Technofascist Misogyny
I’ve spent a lot of the past 12 years investigating misogyny in tech — everything from the widespread industry rape, to abuse and discrimination in the workplace, to how technology products affect women all over the world.
There’s… a lot of misogyny. The first way you tell, as a woman in the valley, is when you get there are a wholeeee lot of the women around you, end up being in some kind of very serious sexual abuse situation. This is girls getting drugged and raped at conferences, bosses sexually assaulting their subordinates, venture capitalists raping women founders raising money, girls being pressured into sexual activity, pressured into sleeping with multiple men at the workplace (who then both turn on her, seriously this happens all the time) — yeah, big red flag there — threatened with career losses for breaking up with someone. There’s lot of stalking that happens, often with a stalker being a woman’s co-worker or someone else she met within the field, and no one does anything to help her. Then you had the many instances of women in the industry being attacked in highly visible, 4chan-style attacks coming out of industry social media (Reddit and VC-backed HackerNews), which often included severe sexual harassment: image manipulation so that women’s search results were coming back with photoshopped and otherwise manipulated photos of them, with bodily fluids on their faces, sometimes being assaulted in interactive modules. Hacking and distribution of explicit photos, threats of revenge porn. Constant taunting about your body and how you look and shit.
And again, this is happening in a CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT about things that are happening IN THE COMPANIES. The people who were doing the attacks were industry members, the women were in the industry and often visible figures, sparking hatred and backlash. Some of the attacks were at global scale — i.e., Donglegate, preceding GamerGate, and several of the high-profile sexual abuse cases — but it happened on a smaller scale to many, many other girls.
One of the biggest reasons women leave the industry is BECAUSE of the sick, evil sexual abuse that is allowed to run rampant. The venture capitalists, the ones running the whole show, say and do nothing, in fact, they support these efforts publicly. For example, I was dealing with a very serious stalker, who coincidentally was friends with some tech media figures associated with venture capital. Venture capitalists were openly giving money to my stalker — who stalked me for a full 18 months, including making videos of me as a puppet and going to the shooting range with one of my biggest detractors… Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo was obsessed with me at the time and orchestrating really big harassment campaigns on me that left me getting material death threats. And yet, venture capitalists, IN THE MIDDLE of these attacks on me, were literally giving money to my stalker for his “media company”. In another high-profile incident, Marc Andreessen publicly avowed the oustered Github CEO after a very serious case where a woman was attacked and chased out of the industry after whistleblowing about gender discrimination tied to in-office dating at Github; in-office dating being one of the primary sources of sexual abuse and harassment.
During the last bubble, there was this app called Whisper that let people post anonymous public messages, and it would show the content that was being populated near you. Thus it ran rife with minor leaks of proprietary information, speculation and shit-talking in the Valley as we were the first users to the platform. At the time, I was in my early 20s and doing some tech critique on the side while I worked my day job at the company town like everyone else. But one day I logged in and there was a post that said, “I would really love to punch @shanley in the face”.
There were over 300 likes; even though they were anonymous, I knew that these were people I worked with, went to parties with, signed contract with, hung out with, sold software to; and THOSE people’s friends. And I knew that most of those likes probably came from men, the overwhelming share of people in the industry, and people pissed off that I was exposing the industry culture.
It was a really scary moment, not because it was shit-talking on the internet, or even that I was concerned for my safety at that time (that came later), but just how violent it was.
Oh, and it said I need to get “hugged with a penis.” It was the sexual violence + physical threats combo that always got to me the most, and as an outspoken critic of the industry, I endured a lot of it.
These brutal, enduring, and oftentimes sexually abusive events, were something that most women in the industry experienced and all of us knew about. The environment was drenched in it. It was unavoidable, suffocating, and frightening. This was something much worse than the “subtle sexism” that gets talked about: highly protracted, ubiquitous sexual and misogynist attacks, supported by venture capital itself, the power center of the industry.
Tech and venture capital misogyny of course has the same structural planks as misogyny in general. But in the technofascist ideology, there are material variations and expressions of misogyny that are important to understand, because they help us reason about what we see today, the technological and economic decisions made.
Women have been most effected by the tech layoffs, many of the job fields that AI aims to attack are dominated by women, women will be facing new types of sexual violence with the new AR/VR formats coming out, and women and their children in a number of countries in the global south, that are under invasion by tech fascists, are going to be affected by this in a very real way, in the manner of events we have seen unfold across Oakland and San Francisco before them. In these cases, women and their children were forced out of housing, forced to subsist on sub-living wages, experienced labor exploitation, and were criminalized and subject to police violence.
