Stop Feeling Bad for Tech Workers, These People are The Enemy

One of the defining questions in the Millennial politic has been whether or not the computer programmers, product designers and managers, UI/UX people, in short, Silicon Valley; if they were going to come down on the side of good or the side of evil.  

Half of Twitter’s employees just got fired, and there’s a literal tsunami of outrage from liberals about it — how this is unethical, unreasonable, potentially illegal, mean, abusive, worker exploitation, etc. etc.  — matched with a rush of praise and adoration and defense for these workers, a pouring out of total outrage on their behalf, flooding them with attention and pity. 

All of this outrage and coddling for people is based on the assumption that tech workers are distinct from, and in some way, in opposition to the billionaire class that runs them. It positions tech workers as victims of the real “bad guys”, as maybe even being canaries in the coal mines, as being the ones who are fighting evil in tech, holding it back.

Is that true, though? 

I have been trying to organize tech workers for ten years, and let me tell you something. I have met a bunch of Twitter employees over the years, I was at their parties with Will.i.am in the early days, and their developer conferences; I’ve been to their fucking HQ to talk to (yell at) their team about various justice issues on the platform, I’ve had multiple meetings over the years with Twitter managers and programmers, my magazine was read extensively by Twitter employees, been at the bar with these fucking people… I have personally put a lot of work into trying to fix Twitter and make it what it could actually be: a reasonable commons run by the interests of the people. 

That, and huge amounts of activism by others, got absolutely no where for 10 years, and that is in large part because the employees there are apathetic, tuned out, out of touch, arrogant, privileged, cosplay liberals and self-indulgent narcissists, who think that are special and that they are somehow more deserving of worker’s rights than any other class, especially those that are doing far more dangerous and underpaid labor. 

Tech workers NOT part of the broader class of workers, because they have CHOSEN not to be, and because they have benefitted extraordinarily from not being so, and because they have kicked other workers again and again to maintain their own status. They don’t want to be put in the same category of any of the people who are standing up for them; nor would they ever stand up for anyone else. 

Twitter workers do not give a single fuck about other workers except as something to feel superior over; therefore they have been unable to view themselves as workers or workers in need of any type of organization or protection. They said nothing during COVID, when Elon forced workers to come in to the factory, resulting in hundreds of totally avoidable cases. When Elon fired anyone who wouldn’t come to work because of the pandemic? Said and did nothing when Elon locked Tesla employees inside of factories to create a ‘closed loop’ of productivity — and that was AFTER he announced the Twitter buy. Trust me, no one at Twitter said or did a thing. 

Twitter employees have literally never stood up for any other workers in the industry. This is 100% par for the course for people in tech. Tech workers have refused to stand in solidarity, for years, with even workers for THEIR SAME COMPANY but who work in “less important” or contracted roles like transportation and building management and culinary. For years, these companies have cracked down on any form of unionization in these roles; they were successful in putting them down again and again. Those workers asked for help and solidarity from the technology ones; it was refused again and again. People think that tech companies are brand new to union busting; psh, they were getting caught in lawsuits at the very beginning of the last bubble, fucking up the shuttle drivers’ organization. And tech workers have stood by and said and done literally nothing as others were being treated like this for YEARS on end. 

There was nothing wrong with the arrangement for them; they got rich as fuck while people below them were being trampled. And they thought it would never be them who would experience labor exploitation, because they were so fucking special.

This is not divorced at all from the fact that Twitter’s employees did absolutely nothing except whine throughout the course of this entire Musk acquisition and takeover. They didn’t have any kind of coherent identity as a group outside of their individual employment, so how would they? Twitter employees were unable to organize themselves because all they had ever done is crush other workers and see themselves above them. 

There was not even a meaningful effort towards employee organization of ANY kind when this went down on Friday, even though they had had six months to prepare for this; there were no resignations in protest when HALF of their colleagues got the axe. They could have ALL quit before Musk could cut the cord, but they still each wanted to be there more than they wanted to organize around even basic principles or mount literally any kind of resistance. Imagine that — all of this supposed outrage and not a single person that remained on staff quit in protest and solidarity, even though that is the abundantly obvious correct step, assuming internal sabotage is not to your taste. (though i would encourage it strongly)

This is the start of something new in the Valley, which is billionaires cracking down on computer scientists with big layoffs and depressed salaries/valuations; Zuckerberg and Elon have both been telling workers to work harder, and to some outrage; but again, this outrage has no shape or container, when tech workers are *just* starting to realize that they AREN’T in the same class as their bosses, that this has been an illusion that *they* themselves created, out of hubris and superiority. Ignore the struggles of other workers and you will soon find yourself  humbled by your exact resemblance to them. 

