TRASHFUTURE - Abolish Silicon Valley feat. Wendy Liu

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

This week, Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and speak with leftist tech writer (and tech industry veteran) Wendy Liu (@dellsystem) about Silicon Valley’s labour force, what it means to unionise tech workers, and how she escaped the thrall of tech-libertarianism. During the interview, Wendy mentions an article by Alex Press (@alexnpress ) about organising the tech sector. You can read it here: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-31/politics/code-red/ You can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/). Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this with a special ingredient: care (and impotent fury).

It's been a very exciting game today, when the day of recording, when England and Sweden played their match. It's going to be a few days subsequently when you're actually listening to this. So hello from the past, but what's very exciting is that, of course, our two favorite figures from England and Sweden, I heard, made a little friendly bet. And let's just say that between Paul Joseph Watson and Peter Sweden, Peter Sweden is the one who needs to spend the night in the haunted Caliphate of Tower Hamlets, and Paul Joseph Watson is not going to be forced to go to Malmo.

Peter, Peter Sweden and like Derek Acour, a spend a night chasing Muslim ghosts around Bethanel Green. Very, very cool streetwear Muslim ghosts. Yes. Yeah. Just people, just people's Muslim grandma telling them that they're not going out like that and to make sure they've eaten. I hit very close to home.

Your Muslim grandma was a ghost. Hussein, why are you wearing such a slutty T-shirt? Don't tell my ghost grandma about that. It's thick boy season. Don't tell my ghost grandma that I'm walking around in Tower Hamlets wearing A6 and a graphic T. A6 is streetwear. I mean, it's not really.

It is. It's just that it's not caught on just yet. It's not. LSE was like really lame back in like the back in the 90s. The LSE has always been lame. The LSE has always been lame, but LSE the brand, which is very much linked to the Frankfurt school as we all know. I was called it LSE.

I thought it was a LSE. I grew up in Essex. So, you know, you basically grew up in Love Island. Yeah, I did. We were talking about this earlier. I did. My favorite type of streetwear though is this brand called Le Coq Sportif. Do you remember that?

Yeah. Yeah. I remember Le Coq Sportif. You know, it's like the apotheosis of like just how dumb Frenchness is, right? Like, it's like it's an entire it's an entire nation of people who think it's okay to do mime and circus stuff. And like their biggest athletic brand is of a chicken for some reason. Like France has no taste in anything.

It's a sporty chicken. Yeah. It's a sporty chicken. When you're doing when you're doing pelvic floor exercises, Le Coq Sportif. Hello and welcome back again to Trashutra, the podcast about how I don't do the opening slogan anymore. I got bored of doing it. And so now I'm just doing a shortened version, but that includes this explanation, which

is longer than the original one. Looks like I need to go back to the drawing board because I may have over-engineered the solution to this problem. Alexi, Brian, you need Elon Musk to give you an efficiency drive. Elon Musk needs to drill through this problem with a bouncy castle. I would love to see a version. Like you start saying the intro, but like it's like Elon Musk has made it more efficient. It's the set.

There's one problem which is like a piano falls on you halfway through using it. Workers' rights are so boring. Sometimes the cost of efficiency is, you know, people get hit by a piano in space. This borderline, Elon Sifredi. Elon Sifredi. Hey, do you guys like space? No. No one on this podcast likes space.

Space sucks. Space sucks. That's our take now. Space sucks. It's an anti-space podcast. It's anti-space-axe. Like, no, it's like the thing is. No, space is like we work, but it's workers can't live in space.

There's not enough oxygen. Space is anti-worker. Redistribute the oxygen to the masses. Redistribute the oxygen equally throughout space is my opinion. I think it is distributed pretty evenly throughout space to be fair. Welcome again to Trash Future, that thing I said. My name is Riley. You can find me on Twitter at ralah.

I don't recommend it though because all of my posts are very bad about piss. It's Hussain. You can follow me at hkisfunny. I've done the it's coming home, but not your dad joke, haven't I? You can do it again. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I laughed at it in the pub. If you enjoyed it once, why not do it again, as Riley says to all of the women he knows.

