Analyzing Tech as Fascism
This is a pretty big topic; you can read my original thesis, that tech is a fascist state-within-a-state, here, to get caught up. TLDR; the tech industry is far more than an “industry”, it in fact, has a deeply fascist character and formation that has been radicalizing and growing at warp speed, and sees itself as a sovereign nation, separate from the US; and furthermore, that it is engaged in an active, highly accelerated development of weapons companies and is rising quickly in money and power, doubling its wealth in the pandemic alone, and that we are under attack by it in a very literal way.
For this piece, a preliminary exploration of some of the fascist elements of the tech industry itself, why I believe calling it a fascist state is utterly justified, and which I hope, you will find applicable and useful for reasoning about ongoing tech developments. For now I will use just very simple definitions and concepts literally off the Definitions of Fascism Wikipedia page so we are using widely agreed upon theories, to talk about where we see fascistic elements within the industry, as well as its leaders and structures and economics.
Ian Kershaw, an analyst of fascism, discusses re: fascism: “the creation of a ‘new man’ and a new society – requiring the total commitment of the population to the overturning of the existing social order and the building of a national utopia, in ‘a revolution of mentalities, values and will’”.
This charter of building a sovereign utopia, applies to the tech “industry” far more than any other industry in America, and far more than the American politic/government itself. Tech sees itself as creating a new world with technology; its vision has always promised (but never delivered) a utopia of a technologically-enabled (read: technology-run), world, where technology has produced, through the cycle of innovation (bubbles), enhanced, improved, new versions of every form of living: this is pitched as better connection to loved ones, more security in the home, optimization and breakthroughs in health, tech-enabled police and military weaponry to “protect” us, surveillance that makes us “safer” and “reduces crime”, “smart” transportation. Food, delivered on drones, every item you can think of, at your door within hours; remote work environments allowing people more flexibility to accomplish their goals and spend time with their families (even though remote working is proven to extract MORE work hours). For everything that exists in the “other” world, there is a version of it in the technology world that eclipses the former in every way. There is literally nothing that tech doesn’t want to fundamentally change, and is in the process of changing, to accord with its utopian vision.
Kershaw writes about the appeals of fascism:
“Fascism's message of national renewal, powerfully linking fear and hope, was diverse enough to be capable of crossing social boundaries. Its message enveloped an appeal to the material vested interests of quite disparate social groups in a miasma of emotive rhetoric about the future of the nation”.
This is a direct connect with tech; which combines the fear of falling behind technologically, fear of losing to China and Russia, fear of not keeping up with the rest of the world, as well as fear of technology’s power if not “stewarded” properly. Tech is constantly doing things like creating the OpenAI “research” group, fear mongering about the dangers of AI and then having the worst people in the industry make grandiose claims that they will steward the technology properly. And the message of tech is indeed broad; even though the material benefits never appear, the vision it sells is still broadly appealing and even intoxicatingly so. Flying cars? Virtual reality? It’s literally selling a magical future; something that the US government is certainly not doing.
As far as the singular utopianism, you see this manifesting even in discrete areas of inquiry within the field, such as AI; everyone in the Valley is working towards the specific goal of creating a sentient AI, even if you don’t work in that area, it is understood that a collective goal is for this to be produced by our collective innovation. There are a few widely understood markers of innovation for the mainstream: self-driving vehicles, truly realistic virtual reality, brain implants, Mars colonies. So when it comes towards building a “national utopia”, there are actually very concrete ideas of this and what it looks like, that are widely shared and widely viewed as desirable, even if viewed with some skepticism.
The industry is employing every single person within it, to work together toward, singularly, the vision of the tech empire: this is the #1 shared concept bringing these people together and orchestrating them towards world dominance. It is one reason why the industry moves so fast: industry-wide adherence to the mission, transforming everything it can into a tool for the techno-utopian nation. Everyone sees themselves playing a role in that, and that role is clearly defined: in whatever sector you are in, get as much data as possible, automate as much as possible, make as much money as you can (for you and for the empire), etc. These philosophies are nearly universally adopted by the industry — everyone thinks we are “changing the world”, “creating a better x”, “a new way of y”. Words like transforming, creating, building, developing, future, innovation are everywhere, an ever-present propaganda mesh. And within the industry there is a deep sense of belonging around the value of tech utopia. It orchestrates the labor in the industry, and it provides people with a ton of personal purpose — they are the ones bringing around a tech-perfected world. It is their software described in “software eating the world”. The #1 goal? Eat the world. Whatever else you are doing, eat the world.
