Analyzing Tech as Fascism, II
In previous posts, I’ve made the argument that the political character of the tech industry is fascism; that the industry is run by tech fascists, that it carries out fascist aims as its primary organizing principle, and that in short, the tech “industry” is the operating fascist party of the United States. After presenting my argument that tech is a fascist state-within-a-state, fighting for its own sovereignty, I started an inquiry of analyzing tech according to the most highly held and accessible definitions of fascism. That post covered fascist principles including the building of a national utopia, the manufacture of an exterior enemy, the creation of a “new man”, the discrediting of state authority, the development of hero complex, and the suppression of the free press and dissent in general.
In this post we’ll go through some of the other aspects of fascism and how they line up with tech and hold up in analysis. Just as before, we’ll use the most accessible, widely adopted definitions of the term, cataloged in Wikipedia, with some additional citations from Orwell’s 1984.
+ Perhaps one of the most recognizable and compelling aspects of fascism is “newspeak”, thanks to Orwell and because we are delighted by notions of things like propaganda and brainwashing and word games, and how they play out politically.
Eco’s definition is as “an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.” — essentially, cutting down and manipulating how we talk about some things, to a small set of simplistic concepts, that then lack depth, analysis, or critical thought, and that narrow the frame of what is even discussed.
Anyone with even passing recognition of the industry culture, knows that it LOVES to flatten meaning, dumb it down, turn it into soundbites; this is the industry that invented memes and irony and emojis and 140-character messaging and Buzzfeed-style “journalism”. Notice how VCs on Twitter talk like Buzzfeed articles and post idiotic memes just like any other irony-poisoned pissbaby incel/volcel, as tech employees build their identities and relationships by “trolling” and having “bits”, even in their workplaces. Tech is the origin of the modern, data-derived, radicalizing, strip-mined, meme-ified, engagement-optimized impoverished digital language, the origin of the rot of critical thinking as it has not only created brain-destroying social media but has also swallowed the press and replaced it with internet blogs which have just dragged the richness and integrity of cultural production into the gutter by making its highest aims page views and “engagements” from zombies. Even internet blogs are being shut down by VCs, as social media now replaces them and they are DONE with “woke” anything. Tech has the entirety of the country talking like a marketing department; our Twitters look like resumes, our LinkedIns look like social calling cards, our Instagrams are commercial photoshoots; this is an industry of reduction, of turning huge amounts of data into digital trading cards for quick hits of adrenaline and dopamine. It is no surprise that the inner language and concept production is also impoverished. The language that is used inside of the industry to reason about who we are and what we do, is a proto-nationalist set of mega-concepts/memes that reduce work in an incredibly complex technology space to just a few, big, dumb, nationalist, utopian concepts.
Since the early days of the pandemic, the shiny new VC rhetorical framework, the industry’s singular ideal, is: “building”- nothing more, nothing less; and the idealized or “new man” of fascism, is “a builder.” Eco discusses the defining fascist quality of “The cult of action for action's sake”; held up here very literally in “build” as perpetual action, as singularly desirable and worthy, other qualities be damned; the goal is simply to be hustling constantly, hacking constantly, building constantly, new companies all the time, new funding rounds all the time, new innovations, changing the world, fixing the world, saving the world, building the world, and so on ad nauseam. Building is a newspeak vocabulary for the never-ended appetite, the imperialism of the industry (another sign of fascism); it is extended in other buzzy propaganda vehicles like “software is eating the world”.
Orwell, describing Newspeak, has stated: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees… but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
The division of everything into building and not building, certainly precludes a complexity of thought and also reasoning critically about the merits of the objects that are built; this correlates quite perfectly with, again, the imperialist agenda and the fascist demand for ever-expansion and never-ending growth. What could there be outside of building, and not building? Orwell further describing Newspeak:
“There was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science,’ any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc*”
*In 1984, Ingsoc is the philosophy of the fictional totalitarian state.
And in this case, you have a perfect corollary: building itself IS a complete philosophy of human development, and it erases “a method of thought”, the very notion of production as the realm of critical thought at all… rather, it is mindless, stripped of those very processes germane to the scientific method and which underly human progress itself. Science, with the rigor it requires, is erased; “building” is full and sufficient in and of itself.
