wedontagree

They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

– Charles Stross, Accelerando

One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back [to the world], not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts.

– David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Over 2024, we saw major tech investors and company owners overtly turn toward the right, overtly backing Donald Trump in his electoral campaign. This group of individuals, which commentators have taken to calling the “Tech Right”, are motivated by various concerns like the attempts by the Biden administration to regulate them and a general backlash against “wokeness”. Representative individuals and their respective justifications can be found in things like Marc Andreessen's essay The Techno-Optimist Manifesto or books like Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, and Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic.

Beyond helping Trump get elected, the most notable instance of activism by the Tech Right was the promotion of Elon Musk to the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which under the pretext of “increasing government efficiency” sought to take control of the core hardware and software and databases that run key parts of the United States government. While at the time of writing Musk is increasingly at odds with Donald Trump and DOGE seems to have failed, his attempt to seize or change the software that runs key parts of the government is a novel political strategy that, while presaged in cyberpunk novels and techno-thrillers, has never been tried in real life before.

What Musk tried to do with DOGE was not simply backdoor privatization. Rather, he was trying to directly exert control over the mechanisms that underpin the United States government. The “truth” that the mechanisms of a state use to enact decisions does not exist in some Platonic realm outside the grasp of regular people. The information must be physically instantiated. In the old days the medium was paper documents that required bureaucrats to create, interpret, and maintain. Now it exists on databases and is processed by computers.

This means that if small groups of people get access to those systems, they can potentially change things in ways that can have life or death consequences. Flip a couple of flags in some database somewhere, and your status in the eyes of the state completely changes. Write some code and you can redirect the budget of the most well-resourced entity on the planet.

At the same time, I don’t want to oversell the danger here. The systems we’re talking about are incredibly complicated and clearly, mere write-access to the mainframe was clearly not enough for DOGE to succeed. Moreover, the broader legal and social context matters, DOGE was blunted both by the courts and by public outcry, widespread organizing, and internal foot dragging by government employees. It may be worth fighting for reforms that make such attempts harder in the future.

Despite these qualifiers, what Musk did is a novel attack vector for anyone who wants to usurp control of a government and so deserves attention. The common-sense leftist assumption about how reactionaries seize power is that they have to engage in mass politics to seize or meaningfully influence and so the opinions of a small minority are irrelevant. But, as security experts like Bruce Schneier have pointed out, as these systems become increasingly automated, those who have access can wield entirely new forms of power.

It’s the usurpation of existing states or the construction of novel para-states / states via novel technical capabilities that give a small number of people far more direct control over the coercive capacity of a state that is my primary concern with regards to the Tech Right. While there’s a plethora of other bad shit that these people, at the end of the day their desires require the existence of hierarchies enforced through violence and so they have an interest in securing state power for themselves.

But I am not here to simply prognosticate on yet another way that we are fucked. One important thing to emphasize about the Tech Right is that it is not representative of the tech industry as a whole and currently represents a tiny minority.

First of all, you have other tech capitalists like Paul Graham who are critical of Trump and were willing to endorse Kamala Harris (while still being critical of “wokeness”). When evaluating the danger the Tech Right poses, it’s essential that we do not take tech capitalists as an ideological monolith. This is because leveraging splits within their broader coalition may well be key to blunting or even stopping them.

But even more important than noting dissent within the ranks is the simple fact that the technical workers who are key to building the technology and infrastructure that tech capitalists rely on to generate income and would be necessary for them to seize and wield power are largely opposed to the ideology of Tech Right.

See, for example, candidate donations in the 2024 federal election in the United States. Employees at Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon all donated to Harris over Trump by ratios of 10-1, a distribution reflected in the software industry as a whole. We find similar distributions within the Democratic primary in 2020, where tech workers gave to progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Or how the push for diversity and inclusion in the 2010s within the tech industry was driven not by top-down cynical rainbow capitalism from the C-suite, but instead as a consequence of bottom-up pressure by professionals within the industry who were persuaded that discrimination was happening by their colleagues. As database engineer Charity Majors wrote.

Corporate DEI programs as we know them sprung up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but I haven’t exactly noticed the world getting substantially more diverse or inclusive since then.

Which is not to say that tech culture has not gotten more diverse or inclusive over the longer arc of my career; it absolutely, definitely has. I began working in tech when I was just a teenager, over 20 years ago, and it is actually hard to convey just how much the world has changed since then.

And not because of corporate DEI policies. So why? Great question.

I think social media explains a lot about why awareness suddenly exploded in the 2010s. People who might never have intentionally clicked a link about racism or sexism were nevertheless exposed to a lot of compelling stories and arguments, via retweets and stuff ending up in their feed. I know this, because I was one of them.

The 2010s were a ferment of commentary and consciousness-raising in tech. A lot of brave people started speaking up and sharing their experiences with harassment, abuse, employer retaliation, unfair wage practices, blatant discrimination, racism, predators.. you name it. People were comparing notes with each other and realizing how common some of these experiences were, and developing new vocabulary to identify them — “missing stair”, “sandpaper feminism”, etc.

If you were in tech and you were paying attention at all, it got harder and harder to turn a blind eye. People got educated despite themselves, and in the end…many, many hearts and minds were changed.

Now doing the work to push diversity initiatives in the workplace, giving money to Bernie Sanders because you want healthcare reform or supporting Elizabeth Warren because she promises to engage in antitrust are all aspirations that capitalism can absorb – indeed there’s a pretty straightforward case to be made that capitalism might work better if such reforms occurred.

But even this dissent is notable because it represents a disenchantment with the tech industry by those who work on it. While it’s easy to sneer at such idealism in 2025, a big reason why many initially joined the industry in the first place was because they sincerely believed in the vision that the companies presented to the world that they were about making the world a better place. As historian Fred Turner describes it when interviewed in 2017.

I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world. Whether their practice matches their beliefs, I don’t know.

About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa. And that is a challenging space to live in.

I think the impulse to save the world is quite sincere. But people get the impulse to save the world and the impulse to do well for the company a bit tangled up with each other.

But as the luster of these companies has faded, the idealistic beliefs that once drove people to work for these companies have transformed into those same workers organizing against those companies they once saw as vehicles for social transformation. As Tan et al write in their paper Unlikely Organizers: The Rise of Labor Activism Among Professionals in the U.S. Technology Industry, the most common form of labor activism we’ve seen among tech workers is what they call “social activism” that is aimed not at improving labor conditions but rather pushing back against harms caused by the company they work for.

Tech workers possess a distinctive professional identity centered on using technology for societal benefit. However, when employers undermine these idealistic values by engaging with perceived bad actors, such as oil companies or militaries, they violate tech workers' belief in contributing to the social good. In response, tech workers, guided by their unique professional identity in preserving the social good, engage in social activism in the workplace.

More traditional forms of class struggle that center the identity of tech workers as workers tend to follow in the wake of social activism because that’s what makes clear the fundamental conflict between workers and owners/managers.

Participation in such activism generates solidarity among employee-participants. It also creates conflict with management, who sees such protest strategies as tarnishing the company’s brand image. In this way, social activism exposes the previously hidden divide between workers and management, masked by the industry's techno-utopianism. Consequently, employees come to understand their own identities not just as professionals but as workers, creating the basis for labor activism.

And it was this class conflict, which emerged out of moral concerns, as well as the election of progressive politicians in cities like San Francisco, that helped precipitate the emergence of the Tech Right. As recent leaked messages from Signal group chats made up of tech elites show, they first started becoming politicized around 2020.

To the degree these chats strayed into politics, two participants said, they rarely mentioned Donald Trump. They revolved around the specific political challenges of Silicon Valley’s leaders: In the chats, executives commiserated about how to handle employee demands that they, for instance, declare that “Black Lives Matter” or support policies they didn’t actually believe in around transgender rights. And they strategized about how to defeat San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin.

And if you listen to the thoughts of the Tech Right on politics today, they frequently touch on tech worker organizing and activism as a motivator. Take Marc Andreessen ranting to Ross Douthat at the New York Times about how elite university students all became Marxists and are infiltrating his companies.

The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies. …

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Or how Alexander Karp’s calls for the tech industry to embrace the US military were motivated by Google workers successfully protesting the company’s ties with the Pentagon. As leftist Michael Eby writes in his review of Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic.

