Tech Fascism and the New Man
One of the major concepts that spans political ideology is that of the “new man”, a superior man, a different type of man who emerges from the various chaoses and degradations of existing civilization to lead the way forward. He is what emerges and becomes possible, via the proposed political ideology.
So we see this across the historical landscape, and in this post I want to talk about: what is the VC’s image of a New Man in their political philosophy, and how that is situated within their fascist ideology? More broadly, this is about the origin myth that technofascists have about themselves, their mythology about who they are, it is how they conceptualize themselves and what their goals and aims are, where they fit in society. These are important foundational ideas even if to outsiders, the New Man looks ridiculous (I.e, an asshole wearing a hoodie). It ends up going… a little deeper than that.
Since these are fascists it is constructive to look at the previous incarnations of the fascist New Man. As we are in a new era of fascism in a specific geopolitical complex, we are going to see their own unique contributions to the New Man canon as well. However, this gives us some good grounding. I’m primarily putting this here as a context to keep in mind for the rest of the piece.
“The New Man is a utopian concept that involves the creation of a new ideal human being or citizen replacing un-ideal human beings or citizens. The meaning of a New Man has widely varied and various alternatives have been suggested by a variety of religions and political ideologies.
Fascism supports the creation of a New Man who is a strong-willed, dynamic archetype, a figure of direct action and bellicose violence. An anti-individualist, he is characterized by a sense of confidence and masculinity, quiet dignity and self-worth, determination, and authoritativeness. With a detachment from romantic love, family background and schooling, his worldview is romanticized, passionate, serious and realist, preoccupied with the honoring of fallen heroes, a strong belief in personal responsibility, national rebirth and renewal.”
Little discussed, how the development of new technology has played a role in these fascist conceptions:
“Fernando Esposito has explored the fascist fascination with aviation. Flying was often deemed as a way out of the crisis of modernity. ‘Aviation stood for the dawn of an eternal order,’ Esposito explains. ‘The aviator, not least because of his boldness, love of danger, indomitable will and Faustian power, was the new man … Flying thus became a metaphor for fascism itself…
Fascists aimed to transform the ordinary man into the ‘new man,’ a ‘virile’ being who would put decadent bourgeoisie, cerebral Marxists, and ‘feminine’ liberals to shame.”
You are not used to thinking of a hacker or software engineer or startup founder as prototypes inside larger fascist ideology. We are very used to trivializing tech, which is doing enormous damage to awareness about what is actually happening. So please, even if it seems absurd, THEY are taking these ideas EXTREMELY seriously, so that is why we have to as well. It is not a “stretch” to suggest that tech fascists have specific values and a specific worldview that is reflected in the structure of the industry and their ideas about what the ideal citizen of the VC state looks like.
Think about it. Is it really so fucking wild of a stretch to see “hacker” thru the lens of fascism (when so many of them turned out to be fascists in fascist hate groups)? To see “10x engineer” through the lens of fascism, the pseudo-scientific divide it places between greater and lesser men? To see “founder” through the lens of fascism, when we are dealing with fascists that are trying to start their own fascist state and building the infrastructure to do so?
The ideal man in the world of venture capital has evolved over time. For a long time, the ideal was the “hacker”. This was a white man with a quick mind, a disdain for social convention, a penchant for social engineering, the uncanny ability to cause big change very quickly, and more than a little of trollishness — this is your Anonymous and your hacktivist and your Mr Robot, something that was coming from a very political base. The hacker possessed a type of special “power”, such as we see in the movies about teenagers who discover their special and dangerous power. Theirs is hacking. And we get to this same core idea that comes up over and over again: that the hacker has a different kind of mind, an innate technical mind, that you either “have” or you “don’t have”, and it just that simple. Hacking is something you *are*.
The white hat/black hat “culture wars” happened within this context. These battlefields over what a hacker was — on the side of right, or on the side of wrong, and where those got murky — spoke to a larger ideological battle that the tech industry has been in continuously thoughout the tech bubbles.
The hacker was always a bit dangerous, a counterculture force who tried to push technological and social progress forward, even if the rest of the world wasn’t ready. Always there is this notion of a white male savant who is an underdog in society and living outside of society and its norms, the only one who can show it a mirror, the only one who can break the system. Move fast, break things.