As Eco and others assess, newspeak leads to a reduction/narrowing/simplifying and obscuring of information. We lose: what are we building? Who are we building for? Who decided that this is what we should build? It is kindof an exploded version of “technology is neutral”, except turning the blind pursuit of ever expansion (imperialism) into the singular priority effort and universal good.
The reductionism is to the level of a kindergarten classroom. If something is part of “building” it is good, very simply; if it ISNT building, its bad, or in VC parlance, “unserious”. Everything in the world is divided into building and not building, serious and unserious; serious being a catch-bag of ideas that basically boils down to according with tech elite agenda, pro-tech empire: furious expansion, building of the weapons fleet, investing in the national currency (crypto); whereas being “unserious” means, straightforwardly, that you are worried about ethics, consequences of technology buildout, thinking about DEI, and most significantly, concerned about marginalized people in connection to any of that and just users in general. But in VC Newspeak, this is “unserious” — juvenile, distracting, frivolous, disruptive.
I will also note that this has a connection to Eco’s idea of “Disagreement is treason”; dissent becomes in fact a challenge to building, thus it impedes the building, the sacred value, and so they are the enemy and have committed the ultimate sin of standing in the way of building. You’ll see this roll out more and more as a justification for VCs to destroy dissenters, unionizers, movement builders, government processes, regulation/taxation, and so on.
“Preventing/interferring in building” will be a crime and a rationale for violence.
+ Robert Paxton has a great quote which defines fascism as “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
I’m not going to cover all of this, but a few highlights. Note “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline”; I touched on this during the last post, in saying that tech fascism is fundamentally obsessed with the decline of the United States itself; there is no area of the US that VCs don’t openly and continually bray the crisis that the country is in, how much better tech could do, and how it has already taken over the operations of much of the government, as it uses tech as most of its outsourced IT- which sounds like not a big deal until you realize this means that they have the greatest access to all of the data, internal apps and processes, full knowledge, access and control of the government’s data core.
Tech openly discusses how the cities are mismanaged, the transportation is inefficient and dirty, there are homeless people on the streets, and human waste, and needles, the government is slow, other sectors are not keeping up with them, the military can’t save us from China and Russia anymore. They absolutely seethe about poor people and attack them over and over again in everything from labor exploitation to gentrification. They consider themselves as a bright new governance of the future, and are not only very much wrapped up in the idea of America’s fall from grace and global competitiveness, but purely hate America and treat it as dirty, out of date, irrelevent.
The part of victimhood is important and stands out here because the very top, richest and most powerful, men in the tech industry — multi-billionaires, world-famous, absolutely adored in the industry and respected outside of it; literally feel that they are VICTIMS of, political correctness, of “DEI” and therefore liberal/leftist policies more generally, of taxation by the US government, held down by adherence to regulations and by ties to America more broadly, they feel attacked by homeless people and poor people, and people who criticize them on the internet. People often remark that VCs have such thin skins; but it makes more sense when you consider the extremity of the authoritarianism and control that tech elite desire: EVERYTHING is an imposition on total sovereignty and total power and total obedience and total worship.
I want to draw attention to “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites”. While it might seem absurd to think about computer programmers as “militants”, considering their reputations as bullied nerds from high school who grew up to want to control the world… a reputation that is totally ridiculous and completely out of line with who and what these people are, while also causing people to view software engineers and the technical worker body with far less fear than they should. So, you might not think of programmers as militants, but does this sound like militants?
People who invade neighborhoods and entire cities on orders from their commanders, who transform the demographics and massively increase the wealth gap of entire cities through gentrification and displacement. Who bully, abuse, harass and report poor people on their boss’s orders. People who have for years, started and been part of fascist hate groups who have mercilessly attacked women in tech, as well as particularly radical/revolutionary feminists, especially Black feminists, on the behest of their bosses; leading organized terror campaigns that included threatening to kill children, to shoot and rape women, getting people fired and forcing them to flee their homes and even the country. People whose ENTIRE LIVES revolve against the tech empire, who live in its shadow, and identify as part of the tech empire above everything. People who create tools of oppression, such as social media apps that ruin the mental health of girls en masse, software to knowingly automate away other workers, personally building weapons for cops and the military. People who voluntarily, without needing to for financial reasons, but only out of dedication to the cause of tech empire, work 60 hour weeks, give up their families, their children, their sanity, to throw down in a toxic environment of overwork and macho displays of virility and aggression. People who build global surveillance systems, who build the algorithms that result in more criminal persecution of communities of color, criminalize them in gentrified communities, and literally give the police weaponry like drones, vehicles, tasters and surveillance engines.