Karp asserts that the tech industry has a moral duty to work with the US government, “an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.” He frames Silicon Valley’s abdication of this duty as nothing short of a national betrayal: “We must rise up and rage against this misdirection of our culture and capital,” he writes. The casus belli for his moral crusade was Google’s decision to withdraw from Project Maven—a Pentagon AI weapons-building initiative—after employee protests led to the company canceling the contract. With scorn, Karp presents this event as evidence of the industry’s borderline-treasonous betrayal of the imperatives of national security and welfare. These Google protesters’ delusions of a “world without trade-offs, ideological or economic,” becomes, in Karp’s view, the ultimate First World privilege—enabling them to enjoy the benefits of American hegemony while refusing to actively advance it.

Now, yes, to anyone remotely familiar with the history of working class conflict in America, this will seem like a massive overreaction. But despite that, there is still a degree of class conflict and that is part of what turned them reactionary. This cannot be emphasized enough, given how every other week we get capital-d Discourse on social media about how the tech industry is dominated by undifferentiated “tech bros” who all share some vague libertarian sensibilities to justify their egoism and narcissism. While this stereotype isn’t entirely unfounded, to write off the workforce of an entire industry with it is to engage in a dangerous oversimplification, particularly when it comes from those who want to change said industry.

The failure to grasp that there’s more going on here goes beyond just those in tech with leftist, progressive or even liberal politics constantly again having to explain to the ignorant that, no, they aren’t all techbros and that they and the people they know also have disdain for various prominent tech CEOs or investors (indeed they are probably more frustrated by their bullshit given their proximity and their degree of knowledge). While that’s annoying, such errors are, I think, downstream of a deeper problem, namely that when it comes to popular visions of a different world that could be brought about, the tech industry is still seemingly the only entity with a serious vision of the future different to our present that could actually be enacted. Sure those visions are mostly bad and frequently fail to live up to the hype, but it’s at least something different to what currently exists.

Such an inability to present an alternative vision even shows up in leftist tech workers who’ve been involved in activism that helped precipitate the Tech Right. Take for example ex-Google employee Wendy Liu who despite writing a book straightforwardly titled Abolish Silicon Valley: How To Liberate Technology From Capitalism doesn’t know where to begin when it comes to fighting tech capitalism. As she admitted in an interview.

I find it hard to envision how things could actually change. All I can really do at this point is to educate myself and keep an eye out for potential points of leverage.

Such paralysis is why I don’t think it’s a matter of tweaking good old-fashioned anti-capitalist theory (Marxism) for our present so we can get on with Organizing! There’s a decidedly retro nature too much of the discourse around tech organizing from the left.

That people default to such assumptions is the consequence of a contingent intellectual history that is worth examining in detail.

A BRIEF ACCOUNTING OF THE THEORETICAL DEBT OF THE LEFT WITH REGARDS TO INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Probably the most popular works of critique of the ideas that underlie not just the Tech Right, but also tech capitalism more broadly is the essay The Californian Ideology. Written in the mid 90s by media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, it was a take-down of the vague libertarian ideology that had emerged in Silicon Valley and was becoming a political force. Its primary voice was Wired magazine, its political champion was the Republican Newt Gingrich and its public intellectuals were futurists like Alvin Toffler.

This ideology, which I am going to call “techno-optimist capitalism” – so as to differentiate between The Californian Ideology the essay and “The Californian Ideology” the ideology – was a seemingly contradictory mix of “the social liberalism of New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right”, that tapped into counterculturalist aspirations for self-expression and fulfillment that had once been directed toward social transformation and channeled them instead into narrow self-satisfaction at well-paid media and information technology jobs and the technology produced by these jobs would be what resulted in the social transformation of American society that radical activism in the 60s failed to do.

Despite all that’s changed since it was written, the basic dynamics described in the essay clearly persist. Every new tech hype cycle that comes around which promises to change everything, provided we let rich and powerful people accrue more wealth and power, it will frequently employ rhetoric of beneficial social transformation and the expansion of opportunities.

Yet the fact that The Californian Ideology has retained its popularity is also indicative of the fact that it was alone not enough. As Richard Barbrook himself admitted in a retrospective interview he did a few years ago.

I think we wrote a brilliant critique of ideology. We should have completely blown [techno-optimist capitalism] out the water, but it of course just carried on. … material reality is more important if it offers to triple your wages. Co-option is easy. … Critique is important. I’m not dissing it. We should do it. But we shouldn’t have any illusions that it will make any difference without our words being turned into action.

I agree with the sentiment that ideas are important insofar as they help people take action. A heuristic I increasingly use with regards to leftist theory and discourse is to evaluate it from the perspective of how it serves the end of strategy and tactics. Does this information help me or anyone else make better decisions going forward with regards to fighting capitalism or other forms of oppression?

Seen in that light, The Californian Ideology was largely a failure. While it does try to make the case that the people driving the transformation – a group Barbrook and Cameron call “digital artisans” should aspire to more than just a narrow life of consumerism and individually fulfilling work that maintains the status quo, but the authors don’t have much of an idea for what they can do to achieve that end. They call for them to exert “rational and conscious control over the shape of the digital future”, but don’t put forward any broad plan for how that might come about.

This basic failure of positive strategy is symptomatic of a failure by the broader left to actually engage with the people who were key to building and developing information technology.

A case in point, Barbrock and Cameron attempt to assert that the people initially interested in the potential of information technology were aligned with the counterculture. But as Jeffery Kaplan, a demonstrator at the People’s Park in 1969 turned Bay Area computer consultant, wrote in response to the authors.

Your attempt to link the development of the PC to the counter-culture is equally flawed. Yes, there undoubtedly were some freaks in the Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley who believed that computers would liberate us from the grip of corporate greed. No doubt some of them made important contributions to the development of computers. But the home-brew computer clubs were almost entirely centered well to the south of San Francisco, in the Peninsula which includes Palo Alto and what is now Silicon Valley. The area was home to a number of important high-tech defense contractors as well as Stanford University, a very elite and very expensive private university. As a result, there were a lot of engineers in the Valley even then, and a lot of money.

Similarly, as Stephen Levy’s classic book on the subject, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, details, many of the original hackers, despite being having superficial anti-authoritarian leanings as seen in their rebellious attitude toward university administration and collectivist approach to software production, were actually not interested in radical social transformation. They knew the early computers they were using came from government funding and most did not engage in anti-war activism. Politically engaged hackers like Richard Greenblatt and Lee Felsenstein who did protest the war were a minority.

And, as hackers got older, they were largely interested in solving technical problems and extending the possibilities of computers, while also getting rich. They were not all that interested in subverting American capitalism or bringing about radical democracy.

Moreover individuals who recognized the centrality of intellectual property as a form of enclosure and control and took action against it like the (deeply problematic) Richard Stallman were politically incoherent. As he remarked when asked what the politics of free software were in an interview.

Free software combines capitalist, socialist and anarchist ideas. The capitalist part is: free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell. The socialist part is: we develop this knowledge, which becomes available to everyone and improves life for everyone. And the anarchist part: you can do what you like with it. I’m not an anarchist—we need a state so we can have a welfare state. I’m not a ‘libertarian’ in the usual American sense, and I call them rather ‘antisocialists’ because their main goal is a laissez-faire, laissez-mourir economy. People like me are the true libertarians. I supported Bernie Sanders for President—Clinton was too right-wing for me—and the Green Party.

The other major error Barbrook and Cameron make is that in focusing on how those interested in information technology shifted toward the right between the 1960s and the 1990s, they ignore just how far the left also fell in that time period. And I’m not just talking about the Democratic Party becoming neoliberal. In the United States, the explosion of radicalism in the 60s had in the United States turned into the New Communist Movement, which dogmatically stuck to Leninism and Maoism, which petered out toward the end of the 1970s. The election of Reagan and then the events of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre resulted in a mass crisis of confidence on the left and saw Marxists retreat into the academy.

Many die-hard communists just gave up on their aspirations. Yes, part of this was state repression, but just as important was the fact that they didn’t feel like the movements they belonged to were going anywhere, that their organizing was ineffective and because the beacons of actually-existing socialism that they held up as exemplars were discredited.

The humiliation of Marxism played a role in how things turned out. But I would also stress the fact that radicals looking for an alternative also failed to make connections with those involved with developing information technology.