Kershaw also notes that:
“… Fascism's triumph depended on the complete discrediting of state authority, weak political elite who could no longer ensure that a system would operate in their interests, the fragmentation of party politics, and the freedom to build a movement that promised a radical alternative.”
Tech very much discredits state authority, something evident in the recent “American Dynamism” platform that tech has been promoting, whose premise is that the government is no longer able to keep up with the pace of technology/innovation, that America is falling behind and what is needed is… more tech and takeover of key government functions. Again, this is openly stated. VCs, tech elite, founders, CEOs, openly state that tech is better positioned to take on government functions than the government itself. Tech also has seen American jurisdiction as a threat to it for a long time now, as court appearances, fines, investigations, regulations, subpoenas, taxes, especially taxes, become not only impositions but risks — I.e., the possibility that there could be a meaningful attempt to break up “big tech”, when the entire industry is predicated on monopolies.
Here I will excerpt to note, briefly, that a number of scholars identify imperialism as a key element; and that is to say, imperialist expansion, which is ever more reach of power, influence and extraction — software’s very ethos, its goals, are imperialist expansion. They are using some new techniques — such as digital colonialism — but are performing the essential functions, of incursion into other countries, power over them and their peoples, as fast as it possibly can, importantly, creating underpaid and massively mistreated workers in terms of the “gig economy”, content moderation and factory work (people often ignore that tech has a massive manufacturing footprint which is used as an imperialist tool). Silicon Valley tech is in the lives of almost every person on the globe; directly connected, and its incursion deepens and deepens. It’s top slogans, both created by elite tech VC Marc Andreessen, are: “software is eating the world” (grow grow grow) and “it’s time to build!” (grow grow grow). The industry has a taste for never ending expansion into power and control over the world’s peoples, it is openly stated (“move fast break things”), and speed and penetration into the lives of others, at all costs, are primary mandates.
As Orwell describes fascism: “It is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way.”
So in this utopian, imperialist nation, you have unfolding yet another element of fascism, the “hero narrative”, cited by Umberto Eco and Emilio Gentile and Roger Griffen. Tech sees itself as literally “saving the world”, and considers itself to be the only thing that can “save” America, and openly saying so, which it describes as decaying, ruined, outdate, impoverished, gross/unclean; conveniently ignoring the way that tech has ravaged the infrastructure of this country, totally destroyed small business in America, got a death grip over funding, so as to deny it to others; and started huge monopolies, as well as went into cities, created enormous wealth gaps, and have done utter devastation to the towns; now they are positioning themselves as the heroes (conquerors) of America. There is a very literal belief in Silicon Valley that they are the ONLY ones capable of doing this work, of saving the world; there is open scorn for others; using extremely black and white terms: there’s builders, and there’s people who don’t build anything.
Within this setting, you have “the new man” concept of Emilio Gentile and Kershaw’s analysis, and others, and this is an interesting one because tech has, through the years, circulated through a number of ideas of what a better, faster, stronger, human is. And fundamentally, this is someone who knows how to code. The tech industry views humanity, most broadly, in two categories coders, and non-coders; or alternatively “technical” people and then, useless people, of which there are many derogatories: “marketing,” most recently, the “PMC” is scorned, and are actually just absented in relevance by virtue of the fact that no one will refer to them with anything but scorn. This goes extremely deep with these people and most people working in the industry truly feel that they are innately superior; technical ability is described as something that is just inherent in humans and that they are born with, and that other people simply don’t have the ability to do this work; very untrue, and notable that the only people tech regards, nurtures, and maintains as technical, is White and Asian men; this dovetails with concepts like “racial exclusiveness”, inferiority, and so on, more fascism. The “new man” is never any women, never a Black man, never a trans person, +/ and so on.
