Abolish Silicon Valley, for TrashFuture

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On July 7, 2018, I recorded an episode of TrashFuture (a left comedy podcast on tech and politics). This episode, which was released July 16, was also titled “Abolish Silicon Valley”, just like the show I did for Novara the week before. What can I say; I just really like talking about abolishing Silicon Valley.

You can listen to the episode on whatever podcast app you use, or via this embed:

A warning for the unwary: this podcast is decidedly a comedy podcast, so if you’re listening because you want to hear about the tech industry and not because you love esoteric Twitter jokes about football coming home, you might want to skip ahead a bit. Some rough topic markers, approaching actual quotations near the end:

6:15: me explaining what I’m doing here, on the left, insofar as anyone can explain such a thing. Elon Musk, Ayn Rand, starting a company. moving to London & discovering “the left”
10:00: me on how the left needs to incorporate more perspectives from within the tech industry
12:20: me on the prospects of building worker power in the tech industry, and the roadblocks along the way (mostly ideological, stemming from this concept of “meritocracy”, which pits individuals against each other and weakens the possibility of any sort of collective spirit). mentioned Alex Press’s n+1 article on tech worker organising (Code Red)
15:00 - Riley on tech billionaires being the nominated champions of humanity and so of course they’re resistant to unions - it interferes with their will, which is of a higher order. me on how even some tech workers (who will never be billionaires) go along with this worldview
16:20: Riley on how this feels feudalism, with its naturally-ordained hierarchy (almost Calvinist); any attempts to challenge that hierarchy would impede the workings of nature
17:30: some jokes about computers unionising
17:45: me on feudalism. meritocracy as the ideological arm of capitalism, and so it’s a step up from feudalism, but not quite abolishing it. You need enough mobility so that a few people can climb up the hierarchy in order to justify the existence of the hierarchy (that’s the entrepeneurial dream). But the whole point of structure is to justify an innate feudalist privilege.
18:55: on the efforts to build worker power in the industry: TWC saw lots of activity after the 2016 US election. the most effective campaigns have been in building solidarity with contractors on tech company campuses who’ve been trying to unionise
20:00: lots of people working in tech are not commonly thought of as “tech workers”. a joke from milo on serfs tilling bitcoin fields.
22:30: milo: “we’ve put all the workers into one big union by enslaving them”
22:35: on $117k being the threshold for low income housing in the bay area (for a family of four). 99.9% of restaurant workers can’t afford to buy a house in the city. This is creating a culture where tech money contributes to driving up house prices, with the neo-serfs unable to even live in the same area. creating a society similar to the capital in the hunger games. some jokes (not from me) about jacking off.
25:00: me: they’re not all libertarians. some remarks on Peter Thiel. a Fallout joke that i did not get.
25:50: Riley on Adorno/Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment) on rationality being used to analyse our social structures, which helped free us from the shackles of feudalism only to launch us into new shackles of meritocracy, which falls apart on its own merits. some more jokes that I did not really get on waterboarding with port in British universities.
29:05: Riley: The American ruling class believes its earned its place, where the UK ruling class fetishes the fact that it hasn’t earned its place. me on the lack of interrogation of the notion of meritocracy - it does of course completely fall apart, but if you don’t question it, it’s good enough for now to perpetuate status quo
30:15: Riley transitioning to where the bright spots are, asking about recent tech worker activism at Google etc
30:50: me explaining that for workers to identify and protest as workers is incredibly new - it’s more common to see workers identifying with their company. there’s little history of pushing back except on an individual level
31:20: James Damore :(
32:50: me explaining that the backlash against ICE is still ongoing. Project Maven’s contract was cancelled, but all the other mobilisations are all a bit still up in the air.
33:35: hussein asking if things are similar to digital media, which has giveaways and prizes and a culture modelled on the tech startup world
35:15: when looking at unionisation going on in these companies, we have to separate the material and ideological factors. ideology is strong in tech; part of the reason diversity is to shit is because of the whole meritocracy thing - people who are there now and successful are clearly just there due to merit, and if we bring in more women and minorities, that’s just lowering the bar. some jokes (also not by me) about women being bad at gaming.
37:30: on the material factors: there’s so much money going around, because these companies are so good at capturing wealth. so those necessary for production are showered with lavish gifts (still, only a fraction of what these software engineers actually generate in value for the company, at least if you go with a straightforward way of estimating value).
