Some of the very worst of the worst liberal takes, apologia for fascist shit, and of course cryptobro grifts and even Tesla worship keep coming from there. It’s fucked.
I don’t want to say all programmers or tech workers are like that, but I don’t like what I’ve seen so far from people with a .programming suffix on their names.
All the leftist programmers found hexbear and lemmygrad first, all that’s left is the libertarian cryptobro lolicons
Nah pretty much all programmers are like this. Please somebody develop a COVID strain that only targets people who know what the fuck a leetcode is. I’ll gladly sacrifice myself if it means being able to rid the world of the disease that are people who call themselves a software engineer instead of a coder/programmer
Not furries though. Though honestly I mostly see those on the Hardware side, or at least pretty close to the cold iron.
I’m a programmer. I think this is mainly a problem of people who are only programmers and nothing else, to the point it becomes their entire persona. I’m more than just my job, I have interests and hobbies outside of it, but some people get sucked into thinking they are their job.
Definitely this. Most programmers I see slowly become supporters of Big Tech/GAFAM (Sometimes this is an “ideal” employer, though the conditions are horrible), besides promoting the “tech will solve all our problems! we just need more of it!” idea.
I know many programmers that (as myself) would never work for a bank or a GAFAM company because we know they are a cancer to society.
And we are getting more by my point of view.
The ugly truth is that IT has always been an industry that caters towards the worst of the bourgeoisie. Go back to the 1960s when mainframes took up an entire room. What businesses had the money to even house those mainframes or the business need to justify those mainframes? The answer is basically the military and financial institutions. Your average COBOL developer worked for the military or for some bank as a number cruncher. You might have some oddball developer who worked for NASA or who worked for the FBI in number-crunching surveilled citizens as part of counterinsurgency, but that’s it. The fact that modern IT people gets funneled towards working for Raytheon or Chase is just par for the course. Obviously, if your industry is catered towards the MIC or banks and pays those workers 6-digit salaries, the workers of that industry would be among the most reactionary.
When the Altair 8800 dropped, all it did was introduced computing to petty bourgeois hobbyists because no actual prole was walking around with an Altair 8800 in 1975. The petty bourgeoisization of tech is when you start seeing libertarian brainworms like how the information superhighway will liberate humanity somehow and various other technocratic bullshit. Even FOSS and piracy, the few good subcultures within tech, sprang out from a petty bourgeois milieu and thus inherited these petty bourgeois brainworms.
As an aside, this also explains why subcultures that spring forth from IT like gaming are also deeply reactionary. Why are nerds more prone to reaction compared to other marginalized subcultures like skaters or emos? It’s because nerds are attached to tech, which has a reactionary superstructure.
I’m still learning, could you please explain how the superstructure of tech is reactionary? Is it due to its proximity with things like weapons companies, tons of investment, intelligence agencies, and so on?
Yes, pretty much. A superstructure springs forth from a material base, and if your material base is constantly within close proximity to the center of capitalist power (financial institutions, MIC, counterinsurgency) due to those mainframes requiring plenty of capital to set up, then that will have a huge distorting effect. Along with this, the high salary of tech workers would naturally would dampen any revolutionary potential, and it shouldn’t be a surprise tech workers would have reactionary ideas. It’s only with the Altair 8800 that petty bourgeois hobbyists started to get into tech and the class character of tech turned from something completely upholding the bourgeois status quo into this half status quo/half libertarian hybrid. Raytheon engineer finding innovative ways to bomb brown children represents the old-school form of reaction while some cryptobro trying to scam you represents the newer form of reaction.
Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine goes into the history of the Internet, starting from its very beginning as a tool of surveillance against dissidents during the Vietnam War into contemporary times. He isn’t a Marxist, but he makes a very compelling case that the Internet and tech in general have always been close to the center of capitalist power. He also draws a connection between Fukuyama’s end of historyTM and the techbro’s obsession with technocracy. The 90s represented the end of history, in the sense of conscious human activity towards self-actualization, and the beginning of technocracy, in the sense of technological improvements that’s aimed towards some techno-utopia. Or in simpler terms, the techbro believes that the human problem of politics has been completely solved with neoliberalism and in this transcendence from history and politics, all future problems are simply apolitical technological ones that will inevitably be solved with an apolitical technological solution.