Take a writer like Murray Bookchin who, despite arguing in “Toward a Liberatory Technology” in the 60s about the potential for relieving humanity of drudgery through computerized automation failed to make connections with or even engage with the ideas of figures like,

• The polymath Norbert Wiener, who coined the term “cybernetics” and had a lifelong interest in organized labor; he wrote a sympathetic article for labor conditions for the Boston Herald in the 1920s. After the war he swore off doing work with the United States military and built a friendship with United Auto Workers labor leader Walter Reuther. The two hoped to build a partnership between labor and scientists and engineers to help ease the transition to automated industry. Unfortunately Wiener’s heavy travel schedule plus heart problems exacerbated by lifelong depressive tendencies and a smoking habit meant he died in 1964.

• The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, most famous for being the creator of the ELIZA chatbot, was radicalized by the Vietnam War, joined student protestors and helped the students who occupied the president’s office at MIT graduate by dragging out the disciplinary process. He expressed his concerns about the ends computers were being utilized toward in his book Computer Power and Human Reason published in 1976, but he doesn’t have much to say about how to prevent bad outcomes beyond giving computer scientists a more well-rounded education that would help them make better choices.

• The cybernetician Stafford Beer, most known for his work in the Cybersyn project in Chile, gave the Designing Freedom lecture series in 1973 in which he articulated a radical critique of the limits of hierarchy in an increasingly dynamic world and the need for transformation. However he did not take an antagonistic orientation toward existing institutions and instead called on them to sponsor alternatives despite simultaneously calling for a social revolution. Indeed after his experience with Chile he increasingly became disconnected from the world, retreating to a remote cottage in Wales that he lived in until his death.

• The engineer and hacker Lee Felsenstein who was key to building and maintaining a phone-based communication that helped enable the Berkeley free speech movement. He also played a key role in the Community Memory Project, a series of computer terminals throughout the Bay Area with simple read-write-search functionality that were arguably the first instance of social media / internet forums. Finally he was the moderator for The Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hardware hackers that helped build the first personal computers. Felsenstein explicitly wanted to build computers that would combine the “Ivan Illich, Bucky Fuller, Karl Marx, and Robert Heinlein” and was explicit about such development being an instance of “Propaganda of the Deed.”

The failure of Bookchin (and others looking for an alternative to the dominant strains of Marxism at the time) to make such relationships is frustrating given that the 1970s Bookchin was hosting conferences and running workshops on the possibilities of decentralization that included not just radicals and environmentalists, but also engineers working on renewable energy and sustainable technology more probably. And we know that in these spaces there were those in contact with radicals in information technology – Weizenbaum’s book has a blurb by the libertarian activist Karl Hess who was friends with Bookchin at the time and was also involved in similar educational efforts.

That social theorists who wanted an alternative to the dominant strands of Marxism at the time failed to make connections between those deeply involved with novel technologies who were sympathetic to the left is, I assert, one of the greatest failings of radicals during the Cold War. In no small part because the ideas of techno-optimist capitalism did not just spring into being ex nihilo and were not guaranteed the hegemony they have enjoyed over the last three decades. Such ideas emerged from people deliberately making connections between disparate and building institutions to help encourage the development and spread and were able to gain so much ground because nobody put forward a serious alternative.

A key figure in that process – although by no means the only one – was the countercultural writer, editor and entrepreneur Stewart Brand whose most famous work was the countercultural bible The Whole Earth Catalog. He was one of the first journalists to cover hackers for a mainstream audience way back in 1972 and helped organize critical institutions that directed technologists and hackers, like the first hacker conference in 1984 or the first online forum, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link in 1985.

Brand also enabled scientists and intellectuals more broadly to cross disciplinary boundaries and work with business in dynamic, interdisciplinary ways. He was a founding member of the Global Business Network in 1987 which engaged in a novel approach to business planning and saw CEOs wherein high level managers would work alongside artists and scientists imagining radically different futures. He was an early board member of the Santa Fe Institute, a corporate funded think tank that pioneered complex systems science that brought people from different academic disciplines like physics, computer science, biology and economics to try and find deeper commonalities between the respective disciplines.

Moreover these ideas and practices spread because they either described the world and/or helped people act in it. For example, while there have been criticisms of complex systems research that was pioneered by the Santa Fe institute, it is not pseudoscience. Despite being overhyped in the 1990s, the basic premises of self-organizing systems have since become part of mainstream science. Similarly, the Global Business Network, whose founders came out of the internal Shell Group Planning could seriously claim that they helped Shell to successfully navigate the 1970s oil shock, which allowed Shell to overtake their main competitor, Exxon by predicting dramatic shocks in the price of oil and also the decline in consumption that occurred in the 1980s. Approaches which assume the possibility of radical discontinuity have since become common sense to how many approach business today.

There was a depth to techno-optimist capitalism that couldn’t just be dismissed as mere apologetics or ideological cover for capitalism. I emphasize this because when we talk about the ideas that capitalists believe, it’s easy for leftists to dismiss the ideas that rise and fall among capitalists as just blather or ideological cover for exploitation. And, sure, ideas in business magazines and books are shallow and frequently bullshit. But it’s not pure ideology, while capitalists and managers are constrained in what they can do they still have a degree of agency and so the ideas that they believe can be of consequence.

(This is why the Tech Right concerns me, stupid as it is.)

After all, techno-optimist capitalism was not just opposed to the left, but also other variants of capitalism. That it won out was partially due to the fact that the ideas in this space could help you think in novel ways which in turn allowed people to act in novel ways.

Take this passage from the manifesto that opened the first issue of Wired back in 1993 from editor-in-chief of Wired Louis Rossetto.

There are a lot of magazines about technology. Wired is not one of them. Wired is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.

Like any line from a manifesto from a movement that ended up being successful, there is equal parts hyperbole and truth to this assertion. Sure there was plenty of unsubstantiated hype in tech even back then. But if you were to go back to the 90s and wanted to give an ambitious young person something to specialize in if they wanted to influence the world in the coming decades, you’d be hard pressed to pick something other than computers and software. And if you were interested in computers you were probably paying attention to or involved in the nexus of ideas that Wired was at the center of, regardless of whether you read the magazine.

And again I cannot stress enough that radicals and even progressive liberals at the time had no real alternative to techno-optimist capitalism. As media theorist Mark Dery wrote in response to Barbrook and Cameron.

I take Barbrook's valuable, dead-on point that the American Left, whatever it calls itself, hasn't articulated any grandiose, utopian alternative to Wired's fever-dream vision of better living through Darwinian cybercapitalism. … But I suspect many on the postmodern Left feel, as I do, that command-and-control utopias, founded on technocratic rationalism and imposed from on high, are an artifact of a receding Modernism. For that reason, we're hard put to cobble together grand, political unified field theories of any sort–which isn't to say that we aren't passionately committed to political engagement on an issue-by-issue basis, outside and even within the current, deeply flawed system.

So yes, techno-optimist capitalism became dominant in part because it had the backing of powerful entities. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that this was the only factor in its rise. When it comes to the generation of ideas you quickly hit diminishing returns when someone has their basic needs met, can access research material and has time to think and communicate with others. Certainly spreading ideas is another thing entirely. But better insights do have a way of winning out over time, at least among people who care.

I feel particularly confident in that last assertion because we have seen former boosters of techno-optimist capitalism concede that it is flawed. In 2015 Wired republished a 20 year retrospective of the essay that conceded “the Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the corporate take-over of the Net and the exposure of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes. Following such concessions, you’ve seen ideological evolution. Stewart Brand, for example, now identifies as a “post-libertarian” and the Santa Fe Institute is doing multidisciplinary research into the dynamics of inequality. Meanwhile Wired has engaged in a degree of self-criticism, running essays critically examining popular techno-optimist articles of the 90s, publishing articles critical of the tech industry and has also done some of the best reporting on the DOGE takeover.

But again, the response is largely a negative one. People know in great detail as to what they’re against, but when it comes to specific things we might be able to do about it, they aren’t really sure. To me this was best demonstrated in a recent interview Wired did with the leftist economist Yanis Varoufakis on his theory that the dominance of the tech giants means we are now moving beyond capitalism and are in a new era of “Technofeudalism.” In terms of detailing what is changing in the economy, he’s more or less accurate. But in terms of what we might do about it, he’s no real idea outside of enacting state policy. And of course given the political weight of the tech giants it’s unlikely that such policy is going to pass unless something radically changes.

