject of tech, do we suddenly start using much more forceful language?

The tech industry, aided by media institutions and the general vibe of management these days, has created a norm in communication of both-sidesism and pathological aversion to calling people out on their shit or making even the mildest challenge to their positions (so long as you're a right-wing bigot, of course). The general idea is that management and tech leaders are very serious people who need to be taken seriously and who have to have their opinions handled with kid gloves. Even the slightest challenge is taken as being vulgar or threatening, as is any expression of emotion or personal opinion. This is reinforced on social media, where equality and a decline in epistemic authority has created the attitude that any opinion, no matter how bad or untethered from reality is, deserves to be respected and above criticism. White supremacy, homophobia, vaccine denial, trans healthcare conspiracies: if you challenge these things directly in polite company, you will wind up labelled as vulgar, hostile and trying to start a fight. The very serious bigots in this whole aggregate then use the appearance of being calm, collected, objective and above it all to pretend that they're right and we're wrong, deflect criticism and keep promoting their deeply evil ideas.

Explicit vulgarity, therefore, is useful to us because it neatly punctures the pretense of objectivity and makes it difficult to re-establish it. Take Elon Musk (because he is the clearest example of this phenomenon, as he is of so many others). If we speak of him purely objectively in terms of things we can describe him as having done, he doesn't actually come out looking that much worse than any regular CEO: certainly, cutting USAID has killed a lot of people and is going to do more, but your regular CEO is also likely to be culpable for quite a lot of deaths and have engaged in a lot of misconduct. He's done damage on a wider scale, but is that really so much worse than what so many of our respectable leaders have done? If we insist further on trying to argue objectively for him getting bad, it's very easy for bad-faith actors to get us bogged down in an endless debate about whether the accusations are true, whether they hang together or not and whether we have any grounds to accuse them. Sticking to objectivity just doesn't work to negate him.

Being vulgar and subjective, though? This guy quite clearly has something massively fucking wrong with him. Normal, healthy members of society don't go around messaging random celebrities and asking to impregnate them via artificial insemination because they broke their dick in a botched enlargement surgery. Normal people don't hire a 19 year old who called himself "Big Balls" and did tech support for a group spreading CSAM to "make the government more efficient" using an electronic dumbass that is constantly wrong. And a healthy member of society definitely doesn't break the software that they built so hard that it starts ranting about white genocide in the middle of a conversation about Homestuck.

This phrasing is clearly rooted in a deep dislike of the man, hyperbolic and riddled with normative statements. It's also much closer to the accurate truth of the matter and more communicative than an objective presentation of assertable facts could be. The guy's clearly fucked in the head: anyone who observes him can see that, and pretending that we still have to treat him as though he's a serious person (as legacy media does) only whitewashes him. Moreover, it puts the onus of proof on the person defending the man: rather than getting bogged-down in a tarpit of an argument, the defender has to argue why everything that Elon Musk has done is actually normal, reasonable conduct. For people unpersuaded one way or another, it also steers them away from an abstract argument about principles and towards the question of whether they would personally want this guy anywhere near them, their children or the levers of power. While a lot of people will turn up their noses at the question of tone, and some people will even tell us that we're undermining our own position by being vulgar and sweary, the fact is that vulgarity is much better at getting the point across.

A similar situation applies with Sam Altman and OpenAI, and the LLM craze more generally. It's extremely easy, if you're trying to be objective, to get bogged down in discussions of whether LLMs and Sam Altman's corpus of work are useful or not. It's easy to get bogged down in debates about whether the machines are doing the same thing as humans do or not or how much power or water a query actually consumes. While these are interesting discussions to be had, they aren't going to persuade anyone that this technology isn't useful, much less that it's dangerous. Being too polite, in short, can completely defang your criticism and make it that the core message doesn't get through at all. Far better, rather, to point out that Sam Altman has a long and storied history of spouting bullshit, and that there's really no good reason to believe anything at all that he says. Far better to point out the utter detachment from reality of feeding thousands of grant applications to Grok to try and remove the "woke" ones, or bring up the AI transcription programs that repeatedly hallucinate the existence of a mysterious boy named Dorian. These models are, as is quite obvious, mostly just ruining everyone's life at the moment, and we shouldn't have to debate their technical minutiae in order to say that.