I'm fine. I resonate a lot with Post Malone right now in the sense that I'm always tired. I resonate with Post Malone because I'm always posting and I'm also a child gangster. Two jokes there. Yeah, hi. My name is Milo Edwards at Milo underscore Edwards on Twitter. You may remember me from many previous episodes of this podcast and it's coming much like me.

It is coming home from Russia, but Milo Milo is the world cup. I am. I am the world cup, which I am the world cup. Little did they know, yeah, and our guest today. Hi, I'm Wendy. I'm at Dell system on Twitter and I don't really know what's going on on this podcast half the time. That's not going to change.

Like, no, that's all of us. Especially Riley today. Shut up. But you're the person who normally knows what's going on. That's why this is such a problem. I never do. So, so, so if we'll be show Wendy as the leader and I'm deputy leader, well, there's a little disorienting.

Yeah. So when Wendy is the one with it most together, who's, who's saying is sort of mentally competent. I can just about make it. Milo was mentally competent, but deficient in attention. I'm playing a completely different game. That's me. I'm just like, and I am very sleepy anyway, sleepy boy. I'm a sleepy boy, but I'm very excited because it's coming home.

So Wendy is a sort of tech. I guess you could say what a tech industry former insider and now turned almost tech skeptic commentator and you can read your work in the new socialist and other similar publications. Novara, etc. Yeah. So my story is that until about, you know, a year, year and a half ago, I did not even know that the left, which, you know, includes podcasts like this.

I did not know that existed. So my entire life was basically just like tech. I was one of those, you know, Silicon Valley want to be entrepreneurs, like I idolized Elon Musk. It's, it's very embarrassing and hide site, see his Twitter and all of his all very random humor. Oh no, I thought he was hilarious. You thought epic bacon reddit daddy was hilarious.

I definitely went through a phase when I thought that was funny. That's what they all say. This is a confessional. This is, this is now the air, the airing of the, not the airing of grievances, but certainly the airing of shame. Oh, I know. No, a lot of the stuff I'm still coming to terms with, but I mean, I definitely was one of those like, you know, fountain head people.

Like I loved iron Rand. I read the fountain head like a ton of times. I want to emphasize the past tense. This is all past tense. I'm much better now that D is doing a lot of work in that that suffix D is doing a lot of work in that word love. And he's like one of those people who escaped from Scientology, you know, I spent all my time denouncing it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, honestly, like so, so I was, I was completely enamored with this tech world. Right. Like I just wanted to make a lot of money in Silicon Valley and I don't really know exactly what happened, but I started a company and then eventually I got to this point where I was like, this is, this whole thing is just like bullshit and I can't do it anymore. I can't defend these like tech billionaires to my friends anymore.

I don't want to keep living this life anymore. And so I moved to London, started a master's degree in inequality at the London School of Economics and kind of like in the process, just discovered the left, like if it's like this thing that you can discover, just started reading books, reading articles, listening to podcasts. Yeah. You know, back when Bernie Sanders and Chapo Trap House invented being on the left in 2016. Yeah.

I mean, I was actually not even, I wasn't even Bernie supporter. I was, I was totally, I'm with her during the election. I like at the time I was just like, I didn't know there was like a left beyond, you know, what Hillary Clinton represented. It was like liberalism versus conservatism. That was the extent of my like political vocabulary. Two brands will want either technocrats or, you know, like people who want to release genetically modified tarantulas into the, into the inner cities of America to try and

spur productivity. Basically. And I was like, you know, technocrats, like liberal technocrats. I don't see what the problem is. Like Hillary has experience. She'd make a good politician. But then again, tarantulas. I mean, both sides make very good points.

I, I, I was personally very convinced by Hillary Clinton after she did the fight song video. Oh God. That's still my jam. That's still my jam. I still my running, I still my running track. Pokemon go fuck yourself. Anyway, so you, but you were in this milieu and then you sort of had your damocene road moment where we don't really know what it was necessarily, but you sort of how everyone

says road to Damascus, but you said damocene road just to somehow be more pretentious. Just in case we forgot. Just so people know you went to Oxford. Shit. That's a normal thing to say. You studied at the, uh, the university of London, the answers, the economic answers. Is that correct? I studied it a lot of places, Milo.

Don't try to list them. Yeah. No, I won't. Um, so fine. You had your, um, you had your, your big realize. There we go. Is that more acceptable to you? You fucking dick.