So the industry comes up with a variety of terms and constructs of its “new man”, that it has cycled through over the years; as soon as one becomes passe, there is another to take its place. When I first started in the industry about 10 years ago, “hacker” was the big phase — the industry, and the world, was divided into people who hack, and people who don’t. Hackers were the true citizens of the tech state; all others were explicitly considered inferior and this was maintained by, I.e., paying everyone else much less money arbitrarily, even though marketing, administration, culinary, and so on, are foundational. It was the justification for the wealth gap between technology workers and everyone else.
The fact that
Then for awhile the buzz term was “I make things”/ this idea of a “maker”, who, I guess, produces software, as opposed to everyone else, including blue collar workers, who are not “makers”, even if they in fact, make things, definitionally. Then it quickly became the “10x engineer”, which was essentially some kind of engineering counterpart to the “founder”, who may or may not be a 10x engineer; despite the idea of 10x engineers (those who contribute 10x more than others) being a totally incorrect thesis based on deliberant bastardizations of research done while computing was still on punch cards. On 10x engineers was confered even celebrity; this was a man who stood out, elite, among his peer software engineers. This gets into the idea of intense hierarchy that many researchers associate with fascism; something that is also bourne out in different engineering levels at major companies, something we can discuss in more detail in subsequent posts.
I suppose in many ways the “10x engineer” was the evolution of the “young white male hacker” prototyped by Mark Zuckerberg and famously adored by venture capitalists; now directly usable as a further division between technical talent. Most recently, the suite of words for what a new man is, includes “builder” (which is a glamorized take on a worker, but BETTER THAN a worker), and people who are “hardcore coders”, “serious technologists”, as the industry prepares to start running a much tighter ship as well as doing mass firings of, stated or not, their lowest performing employees. Gentile mentions the idea of civil ethic under fascism, to be focused “on discipline, virility, comradeship, and the warrior spirit;” the idea of discipline as an organizing function appears in Kershaw and Gentile, and others. In tech, it is glamorized to work 80 hour weeks, sleep under desks at work, expected that you will lose your wife/girlfriend to this, be on call all the time, rescue the company from global outages, never develop outside hobbies or interests; NOT taking vacation time is a badge of honor among tech employees. Everything in their environment is further built to ensure maximum productivity — your co-workers are your friends now, so that solves being able to get away from the company or wanting to leave it, doesn’t it?
The most enduring and elite form of all this, comes down to the long-standing industry line: are you a founder? Founders are basically the epitome of what someone in the new tech empire looks like. Rich, successful, entrepreneurial, connected; these people are regarded almost like demigods, as are venture capitalists themselves; they “take hard risks”, they “see around corners”, they “make bets others won’t”, they have a finely honed “instinct” for what will work and what won’t. The founder/VC trope has an emphasis on masculinity, also a common thread in analysis of fascism: these are MEN who are “not afraid to work hard” “do what needs be done” sleep 4 hours a night, never see their children, do not love their wives; this is a new type of man in the tradition of individualist explorers, conquerers, emperors, colonialists, etc. Being a founder is fully fetishized in the industry; and to either be a venture capitalist or a founder (or a founder who becomes a venture capitalist), is the highest form of the idealized man in the disciplined, hierarchical, masculine tech utopia.
These are its cherished and beloved leaders, and in much of inquiry into what fascism is, a focus on leaders and allegiance to them, is a primary organizing principle; Gentile in summary: “a political system organized by hierarchy of functions named from the top and crowned by the figure of the ‘leader’”. So it comes as no surprise that venture capitalists, at the very top of the system, in Silicon Valley are considered essentially gods; this is secured in large part because of the extreme and total, unbalanced, financial control that they exert on the industry, but VCs are treated by the tech community as treasured heroes and leaders, and they enjoy unlimited bootlicking. A good example of how tech leaders often transcend to being viewed as mythological in statue, is of course, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a known piece of shit; stories up and down the Valley spoke of him screaming abuses at engineers, surprise firings, the abandonment of his daughter and her mother, literally colluding with other tech executives to fix the prices of salaries up and down the Valley, and oh yeah, the factories, remember those? Still going? And his abusiveness was actually regarded admirably, and even “the price you pay to either be someone like that or work with someone like that”, that’s just the way it is when you are dealing with a God. He was worshipped. When he died, people were openly crying in the streets about it in Silicon Valley, and a multi-week sobriety descended on the industry. While there was obviously world-wide mourning of this, that of the valley had an entirely different tenor; a general in our army had died. Jobs is still regarded as an ever-present ideological figure, and his way of doing business has been emulated all across the industry, ranging from the emphasis on design and beauty, to that (bastardized) concept that “users don’t know what they want, so its actually a bad idea to listen to them”.