Vulgarity is also a useful shorthand for passion. These are things we care deeply about, and swearing is language that exists for expressing strong emotions. In a world where caring is seen as cringe or boring and writing styles reflect that, expressing how much we care to our readers means being vulgar and saying things that will upset certain parts of the population. If we want to disagree vehemently with the way the world is, we can't very well use a narrow subset of language deliberately chosen to make strong emotion and vehement expression almost impossible. While we don't have to be profane, perhaps, vulgarity is inevitable.

Finally, vulgarity can be funny, especially directed at people in high positions. We live in a deeply hierarchical society, whatever some people will have you believe. The high and mighty of the world, right down to people like your idiot boss, think themselves better than you. Being vulgar can thus be a way to bring them down to earth, demonstrate that they're no better than we are and that we are in fact more capable than them, and in fact, have a bit of a laugh at their expense. The thought of the richest man in the world being frustrated sexually because he broke his dick while trying to make it bigger or the former Prime Minister of Australia shitting himself at an Engadine Maccas after the Cronulla Sharks won the big game can't help but be a little funny, let's face it.

Vulgarity, in short, punctures the membrane of objectivity, seriousness and po-facedness that people in high positions use to shield themselves from scrutiny or criticism, or even much real examination. You can say things in a sweary, somewhat vulgar blog post that simply couldn't be written in a newspaper or said by a journalist, and thanks to the vulgarity, more often than not, the argument will actually land. It lets us fight the powerful as equals, and when they're forced to do that, they do not do well at all. It is one of our most powerful weapons.

Horny

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the tech industry as a whole has a deeply disordered relationship with sexuality. It's glaringly obvious when you look at the upper echelons of the tech world these days: Elon Musk clearly has something strange going on, with his botched attempts at penis enlargement surgery, his breeding kink and his persistent fixation with white genocide caused by people of colour outbreeding white people. Peter Thiel is gay, but also so devoted to his wealth that he's willing to support people who want him dead for his sexuality so that he can protect his wealth. Bill Gates was on the Epstein list, and whatever happened there was serious enough that it seems from the outside to have precipitated his divorce from Melinda. Sam Altman has some pretty ugly accusations lingering about what he might have done to his sister when they were growing up, and as for Richard Stallman... well all I can say is ick(TW: Sexual assault in the last link). While individually these things could presumably be explained away, taken together, there's a clear pattern of something having gone badly wrong.

This extends to the wider tech industry as well. Relatively healthy, consensual expressions of sexuality are consistently marginalised, hounded off of hosting services and even criminalised (one of my friends works with a company that helps sex workers vet their clients for safety effectively, and they've had to deal with an absolute torrent of hostility, up to and including being de-Cloudflared). Meanwhile, explicit calls for rape and sexual abuse are apparently fine on most of the same platforms, with the end result being that the most accessible information or discussion of sexuality available on the internet is deeply unhealthy. Sex workers who chose the profession are relentlessly hounded under the guise of stopping human trafficking, while actual human traffickers (who look a lot less like the stereotypes than people might think) are largely allowed to operate on the same websites. Tumblr, for example, has a habit of banning trans users for supposed "violation of community guidelines" and generally hammering even relatively mild erotica created by users, while at the same time bot accounts posting rather less pleasant mass-market pornography are allowed to run rampant. The pattern seems to be one of flattening and making things advertiser, where genuine and healthy expressions of sexuality are pushed to the margins of the internet for being overly explicit, while bad actors and purveyors of some deeply unhealthy sexual mores are allowed to either explicitly promote themselves in the centre of the internet, or are allowed to fly under the radar so long as they don't cause trouble. Honestly, I think this is exactly the opposite of the way things should be.

As for the culture of the tech industry, well, tech is deeply, deeply sexist. Many engineers are deeply repressed men that struggle with emotional intimacy, vulnerability or any of the things that it takes to actually have good sex or good relationships, and it's perhaps unsurprising that software engineers and other tech people are over-represented in the Incel and Manosphere spheres. Even when a lot of these engineers do engage in sex, it is, by all accounts not very good and with people whom they tend to see as disposable. All in all, the tech industry's attitude to sex is deeply repressed, weirdly normative and honestly just fucked-up.