So, this misogyny is a pillar of what we see as the overall picture of technofascism, because indeed, the misogyny in the industry is technofascist misogyny, and has unique attributes and new ways of being expressed that we haven’t seen before.
In all misogyny, there is a story about why women are inferior.
In some Christian movements, it’s because they are mothers and nurturers and homemakers, and this is a theme in a lot of the modern misogyny. In technofascist misogyny, it is literally that they think that women are inferior *because they are bad at technology*, and that this is an innate thing, that simply can’t be changed, altered, taught. Nothing. Innate technical superiority. It is widely held in the industry that women are just not very good at computers; this is the justification for this conspicuous absence in the industry. So, this is a widely held view throughout the entire thing.
And because technology is the future, and women can’t do computers because they are BIOLOGICALLY inferior, men are the leaders of the future. Just how it breaks down sweetheart. Women are not perceived as a part of architecting the technology, the future and indeed, the technofascist state; with the exclusive mandate of building the technofascist state at accelerationist speeds, women, who are inferior in building technology, naturally take a back seat in the rocket ship.
This is reflected in statistics on venture capital, where venture capital stands out GLARINGLY in core metrics compared to even the startups and even giant tech companies themselves: less than 2% of venture funding goes to women’s startups and the representation of women venture capitalists is less than the number of women in the field overall. By half. This is a logic behind the consistent exclusion of the women from the tech economic system.
And as we see venture capital itself pushing women to the edge in a variety of forms — of the industry, gig work, bans on sex work — you see that in how the technology infrastructure works as well, where women are actually excluded from the financial technology in general. We see this in everything from bans of sex workers and feminists on CashApp, to the even WORSE gender concentration of wealth in crypto than in the overall American financial system and the industry itself, and how new research into financial AI shows a gender bias against women. Of course, all these things are coming from the same source and the negative economic impact on women from technology spans platforms, startups and apps, but is coming from the same place: venture capital. And it’s technofascist misogyny.
People think that startups and tech companies are themselves where the misogyny is coming from; but startups and tech companies actually have better core indicators than venture capital itself; it is the venture arm where we see the worst outcomes. The enemy we are facing is not that 2 in 10 people in the industry are women — that is happening at the startup and company level — but rather the far more substantial, in all ways, misogyny that is within venture capital, which is economically where all startups flow from. Under 1 in 10 venture capitalists are women, and again, women literally receive less than 2% of venture capital funding. So at this level, venture capital — the financial substrate of technology innovation — we see this even much more severe and draconian spread.
Of course, study after study has come out saying that having balanced teams and companies produces better results and even more profits, but the larger goal, of depriving women from access, control and participation in the financial ecosystem, is more lucrative than even those supposed near-term goals. Again, these ideologies play out on long time lines, and venture capitalists do NOT receive or optimize for short-term returns, and never have. They want the full 51% of our shit, they want to harvest all of our labor, they even want your babies… okay, we’ll return to that in a minute.
This idea that women are just innately less technical is obviously patently ridiculous — the first computer programmer was literally a woman, weird! — and the reason why less women are technical when you actually get into the industry is because, at every step in the pipeline, they have been being pushed out of it. We never have the opportunity that men do to even gain experience in the technology, which takes decades… we’re already out the door because we got raped. For the record, half of women in tech leave the industry in under ten years. This of course, is the 10 years of experience that you need to get to the next levels of your career as far as the career progression of the industry; they manage to get nearly all of us out by the time we are at a point in our careers to viably be running significant parts of the field. The Valley is filled mainly with women in their 20s, very few in their 30s, and none in their 40s, which is when many executives and other industry leaders are actually coming into their own, against the common wisdom of the “young boy genius”, which are extreme outliers exploited to the maximum potential. Most people are really getting started at 35, 40 and later.
I know how it happens at every single step and have documented it. We are systemically pushed out of the industry and that actually takes a significant amount of effort on their part. It does not just happen “naturally” that less than 2% of all the funding for new technology infrastructure goes to women. If you were drunk and shooting at 100 glasses on a log, you would hit more than two of them.
This is a sniper’s work.