When pressed on what can be done beyond government policy, Varoufakis responds.

That's a very good question. I have no idea. But this is why—against my spirit, against my preferences and my desires—I'm still in politics, because there is no alternative to politics.

Again, the basic problem is a lack of strategy on the left.

SO WHERE ARE WE EXACTLY?

One of the few prominent leftist intellectuals who’s actually interested in trying to understand not just how capitalism is changing, but also what the people who are driving the transformation do and think is the critical theorist McKenzie Wark. Wark has argued for decades that the advent of information technology means that we’re seeing the rise of a new “mode of production” and with that entirely new dimensions of class struggle.

In her recent book on the subject, Capital Is Dead she argues that the nature of economic exploitation has changed with the rise of information technology such that we are beyond capitalism and, as the tagline puts it, have arrived at “something worse”. The growth of an information technology dominated technology has resulted in rise of the “vectoralist” class and the shift away from capitalism to “vectoralism”, which is defined as a mode of production dominated not by people who own not the means of production but instead the means of computation and communication. Counterposed to the vectoralists is the “hacker class”, those who produce intellectual property that the vectoralist infrastructure regulates, controls and utilizes. The vectoralists profit not through extracting surplus value, but instead through leveraging asymmetries in information derived from their control over infrastructure.

I think Wark’s overall analysis of how things have changed is broadly correct. But I take issue with certain specifics.

The first is that I don’t think that an increasing share of profits derived from control of information and communication makes a break with “capitalism”. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda, drawing on the historian Fernand Braudel, was talking about how companies like Microsoft were “anti-market” entities that manipulated markets so as to secure their dominance back in the 90s. And you can go back further to Braudel himself, who argued that early capitalists emerged thanks to information asymmetries in terms of hoarding connections that gave them a monopoly on long-distance trade.

Given this, I assert that we are not seeing the rise of a “new mode of production” with the tech giants, but instead the intensification of aspects of particular aspects of capitalism to do with information that has been enabled both by developments in information technology and developments in mathematics and the sciences which allows people to think more rigorously about such matters. These qualitative shifts are giving rise to new forms of class conflict, but I still think we’re in capitalism.

(That said, I still like “vectoralist” as a broad term, far more than “technofeudalist” and will be using it in this essay to describe the subset of capitalist arrangements that have emerged with information technology.)

The other major conceptual disagreement I have with Wark's is her broad definition of the “hacker class” hurts her ability to get specific about the forms of action distinct parts of the class can take. For example, in one of the few paragraphs in Capital Is Dead that actually engages with specific action that members of the “hacker class” have taken, she brings up unionization efforts and walkouts that have taken place in different industries.

Sanctioned desire is neatly summed up in the image and slogan of a cellphone company: “Boss Revolution.” The image is of a raised fist, with a cellphone in it, in red. The only desire permissible is to become a boss, like Don Draper.

This has not stopped some interesting and promising signs of hacker self-organization in technical and creative industries, from the unionization of creatives at Vice Media to the Google walkout to refusal to work on border control or military projects across the tech industry.

Certainly there’s value in showing people in vastly different contexts from each other that they share a common interest in the oppression they face. But we should not lose sight of the vast differences of what the specific context means they can do about it. A programmer and a journalist may ultimately be exploited for profit in ways that can be traced back to intellectual property, but they differ wildly in terms of how they take action. Those with technical and scientific knowledge and skills have a key role to play in the present form of capitalism and as such have a key role to play in fighting it.

(This is why throughout this essay I will be using “hacker” in the original sense: a person with technical skill who achieves goals through unconventional means, rather than Wark’s definition which is anyone who produces intellectual property.)

By way of analogy, take a sector of the working class from the late 19th and early 20th century like coal miners. They were critical for broader working class movements because coal was a critical commodity that if the supply disrupted would affect the entire economy because it was an input for so many processes. Their capacity to do so was further enabled by the specific working conditions and broader culture they existed within. Miners were skilled and difficult to supervise which made them resilient to both managerial discipline and the threat of scabs. They also lived in remote communities that had built tight-knit cultures of solidarity and mutual aid out of necessity which made collective action much easier.

Any broader movement which could get them on side then had a significant force multiplier. And while that was not enough to win in every confrontation they engaged in, it was enough to result in many significant victories. Two notable examples would be: a miners strike for better wages in the Ruhr in 1889 forced the new Kaiser Wilhelm II to back away from conservative policies and to embrace labor reforms and the 1902 Belgium general strike was led by miners and resulted in the adoption of universal male suffrage.

While the leverage that miners have has declined thanks to technological developments, the increasing integration of unions into the capitalist order (if not their outright defeat) and the utilization of other energy sources, novel forms of resistance have emerged that are as unimaginable to those living just a few decades ago as the workers movement would have been to those living in the 18th century.

To understand these new possibilities, I need to briefly go over how tech capitalism works at a high level.

The companies that operate according to a vectoralist logic tend to be funded by venture capital, forms of investment which invest in multiple companies with the intention of finding one that will be incredibly successful. And while there are instances of venture capital enabling genuine innovation in the past, it has increasingly turned toward trying to monopolize parts of the economy.

Ironically, this drive toward monopoly is a consequence of it becoming easier to make new companies and thus increasing competition. As a paper by Martin Kenney and Josh Zyzsman described the technological shifts.

Increased speed, and ease of market entry due to availability of open source software, digital platforms, and cloud computing. This facilitated a proliferation of startups seeking to disrupt incumbent firms in a wide variety of business sectors. The contemporaneous growth in the number and size of private funding sources has resulted in a situation within which new firms can afford to run massive losses for long periods in an effort to dislodge incumbents or attempt to triumph over other lavishly funded startups. This has triggered remarkable turmoil in many formerly stable industrial sectors, as the new entrants fueled by capital investments undercut incumbents on price and service. The ultimate result is that new entrants with access to massive amounts of capital can survive losses for a sufficiently long period to displace existing firms and, thereby, transform earlier industrial ecosystems.

This drive to monopoly is why the fact that these platforms actually do empower users, their drive for outsized return results in them constraining such agency. They must also find ways to extract more and more revenue from users, be that by selling more ads or gathering more data or locking more features behind paywalls. As the user experience gets increasingly worse, they must also make it harder for users to use alternative technologies. This is a process that tech activist Cory Doctorow calls “platform decay” (I term I much prefer over “enshittification”).

Such constraints are not a consequence of how tools must be built, but are instead the result of deliberate choices made by these entities that are backed up by the force of the state.

The reason someone can’t make a service that gets my friends' Facebook posts without the advertisements, the spam and unwanted posts isn’t because it’s an unsolvable problem in computer science. Rather it’s because it’s illegal and anyone who tries to do it faces lawsuits. But if it was legal to do so – or if Facebook could no longer identify people who build bridging software – it would be possible to circumvent much of the bullshit of Facebook.

However it isn’t just that tech capitalists tend toward crappy products once they get a captive market. It’s also that software development comes with significant diseconomies of scale because of the complexity of organizing people and as such there are reasons to think as these entities increase in size they tend to be less efficient at allocating resources and directing employees. The computer scientist Fred Brooks summed up the problems in his classic paper No Silver Bullet.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. …

Many of the classical problems of developing software products derive from this essential complexity and its non-linear increases with size. From the complexity comes the difficulty of communication among team members, which leads to product flaws, cost overruns, schedule delays. From the complexity comes the difficulty of enumerating, much less understanding, all the possible states of the program, and from that comes the unreliability. From the complexity of the functions comes the difficulty of invoking those functions, which makes programs hard to use. From complexity of structure comes the difficulty of extending programs to new functions without creating side effects. From complexity of structure come the unvisualized states that constitute security trapdoors.

This inherent complexity is why good programming is a craft in the sense that it requires individuals to not just develop formal skills but tacit knowledge about how to proceed in development given specific circumstances that requires a significant time investment to learn via practice. It’s this autonomy that has given skilled developers a degree of freedom at work that has come without programmers ever needing to unionize at scale or form professional associations that other professionals like lawyers and doctors simply through market demand for talent.

The possibility of just choosing to work on something for yourself and the intrinsic motivation as well as the freedom to go at your own pace and meet the standards of the craft that you have chosen. Today this occurs most often outside the confines of capitalist workplaces. As programmer Simone Robutti notes in an interview.