An important strand in opposition to the tech industry and this shitty culture that they attempt to force on us is thus the power of being massively, hopelessly, openly horny. Whether that's being catastrophically down bad for fictional characters (Karlach, my beloved), having polyamorous orgies and talking about them on your blog, writing or drawing smut, doing burlesque, actually being able to have good sex or in any other way openly expressing your sexuality without shame, horniness is extremely powerful in combating tech industry culture.

To discuss why this works, we need to set out a definition of horniness that we can work with: this, as with all formal definitions, will be narrower than the colloquial usage, hopefully in a way that sheds light on the core of the concept.

For our purposes, then, horniness might be defined as straightforward, unconcealed sexual desire or expressions of sexuality. To be horny is to be loudly, unashamedly sexual and unconcerned with hiding or repressing it. It is to accept yourself as a sexual being with sexual desires, to be at ease with yourself around sexuality and to have integrated your sexuality with the rest of yourself rather than splitting it off as "not-you", or a part of yourself that has to be repressed and hidden away: a part of Jung's shadow, if we wish to speak psychoanalytically.

So, why does this dovetail with opposition to the tech industry so well? Simply put, the tech industry is built on and heavily shot through with repressed desires. This is a straightforward Freudian analysis: the industry as a whole focuses on fulfilling desires that our societies consider to be dirty, shameful, unacceptable or to be repressed.

Take, for example, the case of Instagram. On the face of it, Instagram is a fairly restrictive platform: nudity and sexual content are generally censored, even to the point of people on the platform writing "s*x" instead of "sex", information about sexuality tends to be deprioritised by the algorithm, and, if you were to read the rules of the platform as set out by Meta, you'd probably conclude that Instagram was a fairly prudish, sexless place: the very model of an advertiser-acceptable, clean, safe and sterile platform desired by the industry that we discussed in the section on vulgarity.

This isn't how it plays out in practice. Instagram, in practice, is absolutely full of repressed sexuality, and it comes out in rather pathological ways. For one thing, objectification (particularly, but far from exclusively of women) is rife on the platform. Rather than being sexual people wind up sexualised, with sexual connotations and sexual framing leaking into literally everything else. We thus have influencers being judged for dressing and acting in overly sexualised ways while these same influencers draw extreme amounts of attention from both wanted and unwanted sources for doing the thing. How sexual the influencer's content actually is is largely immaterial: it'll be sexualised regardless of the actual facts on the ground. More personally, an extremely talented make-up artist that I know who occasionally posts slightly provocative photos is consistently bombarded with messages from creepy men on the platform, as though posting photos of her work on Instagram automatically makes it acceptable for men to see her as a sexual object.

In the end, what is being offered by Instagram are to a great extent narratives about how to accepted as sexually desirable by one's wider social circle. When one can't speak openly and honestly about one's desires, but still has the desires, social pressure tends to push you towards wanting things that are socially acceptable to want that society implies will get you the underlying, shameful desire. Hence the prevalence of tradwife discourse: it's telling women who want a good partner and a good sex life, in essence, that the way to do that is by conforming strictly to an imagined idea of traditional gender norms. The process is similar with fashion influencers: the implicit communication is that if you dress a certain way, you will be seen as a valid object of desire, and thus, in one way or another, be able to get some of what you want.

This dynamic extends to nonsexual forms of libidinal desire: repressed desires for money, for domination or for social status come up just as much as desires for sex. Cryptocurrency plays into this a great deal: inasmuch as it offers the promise of great wealth for nothing, it plays on hidden desires for security, community and social stability. When people don't register that what they actually want is a roof over their heads that they can't be removed from, good food, a community that supports them and the freedom to have fun and do things that they enjoy, this is a temptation that it's very hard to resist. Thus, getting one's economic and social desires met winds up being flattened and repressed in much the same way as sexual desires do: you buy what you're told you want, rather than what you actually do (which you might not actually be aware of).

