I'm still learning, could you please explain how the superstructure of tech is reactionary? Is it due to its proximity with things like weapons companies, tons of investment, intelligence agencies, and so on?
Yes, pretty much. A superstructure springs forth from a material base, and if your material base is constantly within close proximity to the center of capitalist power (financial institutions, MIC, counterinsurgency) due to those mainframes requiring plenty of capital to set up, then that will have a huge distorting effect. Along with this, the high salary of tech workers would naturally would dampen any revolutionary potential, and it shouldn't be a surprise tech workers would have reactionary ideas. It's only with the Altair 8800 that petty bourgeois hobbyists started to get into tech and the class character of tech turned from something completely upholding the bourgeois status quo into this half status quo/half libertarian hybrid. Raytheon engineer finding innovative ways to bomb brown children represents the old-school form of reaction while some cryptobro trying to scam you represents the newer form of reaction.
Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine goes into the history of the Internet, starting from its very beginning as a tool of surveillance against dissidents during the Vietnam War into contemporary times. He isn't a Marxist, but he makes a very compelling case that the Internet and tech in general have always been close to the center of capitalist power. He also draws a connection between Fukuyama's end of historyTM and the techbro's obsession with technocracy. The 90s represented the end of history, in the sense of conscious human activity towards self-actualization, and the beginning of technocracy, in the sense of technological improvements that's aimed towards some techno-utopia. Or in simpler terms, the techbro believes that the human problem of politics has been completely solved with neoliberalism and in this transcendence from history and politics, all future problems are simply apolitical technological ones that will inevitably be solved with an apolitical technological solution.
Seriously, go read the book. So many things about how techbros and Redditors think and act starts to make complete sense.
I'm still learning, could you please explain how the superstructure of tech is reactionary? Is it due to its proximity with things like weapons companies, tons of investment, intelligence agencies, and so on?
Yes, pretty much. A superstructure springs forth from a material base, and if your material base is constantly within close proximity to the center of capitalist power (financial institutions, MIC, counterinsurgency) due to those mainframes requiring plenty of capital to set up, then that will have a huge distorting effect. Along with this, the high salary of tech workers would naturally would dampen any revolutionary potential, and it shouldn't be a surprise tech workers would have reactionary ideas. It's only with the Altair 8800 that petty bourgeois hobbyists started to get into tech and the class character of tech turned from something completely upholding the bourgeois status quo into this half status quo/half libertarian hybrid. Raytheon engineer finding innovative ways to bomb brown children represents the old-school form of reaction while some cryptobro trying to scam you represents the newer form of reaction.
Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine goes into the history of the Internet, starting from its very beginning as a tool of surveillance against dissidents during the Vietnam War into contemporary times. He isn't a Marxist, but he makes a very compelling case that the Internet and tech in general have always been close to the center of capitalist power. He also draws a connection between Fukuyama's end of historyTM and the techbro's obsession with technocracy. The 90s represented the end of history, in the sense of conscious human activity towards self-actualization, and the beginning of technocracy, in the sense of technological improvements that's aimed towards some techno-utopia. Or in simpler terms, the techbro believes that the human problem of politics has been completely solved with neoliberalism and in this transcendence from history and politics, all future problems are simply apolitical technological ones that will inevitably be solved with an apolitical technological solution.
Seriously, go read the book. So many things about how techbros and Redditors think and act starts to make complete sense.
I have a great section from that book saved as an image, regarding the bipartisan privatization of the internet in America in the 1990s
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/be5c5f4b-b63f-4966-853c-c6f645705097.png
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Yes. Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley provides a good overview, though he lays it on a bit think.
Wonderful, thanks for the recommendation!