38:15: weird social/political composition of workforce - it feels like there’s no need to unionise cus they’re making so much money
38:45: if fb employers seized the means of production, what would they seize (jokes about pokes and segways and aunts etc)
39:30: on why tech workers would want to unionise for ethical reasons. videos of ICE detaining children in cages going viral, making tech workers realise that they don’t like the world they’re building
40:20: Project Maven: building AI for drone imaging. there was an open letter circulating, and a bunch of people quit, which got google to not renew the contract. but of course the US military industrial complex is bigger than one contract
41:00: with ICE: microsoft was downplaying it. interesting that all this mobilisation has been happening around the same time (or perhaps not so surprisingly - all aspects of the same core problem, and they’re all coming to the surface at once). Raising consciousness for an industry that hasn’t had much. I personally didn’t know what unions and class power meant, and associated unions with like coal miners (relic of an older era). Software engineers love newness and thinking they are special
42:15: hussein on why we don’t think of white collar professionals when we think of unions. on the weird hero worship culture in programming communities. the idea that you don’t need anything more than yourself and a keyboard in order to achieve. a very individualised notion of success
45:00: me on what labour markets are and how they function. Telling people to learn to code. Valorising the labour market. Don’t do arts just do STEM because the labour market values only the latter and we should take for granted that it’s a good way of allocating resources. Riley on Juicero as an example of how flawed this reasoning is (they all had stem degrees)
46:20 back to Adorno and Horkheimer. me on abdicating moral judgments to the market through venture capitalists, which results in a catastrophic waste of resources. hence: Abolish Silicon Valley. Because it’s structurally fucked, cus of the way money works in the industry and the way tech works under capitalism. It’s a way for the wealthy to guard their wealth in a dispersed way. In an earlier era, if you had resources (like food) you would hire guards to guard it for you keep it from the rabble. That’s what Silicon Valley is now. People working in the industry don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, but as a whole they’re guarding wealth for rich people. And they’re also creating a neoliberal hellscape where people at the bottom are reduced to bargaining with algorithms for the right to stay alive.
48:00: me on recent Deliveroo protests: Deliveroo changed the pay structure, meaning drivers would make less money. and, of course, you can’t bargain with an app. Riley on how it’s introduced under the guise of flexibility (Milo: joke about better flexibility meaning it’s easier for them to bend you over and fuck you), into a system of unequal power, which means it will redound to benefit of the more powerful. the main function of the tech industry is to perpetuate the myth that workers and owners don’t have opposed interests, but are instead on the same team, solving collective problem. Everyone’s in it together including Elon Musk. Can smooth over divides. It’s a sleight of hand.
49:50: me on the material dimension: companies give out stock options, but only to those close to the point of production (software engineers, PMs etc). So people feel part of the company and identify with it. Riley on the Tesla layoffs, when ex-Tesla worker was publicly grateful despite having been fired
50:45: me on reading the Elon musk biography in 2016. it can be good, if you read it with a critical lens. SpaceX workers, for instance, don’t think in terms of class struggle - they were distracted by how cool the problems were. no one else worked on those problems (except nasa), but they didn’t think of it in terms of private company vs public; they just wanted to work on a cool product. and the aspects that those of us on the left would think about (unsaid, but like, class struggle, political economy) weren’t considerations for them
51:50: really good tweet thread on Silicon Valley being like the Soviet Union
52:10: Soviet Union failed due to a centralisation of power - state corporation. The same sort of thing is happening in Silicon Valley (milo: Stalin Musk), same distorted way of looking at world and valorising failure. twisting the idea that there can be power. valorisation of success for companies that make money
53:15: milo on companies like Uber actually losing money. Me: that’s part of a strategy though. What’s more twisted is that it’s not just about money. They just want to work on something cool, money maybe validates it but it’s not the goal, it’s incidental (is what I’m trying to say)
53:30: the inverse is when failure is valorised. Me on mattermark, which raised 7 million and sold for less than a million … which made me laugh cus the company that bought them offered us the same amount of money even though we raised so much less. Which means none of the employees got anything and investors lost money too. VCs lined up to congratulate her for “landing the ship” (milo: in a pile of shit) and said they’d write the next check (this still gets me tbh)
54:55: me on how it’s easy to laugh until you remember that these are actual resources being funnelled toward this disgusting world that’s pissing it all away.
55:15: Riley: it’s easy to be hopeless until you remember that there are these glimpses of class consciousness. whether it’s lower paid or higher, who realise most of what they make is taxed away by their boss. And they’re able to resist in a way, as workers. Me on how more people in tech who follow me seem to be faving/retweeting stuff I post, like that clip of me on Tysky Sour saying tech workers’ interests lie with their fellow workers not their boss.