These people are very much militants. Most recently, tech announces that it is opening up shop in Atlanta and Miami, and techies begin to flood in to take over the city, acting exactly on orders. And increasingly, they are literal soldiers of tech, as they design and build an entire infrastructure for weapons production and are operating those in the field under the also very newspeak-y “American Dynamism” — how could one be against dynamism? Techies are creating a whole new world of militarized drones and deploying and piloting them personally. They literally work for military forces, and actually are LEADERS in military forces, the “cutting edge” of the field.
+ On that note, back to Gentile, within fascism we have this notion of “a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, including through the use of organized terror.”
Here we must look to how tech has played a massive role in militarizing the police throughout the United States, and how it has in fact innovated and put in production on the field, a new kind of tech-powered super cop; the body cams are tech-provided, their cars are militarized by tech companies, all of the police and CIA data is in AWS, tech companies supply them with inter-agency surveillance systems like the Domain Awareness System. Amazon itself serves now as a private police surveillance system with consumer surveillance technologies (such as Ring, and VC-backed Flock Safety); Microsoft has even built squad vehicles, Marc Benioff famously donated a weaponized jet-ski to the SFPD. There was a huge outpouring of energy against tech’s contracts with ICE, in particular two Thiel-backed startups Palantir and Anduril, around 2019; they didn’t budge one bit. Policing is core to the tech business model, to the tech revenue flow, and to its creation of its own state. Police don’t serve poor people, people of color, long-terms residents of cities: they serve the wealth and the power, which in growing tech cities like Atlanta and Miami, are venture capitalists.
Tech is the backbone of the police state and has been for some time; its investment in keeping the police funded is high, because of the huge amounts of money they are able to get through these kinds of contracts, of which there is way way more room to grow. It is increasingly difficult to see modern day policing without the influence of the technology industry as not just a vendor but as a visionary of what policing is and could be, as well as a client in more and more cities across America and the globe. It puts them in a position of power over the policing apparatus itself, which is dependent on Silicon Valley to maintain, once again, its competitiveness in the global economy and its efficacy in the face of domestic troubles.
Another place where we see implicated, tech’s fascist mobs, which have served as organized terror, indeed, the tech fascist gangs that have organized using 4chan/8chan/KiwiFarms and other sites, have very much functioned to suppress particularly leftist dissent as Gentile discusses.
While I’m hesitate to use the word “secret police”, it remains the case that these groups are 1. Directly funded by tech fascist billionaires, including Thiel and Palmer Luckey and 2. Carrying out the aims and goals of the tech empire through fear and intimidation — very much rising to the level of “organized terrorism” that Gentile cites. Missions have included, specifically, terrorizing women in tech and gaming; fighting elaborate digital warfare for “free speech”; attacking critics of technology companies and open source projects; and more broadly, attacking “leftist”, women cultural critics with big platforms.
These groups have very much functioned as organized terrorist groups, and have had a devastating role in suppressing dissent that might formulate in any way against tech empire. Their terrorism techniques have included:
Gathering information about political dissidents and critics, threatening political dissidents and their families, smear campaigns, defaced websites, forced people to go into hiding, published their addresses online, stalked or sicced stalkers on targets for months or years, dug up and published reams of personal information, made revenge porn and sites, hacked into email accounts, phones, computers and messages to find useful blackmail or humiliation material, called SWAT teams on targets, threatened their children, forced them to leave their houses and sometimes the country, caused them to get fired, caused total community abandonment of the target, etc.
So if you consider that tech actually does have its own policing ecosystem, which includes:
Serving as outsourced IT for police departments
Architecting police surveillance systems
Building entire new technology services for police infrastructure
Creating neighborhood policing tools and having their employees use them to displace people
Serving as a primary source of data to policing units, providing data about its users to the police state
Creating private police forces at its offices and factories and so on, as well as buying and paying for policing in its major hubs, beginning with Palo Alto and Mountain View; as well as employing private security forces of unknown size and magnitude
Having its own shadow intelligence, investigation and terrorist force, operating now for literally decades against any who went against tech.
…you see that tech in general has a very strong policing character to it, that it is heavily invested in both policing outside its walls and policing within itself as well. I would watch very carefully because while we don’t see tech as sovereign over the US policing system, they have access to the data, weaponry and staffing, that they could very easily become the policing system of perhaps its own borders or even just in general ascend to a much higher degree of control over the US police; that a transition to having tech run policing in ALL areas is very much within the scope of what is possible and is already in play.
