How Tech Radicalizes and Weaponizes Computer Programmers

People don’t tend to think about the “products” that tech produces, that exist outside of its apps and software and platforms and so on. Less do they consider that one of the manufactured products of the tech industry *is* the technology workers themselves. The tech worker is very much a creation of venture capital, which creates an environment to weaponize and radicalize them. 

The greatest tools that VCs use for world domination are money and class, and it wields them using its computer programmers. It’s a myth that computer programming salaries are somehow naturally aligned with various market forces and that they represent an organic or even honest economic phenomenon or baseline; rather, tech salaries are very deliberately inflated to an extreme degree in order to create a wealth gap. Steve Jobs was caught market fixing programmer salaries before he keeled over, in a conspiracy along at with least three other major Valley companies. Apple got a slap on the wrist. Since then of course, they’ve become even more sophisticated at this type of manipulation, and more successful in keeping it out of court. 

The huge salaries of tech employees is what creates the class of people that is used to take control of cities, to sway a variety of politics and elections, to guard tech elite from criticism (via a mutual investment in disproportionate wealth), to seed VC messaging in the broader culture, and to abuse lower classes of worker in various ways . The salaries give technology workers absolute power to take over lower income workers, their neighborhoods, their cities… 

Consider, I.e., that a Facebook employee can easily make 350 base/yr PLUS soaring stock options — but its contracted workforce of professionals in building management, transportation, culinary etc make minimum wage. I am reminded of how Twitter moved into the Tenderloin, a very oppressed part of the city, and instantly IPOed, minting hundreds of brand new multi-millionaires that, of course, then moved into the Tenderloin or right beside it, along with other tech companies who did much the same thing. The office alone doesn’t do it; what is needed to take over is a significant force of workers armed with the disproportionate wealth. Using the scenario above, if you have a engineer making 350k, and you have a low-income worker making $50,000, thats 7x. That is a HUGE gap, and it is also a very conservative estimate, when you add in what the tech worker is making in bonuses and significant stock packages, often worth much more than salary at the true powerhouses like Facebook and Apple and Amazon. It is easy to see how this practice, easily shifts control over the city to tech workers, commanded by venture capitalists. 

Now, to give you a sense of scale, there are 4.4 million programmers in the United States. That is a significant army. That is the number of people in fucking Los Angeles, and they are getting paid sometimes up to 10x-100x+ what other workers are, including other workers for their own companies. That is a tremendous amount of power — with average *salary alone* (not including stock options, which can drive huge wealth), of the computer programmer being $139,000, that’s over 600 billion dollars PER YEAR. That is, again, BEFORE you include stock and windfalls from IPOs and acquisitions. The US army’s annual budget is *283* billion, to give you a sense of scale.

As VC continues to militarize and set up strongholds in major US and global cities, the comparison of tech workers to soldiers is increasingly apt. As this current round of city invasion plays out, we are seeing tech calling in tens of thousands of tech workers into new targets. For example, the artificial discourse about “San Francisco isn’t hot anymore, its Miami and Atlanta”, sends the command to startups and programmers of all sorts to get their asses to Miami and Atlanta. 

Industry practice of hiring dominantly White and Asian men serves an ideological function as well. This is a base that already encompasses and embodies structural misogyny, anti-Black racism, homophobia, transmisogyny and ableism; and these facets are then nurtured in the working environment. For example, all men in tech are allowed to treat women in tech as poorly as they want, with no consequences, and they both see it being done around them and do it themselves. VCs regularly “rescue” or move around its top extremist executives, such as Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, as well as CEOs who have been found liable for sexual misconduct. They won’t just *not* punish you if you do something awful, they’ll actively force you into an even higher position. The top venture capitalist in the Valley, Marc Andreessen, has essentially said on many occasions that sexual violence is not a fire-able or nullifying event. Men in tech KNOW they have the backing of the establishment, up to and including rape. These days, such issues are referred to as “unserious” by venture capitalists. But being in an environment that is constantly abusing and bullying women with impunity, moves the dial ever further up. 