Sometimes we frame the tech industry as a super-efficient machine that extracts, exploits and so on. But most software is bad. It’s an extremely inefficient industry where the wheel is reinvented everywhere all the time – for different structural reasons that I won’t analyze here. The average tech worker is frustrated with the state of technology, he knows it could be better. They work on open-source projects or on personal projects where the level of quality is much higher. Workers also want this to be their daily experience at work. This cannot happen because you have to deliver in a rush to make more money. We have opposing incentives here. This is not material; this is the emotional connection you have to the quality of what you craft.

The benefits of intrinsic motivation were what partially allowed techno-optimist capitalists to win out over more conservative variants. One of the reasons that Silicon Valley became a tech hub over other locations in America like Route 128 region in Maschuttessus that was more conservative in its approach was that California labor law did not enforce non-compete clauses in contracts and as such there was far more mobility between firms and far more knowledge spillover, as legal theorist Ronald Gibson argues.

The success of such autonomous approaches is reflected in the prevalence of the utilization of open source software throughout the economy. Certainly open source software is to a large extent captured by vectoralists and its benefits do not accrue to end-users. However the fact that they have to rely on a degree of self-directed labor is clear evidence that non-capitalist forms of organizing can be superior in specific circumstances.

Hence the tendency toward monopoly that we see in the tech industry is not some natural outcome of the superiority of economies of scale or network effects. Rather it is a consequence of state intervention that encourages particular arrangements. This is why, despite the anti-statist rhetoric of many who make up the Tech Right, they are fundamentally tied to the state form in some way (be that the United States government or something else entirely). Without the option to corral access information through coercive violence backed by something like a state, the empires they built would erode via user freedom.

Given all this, I posit that the crux of the conflict today is, contra Karl Marx, not over wage relations. Rather it’s a conflict over what technology is developed and how it is deployed (conflicts over wage relations are merely a subset of this broader struggle). And while anyone who wants can play a part, those with technical skills and scientific knowledge have a key role to play.

ON THE STRATEGIC POSSIBILITIES FOR OUR PRESENT

One immediate problem with trying to talk about a movement that seeks to leverage the possibilities of technology is that the space of potential action before us is far, far wider than the set of tactics prescribed by canonical leftist thinkers. Any rigorous definition of “technology” will resemble something like “ways one might act in the world.” As such it includes a vast array of potential action.

This basic fact is in direct contrast to traditional leftist approaches to organizing which largely emphasize the importance of growing a movement and getting people to act in ways that are legible to the center of that movement, whether that be getting people to participate in a coordinated strike or to vote for a socialist politician. As such they fundamentally entail the curtailment of what people do “at the edge” so as to ensure a degree of overall coherence from the center.

Despite this the sheer scale of things that people could do, it is still possible to demarcate between broad approaches to categorize politically consequential action that people might take. To this end I like the following conceptual scheme which breaks forms of action into four broad categories that I break down on the following axes – whether or not the action occurs within a capitalist institution and what the action seeks to achieve.

One can act inside institutions like the state or corporations or outside those institutions. Such action can aim to be to be destructive in that it undermines property claims or destroys mechanisms of control or it can be constructive in that it builds technology or capabilities that helps people fight oppression or go live beyond capitalism.

	Inside	Outside
Destructive	Shaping internal policy in firms, stopping or sandbagging projects	Breaking infrastructure, freeing intellectual property
Constructive	Working on subversive projects funded by the state or capital	Building and maintaining technology that subverts capital

If that all sounds too abstract, let me give you some specific examples.

I want to start by returning to tech worker organizing. As I mentioned earlier, a primary driver of tech worker activism is not working conditions but instead broader social concern. While to some workerist leftists that will sound like a distraction, I think it’s clearly the case that social activism, when done right, is far more consequential than traditional workplace organizing because of the sheer number of people who are affected by technologies. If every worker at Google was unionized and only focused on working conditions within Google that would affect a couple hundred thousand people. Conversely successful attempts to shape the trajectory of technology that Google deploys could end up affecting every person on the planet.

Of course people can do both. But given the broader backlash against tech worker activism we’re seeing, majoritarian forms of resistance may be too risky or may take too much time.

However there are other forms of leverage people have. People within specific positions who have accumulated a significant degree of knowledge about the software they work on are not just hard to replace, but can also engage in hard-to-detect sabotage and subtle infrastructural changes that can frustrate attempts to use technology in bad ways. Given the increasing risk workplace organizers face thanks to the threat of layoffs, more informal forms of activism may be necessary.

Since I lack direct contact with what’s happening inside these companies, I leave it to the discretion of tech workers on the inside to decide on the appropriate strategy.

However, while such activism may be critical for preventing immediate dangers, in the long run, the real interesting stuff is in activism that attempts to break apart the control vectoralists have over information or infrastructures of control, rather than attempting to ameliorate their negative effects from within.

Probably the most impressive example of this is with the scientific publishing industry. In many ways this is a vectoralist arrangement par excellence, a billion dollar industry built on rent seeking with higher profit margins than the tech giants.

Which is why it’s particularly noteworthy that the property claims of the industry are being eroded by the neuroscientist Alexandria Elbakyan. She built the website Sci-Hub which allows people to easily pirate papers and probably operates on thousands of dollars each month. And while that has not brought down the publishing industry, it has dramatically expanded access to literature, particularly in the global south.

That might be the most effective act of expropriation in history.

Her success is entirely a consequence of the nature of intellectual property. Because information can be easily transferred across a network and copied to some other device, it’s much easier to “steal” intellectual property than physical property. Compare what she and other pirates have done to workers trying to expropriate a factory. For the workers to be successful to not just defeat the local security, but also hold the location against the armed forces of the state that will be mobilized against them. Certainly not impossible, but requires far more effort and is far riskier because the factory is a big, complicated, heavy physical object that can’t be easily relocated or reconfigured and so requires people to defend against the force that will inevitably be mustered against them by capital and/or the state.

Conversely, one can store all of Sci-Hub on a portable hard drive, which makes it easy to move across borders or mirror on a website somewhere. The declining cost of hardware opens up strategies of evasion and circumvention when it comes to conflicts over property that were largely denied to the working class because the physical infrastructure was so heavy and expensive.

Similarly it’s also possible to engage in action to frustrate mechanisms of control. Sometimes this can take the form of instructional shifts. The Snowden leaks documents for example helped motivate shifts toward normalizing end-to-end encryption – Google for example encrypted traffic between data centers it and other companies owned in 2013 in response. At the same time it can also take the form of more direct acts – pseudo anonymous Phineas Fisher hacked into the company that built spyware for governments to spy on activists called Hacking Team, forcing them to close in 2017.

Just as important as breaking open intellectual property or eroding and undermining systems of control is building things which empower and support individuals against capitalist domination and allow us to construct a partial post-capitalist economy in the here and now.

First let’s start with what activism that operates within existing structures. Two clear examples here might be developments in communication technology like Signal and Tor, both of which partially operate thanks to funding by capitalists and the state.

The core encryption algorithms which power Signal were built by anarchist hacker Moxie Marlinspike, but the initial funding that allowed him to do so came in part from the Open Technology Fund which in turn got money from the State Department (which came via policy changes enacted by Hillary Clinton of all people). While initially used by privacy-concerned techies and activists, its user base has grown considerably to include not just regular people, but also high-ranking military and business people. Per the current president of Signal Meredith Whittaker (who also organized the Google walkouts against Project Maven).

Now Signal is established critical infrastructure for militaries, for dissidents, for journalists, for CEOs, for anyone who has private confidential information.

The Tor network is even more tied to the United States. The original paper for onion routing was written up by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, as was the initial software. Since the project came under the stewardship of The Tor Project, a significant portion of its subsequent funding has also come from the United States government.

So what explains this connection? Are radicals being taken for a ride? Or, worse, are they selling out?

No, instead they are leveraging the short time horizons of the United States. By empowering resistance movements and intelligence agents abroad, they also empower resistance at home. As a zine spelled it out.

The pursuit of control rather than freedom is by definition rather shortsighted. One branch of the US government funds anarchist hackers to empower dissidents and destabilize enemy regimes, while the other, slightly more cogent branches of that same government desperately threaten and throw those same anarchist hackers in cages. Everywhere the capitalists are happily selling us the rope to hang them with.