And what Twitter employees have done is far and beyond *just* fancying themselves part of a class of people who really don’t give a shit about them. They have actively mounted some very serious, very dangerous, very deadly campaigns on the orders of their bosses, again and again. There is no basis of worker solidarity when tech workers are not even part of the communities where they live and work, where rather they are personal invading armies for VCs. They have been knowingly complicit in the full frontal assault against the very communities they live and work with. Twitter, using its employees, has been the #1 company in culpability for the invasion and destruction of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. The Tenderloin was an arts and culture center, a center of the queer community in the Bay, and of the rich services that grew up particularly around the initial AIDs crisis and in its legacy. It consisted mainly of long term residents who were queer, trans, people of color, low-paid workers, sex workers, and many young families. It was home to people with psychotic illnesses who were living on the streets or in short-term/nightly housing, people who were drug addicts. 

Twitter decided to take it over. It was the last place in the city that hadn’t fallen to tech. It moved its offices and employees in 2012, into the last un-gentrified part of San Francisco, even despite total and continuous outcry from residents. Despite literally seeing protests in front of its offices, its employees just kept on with their bosses, personally contributing to gentrification and displacement of thousands of people while becoming incredibly wealthy. When Twitter IPOed, it produced 1700 new millionaires at the exact same time that actual residents of the area were getting squeezed to the last possible margins. 

One time I was out bar hopping and a Twitter employee with us was asked (by me): what about the people in the Tenderloin? What about the people who live here? And he said, what about them? You mean drug addicts and prostitutes? The city will be better for it.  

In order to work at Twitter, you need to be willing to make some really profound ethical compromises. Its employees have developed and implemented product decisions that have resulted in tens of thousands of sex workers and various other “undesirable” (such as: leftist, feminist) women getting kicked off of the platform and cut off from their livelihood and place in the commons. In 2018 there was a vary serious crackdown on women using the service; the cost alone of that one round of unfair permanent bans, mainly to women who were self-defending from the platform’s own harassment, was huge. Its employees have stood by for year after year after year while hate groups and pedophile groups proliferated; at one point, their terms of service were updated to specifically include the latter. Why do you feel so bad for people who are willing to, knowingly, harbor PEDOPHILE GROUPS?!?! 

There’s this idea bubbling up that Twitter’s algorithms have been primarily punishing to the Right, when that is not true; in fact, it took literally years of activism to convince Twitter to even kick off Nazis who were openly threatening to kill women and posting pictures of their homes, their addresses and their social security numbers. The fact that we fear Elon being worse, does not mean we can have rose colored glasses for the legacy of this company; one that has profited to extreme degree on activist movements while allowing them to be brutally and relentlessly attacked for years and years and years on end. That has ruined countless people and its deleterious impact on progressive politics can’t be understated. Even at the end of last year, Amnesty International released a report stating that of regular users, 40% of women are harassed on the platform, which is just an insane number when you think about what that looks like cumulatively. And when you consider that people outside of the company have agitated for a safer platform, for over ten years, with close to zero results. No matter how much the story is now being re-written to make it look like Twitter under Jack was a safe place, and now it will be “ruined” under Musk — no, this site has consistently allowed for huge violence while doing nothing about it. 

Here is the truth about tech workers: they have absolute disdain and disgust for not only their fellow workers, but the communities they are part of. They have a total smugness and a sense of superiority over all other groups of workers in their generation. They have an insatiable sense of entitlement: what you are seeing out of Twitter workers is no way the lament of an oppressed worker, it is the stunned humiliation of discovering that they weren’t as precious and indispensable as they thought they were to psychopathic billionaires. Tech workers CLING to false beliefs in “meritocracy” —they have to in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that is caused by the improbable fact that they are worth 10x+ what other workers are. Despite having ample evidence that their economic status is just a weapon for tech companies to commit city invasion, they have willfully served as foot soldiers of gentrification, doing the day-to-day dirty work of forcing out tenants, making sure existing small businesses are closed and that “better”, more “upscale” establishments were brought in. They have personally harassed and humiliated, including physically, mentally ill people with bipolar one and schizophrenia living on the streets, and their disdain for them and political action against them caused further displacement and poverty. 