The raw, gritty hacker energy was at its highest around 2013-ish, when the PRISM leaks happened. At that point industry propaganda, blamed the government solely, and its workers (delusionally) thought of themselves on the side of the victims in this scenario. Ultimately, when the tension around PRISM dissipated, the image of the hacker was drained of a lot of its political content and re-deployed as a venture capital tool. “Hacktivism” and especially the idea of leaking government information, was threatening. And the threat posed was one that tech could relate to — the Valley is very serious about avoiding leaks, it is notoriously obsessed with PR, and they often dealt with disgruntled employees. Apple has had the most advanced version of this where the entire company is run using war-time military strategies like compartmentalization. These companies were themselves facing ongoing onslaughts from hackers and trolls that could cause them serious issues in the marketplace, such as the famous AT&T iPad security breach.
With this notion of the hacker, tech was in the same basket that the intelligence agencies were in. Having to worry about employees who had access to this precious data leaking it in some way, or blowing the whistle on it. The risk was high and the more the “hacktivist” became a global phenomenon and the longer it lasted, the more of an issue it was.
So we saw a really significant co-optation of this idea or at least a re-channeling of it in a way that suited venture capital as it itself grew and matured. We saw a much more mellow version of the hacker emerge in the last bubble, one who working on the inside of the tech economy specifically, and specifically, the hacker was a programmer working at a VC-funded tech startup. What was once the counter-culture hacker eluding surveillance, became the hacker creating the fascist surveillance state out of a WeWork office.
In the end, the lasting take away from the “hacker” period was the Mark Zuckerberg archetype. Hacker was his origin story. A college student sitting around “hacking” for fun and curiosity, discovers a market and comes up with an idea, “hacks” it together, and becomes the next unicorn. The hacker is now a superlative computer programmer or founder in the VC portfolio, and once again you get these ideas about innate abilities, the obsession with them in the culture. This funneled the more dangerous counter culture energies that had come out of the “hacker wars,” into something that was palatable in the startup environment, that its politics could be narrowed down to the politics of the VC portfolio and its interests.
It is not an accident at all that Zuckerberg was chosen to epitomize the hacker image: he was a massive titan of a global surveillance empire. The hacker/Zuck figure was about enshrining his status as one of the heads of state, if you will, of the technology field. These ideas of Zuckerberg and even Steve Jobs, these are the preservation of the image of the leader or the epitome of the new man, that are being preserved as a cultural artifact continuing to affect the industry today, and in fact, in the case of Steve Jobs, his impact on the field has been phenomenal and he is essentially worshipped as if a cult leader to this day.
You see the “new” versions of these figures and their influence pop up; for example, you had Elizabeth Holmes in the Jobs archetype and up and comers like Palmer Luckey who follow more in the Zuckerberg prototype. As improbable as it seems, these are indeed the founders and pillars of the new venture capital state and these are ideas that are coming from, and about, tectonic leaders in the industry.
And the thing is… in startup landia, we all started dressing like Mark Zuckerberg.
Fuck.
Hoodies became the rage and everyone had several company-branded ones, with our Twitter handles proudly emblazoned on the sleeves. There were even special, employee-only hoodies in different colors, it was like a prestige item that only members of that company ever got. Like you were OG Github or OG Twitter.
That’s not gonna look good when the trials start!!!
This Zuckerberg prototype was a very potent mythology that proved out to be very effective in actually organizing the industry and the workers in the industry ,who were very accepting of these prototypes and sought to emulate these folks. Venture capitalists at the time, and famously Paul Graham, made very clear that what they were looking to invest is someone that looks like Zuckerberg and has that kind of… aura.
Somewhere alongside of those developments, we arrive at the unfortunate case of widespread use of the terms “rockstar” and the “ninja” in the second bubble. This is extremely embarrassing, I am definitely airing out industry dirty laundry to even mention it, there’s kindof an internal pact to never talk about it again. Far from our finest hour. Our pursuit of the “cool factor” has had many stumbling patches and referring to everyone as “rockstars” and “ninjas” was certainly a bumpy time.