A lot of the weaponizing has to do with making people literally worse people than they were before. An environment that is 80% or more White and Asian male is inherently monoculture, inherently it radicalizes, and in the tech environment all-male engineering teams sink very quickly into depravity; they are quick to claim irony or some kind of bit, I.e., the “brogrammer” stereotype, but as in the political culture more broadly, irony just serves as a cover for a bunch of absolute bullshit. I’ve seen mannnyyyyy companies with work environments with all male engineering teams that just had totally blatant racism, homophobia, misogyny, and all kinds of slurs, really gross. It was just… normal. And due to the inherent nature of hate speech, it just spirals and spirals out of control, becoming more and more extreme as the worst thing that was said becomes the new baseline. You can get some pretty serious shit really quickly. The constant, constant, constant flow of alcohol into the bodies of startup workers also contributes to ever-worsening behavior. 

 I’ve talked about it before, but its important in this particular context, and that is: all of the online hate groups were started by computer programmers, and “trolling” culture was developed OVERALL by them in the early days of the internet, when they were (as they still are), the only ones able to set up an infrastructure for it. While they don’t cop to it publicly, tech is FULL of people who man 4chan, 8chan, KiwiFarms, Daily Storm*r. We even have our own internal board, Hacker News, which has been directly connected to numerous 4 and 8 chan style attacks on women in tech. There are regular “burnings of the witch”; these mass attacks flex male worker’s power to destroy women, and serve the larger industry function of terrorizing women and driving them from the industry. Again, the goal is to centralize money and power in a small group of White and Asian men, and anything that furthers that goal is an automatic green light.   

The reason why a lot of the current terrorism we see from these sites, started by attacking women in tech and gaming, is because it’s men in tech who do it. Outside of any structural hiring bias, men in tech perform the function of wealth concentration in White and Asian men by marginalizing and abusing women out of the field — keeping them from it. Look to the Linux community: when something comes up about women and Linux where they are being critiqued for their (horrible) demographic track record and treatment of particularly women, they attack. No one ever says it, but this is obviously coming from the Linux community; no one else gives a fuck about Linux like that, grow up. Linux has an active hate mob and has for years. You can also tell the disproportionate influence of male computer programmers on hate groups because sites like 4 and 8 chan are/were full of boards specifically for various technical subsets, as does Reddit, which goes down in history for generating HUGE racist and misogynist attacks, many of them involving tech in some way. 

The fact of the matter is, tech has a far disproportionate responsibility for politically and corporate motivated attacks as well as the development of computer terrorism and creation of hate sites and platforms. Furthermore, the industry has allowed these sites to operate continuously since the inception of the internet — Nazis and pedophiles were organizing on the internet since the very first days. This is nothing new. Tech has done nothing because the hate groups perform essential functions for the industry, ESPECIALLY in squashing dissent, and especially as they have generalized to a variety of political targets VC would like to immolate (any social movement, for example).

Internally, employees also perform functions for the company such as harassing, abusing, etc. marginalized people in the office and forcing them out of the industry. Tech as baseline forces half of women in tech to quit by 10 years in, which is really just the start of the career. It is the workers around them who “massage” them out of the system as they get older (and less fuckable). Sorry to be crude, but its not a coincidence that the tech companies are full of girls in their 20s and there’s no women above 30 around, lol. Hyperconcentrating a group of privileged men and then letting them stamp out all lower paid residents, abuse women in the workplace, and work in troll armies, stokes the fires of hate and self importance. It’s a recipe for a violent, white supremacist, misogynist army that is posed to unleash on the world, on demand, at VC command. 

Considering the recent massive militarization of the industry and its propaganda framing of “American Dynamism” and “building”, you’ll start to see these hate groups and extremist tech workers operating more and more openly as they have a plausible platform that will be supported by the bosses. This will make their terrorism more effective than ever before. The venture capitalist’s clear disdain for social justice also sends the message that it is encouraged to attack marginalized people, and openly be misogynist, racist, even Nazi pigs. 