Today, Musk is probably the closest we have to such a character. His following started out being men in the tech industry, and they built him up with adoration and praise and emulation and purchase of dogecoins and never-ending bootlicking, just absolutely embarrassing, have some pride, into a fascist troll prince; now Musk has grown a very dangerous, hate-mob-esque following, because of course he did — computer programmers are the ones who started all the hate groups and man them to this day.
Founders and VCs are in fact becoming mainstream celebrities, but they started out by being industry heroes. Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen, Jobs, Gates, Musk, even Thiel (feared, but deeply respected), these are considered our industry’s biggest heroes. Palmer Luckey, massively underestimated roundly, is nonetheless up and coming and referred to as “the real-life Tony Stark” - more heroism. And then on a smaller scale, in the industry itself, you have various groups of highly regarded folks — Github’s programmers, most notably, becoming industry celebrities, as well as Twitter employees. I would say the people who are universally regarded in tech as the “presidents” of the industry, if you will, that would be, Musk, Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos and Gates and Cook, of course, very famous, but they are not perceived as helming the direction of the industry, whether that is accurate or not.
Okay, so we have our utopian vision, our utopian man, and our beloved leaders… what do we need, what do we need; ah: an enemy.
In reasoning about fascism, we talk about the manufacture of an enemy, and I think you see those ideas of “contempt for the weak” (Umberto Eco) + “creation of an enemy” that is so germane to fascism, functioning together within the tech environment. I think there are a few possible ways of looking at enemies of the industry and how they are constructed, and this is only a few:
One important enemy is actually derived from tech’s rapid takeover and transformation of cities, its destruction of them, establishing dominance over entire communities and land masses and cities, massive gentrification, transfer of land ownership and housing, all of it. The Bay Area has become the leading example of this; but we are also seeing this same dynamic being played out in Miami and in Atlanta; importantly, these are both areas with thriving Black communities, Latinx communities, and both have some the last vestiges of the queer scene in America after tech killed SF as a queer city; and so these sites are not unlike what the Bay Area was before it was invaded and destroyed by tech.
When I was in San Francisco working shortly after the banks crashed, in 2009, there was an attitude of total disgust and disdain for many parts of the city, and there was an overall attitude that going into a community with tech offices, tech workers, tech money, and tech demographics (primarily White and Asian men), was all the better for it; that they were doing these communities a favor by going into them, and brutally gentrifying them with catastrophic results for the community. There is a belief that all cities are sub-par, are not up to the level of a tech city. The American city itself is an enemy.
One of the elemental enemies, an enemy that is hated across the tech sector and by everyone from the top of the industry to the bottom: poor people. ESPECIALLY people without housing. To tech, “homeless” is really a blanket term to mean all of the poor people in the city, housed or unhoused, those living in temporary housing. They hate poor neighborhoods; when I asked a Twitter employee once if any of the software engineers there had thought about the implications for the Tenderloin, of them moving the offices of a mega-tech company there; and he said, without skipping a single beat “displace who? Drug addicts and prostitutes and homeless people? There’s nothing worth saving,” which reflected a great deal of awareness that the result would be destruction and devastation, but that it didn’t matter, because these people are sub-human.
This is: primarily Black and brown, people living at the poverty line and/or on government assistance of various formers, queer families, trans sex workers, drug addicts, people with mental illnesses, unstably employed people (like their own “gig workers”, etc.)