+ As an important argument regarding the economic organization of fascism, Gentile discusses a “corporative organization of the economy that suppresses trade union liberty”, and I think this is important to narrow in on because union busting is such a strong central economic principle of the tech empire.
Most recently and visibly, Elon Musk has been engaging in heavy union busting at Tesla, and Amazon has been fighting them tooth and nail, most egregiously with a new technology (made by Amazon software engineers) for detecting sites of possible union activity. But we can track union busting going wayyyy back, even though it is perceived as a new phenomenon. In the Web 2.0 bubble you had significant union activity — and significant union busting — happening, such as in 2015 with drivers for the top companies in the Bay, which drove people from the city into work further south in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View, and so on; many of these drivers were from Bauer Transportation, and when these workers tried to unionize, Silicon Valley was there doing the fixing; there were then, and have continued to be, union busting lawsuits constantly around tech — none of them ever resulted in anything like significant economic change for these workers.
There was also the case of WeWork, which immediately fired office and janitorial staff after they organized to create better working conditions; they were fired in 2015, and WeWork the company didn’t explode until 2019. I point significantly to the Silicon Valley Rising movement doing great work during that time as well, who promoted worker organization and cross-collaboration, allyship between technical and non-technical workers, and also documented the difficulty of unionizing within the tech world which embraces anti-union as a point of philosophical pride and a defining part of the tech “building” world: we don’t unionize, there is no need for unions, and unions will not be tolerated. They are… unserious.
Just in the past few months, Apple is facing a lawsuit for union-busting of employees at its retail locations; famously, Steve Jobs worked with several other Silicon Valley prize-pig companies to fix programmer salaries in *2005*.
Unions are anathema to technology and the industry acts in a united manner to squash them. It is very simple: they are not going to let you unionize and make progress. They are simply not willing to entertain unions. While there have been a small number of unions set up specifically for technology workers, and some contracting software shops have unionized in the face of labor abuse by big tech, the lack of traction within the industry overall is actually startling — I don’t know if there’s another field, perhaps outside of finance, that has so little unionization (I’m sure there are, but I’m thinking in comparison to health, manufacturing, academia, transportation, railroad, so many fields when there is at least some tradition and ongoing labor power).
Outside of some pretty extreme outlier cases, software engineers are not unionized *at all* even though they are clearly workers (…unless they are militants, which far more describes and explains the behavior). There’s no reason why tech employees shouldn’t unionize; even though they are much better paid than many other workers of their generation, they are still paid massively less than they should be, in proportion to the amount of money they make for their companies. By that calculus, the degree to which tech workers are being ripped off from the value they provide, is truly shocking; yet, tech workers refuse to recognize this simple economic reality and a lot of their identity revolves around the (false, self-flattering, arrogant) assumption that their bosses genuinely value them as people, that they have an equal stake as the executives and founders and venture capitalists in the companies, and that they are treated well; the idea that they are actually being treated very poorly and that they should organize to actually get reasonable pay, is anathema to their entire identity.
Methinks that these workers are in for a rude awakening; as they are finding out, they are not exempt from automation, as numerous AIs by infamous union busters like Amazon and programmer “favorite” companies like Github, are in fact, using their own code to replace them. And they are also finding, they are not exempt from layoffs, mass firings, public humiliation… STILL it is not enough to make software engineers do anything. It is very clear what side they are on and how deep their investment in the tech empire is. They chose their side, and they can die with it.
+ Well, we’ll tie it up there for this installment.
The idea that tech is a fascist state, when we are so totally used to thinking of it as an industry, is a little awkward at first. After all, it means fundamentally changing your frame of reference from “American corporation” to “aspiring sovereign fascist empire”. However, I invite and encourage you to take these words seriously, because tech is hurtling towards us, they are picking up the pace everyday, the timeline is significantly accelerating. The pandemic was a black swan event for them that doubled (at least) their money and power; this accelerated their timeframe significantly.
What do you do with fascists? What happens when fascists come to power?
We have to get ready for a potentially deadly showdown. They control a huge amount of the infrastructure in this country and are an incredibly serious and dangerous, direct and ongoing threat to all of us.
Please wake up. We have to fight them.