Radicalizing the Startup Worker in Fascism
When I worked in the tech industry, things were pretty bad already. I got to the Valley in early 2009, right before the web 2.0 bubble got really going. We were in a “winter” — aka, when venture capitalists sit on a bunch of cash they definitely have on hand while the rest of the valley starves, ensuring they can get startups for cheap and on more favorable terms.
I worked out of a lot of cheap and ugly offices at first. Then the money came back and the VCs started spending and money was everywhere. That part was fun NGL. Parties absolutely banging. Massages in the office. Lunch and dinner served. Venture capitalists keeping everyone surrounded with nice things. Lots of high quality branded hoodies and t-shirts, sweatpants if you were lucky. Closets filled with laptops you could just take.
But it was always an intense environment in lean or exuberant times. Work was your whole life. Those were your friends, whom you often spent 12 or more hours a day with, transitioning seamlessly from work to the in-office keg to the bars. One company I worked at, we had an actively alcoholic CEO, who got kicked out, followed by another actively alcoholic CEO, who also got pushed out, followed by a CEO who was a recovered alcoholic. He relapsed.
Some of the most radicalizing factors:
Nearly all-male environments, just absolutely toxic, encouraged to be as disgusting as possible, I lived through the age of the brogrammer, predecessor to the new Health Bro / Bryan Johnson dynamic.
Lots of young people in startups and they are more susceptible to all of this, very easy to manipulate and shape and control, brains still forming, first time to the rodeo
Culture of trolling both in-office and outside of it — trolling was explicitly a part of startup culture and reflected the reality than 4chan and 8chan were from computer programmers and largely manned by computer programmers leveraging technical attacks on political enemies.
Industry message board Hacker News (HN), started by YCombinator (Thiel, PG, Altman) and a constant source of insane right-wing talking points, attacks on women in tech, racism — particularly anti-black racism — all more or less anonymous. HN is our industry’s personal 4Chan, where conversations of technology and startups and news existed in an increasingly right-wing environment.
Drugs and alcohol culture: booze fuckin everywhere, conferences with all day and all night drinking, all free on company credit cards and sponsors, programmers taking Adderall and Nuvigil and cocaine, mainly uppers, sometimes ecstasy. Lots of weed. Some offices, backed by a16z, had weed bars and volcanos. It was the pre-ketamine days for sure but we did what we could.
Venture capital setting the industry culture; hustle culture, growth hacking, 10x engineer, setting up the conditions for 0 work/life balance, constant pressure and stress… it is often said that working at a startup is like being in a pressure cooker, and I can tell you that is true.
Now, I haven’t worked in the tech industry for many years — they hated my ass lmfao — but I monitor chatter in the startup world pretty closely and following exactly behind the radicalization of the venture capitalists, is the radicalization of the programmers. It is worse than ever, with a16z shoving fascist propaganda down everyone’s throats, startups like Yuga Labs and Praxis and all the Network State shit are explicitly fascist, kids in their early 20s are being pumped into shit like the Network State school, YCombinator churning out more psychos by the moment, there is a much bigger canon of tech fascist literature and propaganda, ranging from the Network State book, to Marc Andreessen’s many manifestos, a resurgence of interest in Curtis Yarvin, to all the tech fash podcasts, new ones all the time. All the startup brands are shot full of nationalism and violence.
There is a new militancy and a trend towards war mongering that accompanied the venture capitalist’s move into war startups during the last bubble, planting evil seeds which are breaking to the surface now; Coinbase sponsoring the fucking Trump military parade. VC weapons in Israel and at the border and in the cops. There are entire enclaves of defense startups where they live and breathe war, hundreds of startups where everyone in the company is thinking primarily of killing people.
Venture capitalists have more power than ever and this does indeed trickle down into all of their workers. A new and more intense sense of impunity, disregard for human life, sense of innate superiority, settles in. The Network State brings a new level of isolationism, being “apart from”, “better than”, racially superior.
Hundreds of thousands of people being sucked into this shit and groomed for it and stewing in it and surrounded by it. It’s deep in the technical universities too, MIT, CMU. Venture capitalists are dangerous but this is in part because of the current and future workers that they control. They are pushing the entire startup world straight into fascism with them.
We are contending with a much larger fascist threat than people think, because they think about just the tech billionaires, and not their legions of workers that are utterly beholden to them, and following right along with the fascism.
Startup workers leave a significant mark on the world. And they have their marching orders. In a world where war and policing is done with computers, startup workers are soldiers and cops, doing what they are told.