Even startup culture, in many ways, is an expression of repressed desire. Our society has in it two competing value sets: one that states that status and honour are distributed according to how much money you have, and that having as much money as you possibly can is a moral good, and another that states that having any desire for money at all is morally suspect and that you should only ever focus on making the world a better place. This creates, naturally, conflicting drives in people: they want resources and social status, which, in moderation, isn't a bad thing, and they see that the way to do that is to become filthy rich. However, they're consistently steered away from the (immoral and exploitative) methods for actually achieving that, because lying, scamming, exploitation and grifting still tend to be looked down on by the kinds of people whom you'd actually want to spend time with.

The mythology around startups primarily enables people to do the first thing while appearing, to all outside appearances to be doing the second. Thus, for example, you can massively enrich yourself by putting taxi drivers out of business and replacing them with a much more precarious and unstable workforce, all while people claim that you've made the world a better place by making it much easier for people to get around and travel. You can wind up lionised in the media for your brilliance and great generosity to the world, all while you're exactly as exploitative as the bad old people that society so denounces. In short, you find yourself able to meet the desire for money, domination and social status without having to say that that's what you're doing or even admit it to yourself: a textbook case of repressed desire.

In short, the tech industry as currently constituted gets its hooks into you by playing off your repressed desires: the desire to be rich, respected, loved, to control others (which in my experience is usually a distorted form of wanting to control your own environment), and yes, the desire to fuck. And as I'm sure many of you have experienced, it's the desires that you aren't willing to consciously acknowledge that tend to have the greatest effect on your behaviour. And this is where we get back to the horny.

Being at ease with and comfortable with your desires, with what you want, is an extremely effective way to reduce the hold of the tech industry over you: the model of the industry assumes that you don't know what you want, and then aggressively pushes on you a thing that they think you should want based on the underlying need. If you don't understand that you're desperate for thoughtful, meaningful and accurate information about the world, it becomes easy to sell you something like ChatGPT. If you don't understand that what you want more of in your programming job is challenging tasks, the chance to learn and the ability to help people with the code you write, you might easily be suckered in by Copilot's promise of greater productivity. If you're unaware that your surface desire for extreme wealth stems from a deeper desire for security and more freedom from financial cares, cryptocurrency's promise of money for nothing can be irresistibly tempting.

And if you don't understand that what you're desperately craving from sex is intimacy and closeness, or fun and exhilaration, or even social connection, the tech industry has a wide range of things that they can sell you. From the aforementioned Instagram, to the recent spate of AI pornography and sex workers, to Tradwife content (for women) or Andrew-Tate style what-the-fuck (for men), even to dating apps that push you into becoming an ever flatter, more average and more superficial version of yourself, the industry can do a lot of damage. It'll encourage unhealthy relationship and sexual patterns, whether that involves being pressured into promiscuity that you have no interest in (to be clear, I am entirely in favour of people sleeping around when that is what they knowingly, genuinely want to do) or extreme repression structured around a very particular, largely mythical standard for how people should live and interact. The end effect is that you end up fucked-up, with a deeply distorted view of what sex and relationships should be, while simultaneously developing a deeper and deeper dependency on the tech industry.

Wanting to bend Astarion over and impregnate him, by contrast, is a lot harder to co-opt. Drawing smut or writing erotic fanfiction, in particular, is something that the tech industry has always aimed primarily to crush rather than to take into itself. People who are horny online in this kind of way, either from writing or consuming this content, generally know what they want. They know the kinds of people that they find attractive, why they find them attractive and what kind of relationship they're likely to have. They are, in general, better at identifying the difference between a pleasant fantasy and what they actually want from a relationship (Dating Astarion in BG3 might be a pleasant fantasy, but I'd never want a relationship like that in real life). They're capable of using these spaces to explore desires and desire whether they actually want them or not. None of this is conducive to the tech industry's exploitation: to be exploitable, these impulses have to be hidden and shameful.