What becomes possible when you take on such extreme animosity towards these folks and back it with a multi-trillion dollar tech empire? For one, this is a recipe to maintain a perpetual technology underclass, I.e., tech gains the ability, through squeezing out these communities and gentrification, to pay less than a living wage and extract as much as possible from its “invisible workforce”, the true labor story beneath the industry. It gives tech cover to aim for aggressive destruction of social services to these communities, and cut off political support for them; justifies reaching deep into local politics and corrupting them; the industry generates fake outrage at these citizens, then pressures the government for changes and latitude to interfere and even “design solutions” to deal with the issue: neighborhood watch apps, mass purchase and land lording, availability of low paid jobs, government support for invading marginalized areas of the city; its also a mechanism to extract tax breaks from the city. So there is a generative purpose for them in these enemies as well.
It is actually the people that tech most negatively affects, that it sees itself in most opposition to. (This is also about squashing any dissent that could come from these communities). Tech moving into these cities has increased the poverty of residences, has increased police violence against them, has worked to undermine the economy of the city through massive tax breaks, in packages that often include the notion that tech companies are going to do something to “give back” to the community, which of course they never do. So tech has as its greatest enemy, those which it most impoverishes, and uses that improvershment to continually oppress both literally and materially, as well as in general propaganda: the existence of these people means we must do more to erase them. The unhoused people that tech hates — these living conditions are actually generated by the industry through gentrification and other attacks on community, which have eroded employment, housing, services, affordability, mutual aid, small businesses, etc. Sick shit!!!
The contempt that programmers have on a personal level for residents of the cities they come to invade, is actually pretty globally known; there have been multiple “scandals” to this effect, most famously, when Greg Gopman, a general clout-seeking tech grifter and transplant to SF, posted some serious bile about the Tenderloin to a social media platform — he worked at Twitter, which had literally moved into the Tenderloin to gentrify it; he was, personally, part of the Tenderloin takeover, and his comments at the time cannot be divorced from that. And then it really turned into a huge raging debate; many people ostensively deriding this “take”, but who also participate and benefit from the tech processes that create it. These attitudes are expressed by top venture capitalists and tech elite literally constantly, perhaps most notably Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, the latter of which PARTICULARLY hates the Tenderloin in SF.
So you have your near enemies and then you have the industry’s far enemies, China and Russia; discourse around this has really accelerated in the past few years, emerging right from venture capitalists, and primarily taking the form of: “We are at risk of losing our technical edge over China and Russia, we need to quadruple down on technology investment (give us money), in order to maintain this competitiveness and to retain our place as the technology leaders of the world”. So, here we have an existential threat; and more than that, we have a necessary ingredient to many fascist formations, which is exactly, war (“life is permanent warfare”, Orwell) and militarization.
Tech is a very war-like industry, though many don’t see this. Most people think of tech primarily in terms of friendly, consumer apps, which is what they want you to associate them with. Meanwhile since the inception of the industry, tech has been providing data, software, hardware, strategy, even custom-built datacenters dedicated to intelligence agencies and the military; the most egregious example was several years ago when it was revealed that a number of tech companies had contracts with ICE and were materially forwarding the detention and sexual abuse of women and children at the US/Mexico border. So there’s always been that functioning in the background of tech, where even within the industry it is side-lined as an issue to avoid the ethical questions.
Most recently, we have seen a massive militarization of the industry; militarization playing a key part of many fascist apparatus. Under the headline “American Dynamism”, the biggest VC firms in the Valley have been building out a fleet of weapons companies — they are creating military-grade surveillance systems, weaponized drones, a number of autonomous war vessels, including submarines and airplanes; military satellite networks, AI for “war fighters”, as well as various intelligence services, i.e. Companies in a similar vein as Palantir. “American Dynamism” is the industry’s #1 current platform, and it invokes Russia and China, as well as the decline of American military competitiveness, as reasons why we NEED a massive, tech-led weapons build-out; this is, in my ten years studying these psychopaths, the most dangerous thing on the board right now; their top weapons company, Anduril, announced a raise of 1.5 billion bucks just a few days ago. So just huge amounts of money and investment are flooding into these things; and we are able to see a very clear fascist superstructure and logic, operating at greater and greater levels of organization.