Tech workers have done this even when anti-eviction, anti-gentrification and housing activists have been consistently in their faces for a decade. I believe in the concept of fair warning and notification, so I want to make this extremely extremely clear: these people have been told clearly and directly what their obligations to society are. I want to assure you that tech workers have been told, over and over and over and over, for years — more than a decade — what the consequences of THEIR *material* work is. They were told, over and over and over, how their employers, which they were often getting rich as fuck off, were ruining it for anyone else and causing global damage. I have spent over 10 years trying to organize tech workers to actually stand up to this system and actually turn the industry into a force for good. I can testify that they have been lectured, yelled at, educated; awareness has been built, there have been diversity and inclusion trainings. There have been highly visible movements, from the societal condemnation of the PRISM project, to #NoTechforICE, to the movement around Ferguson that grew in Oakland, right next to where most of the technologists in the country are concentrated. 

They. Know. 

Tech workers don’t just treat all other groups of workers like shit, they don’t just roll over their communities, they themselves commit really horrifying violences to their own coworkers. The lack of any interpersonal care or respect for even their fellow office/team workers is not in existence. The classic case is that we’ve had massive battles for women in tech, and 10 years later, there are no more women in tech then they were, and furthermore, the women employees just in general are treated like absolute shit,  they are literally raped and sexually assaulted all the time, that they are treated like company girlfriends and sexually exploited and harassed and stalked, they get paid way less and get advanced way less: men don’t say anything. They let it all continue. This is how they treat their own colleagues. 

The only sustaining bond that most tech workers have to each other is within a particular company, where their bond is based primarily on making money with each other. There is no coherent concept of what a tech worker is and what political ramifications they have. Tech workers do not even think of themselves as workers, so there have not been any worker movements. There’s been a walkout or two at Google for various fractional movements for things like climate change, but those were all very brief and swallowed very quickly. The harm has always, in ever single case, been overwhelming of the effort.

I had a best friend once, and he was the founder of a database company named Basho. Some of his friends from another company he worked with, took software he created and built an entire company out of it; but Andy didn’t have enough money to buy in early on, and so they wouldn’t even call him a founder, even though he literally wrote the software that held up the whole company. Andy had serious mental illness that was progressing and progressing, and getting worse and worse. They knew it. Everyone knew it: the investors, the management, all the other employees. They knew it but he was their star; he was “our Zuckerberg”; they needed him. No one ever once materially advocated for him to have working conditions that wouldn’t result in mortality. They just tried to get as much as they could. 

When he died a few years later after being pushed out of the company he founded for symptoms of an illness they knew he had, only one of the executives even came to the funeral.  And many other faces were missing as well. I have seen tech workers screw over, lie to, personally exploit and personally abuse even each other — even in between white men. I have known tech workers to have the most reprehensible personal characteristics imaginable; I have seen people that I thought were good, transform into greedy, malignantly narcissistic monsters. People in technology have a giant superiority complex; they literally do think they are better than all of the other workers in their generation, and they don’t seem to feel any connection whatsoever to the struggles that the rest of them are facing. 

To generationally situate this all, it is tech workers who have abandoned and left behind their generation. We are the generation that was simultaneously being given the internet and being told that the world was dying due to climate change, and then we were plunged into the middle of a new world of Forever War, based on blatant lies told by the government. We watched our generation go to war for that fucking shit. We lost friends to that and the meth and heroin and opiate epidemics; in my high school, people were dying of heroin overdoses straight out of 12th grade. The criminal justice system ate us, mental illness has brought out to our knees. Everyone who went into college ended up in massive student debt. Many graduated into the economic recession created by Bernie Madoff and the housing crisis; it becomes clear how few of us would ever even have a house. We were used, to totality, by boomers, for our votes, dollars, and bodies as soldiers; it was our futures that paid their mortages. Now in our 30s, they’ve let the pandemic bring the country to its knees once more. Many are barely scraping by, many in such bad economic straits. 

You would think that tech workers, because they have the most power and money of us, would use everything available to them to try to save our generation. But what has defined software engineers is that they are better than their generation. That is how they definite themselves. That they are smarter than everyone else because they went to an engineering college, are “builders”, “hackers”, “entrepreneurs”, “hustlers”. Tech workers literally have a bone-deep belief that technical ability is some sort of inherent trait. This is directly in contrast to the workers of our generation that they see as failures and as dead weight with no skills and no talents; what makes techies so special is that *everyone else* is dumber and weaker and doesn’t have “entrepreneurial spirit” or “hustle” of whatever the case may be, that they don’t have what it takes to “grok” programming. They also genuinely see themselves benevolent guardians of the rest of their generation, because of this superiority; but they haven’t done a single thing to lift our generation up. 