In general, knowingly-held, well-integrated desires, even when the desires themselves might be quite dark or publicly unacceptable, are difficult to co-opt. Whether or not you act on the desire or choose to restrain yourself from it (and both are, in many cases, the appropriate response in a given situation), knowing and being able to name the desire and either acting on it or sublimating it are extremely difficult to use as hooks. After all, knowing your desire means being able to judge whether a proposed technical solution is likely to meet that desire or put it further out of reach: will Facebook bring you more intimate friendships or a more lively social life? Will ChatGPT help you learn how to become really good at developing software? And will Tinder help you find a life partner, or merely bring you disappointment? You can make a reasoned decision, and very, very often, the answer will be no.

So, this is one part of horniness. You'll notice, however, that nothing I've said so far conflicts with the idea that we should keep our sexualities deeply private and not communicate about them at all. And there's a kernel of truth here: discussions of sexuality aren't appropriate for all settings and we probably shouldn't broadcast them to everyone we meet. However.

The tech industry's preoccupation with feeding off and exploiting these repressed desires relies on a basically total condemnation of these desires by society. In order to exploit repressed desires, one has to create the impression, broadly speaking, that "when you feel like this, this is what you want". You have to be able to convincingly say that when someone feels sexually aroused, they want a standard heterosexual relationship (whatever that looks like in the context: there are very conservative and hypersexualised variations of this) or mass-market pornography. You have to be able to convincingly tell people that when they feel uneasy or insecure in their social standing it's because they need obscene amounts of money and multiple Bugattis, and then proceed to sell them a shitcoin in a pump-and-dump scheme.

Loudly, unashamedly and comfortably talking about your real, actual desires completely undermines this position. It demonstrates to those who see it that you have real desires for people and things that aren't the standard, flattened variety: when I find myself being publicly, unreasonably happy about Dame Aylin and Isobel's relationship, it validates the fact that people who are like that (in this case, tall, muscular women in a lesbian relationship) are desirable and that people who have this kind of desire are valid and acceptable members of this society. Even if the desire itself (say, the desire for domination) isn't one that can be given free rein, practices such as BDSM demonstrate that even the darker parts of our psyche can be sublimated into something positive and healthy. And when enough people do this, it becomes impossible to maintain the illusion of uniformity of desire and the consequent repression that the tech industry relies on to function.

Real, individual desires are much more widespread and multifarious than the tech industry lets on. I tend to agree with the blogger Aquarusa that the vast majority of people look pretty attractive, and even from a purely superficial perspective, almost everyone in this world is going to be able to find quite a lot of people that find them attractive: the only trait that I've seen be almost universally unattractive is an unpleasant personality, and that isn't a physical trait. Short men, men with dad bods, tall and muscular women, fat people... for every trait like this, there are a whole lot of people who openly find those traits attractive, even in a sexual way, and speaking about that openly can demonstrate effectively that these traits can very much be attractive and desirable. The same goes for kink: people taking pleasure and finding enjoyment in odd-but-harmless activities such as petplay and so forth demonstrates the sheer range of what people want and enjoy in a way that it's almost impossible to rein in or turn to the use of the industry. With enough flowers of desire blooming, the only way, in the end, to use that to your advantage is to do your level best to actually meet the desires rather than shaping them.

So here's to the Fujoshi, to the furries, to those of us who post screengrabs of Shadowheart's ass on r/okbuddybaldur. Here's to the sex workers, the kink enthusiasts and the people who write deeply horny Stormlight Archive fanfiction. Here's also to the people who are candid about just wanting a quiet life where they can write in peace, to the people who want stability over absurd amounts of money, to the people who openly want intimacy in their platonic relationships. Here's to those of us who are unashamed by what we want and are willing to tell it to the world.

Threatening

One thing I've found striking in my time blogging is that when I make what I think are some relatively measured criticisms of the current state of the tech industry, a few people will always respond as though I've personally threatened to kill them and their family. The vehemence of the reaction is almost always way out of proportion to what I've actually said, and it genuinely, really seems as though when I make criticisms of this technology it cuts at a deep part of our critics' identity.