56:50: going back to FB employees seizing the means of production. FB is not just a product; it’s a gatekeeper in global value chains of commodity production. Google/FB control 2/3 of all digital advertising spend in the US, which means they serve key roles systems of in commodity production, extracting rent from value chains. Any time someone buys something, part of that money could have gone to labour if it had more bargaining power, but instead it’s going to the top. So what are the means of production in this case? It’s complex because it’s advertising hence distribution. Marx talked a bit about advertising as part of the costs of distribution in market. but that makes it hard for us to reason about it because these big tech companies are changing the way the economy works in a way Marx could never have predicted
58:30: Riley: by seizing on an entirely unnecessarily element of production (since marketing only occurs when overproduction occurs [which is a bit of a simplification but a useful framing]), there is a need to rely on pure commodity fetishism to distribute product, since you can’t rely on use value. But for all of its faults, FB does produce something that people find valuable: a stable way to keep in touch with people in your life. Full of contradictions. On the back of this thing that’s totally unnecessary, enabled by marketing (which is a pernicious force), it provides a service to people that they value. So the question, is how do you organise labour power to excise the marketing from Facebook and simply provide the infrastructure that they value?
60:20: me: that is the billion dollar question. and it is the right question. how do you separate the good parts of the tech produced by these companies with their shitty business models? And this applies to all of these companies. In september Uber got their TfL license revoked. Uber as a tech is useful, but it’s being used in a way that’s not good for most of us: for drivers and us as citizens. we’re relying on this (privatised) network of cars when we should actually have better public transit. So it’s about extracting the efficient (matching) tech from the purposes to which it’s being put. And to do that you need worker power, people who understand how these technologies work to build something in their place. And maybe you need some sort of government action as well. You need people to unionise and use tech for everyone’s good.
61:30: milo on the silver lining of the political hellscape that we’re in. People in their companies recognising that they can hold their companies to ransom to make changes whereas before, people would just vote for Democrats and assume all was fine. Cus Republicans are like concentration camps, whereas democrats are like a little less ICE. Me: they’re like, let’s just be civil to each other!! They’re completely losing the thread here. what we’re seeing is a total collapse of the centre ground. It’s awful but it’s opening up new possibiliies. I don’t want to sound too accelerationist but maybe this is the only way, only way out is through
62:15: Riley this is what it took, because under subsequent centrist liberal govts, fundamentally there was a voter contingent of middle class people who were comfortable, whereas the subaltern class was never uncomfortable. The acceletarionist case is that you have to make the middle class uncomfortable. Not that ICE is justifiable, but, one of the facts of ICE and the excesses of the use of ICE as a rogue agency is to push ordinary liberals beyond the pale. usually apolitical, but this forced them to become political. All of these coders activated by ICE who - let’s remember - was doing all of this shit under Obama too, but the gross excesses forced them to take action within their workplaces. then the policy proposial of abolishing Silicon Valley seems downright reasonable.
64:00: me on how it’s not just about nuking the region (Riley: let’s not rule it out). the point is to restructure society and the economy in such a way that the excesses we see with Silicon Valley are no longer possible. It’s a fundamental transformation of the economy. Because the reason Silicon Valley is so bad right now - it’s not like it came out of nowhere. This is just a microcosm that amplifies the problems with capitlaism. So if you want to abolish Silicon Valley you gotta change a lot of things. Milo/Riley: there are problems with capitalism? Fundamental contradictions?
66:20: on Jordan Peterson, and how I went through a phase where I watched his lecture videos on YouTube (not unboxing, though they make lots of jokes about that). Kind of sad as I was going through a phase where I felt like I needed to read more and understand more about world, watched that and other philosophy videos, but I was lucky in that at the same time I was reading left stuff. I didn’t even know what he was ideologically. I wanted to understand social science humanities stuff since I never studied it.
68:30: milo: Wendy hit on the best description of JP inadvertently - he’s the philosopher for people who’ve just discovered reading. Riley: attracts STEM people. You were on the knife edge. Me: what drew me to the left is that it is more ideologically more coherent and appealing. My own personal story gives me hope for people I know - they’re not incorrigible, they just weren’t exposed to right ideas, and if they were in the right way and given time to think about it, they could be radicalised. Riley: that’s how you abolish Silicon Valley. Me: yeah, radicalise tech workers