Over the 20th century the left became increasingly concerned with the co-optation of seemingly radical movements by capitalist forces, the integration and neutralization of outsider elements into the system. While it’s an understandable reaction given the repeated failure and subversion of promising movements or ideas, it has resulted in people ignoring significant ways in which radicals have managed to leverage the system in radical ways.

This doesn’t mean we should uncritically accept anyone who takes money from the state or capital. But it is possible for us to pull one over on our adversaries by doing things inside their systems without them noticing or realizing the implications. It’s also reasonable for people to do rigorous analysis on those involved and the consequences of the work they’re doing instead of defaulting to the simple heuristic of “bad entity funding thing = thing must be bad.”

The reason I’m confident in Signal and Tor is not just because I have trust in those involved thanks to those projects being touched by multiple people I trust and also directly knowing people involved, but also because of the nature of cryptography itself. The mathematics and the code that underlies these systems is open for anyone to inspect. Hence there’s good reason to trust them both because they have been vetted many times by independent experts, but also because any attempt to introduce a weakness that could threaten radicals would also threaten its utility to the state.

While all this may seem minor in our present, it’s worth remembering the stakes from when the original Crypto Wars over whether encryption could be publicly available were being fought in the 90s.

[Widespread strong encryption] was the National Security Agency's greatest nightmare. Every company, every citizen now had routine access to the sorts of cryptographic technology that not many years ago ranked alongside the atom bomb as a source of power.

The possibilities of novel communication technologies go well beyond just secure encrypted communication channels. I think that one of the most important forms of contestation in the coming decades will be in developing novel forms of communications infrastructure outside the control of vectoralists and the state.

Anyone paying attention to politics in the last decade and a half is no doubt well-aware of the issues of social-media based activism and organization. But far too often what is implicit in criticism of internet-mediated organization is the assumption that presently-existing social media is all there could be and with that assert that networked forms of politics have been tried and found wanting failed.

This is simply wrong. It's entirely possible for radicals to build alternative communication networks or to influence existing systems in ways that can be incredibly consequential and serve the ends of activists. I believe this to be the case because people already did this for the social media that helped enable the revolutions and uprisings and movements of the last decade and a half.

Harry Halpin and Evan Henshaw-Plath in their paper From Indy Media to Tahrir Square: The Revolutionary Origin of Status Updates on Twitter detail how Twitter got its start in activist internet projects like IndyMedia and TxtMob that came out of the alter/anti-globalization movement.

IndyMedia was a collection of websites that allowed you to upload media and share it across the world. It was directly built in anticipation of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle for the explicit purpose of going around the corporate media. In the aftermath of the protests it saw a dramatic explosion of users by both activists from around the world and journalists because it served as a primary source of information as to what was going on in the wake of the media shutdown.

The messaging platform TxtMob was built by people involved in IndyMedia for the purpose of enabling real-time on-the-ground coordination of protestors. In the run-up to protests against the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2004, protestors built this system which allowed mass text capacity to activists on the ground to communicate things like cop movements for free through leveraging a network of computers.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was inspired by such projects – in particular he was thinking of the status sharing feature of TxtMob and the general design of websites like IndyMedia. There was also a crossover of individuals from both projects to Twitter like Blaine Cook himself who was part of IndyMedia and TxtMob and was also one of the first programmers employed at Twitter.

Given the direct influence Twitter has from radical projects designed to get information out to help activists, it’s not at all surprising that movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter converged on similar use cases that were initially prefigured by a much smaller number of activists from North America that such movements had no contact with. As Halpin and Henshaw-Path write.

The original use-cases and even values of Indymedia and TxtMob were built by their designers into the affordances provided by Twitter. It is no surprise that a vast social movement like the Arab Spring – with little relationship to the anti-globalization movement that built the predecessors of Twitter – would arise to use Twitter to overthrow governments. The tools that had been pioneered by a relatively small amount of protesters as part of the anti-globalization movement were now able to be used by everyone, including those in the Global South that needed them the most, having more important things to tweet about than even Twitter expected.

And yes, while those movements largely failed to achieve their aims, it would be a straightforward mistake to assume that the systemic problems to such movements are inherent to attempts at organizing mediated by computers. The existence of various open source software projects or Wikipedia is a straightforward rejoinder to the notion that the internet is anathema to more serious forms of organizing.

The basic problem is that we’ve explored only a tiny fraction of what is possible and that the tools we have available to us kinda suck. Moreover we should not expect the vectoralists to build them for us given that activists are not a good source of revenue and require highly specific use cases that are not relevant to the majority of people (and that’s before we even get to the question of how these tools threaten their power). While tools will never remove conflict and friction within a movement, I think that some of the worst pathologies stem from the underlying structure of these tools and as such can be overcome or at least diminished through better tools and infrastructure. As Halpin and Henshaw-Path conclude.

As social movements will continue to make new tools and utilize existing tools in unforeseen manners, the future of technology is still being written.

Which is why we should aspire to nothing less than full stack control of the communication networks we use: from the connections to the servers to the devices people use to the software they use as an interface. Yes that is a significant undertaking, but I see it as the modern equivalent of building the networks of newspaper and letter circulation that powered movements in the 19th century.

The consequences of cheap computer hardware go beyond possibilities for novel forms of communication however. We’ve also seen considerable developments in the realm of productive technology.

The poster child of these developments is probably the 3D printer. While the technology has been around since the 70s, it was only in the 00s that it really became accessible to people thanks to advances in computing and the expiry of patents.

The engineering professor Adrian Bowyer wanted to build machinery that was capable of self-replication as described in his manifesto Wealth Without Money. He started the Replicating Rapid Prototyper (RepRap) project while employed by Bath University alongside his student Ed Sells. It quickly became dominated by hackers in the form of dozens of volunteers who contributed in the early days who sped up the process of R&D significantly thanks to individuals experimenting and offering suggestions.

While 3d-printers have not yet become capable of true self-replication due to the precision required for electronic circuits and microprocessors, the RepRap project nonetheless helped kickstart the 3d-printing revolution thanks to the work of hackers bringing down the costs of the technology considerably. So while the utopian vision of purely self-replicating machinery has not yet been realized, productive technology has become accessible by several orders of magnitude.

People have used 3D printers for minor things like household items or the piracy of Warhammer 40k figurines which has had some economic impact (I could only find speculative estimates, not empirical ones and so I don’t want to make unfounded claims). A more clear cut example of its consequence is the production of weapons, like those used by insurgents in the currently ongoing civil war in Myanmar or allowed amateur arms manufacturers Ukraine conflict making simple shells that contain explosives for the war effort. And while the arms produced this way are subpar compared to those conventionally produced, when you’re in a war a subpar gun or bomb is better than nothing.

Again, with the accessibility of manufacturing we see similar shifts in terms of attack and defense when it comes to self-organization as with the pirating of information. Setting up a 3D printer is not as easy as downloading and running some code off the internet, but it is still cheaper than building or seizing and then defending a collectively operated factory of old. Once again technological development enables strategies of evasion and circumvention that were previously off the table.

These few examples I’ve given are but a tiny fraction of the consequential actions that radical technologists and hackers have engaged in since the 70s. And this history is but a foretaste of what might be.

It is this strategic latitude that gives me hope. Not because these dynamics mean in any way that our victory is guaranteed or even likely, but rather a sense that the space of potential action is vast and that in that space there are consequential things we could do.

I think it is this disposition, the sense that one can do shit that matters, that might be the only thing that unites leftists with technical expertise. Beyond that we vary wildly: in terms of our specific ideology (leninists, anarchists, social democrats, progressive, vaguely left-liberal etc), the domains in which we specialize (basically every domain of technology and science), our subjective estimates of how likely we are to be ultimately successful (opinions range from “we’re all going to make it!” to “let us assume we are fucked” and everything in between). But even among the most pessimistic, I nonetheless find that they have a no-nonsense confidence about their agency with regards to affecting change in the world. “Why wouldn’t I be able to take consequential action? Either I know people who’ve done so, if I haven’t done so myself?”

It is this no bullshit confidence that I would like to see spread among radicals.

Unfortunately the broader left will not smoothly shift gears to incorporating such insights and attitudes. The reason that so many leftists are ignorant of technological developments and possibilities is not just because people failed to make connections. It’s also because there are various ingrained attitudes and assumptions that bias people toward ignoring or dismissing it as a domain of interest.