While most people in the tech media and more elevated people in the industry get enough coaching to not admit to being ideologically threatened by us, their behaviour shows that they clearly do see criticism as a real threat. Tech industry boosters and their media lackeys engage heavily in what Bret Devereaux refers to as "normative smuggling": the broad outline of this rhetorical technique is that the people using it make a descriptive claim about what is happening, and then implicitly and imperceptibly shift the claim from a descriptive claim to a normative one. Oftentimes the normative claim isn't even really true. While Devereaux was writing in the context of international relations, the way this plays out with LLM technology is as follows. Firstly, a technology is developed and some people use it and find it superficially impressive. The claim is then made that this technology is amazing, revolutionary and will change everything forever off the back of the first observations: this isn't true, but so it goes. As this movement gains traction, there's an imperceptible shift from this (false) descriptive claim to a normative one: you need to use LLMs because otherwise you'll wind up poor, left behind and out of touch, or you'll get fired because your boss requires it or whatever other bullshit happens. Obviously, the fact that they feel the need to coerce implies that their position is nowhere near as strong as they claim. In any case, the fact that this kind of shit keeps happening suggests that these people can identify an ideological threat when they see one. So why do the high and mighty see us as threatening? It certainly isn't the content of our arguments, at least not entirely: people have ignored much more damning complaints without immediately reading them as being threatening.

While most of us aren't physically threatening to the high and mighty in the sense that we aren't about to do an Italian plumber to them, we all, for one reason or another, represent a significant ideological threat. First off, us critics? A lot of us are very, very good at what we do. Whether it's skill in technology, skill in writing, in systems design or in the quality of analysis, a lot of us can run rings around the high and mighty and their machines. I'm relatively confident, for example, in saying that I can produce prose far better than what one of Altman's infernal machines can, and if you say otherwise, you have no taste. A good engineer can run rings around a Copilot-created abomination of an app, and even a mediocre solutions architect can still architect a system significantly better than even the best models. For the kind of mediocre management apparatchik that is outcompeted by ChatGPT on basically everything, simply being good at something and correspondingly more difficult or impossible to replace by an electronic dumbass machine is a real threat. The fact that we present a clear, convincing argument for craft and craft ethics over managerialism and looting companies blind makes us dangerous: we are more competent, more at peace with ourselves and outright cooler than they'll ever be.

There's also the fact that tech, as we've already established, is really rather bigoted, and a lot of us are from non-traditional backgrounds and identities. In an almost entirely male environment, an awful lot of us are women (some of us are even trans women!). There are a lot of people of colour in here as well, and even those of us who are white men are old enough to have come from a previous, very different tech environment. We're meant, in the tech ideology, to be worse at tech than the largely white men who inhabit the upper echelons of tech. We're meant to be stupider, less creative, less prestigious. Seeing us build followings, seeing people listen to us, and watching us demonstrate that we are extremely fucking good at tech: better, in fact, than a lot of mediocre men who lucked into the field by being privileged and good at saying the right things at the right time.

Finally, there's simply the fact that we seem to live in ways that we're much more at peace with than the tech industry wants to allow. We live in fundamentally countercultural ways, and interestingly enough, our particular tech critic counterculture is one that the modern, highly technologised mass culture has genuine difficulty assimilating into itself. Many of us do a lot of things (cooking, baking, gardening, home maintenance) ourselves with our hands, not because of any Tradwife or cottagecore fantasy, but because we have the skills to do a genuinely good job at it. We interact with technology in highly intentional, careful ways that lead to many of us not having a presence on platforms where it's thought that we should, build tools of our own where existing ones don't suit and often just have interactions with tech that other people think are very, very weird. The craftsman ethic that a lot of us adopt, whatever its economic merits or otherwise, is much, much better for one's peace of mind than the way most people work. And quite honestly, from what I've seen, we seem to have better relationships than the average person does, and by quite a bit. We have friends whom we can be emotionally and intellectually intimate with. We have strong communities. We even seem to have a much higher hit rate on strong, emotionally committed relationships than tech leaders do.

So, we're cooler than them, we have a countercultural cachet that they can't match, we're competent in ways that effortlessly outclass the best efforts of tech industry leadership, and on top of that, we are, if not happier, much more at peace with the lives we live? And we're not generating data by being on their shitty tech platforms? Of course we read as a bloody threat.

Conclusion

So, there we have it. If you stand in opposition to the tech industry and want to do it effectively, you should be vulgar, horny and threatening.