Tech is Purging the Industry of Political Enemies

A very serious transformation of the tech worker base is happening right now. Amidst all of the financial turmoil and the mass layoffs, everyone who isn’t a white or Asian man is being systematically purged from the industry. DEI departments whose job has been to recruit and retain diverse talent are gone. By demographic, funding to founders of color has plunged dramatically; funding to women has as well. Women +/ people of color have been disproportionately affected by the layoffs. Women in tech have been 65% more likely to be laid off than men in tech in the recent gusher. Latino workers have also been disproportionately affected. Funding for Black founders dropped by over 50% just in 2022. 

This is a literally a purge of the industry to get rid of undesirable elements and importantly, to get rid of the humanitarian considerations that these people have brought to the fore time and time again. Venture capital is currently in the middle of an extremely aggressive build out of a hostile financial ecosystem and an autonomous weapons platform that realizes the most fascist, most violent possible futures of the industry.

And there will be literally no one inside of it to stand up, resist or even blow the whistle. 

Even though there were only ever very few people outside the white and Asian male “ideal” within the technical workforce, what we see now is a concentrated and deliberant attack on these workers to get them the fuck out of the industry and make sure no one is going to say, or do shit to stop the horrifying economic attacks, open aggression on the global workforce, and military expansion that venture capital is now undertaking. 

A lot of people outside the industry only saw a little of the “diversity in tech” conversation, and don’t realize that what happened in the industry from about 2012-2015, was a full-blown, multi-issue, broad-based movement of tech workers. This went far beyond the “DEI” that the venture capitalists were eventually able to whittle it down to. It was a movement of +/ women, people of color, queer people and people with disabilities, presenting an extremely broad and deep slate of change to the power structure of the industry. This did include representation, salary equality and venture funding; but it also had significant anti-rape efforts, anti-gentrification efforts, anti-war efforts and anti-fascism efforts, the latter targeting the large number of fascists within the industry who terrorized women in tech at will, driving dozens of them into some form of hiding with a combination of SWATing, stalking, hacking, social engineering and other technical attacks. Along with a number of my colleagues, I was deep in battle as we fought for safer technology for our users, for better treatment of workers across the industry, for an end to the brutal war on local communities that tech was fighting. We fought for independent technology, for free tech criticism, and for alternatives to venture capital funding. And perhaps the crown jewel, the part that really sent them over the edge — that was the one for wealth re-distribution from venture capital and tech elite, a theme that we revisited over and over again. Boy, they really fucking hated that one. 

We were fighting them, hard, on every angle, and it was never just about demographics; however, our movement was violently narrowed to demographics through corporatization and co-optation of the movement, and now tech is taking these under-represented groups out completely. 

There WAS resistance over the last ten years from tech workers; but there won’t be any more. Far from the days of successful walk-outs at Google to cancel the Project Maven Pentagon project, a new survey shows that half of tech workers are just fine working on weapons contacts. That is only one area where we will see a massive backslide and regression. This is a change that has been secured through the non-stop terrorism of individuals and collectives promoting peace within the industry, by driving them out and by weaponizing other workers against them; by inculcating tech workers into war games using as under-handed tactics as having fucking Raytheon and Lockheed hanging out on college campuses and industry conferences, and making serial killers like Palmer Luckey the celebrated enfant terrible of the hardware world. 

The dissent in the industry was almost never coming from white and Asian men. Believe me. They sold out the movement again and again when they did get involved. They ate at the slop while others were fighting; even in the best case scenario, they were but lukewarm allies for an industry they have consistently refused responsibility for. 

So with these major changes in the industry, the only population that ever would or could dissent, is being washed out to sea. 

While there is a lot to be said about financial participation and access to innovation and so on when it comes to these layoffs, that has been written on extensively elsewhere; for our purposes, I invite you to think about the implications for dissent and resistance and for moral action. Not only are we dealing with a venture capital force that is a destructive, terroristic financial behemoth, but we are also dealing with an INTENSELY homogenous, monocultured worker base of nearly exclusively white and Asian men, in a deeply radicalizing technology culture that consistently produces war criminals, financial terrorists, rapists, fascists and groups of fascists who attack in swarm-like formation against political opponents — something they perfected during the tech movement of 2012-2015. The fascism everyone has been so worried about over the past ten years was the ripples coming out of tech’s fascist gangs operating on 4chan, 8chan, Hacker News, Reddit, Kiwifarms, etc. That is direct from the industry’s technical culture and we will soon be seeing it out of hiding in anonymous accounts, and into the light of day, fully and openly endorsed by venture capitalists who are currently purging the industry of even the mere potential for worker organization or political advocacy. 

What we are looking at is not only fascist multi-billionaires, but a fascist workforce run under fascist rule, with absolutely no dissent whatsoever allowed in the industry. It was barely tolerated before — ask me how many years I lived in hiding for publishing tech critique during the movement — but anything that existed, is getting shot to hell right now.

One part of the layoff story is about the disproportionate layoffs of minorities in the field, and that is important. But this is also about a political purge to get rid of a wide assortment of political interests in the forms of tech critique, worker organization, unions, community relations, anti-war efforts, and worker interest groups for I.e. Women or queer people that have popped up in the industry over the past 10 years. 

It’s hard to believe it now, but in 2012-2015 we had a very robust, multi-issue, rapidly growing workers- and political movement, that was dismantled by hand, by venture capitalists, almost to a person; people were chased out of their homes and the industry, rendered unemployable, bought out by tech companies, starved of funding and support, attacked by hostile fascist gangs coming out of the major hate sites.

But the events we are seeing right now will be the decisive blow. And they will NEVER allow it to grow back. This is it. It’s fucking over. Anyone who tries will be rendered instantly and permanently blacklisted. There WAS a dissenting force in Silicon Valley… but by the time this worker re-organization is done, there won’t be any at all. Our ability to know what is actually going on inside the industry is going to disappear, there will be no accurate or critical reporting. There will be no groups that are organizing against the military build-out or against the acceleration of closed-source, for-profit artificial intelligence. There will be no one advocating for the women who are often severely sexually abused within the industry, and there won’t be ANY money flowing from tech workers into progressive social causes. There will not be any industry support for progressive social causes period; that was always secured by internal agitation. 

It’s over. 

We are looking at a fascist leadership — venture capital — and a hugely radicalized, fascist worker base, operating with no resistance whatsoever, in a self-contained, insular, authoritarian ecosystem. With venture capitalists openly identifying as accelerationists…. We are in huge fucking trouble.

The end of any and all internal resistance means the lamp in the lighthouse has been snuffed out, and only darkness comes.