I know the leftist in me is supposed to have sympathy for these people and get them to unionize. But only after I stop laughing and enjoying this moment. For years these fucks told the rest of us to “learn to code” and pretended like studying anything else at uni was a fucking waste of time.

GUESS WHAT FUCKERS. SO WAS CODING. Looks like we’ll be baristas together, only I’ll have three years of experience!!!

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead
      ·
      8 months ago

      https://www.shanley.com/blog/stop-feeling-bad-for-tech-workers-these-people-are-the-enemy

      Okay so I haven't read this dudes entire body of work so I don't have a totally clear view, but I did read this article and, hot take, everything he says here could be applied to all workers in the imperial core.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        8 months ago

        Yeah, this is just describing the difficulties of unionising a labour aristocracy. And you absolutely can unionise that.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
        ·
        8 months ago

        I think you're right, but as someone in tech, I've talked with the EXACT people that the author describes as not self-identifying as workers, and it's not just the same false consciousness you see in all settlers. This paragraph was particularly salient,

        Their entirety of identification as workers comes from being better than everyone else. They are like air benders of morality, doing the most fraudulent arguments to justify how the tech industry has somehow turned, on their watch, into Mordor. They aren’t even telling people the TRUTH about what is happening in the tech industry. They should have been whistleblowers; the positive perception that the outside world has of tech is very much maintained by the employee’s silence. Things in the tech industry have advanced far beyond what the general public thinks. The reality of what is happening in the industry is about 1000x worse than even generally understood in a mainstream that more or less accepts the industry deeply problematic at best. But techies are complicit even in the very worst of it: like the startup-created, VC funded surveillance towers that help round up children at the US/Mexico border and feed them right into detention and death and sexual violence. The programmers themselves have created an absolute maze of false logics to justify directly working on software that directly kills people and is used against the People by policing and intelligence agencies and the military. In this particular case, the argument is that they can’t be responsible for how their software is used, even when designed specifically to do that thing; nor can they be responsible for working somewhere which requires that thing. Oh, okay!

        Having posted here before about my efforts to try to get people to see MIC companies for what they are, I can freely share that every single time it's just an insane uphill battle to get techbros to even recognize they're the same species as the victims of the systems they build at Palantir or whatever other garbage company. I might not be as pessimistic as the author (I'm also not exactly in the imperial core, per se) since I have had some success with the occasional person, usually those who aren't cishet white or white-passing dudebros, but MAN are techbros ridiculously reactionary.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          ·
          8 months ago

          Bourgeoisified workers do not see themselves as working class because they were specifically elevated above the rest of the working class for their usefulness to the imperial project. They have to be elevated, because otherwise they'd stop being complicit.

          So if the bubble is popping that just means they're being re-proletarianized. I think those types of people are going to find out really fucking fast that they are mere workers like the rest of us, and if we don't radicalize them they're just going to become psycho reactionaries.

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]
            ·
            8 months ago

            I guess that's the point, right? These settlers already were carrying out the necessary actions the imperialists, landlords, etc needed through their gentrification and development of automated surveillance or military systems. Now they're being re-proletarianized and desperately wish to keep their mouths on the treat dispensers, they'll kick everyone else down the pile as long as they can keep sucking on the treat teat.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
              ·
              8 months ago

              I'm hopeful that time in the dirt with the rest of us will soften them up. Without a constant supply of treats their boogie ideology will either collapse because they'll realize they weren't the special boys they were told since childhood or their egos will collapse instead and their ideology will reconstruct itself as reaction.