But, this is their ideology and what they believe and as you can see, that is increasingly dangerous.
Anyhow, within the tech industry itself, of course you have the massive sexual violence we talked about, and you have a culture that profoundly protects that at all levels, and there’s a massive mechanism in the valley itself to suppress resistance to the sexual violence. Women are intimidated into silence, pushed into legal agreements with questionable validity, given relatively paltry amounts of money to shut up, but yes, fear is the primary thing. Venture capitalists have explicitly and implicitly supported those industry-wide attacks that also are unique to this industry, indicated another symptom of a divergent strain of misogyny. It is somewhat analogous to some of the shit you see in Hollywood with how the mainstream can attack particularly female celebrities — in ways that often ruin her life.
Even for the women who remain in the field, their stories play out very differently than men. Inside of the companies, the highest concentration of women in is marketing and PR. The industry whines that it can’t find more women technical talent — well these gals are literally sitting inside the companies already. But it is not considered even once to provide in-industry technical training for women who might want to branch out and pursue, frankly more lucrative and powerful roles; because women are devalued, marketing is also devalued. So even with the women who do get “approved” to stay in the industry, there is still this very serious line and devision between the women and men’s role.
It sounds silly — oh, they just think that women are dumb. But this is really deep. Venture capital has been talking a lot on the podcast and conference circuit about intelligence; the general line is that: some people are just smarter than others, that is an innate quality, IQ is the best measure of intelligence, IQ is fixed and innate, smarter people just have better outcomes, and some people are just… better than others. Innate superiority has come to the forefront of the technofascist talking points, with direct ties to antiquated models of intelligence like IQ.
So yes, we are starting to get into gender and race science territory. This is one of the more terrifying, openly fascist elements of the ideology: that some people simply are smarter and better than other people, and that this is proven by advanced technology and biotech research. The other day Marc Andreessen was on a podcast saying that we actually understand human intelligence very well, when this is factually not the case. Even psychiatrists will tell you they have no idea what is going on with the human brain and consciousness. They don’t even know why Prozac fucking works. It is this pseudoscience of fixed values, that intelligence is innate, that being part of the future is tied to it, that belonging to the group of humans that count vs the ones who don’t, is actually a scientific conclusion.
Technofascism parades much under the ideas of fixed superiority both in humans and also in technology itself. Defined by them, of course. Concerningly, Pirate Wire, a technofascist media outlet backed by venture capital, recently mocked “the presently-favored, clown world iteration of black supremacy.” This dialogue has been growing stronger and more radical as VC is not met with any resistance to this dangerous platform; literally no one is saying shit about it or even talking about it. The tech critics you listen to are failing you. VCs are out here with openly fascist and Nazi talking points, talking about “master/slave morality” from Nietzsche, positioning anyone not in the… shall we say, master race — as inherently inferior and in need of… brain implants to “augment” our intelligence. Quite literally.
It’s worth noting, and history will note, the unusual number of gay men who compromise the upper echelons of venture capital. It’s an interesting phenomenon and actually related to the ideas of wealth concentration in the industry. Venture capital has lots of gay men in charge specifically because the PayPal Mafia, following their extremely lucrative acquisition by eBay, was full of gay men. They all moved into the venture capital space, founding a series of firms, and their luminaries got even more filthy rich and did even more evil things and hired a large number of gay men to work at their firms, including recruiting gay male college students for Peter Thiel’s Fellowship, which gives college students $100,000 to drop out and start a startup. Like everyone else, Peter Thiel has been in no way exempt from wanting diversity and inclusion… for his own. And so many of his hires and recruitment efforts have really been DEI efforts and affirmative action for white gay men in the industry, and he has brought them with him. Because Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia, with a number of gay members, have been able to secure a great hold over the industry, we have this other element here where we have technofascism from the positionality of the gay white male. With the power and money this concentrated in the Valley, having just a few gay guys at the very highest echelons does change the game.
Gay men, of course, can also be misogynists and particularly in the case of venture capital, we have one of the most dangerous examples of this unfolding in history. What differentiates gay and straight misogyny? This varies and it is far from the goal of this article to go into that categorically, but in the case of Silicon Valley homosexuality and the gay men who run the show, my personal opinion is that there is a absence of a sense of a need for women whatsoever — I think a lot of these people would be more than happy to never see a woman again and aren’t sexually motivated even to have them in the environment, much less the economy. Remember Peter Thiel saying that giving voting to women was a mistake?