And I do agree that discussing the evolution of these myths about the ideal Man, in a serious manner, and then using fucking “ninja” as an example, seems like a lot, but what we are seeing at this time is a burgeoning ideology that is trying to find its origin story, its theory of history, its characters and mythologies, so there is absolutely some fumbling happening at this time. And also them desperately trying to find ways to say “some people are just innately better than other people” without actually coming out and… saying it. In fact, most ideals of the New Man have emerged from the necessity of “saying it without saying it.” It ends up requiring a number of logical contortions and so we get some pretty gnarly shit.
The age where everyone was hiring for “rockstars” and “ninjas” was a particularly cringe era and I think we’re all glad it is behind us. It’s important to understand that ideas that were seemingly innocuous, I mean ninja is dumb as shit but seems relatively harmless, however, these lineages of thought have now evolved over the course of many technology cycles, into something extremely serious. Attempts to divide ideal human being from the old, to suggest that these are innate traits, and to suggest that these are just empirical and scientific facts, are ongoing themes.
During the “rockstar” phase there was a lot of concern about “posing” and people being “posers” that emerged during this time. Its absolutely juvenile that something like that would be going on with people in their twenties and thirties, but none the less, this highlights how these ideas draw people into two distinct groups, the ideal and the un-ideal, and make that something that is separating people financially and interpersonally and professionally. It’s getting the job done and driving this wedge between people within the industry. It becomes a competition to prove that one is a member of the higher order, the higher class. That one is a real hacker, rockstar, or ninja. Unlike the posers.
Because this is a question of innate qualities, to be accepted into that class is everything and presumably permanent. You also have a phenomenon where everyone thinks they either ARE a superlative or that they will soon be; this makes it very difficult for people to see what is actually going on and to reject the fundamental basis of these ideas, which is that you can’t live up to these images unless you were born into them.
Fortunately, the cringe years of “rockstar python developers” and “ninja NoSQL hackers” led to the somewhat more staid and scientific sounding “10x engineer”. This has been their most successful device yet and it is also the effort that most reveals their actual intentions here.
The 10x engineer was a maverick who brought to the table, again, that unquantifiable property, the indefinable something that put him an order of magnitude further in performance and value than just your every day standard engineer. It very literally meant a worker who produced 10x the value of other workers. There was a giant organized campaign in the industry to spread this idea, and talks, media, and to ingrain this in startup culture.
What is extremely concerning about the 10x engineer is that it was a VC-helmed campaign that widely spread the complete lie that a 10x engineer even existed. This was an open effort to inculcate the entire industry into believing that this phenomenon was an actual thing. “10x engineer” was passed around as science, as if it had in fact been established that some programmers perform 10x better as other employees in software engineering. This was presented again and again by industry luminaries, as a hardened fact; the concept appeared in software books that were highly read and highly reputable. “10x engineer” was presented as being scientific, and based in objective fact.
One of the first major analyses I did of the tech industry concerned the 10x programmer so at that time, somewhere in 2012-2013, I went back and found all the documentation behind it. Most of the mentions of this from various software texts cited each other as the source, and not an original paper; so I had to track down from there to find the one paper on which all of this rested. As usual when there is a disinformation campaign, sources mainly cite other secondary or tertiary sources and each other, anything but talking about the original premise.
I was absolutely appalled to find that this entire 10x engineer notion came from a tiny study from a time so far in our past, that it was about performance with fucking punch cards. Back when we did computing with fucking punch cards, okay. This was a very specific, era-specific, tiny study, that even within those boundaries, in no way led to a reasonable conclusion that there were 10x engineers. On any inspection the entire idea that this even existed, falls totally apart. It would be absolutely absurd to pick out this tiny, completely antiquated, limited scope study from decades ago and make it into the basis of an entire theory of engineering management, but that is indeed what they did.
Who was promoting these notions, pseudoscience-backed notions of innate intellectual superiority? Venture capitalists. So what I see that concerns me from the standpoint of a fascist ideology or a fascist state developing, is a willingness and wiliness to create pseudo scientific notions to justify the existence of a superior, of innate, technical mind, that is literally 10x better than his fellow man.
This was one of the biggest lies I have ever seen them tell. They knew damn well it wasn’t even true; or maybe it is what they needed to believe about themselves to justify the out of control, insatiable wealth-hoarding that they had accomplished. Either way, with backing from the most important and influential, powerful and rich people in the industry, it was categorically accepted that this special kind of person was just a fact of life and you either were one or you weren’t. Ongoing efforts to scientifically establish the existence of an innately superior technical mind is highly alarming when you consider the ideology of fascism that is driving these developments.