It’s worth examining these concerns in more detail.

HANDLING EXCEPTIONS

The most knee-jerk objection to the approach I’ve detailed here is that it is simply advocating another form of “techno-optimism.” That I am simply calling for people to retreat from struggle, engage in projects and that everything will turn out okay. I want to explicitly state that I do not believe this. I do not think that all we need to do to overthrow capitalism is write some code and distribute some 3D printers. There are certain technological changes and shifts that to bring about will require confrontation and contestation to bring about and we should not shy away from that fact.

Such lazy rejoinders are worth addressing because there’s a widespread knee-jerk techno-pessimism that is dominant on some parts of the left that takes any attempt to intervene technologically as being inherently mistaken, if not cover for nefarious crypto-reactionaries. Because techno-optimist capitalism is the only set of popular ideas for thinking about how to technically intervene in the world, many assume that anyone who does so is, knowingly or not, in thrall to such ideas. I’m talking about the sort of people who spout slogans like “no technical solutions to social problems.”

Now, I want to stress this is a populist position – critics of “solutionism” like Evgeny Morozov are far more sophisticated in their critiques and are happy to admit that there are some technical interventions that are unabashed positives. Nonetheless it's worth addressing this position because such rhetoric directs attention and narratives which in turn shapes action.

Sure, “no technical solutions to social problems” is an understandable reaction to the bullshit of the tech industry. But to take it literally means that to even think about social problems from a technological perspective is inherently misguided or even immoral. Such an orientation doesn’t just kneecap movements in our present, but it also requires people to overlook how prior movements leveraged technology in consequential ways that we might learn from.

A self-conscious “hacker” identity might be new, but the utilization of technology for political ends by movements is not. Collectively-owned printing presses and the newspapers they distributed played a critical role in building and maintaining working class movements in the 19th and early 20th century, access to firearms helped enable civil rights and decolonial movements, oral contraceptives and the washing machine were key to feminist struggles etc etc.

And of course one of the most consequential and widespread instances of “hacker” or “tech” politics we see today is the current fight for transgender freedoms. Many trans people have been forced by circumstance to develop a degree of technical and scientific mastery, as well as build a broader social and technical infrastructure to provide DIY care and treatment because the medical system has failed them and/or because they face legal barriers.

Technical innovation, discovery, dissemination, reconfiguration and utilization is not something to be counterposed to politics. All are political acts, regardless of whether those engaged in or commenting on them acknowledge it.

This is why it is not a question of whether movements use technology to try and achieve political outcomes. Even the most ardent primitivist will still make concessions to modern technology to achieve their aims of a world without technology – arch-primitivist John Zerzan wears glasses and hosts a radio show. Rather, it’s simply a question of whether those movements will do so in a more deliberate and conscious manner. That’s an approach you should take regardless of where you fall on the optimism/pessimism spectrum about our changes going forward, whether you think there’s a 99% or a 1% chance of success.

(Of course given that it’s easy to fall into depression when you feel like you have no agency, it’s easy to see why people would conflate a position that articulates how you might take consequential action with “optimism”.)

The next point of tension many will have with the framework I’ve articulated here is that it directly contradicts fundamental Marxist assumptions around how technological development happens. Core to Marxist theory is that the bourgeois or the state are the prime mover when it comes to innovation. Sure, certain strands of Marxism will put more emphasis on the role of resistance by workers in shaping technology as opposed to others which assume a more mechanistic process of development. But regardless, there’s still the assumption that when it comes to innovation and deployment, the exploiting class acts and the exploited class is forced to react.

That we can take the initiative, that we might be able to steal a march on them via our own innovation or deployment is a direct rejoinder to a fundamental assumption that underpins basically all Marxist strategy. We don’t have to wait for capitalists to sell us the rope that we hang them with, instead we can just build and distribute open source desktop rope factories so that anyone who needs rope can simply make it themselves.

Now yes we are constrained by the present distribution of resources and control over infrastructure. But that’s just one more reason to be more strategic in our choices, not to give up on such aspirations. Likewise while co-option of our efforts is certainly a danger, that’s a point you can make about any radical movement.

However for most Marxists such nuances can be brushed aside. While there are some intellectuals and ideologues who will be troubled by how this complicates their position, most leftist activists, for better or worse, do not engage with ideas at such a deep level and so they’ll just keep on rolling, particularly if such developments seem straightforwardly positive. A case in point, the Leninists I know in real life who organize over Signal do not seem particularly distressed by the fact that they are using a service developed by an anarchist who got funding from the State Department.

No, I think far bigger barriers to widespread acceptance of taking technology seriously are those that stem from the shifts in interpersonal dynamics that such a shift will entail. One major one is that the current association of the humanities with the left means that any rapprochement will necessarily require them to take seriously with people they frequently deride as “STEMlords" or “tech bros”.

Now the prejudice many leftists have against these people is in many ways rational. Simply put, there are many techies who just kinda suck. Many people have had to deal with annoying idiots with “engineers disease” who think that mastery of one domain means they’ve mastered all domains and can speak with confidence on issues they know nothing about. That frustration is amplified when the topic in question is consequential social questions and they clearly speak from a place of unquestioned privilege and a lack of curiosity. To say nothing of how many techies and hackers have no real conscience if not are outright sociopaths who will happily work for organizations that have done a considerable amount of harm in the world.

But such polarization is not merely the result of these spaces being dominated by obnoxious or bad people. After all, the original working class was also in large parts vulgar and uncouth and yet socialist intellectuals still managed to engage with them. Also it’s not like people with a background in the social sciences or the humanities are immune from being pricks, abusers or reactionaries – a case in point, the founders of Palantir, Alexander Karp and Peter Thiel, both have degrees in philosophy and studied under continental stars Jürgen Habermas and René Girard respectively.

Part of the problem is, again, that there simply weren’t enough scientists and technologists on the left who could offer a counterexample and present alternative narratives. This fact isn’t just a consequence of hackers with leftist inclinations being ignored in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, it’s also a consequence of the open suppression of leftist scientists, in particular physicists, that occurred at the outset of the Cold War. Alongside this there was a conscious turn toward making scientists apolitical technocrats. The backlash toward more technical ways of thinking and acting that defined large swaths of the New Left was not at all unreasonable, if unfortunate. As Lee Felsenstein lamented decades after the fact.

At no point did the radicals of the New Left consider technology as something other than an abstract aspect of the power structure which would be turned in the right direction when the larger questions of power and control were resolved. In this respect they differed not at all from their Marxist “Old Left” predecessors. Any discussion within New Left circles that approached the idea of changing technology in order to empower people was met with either incomprehension or advice to drop the idea and organize a union at the technological workplace.

Moreover depoliticization was rampant in mainstream hacker culture. I’ve already gone over how they largely avoided protesting the Vietnam War or challenging capitalism and preferred working on technical problems and this attitude had serious staying power. Joseph Weizenbaum’s concerns about machine recognition of speech as a surveillance tool was dismissed by contemporaneous AI researcher John McCarthy despite the NSA already having admitted to using computers to sort through communications in 1975. This sort of thing continued into the 2000s. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman who did fieldwork among open source hackers noted the widespread “political agnosticism” in such communities back in the 2000s. Many believed that software held out the promise to be a realm of direct control and transparency while politics was mediated and opaque and so discouraged such conversations. It was only, as she noted in an article published in 2017, after high-profile hacker activism in the 2010s and the sympathetic response from parts of media and civil society that we saw broad politicization of hackers.

Some of the lack of awareness on the part of the left is a simple consequence of the fact that broader radicalization of tech workers and hackers is a recent development. Ironically, I think part of it is a consequence of their success. David Graeber astutely noted that grand radical social theory has historically come not out of the success of revolutionary ambitions but of their failure. The specific reasons as to why this is the case are complicated, but I think a major reason is simple incentives around doing theoretical work.

When you’re part of a movement that appears to be successful, doing more practical work has immediate benefits, whereas engaging in lengthy theorizing has uncertain payoffs and may even be counterproductive if it threatens your coalition. But should your movement fail, you suddenly find yourself with a lot of free time to reflect and write (particularly if you end up in exile or in prison) and you can also be far more critical of said movement since relationships that once seemed instrumental can now be challenged if not abandoned.