The all-maleness component of this is really interesting, because where in some versions of misogyny women are still integral to the vision of society, I often get the feeling that women are… not in this one. Like almost categorically disposable. And I worry about that a lot because we are dealing with some extremely fucked up and twisted psychopaths, so if there’s even a FEELING that they might just… want there not to be women (which I strongly personally believe is the case in Peter Thiel), then that is something that bears examination, especially in the context of all the rest of this fascist Nazi shit. And of course there are precedents for the idea of the all-male society but for now it’s just something I want to flag.
Another area of technofascist misogyny has to do with the venture capital interest in women’s reproductive health. This has become a major talking point out of our two major fascist VC firms, a16z and Founder’s Fund: the birthrate is falling and technology and technology futures can address that and can increase the birth rate, and we need more babies. After all, who will be the next generation of guinea pigs if these guinea pigs stop reproducing? It turns out the venture capitalists still has some use for women — to be their genetically modified baby incubators.
So you have a bunch of investments in fertility and birth startups and even in VC-backed media ops that are targeting young women with reproduction psyops, such as the publication “Evie” which is backed by Peter Thiel and is kindof a trad wife / Goop / technofascism mash-up. Here in the investments, the constant overarching theme of controlling the woman’s body and sexual health and destiny, surveillance through technology, reaching in with the technology into the sphere of women and women bodily autonomy. Peter Thiel is very much on the record saying that he thinks women are essentially, and I’m paraphrasing, a waste of fucking space. I mean that means that these technologies are being designed by people that hate women, for the purposes of essentially making them breed so there are more consumers for them and in a very cynical and literal way.
Here misogyny is again linked to the aims of technofascism and serves a material function for their economy. Women are resources for the superior technical male. Of course, this goes beyond the gender axis and is part of a theory of humanity and race whose closest corollary is Nazi science. Indeed, much of the medical experimentation carried out by the Nazis, had to do with reproductive science and serving those goals of bringing about a generation of innately superior beings. Women are needed for this agenda, if no other; and thus you see venture capitalists like Peter Thiel funding this shit despite absolutely loathing women; it is not out of care or concern for women and their children, but rather that VC is now seeking to make the woman’s body a platform for technology innovation and a resource for the technofascist society.
“The Nazi regime encouraged the birth of children deemed “racially valuable” in order to increase Germany’s “Aryan” population. This campaign closely reflected the regime’s racial ideology and theories of eugenics.
The Lebensborn program was designed by the SS to increase Germany’s declining birthrate. It was originally intended to provide pregnant “Aryan” women with financial assistance, adoption services, and a series of private maternity homes where they could give birth.
By the end of World War II, Lebensborn became involved in the Nazi regime’s systematic kidnapping of thousands of “biologically valuable” foreign children to be raised in German homes…
The Lebensborn program was heavily influenced by Nazi racial ideology and theories of eugenics. It only accepted healthy applicants who could establish their “Aryan” ancestry. The SS screened individuals' personal medical histories as well as their family records. Applicants could be denied on the basis of their alleged racial “impurity” or health issues. They could also be denied if they had a family history of physical, mental, or psychiatric disabilities. Nazi theories of eugenics advanced the idea that personal character traits like loyalty and bravery were inheritable and could be promoted through the process of selective breeding. In this way, the SS hoped to stimulate the growth of a strong, “racially elite” German population to advance Nazi goals of conquering and colonizing the territories of Eastern Europe.”
This is getting a bit long but hopefully this serves as an introduction to misogyny in the emerging technofascist empire. One final point as to how to this ideology plays out: black women are in the very crosshairs of this ideology, and we must stop technofascists from harming them in particular, as well as other demographics that are implicated in multiple intersections of the technofascist politic.
Having had to deal with the misogyny in the field for over a decade, I will tell you that this view point goes very deep with these people, and that where we are now is an EVOLUTION of misogyny in tech, that this has come from decades of developing this ideology and this unique misogyny footprint and yes, strategy. This is a strategy.
Misogyny is not a static thing, as many people with college degrees like you to think; nor is it “unconscious” or “bias”. Rather it is a constantly moving, changing, evolving, adapting, material force, acting on every part of society; and acting on every part of the technology that is built, what is built, by who, and who is affected.
For the record, it was the misogyny in tech that led me to the fascism.