The industry adapted and morphed to the proported existence of the 10x engineer and the importance of them, and hiring of them became a competitive issue. Attracting and managing them was on executive agendas throughout the Valley. The hiring process itself became the mechanism for weeding out the differences between workers. Here we see the most open articulation of fascist pseudoscience used to date in tech, had very little push back, and was rolled out across the entire industry in a way that it was affecting hiring and management and economic processes. The entire concept of the 10x becomes threaded through the entire industry and fundamentally, this is about drawing a line in the sand where you have a superior being that in fact is SMARTER, quicker, more effective, more innovative, etc., and then you have… everyone else.
You’ll notice in the definitions of fascism opening this piece, that they mention anti-individualism. At first it seems that venture capital and the 10x engineer has everything to do with exceptionalism and individualism. But from another perspective, this is actually the division that VC is setting between themselves and others; WITHIN their own group, with other supremes and superiors and other 10x engineers, they are sublimated into the goal of building their own state and of serving the mission and of fusing with the corporate / technofascist environment. So what happens after the distinction is made, is that the superior class itself subordinates itself to the fascist superstructure. This is a gatekeeping mechanism and a mechanism and story that justifies, for example, them giving somewhere around 2% of VC funding to women and Black people, by demographic. The 10x engineer is not a woman +/ a person of color +/ trans, and so on, but is specifically a white male. The people being kept OUT of the circle, definitively, shows that the 10x engineer concept and related ideas have a racial superiority component, have a gender superiority component, and are a form of dividing a line and declaring one group inferior, and the other superior.
To the point of looking at venture capital ideology as anti-individualistic, all the mythologies that tech hallucinates to itself again and again, include a very specific vision of extreme workaholism, aka endless submission to the needs of the startup/the VC/ the machine, and the rejection of the personal for the “state”, whether the individual conceptualizes it as a state or not. In this sense, the venture capitalist class is defined both by being superior than other “types” of people, and by being united, within itself, by a relentless and endless pursuit of what is variably called technological progress, innovation, “growth” and “change” and “disruption”, etc. What makes the venture capitalist class different is that they are innately better and THEREFORE, they are the only ones capable of building the new industry / state, to which they dedicate themselves utterly.
This realization of the new and better world, is this preoccupation “with national rebirth and renewal.” The TASK of the superlative, innate technical mind, is to build a new and better state than the one he sees before him, and utterly disdains.
Inside of the total immersion in the task of building the state, we find “detachment from romantic love, family background and schooling” as defined above. I wrote just the other day about the culture of familial, spousal and child neglect that pervades the industry, in which men are encouraged and supported in discarding everyone and everything else besides their mission for the startup (tech nation). This is positioned as a kind of pure ideal, one where your entire life is the work, where you are fully absorbed into it at the expense of all else, you “become” your startup and are its living manifestation. Through this lens we are able to reason about the individualism topic a bit more clearly. This is an in-group, out-group function that is being deployed seemingly in the guise of turning up the best workers, but is actually serving a much deeper function.
Where we see the most crystallization, the most investment, and the purest expression of the idealized tech fascist, is in the trope of The Founder. The Founder is the distillation of venture capital ideology in a great man. (VCs are also founders because of course they founded their own VC firms and most of the biggest ones at this time have been founders and multiple-time founders. So while the rest of the world might see VC as outside of the founder archetype, VC is better thought of as “the highest level of founder”. Only some technical people become founders and only some founders succeed enough to become venture capitalists, so they are in some ways “the ultimate founders” and that is how they view themselves, definitely not as “dumb money”).
All of the most important people in our industry are Founders, and that is supposed to represent the height of masculine power as well as encapsulates the political “argument”, if you will, that fascism is making through him. That political argument is that Founders are the ones who are pushing society forward, the ones on whom all human development depends, the ones who are innately set up to lead, and who are working manically on the realization of the idealized fascist state. Tech VCs openly cite Israel and Christopher Columbus as inspirations. Like the much pined-after, historical technology innovators and industrialists, the Edisons and Oppenheimers and Jobs of history, the Founders forge ahead singularly on VC mission. That is his contribution and that is the sole context of his endeavors. Individuality actually fades away to this task.