Why haven’t you heard more about this? A little characteristic of fascism which is suppression of free press and dissent. One of the reasons why it’s hard to identify tech for what it is, is because the way it operates to destroy dissent, looks different than what we might typically think of as squashing dissent. And yet, tech has gained majority control of media in this country. It owns all the major social networks of course, but it also owns huge numbers of the online publications/blogs/news sites, and has in the past few years, purchased up much of the traditional media in the country; so that includes the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Intercept (and the hilarious thing is that while being funded directly by the PayPal mafia, the Intercept is supposedly some kind of brave voice staving off the threat of the surveillance state), and others. And then you have Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, where the mediums of film and video are not just being distributed, but actually funded by tech companies — Jeff Bezos himself gets involved in productions; Hollywood is slipping deeper and deeper away as the financial structure and cultural structure of cinema is turned over to tech.
There is no free press in this country anymore — that is over. They own allllll of this shit and are at the heart of cultural and intellectual production in this country, working at top speeds to squeeze more and more out of it.
Suppression of dissent is very much operating on all of these tech-owned platforms as well. Twitter is (as it always has) welcoming Nazis, fascists, alt-right, trolls, etc. onto the platform, and this time giving them the order to attack and the signal that they will have wide-ranging latitude to do whatever they need to do to get rid of liberals, leftists, trans people, queer people, and so on, the people that they consider “less than” in a very elemental sense. This, however, is just the most visible current case; as I wrote about more extensively here, tech actually has started, incubated and platformed these groups; their techniques, such as doxxing, mass-reporting, swarming, anonymous death threats, terrorizing through SWATing, sending threatening material, hacking accounts and publishing private correspondence, etc., were developed by technofascists. Because these groups are considered to be just general “organic” formations, no one looks at how tech has actually deployed these formations to suppress actual free speech by marginalized groups. Over the years, millions of people who are /+ Black women, trans women, disabled women, sex workers, leftists, communists, socialists, liberals, Jewish people, abuse victims, and particularly visible activists, have been attacked en masse for years on end. 10 years of it, non-stop.
These were not symmetrical attacks; the attacked groups were acting wholly defensively, confining efforts to increasing security education and developing community-based best practices for withstanding attacks. So a similar thing was not happening to the terrorists; the loss was entirely on our side. I personally have known well over 100 people, easily, who ended up leaving the internet entirely, or in majority, or as a public speaker, or stopped doing activism, for long periods and forever; they were attacked for their political beliefs and thus, those political beliefs were not only essential censored, but were having their entire lives destroyed — this is on a whole different level than censorship, this is truly, crushing dissent. Fascism.
I think we need to really try to reconcile with what the legacy of all of these fascist attacks have been, continuously and cumulatively, and what they cumulatively look like, and then you realize that tech was this entire apparatus, from beginning to end: it was computer programmers creating these sites, it was computer programmers who were the first users of them, it was VCs who funded these platforms, it was tech companies who simply refused, for a decade now, to do anything whatsoever to stop this; that is because they loved these hate groups, because they belong to it and are it. It is because of this that we have so little to resist with now.
Even within the industry, there is a lot of fear of tech elite. It is normal that, in an industry of millions and millions, you’d have at least some kind of ongoing criticism, as you see around many other industries of enormous import. Almost no one breathes a bad word about any venture capital in public; the most you see is perhaps someone trying to accuse a VC’s investment of being frivolous, or some objection to a new buzz word, or vaguely referring to fraud in the ecosystem. They are our celebrities and our state leaders, and no one criticizes them. Once in awhile there’s a podcast or small zine that attempts to do this critique; the ones I’ve seen, are offering analysis we had available by 2013. Its stagnant and dead out there. The tech fascists have, and do, ruin careers and lives. It happened to me, years ago, and now they have it down to a science.
They can destroy anyone they want. And they will. They are fascists.
There’s obviously a great more analysis to be done here, and I will present subsequent to this, other posts where we will explore topics such as isolationism, hierarchy, machismo, the police apparatus (which in America has been heavily armed and influenced by tech for decades), purification, anti-Marxism, chauvinism/hatred of feminism, and so on.
Remember, we are under attack by the technofascist state, its just that no one knows it. But they need to. Tell somebody. We are in a lot of danger and this situation is moving very quickly.