Seriously, go read the book. So many things about how techbros and Redditors think and act starts to make complete sense.
I have a great section from that book saved as an image, regarding the bipartisan privatization of the internet in America in the 1990s
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/be5c5f4b-b63f-4966-853c-c6f645705097.png
Yes. Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley provides a good overview, though he lays it on a bit think.
I imagine that a lot of geeks and nerds have seen society’s shift from mockery and disdain to embracing their culture. And are upset that the world is able to comfortably enjoy their stuff without paying their dues. Or at least, that’s the perception of it.
Most previously marginalized subcultures like punks get mad when their subculture becomes mainstream and commodified. The difference is that punks just call people poseurs while gamers become fascist gamergators.
Engineers are vastly over-represented among extremists
The researchers found that the over-representation of engineers held true in other contexts. Of the 40 jihadists who studied at universities abroad, 27 were engineers. In another data set, comprising 71 extremists who were born or grew up in Western countries, 32 were engineers.
The relationship extended beyond Islamist movements to other extremist groups. Violent neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists in Russia and neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups in the United States also showed disproportionate numbers of engineers.
The article lists some possible theories for why this is: distaste for ambiguity, certainty thinking, etc.
Here’s an earlier version of the paper
Here’s a later version of the paper
Turns out the ideal engineer who just builds shit no questions asked is also gonna do this for bad people, who’d’ve thunk
I think this probably vastly overcomplicates the issue. ‘extremists’ in this article seems to refer mostly to terrorists or terrorist group members/leaders.
Why would engineers be overrepresented in terrorists or terrorist groups? Because they have the engineering knowledge to make bombs, tell others make bombs, or to do infrastructural damage. It seems a fairly straight forward mechanism of causation.
Because they have the engineering knowledge to make bombs, tell others make bombs, or to do infrastructural damage. It seems a fairly straight forward mechanism of causation.
so is the assumption here ISIS or whatever is gonna turn down your application if you’re an accountant or something
Dear 7bicycles,
Thank you for your application to ISIS. We appreciate the time and effort you put into your application, but we regret to inform you that your application has been declined.
After careful consideration, we have decided that your background and experience as an accountant do not align with the specific requirements of ISIS at this time. We are looking for candidates with a strong engineering background, and as an accountant, you do not have the necessary qualifications for this position.
We understand that this news may be disappointing, but we hope that you will not be discouraged from pursuing your goals. We encourage you to continue to apply for other opportunities that may be a better fit for your skills and experience.
Thank you again for your interest in ISIS, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Bruja
ISIS Recruiting Team
That is not the assumption. You’re obviously less likely to be involved any crimes labelled as ‘extremist’ or ‘terrorist’ if your skills lie in accountancy.
The article provides a rebuttal to this:
Other engineers told the authors it wasn’t surprising that the members of their profession were so highly represented, given their problem-solving abilities and technical skills. Many jihadi groups are very selective about who joins their causes, and engineers would seem to make valuable recruits.
But Gambetta and Hertog puncture that explanation. Most of the engineers weren’t recruited into extremist movements; they joined on their own. The vast majority of the engineers involved in 228 plots acted as group founders or leaders; just 15% of them made the bombs.
As an engineer i’ve been thinking about this article , and this one about why engineers are caught between labour and capital . I think the distaste for ambiguity, the degree of certaintity is definately a thing. I can also say from personal experience that the length of the “effort to reward” loop on your discipline ( design of a successful bridge takes years, running the compiler to get no errors found takes minutes) tends to make people more reliant on people and more socialised the longer and larger in scope it is ; most importantly people are part of the solution and not part of the problem. Software guys always think its the client is the problem and Software work can turn into a professionalised mindset for those who rise to the top.
IME engineers are very individualistic people (may not apply to these examples of organizations) who are good at focusing on their range of practice and disregarding the wider consequences that come out of it. Usually comfortable enough not to ask any awkward big-picture questions, and often just apathetic about the big picture to boot.
After the revolution, all programmers will spend at least 1 year breaking rocks with hammers by hand.
Any attempt to “optimize the workflow” or “automate the task” will result in being assigned to bigger rocks with smaller hammers.
Good question, the answer is -
hands you a comically small plastic hammer
points at Mt Rushmore