All this time, programmers are being told they’re the best, the best, the best, and their entire environment reflects it, to extremes of coddling and flattering. The coddling that is performed in tech is REALLY extreme, as you know — the whole world knows about how tech employees get lavish perks like luxury company retreats, and offices that have gyms and doctors and yoga classes, breakfast, lunch and dinner served, massages in-house, etc. I worked at one company like that and it was also the company where the employees were the most egotistical and self-centered. The message to the tech employee is always: you deserve better things than any other worker, because you are so special, you, you must be treated like a delicate egg because what you have to offer is so, so precious. The workplace offers itself as “proof” that you are, in fact, special and important. Believe me, they don’t do it for your benefit; even in these high-perk environments, there is very serious abuse and exploitation of employees. But tech employees would rather serve their bosses than care about exploitation, even their own, which they are too shoved up their own ass to see. VCs would literally use them as human shields if a genuine attempt was made on reclaiming the computing field from VC psychopaths. Would literally let all of you die for them, but you don’t care. Perhaps following the war crimes tribunal, you will get your wish. The consequences of collaboration are execution, a total forfeiture of life.  

Everything in the startup worker’s environment is designed to make him feel not only important, but better than basically anyone else. At every turn, technical talent specifically is told that are computer gods, and that their intelligence levels make them uniquely deserving of life’s charms and jewels. One of the things that radicalization tries to do is justify all of the extreme wealth and power inequalities; this myth does. It causes him to see himself as totally separate from other workers — that is what he is being told and that is what is reflected in the environment. Superiority complex is one of the most important things that tech elite in-calculates in its workers. (And the idea that everyone else is stupid and worthless and irrelevent to the advancement of civilization). It is critical that the employee sides with wealth and power; not, for example, the local communities that their offices are in, their global user base, or even any broader dedication to morals and ethics. They must be taught to identify with the outside world as little as possible. This is the perfect environment for radicalization. 

And it is consistent across the entire industry. Having standardized ideologies and practices and formations, in fact, standardized EVERYTHING, is a common theme in tech (also a natural effect of a monopolistic industry). The degree of uniformity in the workplace, particularly, is extreme. All of our companies operate similarly, even the offices are laid out similarly. Its frequently remarked on how easy it is to move between companies. AKA, same shit, different day. Almost like we were all just working for one big giant VC conglom— 

Companies are organized into the same major functions — sales, marketing and engineering. Companies are structured all the same way, Delaware C-Corp, they use the same pay scales, the same hiring practices, and the same law firms… This gets down to the tooling and minutia. Everyone in the industry uses the same computer, they use the same hosting platforms and version control, the same small handle of chat applications, the same text editors, huge amounts of the same code. The open floor plan is the same, the conferencing software is all the same. This is more evidence that the tech industry is not a competition between startups, but about companies working together and in unison towards shared goals.

Tech workers live in a uniform, VC created bubble. When you work in tech, your entire life is in the company’s hands. It gives you your social life, your financial future, your friends, your meals. The startup is the entire reality for the startup employee. That bubble extends even to CS schools and even coding education programs aimed at younger kids. VCs, along with the military industrial complex, provide significant funding in these areas and very much dictate the curriculum. After all, if you are one of the most elite computer science schools or hacker schools in the country, you need to make sure your graduates are successful, which means they need to get hired by VCs or weapons companies; thus, Silicon Valley is allowed to dictate the technology agenda for children as young as 10. With the diversity in tech movement’s focus on the pipeline, we ended up handing young kids over to VC agenda at younger and younger ages. 

Of course, all of this requires some element of fear and an enforcement board. One of the ways they’ve accomplished this is by turning social media into a key part of the employee’s hiring potential and salary and ongoing employment/promotions. Everyone with power in tech sits on Twitter all day long (look, I get it), but it also means that employees are constantly under watch and that their actions as private citizens and their unique identity is now possessed by the industry. And so you have Twitter as essentially this giant tech echo chamber that is just people frantically trying to get ahead or get clout or whatever and being pick-mes for VC. Pathetic to watch. They converge on the same linguistic formats and made-up a16z buzzwords, even down to the way that tweets are laid out. This makes literally all of them brand ambassadors for not only specific companies and technologies, but for VC OVERALL. 