So as bad as the repression that individuals like Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond or Chelsea Manning faced was, we have not seen technically inclined leftists defeated as a movement. A major factor as to why is simply the sheer number of possible things to work on. Even when a particular project fails or the individuals involved are jailed, forced into exile or murdered, the skills people had can be leveraged in countless other domains even when people have very a little resources (a case in point, Manning was writing papers on post-quantum cryptography from prison). And given the intellectual demands of such work, there’s basic trade-offs between consequential work and popular outreach. As anarchist physicist William Gillis lamented when asked as to why more anarchists with a background in the sciences don’t write for a broader audience.

The problem is free time. You can engineer Real Vegan Cheese at your local anarchist hackerspace, or you can write. Sadly most people don't have time for both.

However it’s not like there weren’t people trying to engage with these people before (like McKenzie Wark). We also need to consider the shifting incentives of left intellectuals.

Alongside the purging of radicals from the sciences, we also saw with the beginning of the Cold War the opening up of the academy, alongside the decline of radical spaces and scenes that leftist intellectuals traditionally operated and wrote for. With this shift, the incentives for knowledge production among leftist intellectuals change toward playing the academic game toward building careers, instead of providing knowledge that is directly relevant to people either involved in a movement or a broader educated public. It’s not that the academic approach does not produce useful knowledge or that knowledge for activists or even an educated public is inherently good, but that incentives matter. There is a degree of conservatism and parochialism to how knowledge production within academia operates as critics – many of whom come from the left – have noted. Conversely, because serious activists have a degree of skin in the game they have more incentives toward getting it right, even if the activists themselves are not formally educated like academics.

The incentives of academics are compounded by the fact that any movement that takes all this seriously will necessarily involve a loss of status for a particular type of leftist intellectual.

Wark speaks of “genteel Marxists”, intellectuals who try to position themselves as having a unique insight into the world thanks to their grasp of a particular set of texts or set of ideas, who operate in the realm of bourgeois culture, who see philosophy as being superior to the particular sciences and yet at the same time wish to maintain disciplinary boundaries and stop people from crossing them.

As Wark admits, this use of “vulgar” is inconsistent. Nonetheless the function it serves is to elevate a particular form of thought (and those who practice it) above others and with that create a separate intellectual class removed from the messy and dirty particulars.

[The] vulgarian insult is designed to produce a certain autonomy and priority for the intellectual in relation to the working class. Marxism can’t be vulgar, because then the masses might figure out how to apply it for themselves to their own situation. Marxism has to be something superior to the sciences, otherwise actual scientists would have to be acknowledged as co-producers of knowledge. Marxism can’t prioritize the nexus between labor, techne and nature. That would pretty much exclude the intellectual from any leading role.

Such a “genteel” approach to discourse (Marxist or otherwise) isn’t just annoying and condescending, it is also utterly useless as a basis for strategy.

Grappling with technology and what it can be used for means engaging with countless technical particulars and how they might inform action given a particular context, especially to those not also knowledgeable about that domain. These organizational issues are inherent to people trying to leverage technical knowledge to change the world, regardless of whether they dream of being the next Steve Jobs or the next Vladimir Lenin. No single figure or committee can hope to compile all this knowledge and then decide on an optimal course of action, regardless of whether the committee or individual is deciding for a corporation, a state or a revolutionary party.

And with that we can lay to rest any hope of a centralized movement that such “intellectuals” might try to insert themselves at the center of.

In particular because this basic problem has implications for anyone who uses technical skills and knowledge to impact the world, regardless of whether they use those skills to earn a living. Hence it is entirely reasonable to speak of far more mundane examples of “tech” or “hacker” politics from anyone who seeks to leverage or reclaim or reconfigure technology, be they workers using encrypted messaging applications to build unions, environmentalists making DIY drones to document factory farming runoff, women making shared docs detailing the actions of rapists, people in favelas or shanty towns across the world repairing and repurposing hardware and anyone writing mediocre Python to do anything.

The ideal is a movement that seeks to empower everyone to have some degree of technical understanding, that builds the social infrastructure to enable anyone who is willing to put in the effort to become a technologist, hacker, scientist, intellectual, etc. Moreover such aspirations are not just instrumentally useful for fighting capitalism and other forms of oppression, such general proliferation of capacities is necessary for any future society that seriously seeks to abolish class because we cannot have a small group of technical elites with a monopoly on knowledge. There needs to be widespread dispersal of capabilities so that people can quickly become proficient in important domains so as to avoid centralizing control of key infrastructure in the hands of a small few.

And while we are a long way from such a world, any movement that approaches such an ideal will be simultaneously more effective and harder to centrally direct. Against this straightforward fact there will be a backlash from those who think we must do things the way They Have Always Been Done.

“Small groups of people doing things on their own to try and change the world without going through The Party?!? People who think that you can try to build technology in a liberatory way within a capitalist totality!?!! Thinking you can convince the STEMlords to fight capitalism?!? Why, that’s nothing more than petite-bourgeois moralist idealist revisionist crypto-neoliberal adventurist utopian positivist labor-aristocratic counter-revolutionary PMC liberal undialectical lumpenproletarian individualism!!!”

Unfortunately what such critics will have to contend with however is that there are still many on the left – to say nothing of those outside the patchwork of subcultures that is “the left” – who actually want to have an impact on the world. Getting serious about all this is not embracing a fad, but instead recognizing a phenomenon that has been going on for decades, was partially responsible for not just routing both the labor movement and state socialism, while also being key to some of the most significant successes against capitalism in the last few decades.

You can continue to ignore it, but just know that it means your anti-capitalist “theory” will be nothing more than a convoluted form of poetry.

CONCLUSION

Despite the fact that I’ve described a theory of class conflict here, I want to stress that I do not see society neatly sorting into two great hacker slash vectoralist camps directly facing each other anytime soon. Even among radical technologists and hackers we do not have any consensus about what we want. And that’s just the radicals, to expect all the tech workers who donated to Warren or Bernie can be radicalized into full-fledged anti-capitalists is also silly. On top of that, we should remember that only a minority of tech workers are actually politicized.

So right now if you asked me to bet, I would predict that the majority of tech workers who are politicized will continue to fight for technologically sophisticated progressive liberalism, not outright anti-capitalism.

Conversely, while the Tech Right is certainly concerning, the complexities of actually trying to seize and yield the power of a state are no small matter and they may well crash and burn before they can consolidate power. As Musk and Andreessen become increasingly disconnected from reality they are more likely to make errors that more moderate competitors can seize on.

Yes there are reasons to think that deteriorating conditions will radicalize more people. But the long run can take a long time to arrive.

“You think this is late-stage capitalism? Your capitalists haven’t even escaped into space! You don’t even have genetically engineered slave populations mining gas giants for helium-three or artificial intelligence running on post-quantum blockchains!”

So instead of making predictions, I would instead like to call for more people to force the broader left to reckon with these developments and possibilities. In particular leftist technologists, hackers and scientists we need to do a better job articulating narratives and developing theories that can be understood by a broader audience who don’t have intimate knowledge of technology and science to explain just how important all this is. Propaganda of the deed has clearly been insufficient in this domain. We need to do the work of explaining why specific deeds were meaningful.

Now yes, I know a call for yet more anti-capitalist research programs and media projects might seem a little silly given that every other leftist now has a podcast, YouTube channel, WordPress/Substack blog, or Patreon hustle. But that discourse, while certainly productive in many respects, only reckons with these developments in a peripheral and supplemental manner. There’s little reckoning with the possibilities in any sort of systemic way, no real attempt to present narratives that center them.

Nonetheless despite the miniscule attention currently given to us, I think we can punch well above our weight discursively. There’s historical precedent here, after all. The workers movement of the 19th century didn’t bring in people by preaching the gospel of Karl Marx or any other socialist intellectual to the masses. Rather they won people and intellectuals over because the existing movement had a no-nonsense confidence and could point to genuine success they had achieved, be that in terms of winning concessions from bosses, building communities that could enable collective action or just helping keep people alive in a changing world.

And so despite our presently diminutive presence in leftist discourse, I would not be surprised that if we do the work of outreach and persuasion, within a decade much of what I’ve written here is taken for granted by the median leftist precisely because when it comes to serious paths forward I just don’t see any real alternatives. Because something is happening and it is – at least in part – something else.