The Founders are the “new men” who can realize the venture capital vision of a financially independent, sovereign nation, indeed, a new kind of civilization, “post-capitalism” or “pure capitalism”. The latter, a term used when they are trying to explain that the fall of America is because *checks notes* we haven’t implemented a pure enough version of capitalism; in either case what replaces it in their dreams is corporatist fascism.
By their telling, in the state of crisis we now find ourselves in, the Founder is the one who is going to make sure that we “build, just build” our way out of it. To a better place. A magical place where we fight wars from VR goggles that kill you if you die in the game, where delivery drones bring things to our houses and there’s flying cars, space travel, even a better way to bank: crypto. Of course, I think we know that we are looking at incredibly sinister developments with these folks.
The innate technical mind or the “founder mindset” is what puts the Founder and indeed, to various degrees, all of the TRUE members of the society, (I.e., 10x-certified), apart from the rest of the society. Instead of the aviator as the emblem of technological and societal progress, we have The Founder. And this time, the plane is boarding for Mars.
The Founder is the technofascist’s spin on the colonial and imperialistic precedents of the explorer, the conqueror, the dictator, the invader, certainly along theses axes, yet mixed up in the digital age and the technology of the day to become a new kind of cyber-fascist.
Industry unseriousness aside, we have been looking at these ideals playing out within the tech industry, but there is a distinct possibility of some particularly memeified vision of this new ideal man, being deployed as part of a populist movement and as part of the growing and thriving right wing extremism in the country.
There is no reason to believe that this persistent notion of the innate technical mind is going to remain contained within venture capital, especially when they are really starting to make their mainstream debuts and are showing significant movement in openly participating in the culture war via a populist platform they are developing: American Dynamism, which essentially says that America has fallen and the only way to get out of it is to give the venture capitalists a ton of money to build drone swarms and artificial intelligence tools oh and also to let them launch a rogue, enemy financial system that is violently breaking away from America as we speak.
These notions that VCs have may very well become a part of a mainstream movement; indeed, we have already seen how the trolling that has been nurtured on VC platforms for years, evolved into fascist hate gangs that have also dovetailed and chris-crossed with other extremist movements across the county. A VC-engineered populist movement, obviously extremely concerning and we need to be paying attention to what venture capital is doing with regard to culture wars and how previously internal dynamics threaten to break out into the open.
Most recently, the Founder has been cast in a much more expansive role than in previous iterations, envisioned by a16z honchos like Balaji as actually the founders of nations and states and cities, as founders in the more historical sense. Their vision of the founder actually positions him as the founder of his own state within the tech nation; and with the arrival of the sovereign venture capital nation, that is exactly what they will be. Corporatism — another fascist super structure. The major issue on the plate of tech fascists right now concerns the establishment and “building” of their fascist state, which means this whole innate technical mind thing becomes not just a matter of hiring but a matter of citizenship. And that will include only some technology workers; this isn’t even about the industry as a whole, but a special subset of them innately capable of doing the work required to build the fascist state and establish itself, violently if necessary.
This battle for the sovereign VC state is playing out economically and it is playing out culturally as well. The launch of the sovereign venture capital state is generated by and will generate its own cultural phenomenon. We are already seeing that in the rise of new fascist propaganda outlets like Pirate Wire and Upstream. There will be more. With “independent media” being swallowed up into the venture capital orbit — look at the string of supposedly counter-culture reporters that have popped up around Elon Musk, or the consistent funding of hate groups by Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel — they are preparing to fund an entire culture war on us and with all of the media and propaganda arms that come with it. It is easy for them to create new media outlets and they will be going full force in that direction. They have been running social and media sites forever… they are its originators. We are fighting them on their turf with infrastructure that belongs to them and is funded by them. AKA, we are in a bad place.
So right now I am worried about what this ideal starts looking like when it bridges the gap into mainstream culture. As VCs are already all-in on the culture war, they are increasingly becoming counter-culture figures and increasingly becoming mainstream figures themselves. So I am worried about their… fan boys.
It’s a new bubble, which means we’re getting new media, new social, new press. What will be the new 4chan?
Twitter?
Is that why they bough—
Oh.