A16z is brilliant at this; I documented in 2014 how they used one of their most effective weapons, Github, (which they used to kill open source and automate programming), to pioneer the use of tech employees as walking bill boards for startups. *Everyone* wears logoed company gear; in fact, upon joining a new company, you are presented with a whole custom wardrobe of gear: you get hats, sweatpants, tshirts, stickers, computer sleeves — you can have as much as you want. Socks. Headbands. Fanny packs. It never ends. Why? You ARE your fucking company, shitbag. And so you ALSO perform it in your day to day life. 

The tech industry is in and of itself a panopticon where VC and tech elite and management sits in in the central tower and it is watching all of its startups and its employees. Everyone is so terrified of VC that no one says anything about it; thats how profound their control is. 

When I got to the Valley I was 22, fresh out of grad school (does anyone want to see my master’s degree? No one ever has), and I met a number of other young people who were also getting their start in Silicon Valley. Thinking back, everyone at least seemed so idealistic. We really bought into the rainbow version of everything: changing the world, making it a better place, helping people. And many of us were very serious about trying to fix problems in the industry, wherever we found them! We would slay dragons!  

That lasted for maybe 2 years, tops, and as I aged in the industry I watched the people around me change too. A lot of people I used to like, care about, and respect, are now war criminals and human rights abusers working as soldiers for venture capital. Over the course of the last bubble, I know people who are unrecognizable from the person they were before. Tech is unique in its transformative power over its workers as well as how it radicalizes them, and then uses them as weapons in the pursuit of goals like global city invasion, political manipulation, and gatekeeping wealth and power. 

This is not at all to excuse tech workers from the due consequences of their unethical actions; after all, they are making these concessions to acquire personal wealth and clout and power and ego satisfaction. Additionally, they have been served warning again and again. They are happy to consent to being weaponized by power. As tech becomes increasing bloodthirsty and hawkish, so do its workers. They are more and more dangerous by the day. 

If that is what happens to your average person, what happens when it’s a sociopath or psychopath, an evil person, hits the Valley? That’s how you get what I call super weapons: people who have been radicalized or positioned to such an extent that they look like outliers even though they are a natural result of the industry, who serve the specific function of inflicting mass disproportionate harm.  

There’s only so high you can go in the industry before you have to abandon any moral sense whatsoever to go further. To get anywhere near the top of your field, you have to be willing to be more ruthless, maniacal, unfeeling, detached and sadistic as the next egomaniac narcissist psycho. So as you climb up the chain of power, you wade through more and more absolute depraved animals, a snake den of psychopaths and sociopaths, to the point that in my professional opinion, the top 15-20% of the industry have no ethics to speak of and are just animals of greed, fury, narcissism and bloodlust. 

All of those sociopaths and psychopaths working together, in a highly contained environment, with access to unlimited wealth and power. That is how tech eventually produces and organizes the ultimate monopoly that it strives for… as well as true monsters of humanity.

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Luckey. The technofascist billionaire, and the production of technofascist billionaires, has been core to how the industry operates for decades. When I say that you are talking about sociopaths and psychopaths, I’m not being dramatic in the least: to hoard that degree of wealth and power, at great, material harm to the entire world and often serious exploitation of tens and millions of workers — that behavior is inherently anti-society, and you can see that play out very clearly in public. 

The evil you see in this industry is literally baked, structurally, into every single step — starting with Raytheon and fucking Lockheed Martin running learn to code programs for middle school girls under the guise of “women in tech”. (Again, women in tech is a cover for war crimes in the industry: getting more representation of white women is prioritized over the ethical implications of their career choices). The totality and deliberateness of the evil, which you see but a drop of in this essay, is yet more evidence that the tech industry MUST be taken back from these monsters, war criminals and human rights abusers. 

Global-scale human rights abuses and war crimes, AND the collaboration of computer programmers with it, are crimes punishable by death in citizen tribunals. Pick your side. One or all will die.