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!

Once you are willing to sink so, so low from a moral perspective, they’re not perceiving even the worst actors as bad, and it is far more common for them to see psychopathic billionaires as inspirations to them, “just like me”, than for them to be critical. People see these figures as aspirational, tech workers think that they, too, will be famous, wealthy, powerful founders and venture capitalists that are the villains of the rest of the world — these as aspirational states for them, and not ideologically problematic, just aspirationally if they were to fall short of them or be denied that status. That is why Twitter employees are baying at the moon: because it wasn’t supposed to happen to them. 

In tech, people pretend to be passionate about products, but in reality it is a purely godless state. Other industries at least, in part of the structure, have an ethical concept; weather that is the the Hippocratic Oath, client/attorney privilege, even just the imperative to minimize mortality in a dangerous working environment, etc. But tech literally doesn’t have any. There is no defining ethics you can point to outside of making money and getting power and control — disproportionately. Twitter employees are upset that their Daddy didn’t do right by *them*; they are not upset with the system that made Daddy, or with the choices they have made as their own actors on the world which has led them here. 

Whose side are the tech workers on? They are on their bosses’ sides. They are very comfortable, on a day to day basis, with carrying out the direct commands of known war criminals and human rights abusers. This pathetic display of public whining is the closest they’ve gotten to mounting a legitimate resistance to the tech superpower, and as you can see, it won’t amount to anything because tech workers can’t even seem to carry on a resistance even when its directly rooted in their own selfish ends. The number of workers in the technology industry, far from being positive contributors to society, are in fact a danger to it. 

They are tricking you into feeling sorry for them. None of this is real or valid. These are not exploited workers, they aren’t even workers by their own desires and self-definitions. They are also letting the bald faced lie proliferate that they are somehow subject to the same employment constraints as anyone else. Tech workers would like you to BELIEVE that it was out of their hands, that’s the job they got, at xTerribleCompany, at Twitter, hey, we all have to make a living someway or another, right? There are literally millions of jobs in the technology industry that do NOT require you to work at companies that, in the case of Twitter, commit large-scale human rights abuses and destroy entire communities and movements. Plenty of companies …. Do not do that shit. It’s also important for people outside the industry to understand that these employees have stock in the company as well, so their financial interest in what happens at Twitter is not even severed. And they will easily get other jobs. Any high-profile layoffs in tech are met with companies falling all over themselves to get the hires, because they think it will help with their brand. These people are real sick, let me tell you. 

Of course in the early days there was reason to believe the tech workers might be good. It sounds stupid to say now, but geek culture has been very tied up in kindof big, fundamental, monolithic moral questions — we were raised on Star Wars, on Lord of the Rings, of Deep Space Nine, the Marvel Comic Universe, shit like that. And these were cultural platforms that dealt, very specifically, with technology, and that were widely loved and adored by people within it. It still blows my mind that we all watched the same Star Wars and the same Lord of the Rings, and it seems computer programmers took exactly the wrong message away.

Tech employees could have been the ones that stepped in when things REALLY started to go south, like when we started to find out about how Facebook causes suicide and how tech companies were creating the biggest transfer of wealth in history, or how it was destroying cities. These are the members of our generation that we have gotten closest to the tech power structure and the closest to actual money we can do shit with at large scale. They are the people with direct access to technology funding and to other related institutions. They are people who are well-paid, often very well-paid, compared to any other group of workers; along with having the potential to make truly fantastic sums of money from IPOs and acquisitions. As things got worse and worse — as it became clear the tech was destroying cities and that its products had devastating effects on individuals and communities — they could have been a force to stop them and to guide the industry into a place where it was building humane products and not having catastrophic impact.

But they haven’t been that force. Because they have CHOSEN NOT TO BE. They don’t WANT to be like the rest of their generation and like other workers. They want to be BETTER. They have already shown themselves, for more than a decade straight, to have no desire or interest in giving back to their generation or even preserving it. They don’t give a shit. They never have, they never will. 

They are our enemy, and we need to start acting like it. Stop simping for people who would literally step over your dead body, on their way to work on the software that put you there.