Having a large amount of my future determined by the whims of self interested billionaires is rough but like at least I can imagine them to be rational actors. Some of them just aren’t though. Peter Thiel has a perspective on the world so drastically removed from mine as to be nearly incomprehensible. I do not consider him to be rational and that is honestly far scarier than the bourgeois who knows exactly what they are doing and what their place is in society from a secular mechanical point of view. The idea that people like peter thiel can have that much power is intimidating. What an awful mistake it was to allow class struggle to progress to this point. If only we could have ended capitalism sooner
There’s the capitalists that get how the sausage gets made, and then there’s the ones that believe their own marketing. Thiel is in the latter, albeit an extreme example. The tech industry seems to breed them at a higher rate, due to the mythos the industry has built around itself where every minor improvement and flash in the pan it makes is elevated to the transcendental.
I think it’s more than just ideological, there’s a material reason why the tech industry has this tendency. Software in the 21st century is all about obscuring labor. Taking the worker and hiding them from view, creating the illusion of surplus and service conjured through a user interface. I suspect this role has kinda overtaken the more straightforward use of computers; machines for calculating, tracking, and transmitting information. Click a button, package on the porch. What happened in between the click and delivery? Don’t worry about that. There goes a self-driving car![1] Of course, when you know to look for it, it’s obvious all the human labor is still there. But these guys don’t think about that, don’t know to look for it. The mythology and the obfuscation make for a vicious cycle.
remotely supervised and course corrected ↩︎
Tech produces real products and fake speculation vessels simultaneously, because as much as financialized neoliberalism wants a world without workers, it’s not possible to worship fake numbers without a real computer to do the math.
Yeah there’s definitely a “pay no attention to the gig worker behind the curtain” element to it. However, I think it goes beyond that to anything that could impede capital; so much of the rhetoric of fintech boils down to “let us ignore financial regulations because we can’t fully unleash the awesome power of our innovation if we have to follow them.”