I already made my terms perfectly clear. So you had your, you had your, you had your light bulb, uh, go off. And then you sort of abandoned that way of thinking and came over to the left, but you sort of brought a sense of understanding of the ways in which the systems work with you over to the left. Yeah. Yeah. I guess.

And I think one thing that, um, I mean it, there are a lot of things I could criticize the left for like as much as much as I'm really happy to be here. And I've, I feel like I've discovered something that just like makes a lot of sense there. I think, you know, obviously the left has a lot of problems and you guys talk about this sometimes, right? But it's all out because we can't be seen saying that shit, although we do think it comes to technology. I think the main problem is that there hasn't been enough engaging with this stuff.

And I think, you know, there are a few people in recent years, um, like Nick, Nick Sernick, right? Who's written about, um, the, this new wave of like technology, um, the big tech platforms. How do we conceive of this from a left perspective? What is the Marxist approach to understanding how Google, Facebook, Apple work, right? And that's, that's really important. But at the same time that I just don't think that's the whole story, that there's not enough platforming of people who actually understand how the tech industry works in like a very

visceral, personal way. And I think without that narrative, you, you're missing a little bit of the picture and you're missing, you know, what can the left actually do about technology? It's, I don't think it's enough at this point to just, um, to throw out this like technocratic solutions, like, oh, we're going to, you know, we're going to have government regulations somehow fix the problem. We're going to have like a socialist project somehow magically fix the problem. You need people who really understand what it's like to work in the industry.

And ideally these are people who have to also understand the left perspective on it. You don't just want to like give you, uh, someone like Mark Zuckerberg platform. The point is like to find people in the tech industry who have been radicalized or who are on the path to radicalization and to combine their narratives and their takes and like their very technical understanding of how these systems work with the left critiques. And then from there find, find a way to synthesize this into, you know, a broader picture of what we should be doing about technology. Because what you did recently was you're sort of, you were recently in like Palo Alto

and San Jose and stuff, right? The lion's den when you went into the mouth of madness. So I stayed in San Jose and Patagonia and so you and you were there, if I'm wrong, to actually begin having these conversations and sort of finding out where these tech workers are who are beginning to think like this. Yeah. So I recently got a little bit involved with the tech workers coalition, which is this group.

It's like a very amorphous group. It's not like a formal organization or anything, but it's just, you know, it draws together a bunch of tech workers who are dissatisfied with how the industry is going. And you have people with a wide range of political views there, right? You have some people who are just still just liberals and you have people who have been, you know, communists since they were born. But I don't like the table football in the, in the lobby. I demand table tennis.

But the point is this is, this is a place where all these people can get together and air their grievances about the tech industry and specifically try to understand their own concerns as workers, right? Because even though there's this image of the tech industry as being this place where everyone's coddled, everyone gets like a, you know, six figure salary, free food, buses everywhere, whatever. Yeah. A lot of that is true, but they're also, everyone has some problems with how they're treated

at work. Maybe it's that they're not given enough autonomy, right? They're given some autonomy, but they still can't fully decide, you know, what the product they built is. If my retirement beanie has been significantly reduced. And it's like, it contributes to a situation where people do have grievances, but there is no real formal structure for airing them because there's very little unionization, right?

Why, why, why do you think that is? So this is something that's been explored more in the last like year really. So there's a really great piece in N plus one by Alex Press, who's an editor at Jack Man, that talks about why unionization in tech has just historically been basically non-existent. And I mean, it comes down to a bunch of different factors, right? Like one is the fact that if you think about how Silicon Valley started, how a lot of these companies started, one way of looking at it is just in a geographic sense, people were

trying to escape the union structures in the East. So Alex talks about that a bit in her piece. And another is just like, if you look at the ideology within the tech industry and the way it grew out of this programming community, where for a while it's been this thing where it's like, it feels like a meritocracy to the people inside it. So the people who are, who are in it, they think that it's like a very technocratic way of thinking that like, because code is neutral and there's like a neutral way of judging how good code is, then it's all about merit.

If you do well, if your code is good, it doesn't really matter who you are, then you'll rise the top. Because of that, it's all about like you as an individual being the best you can be. And who needs unions when you have that one is just, it's about pitting individuals against each other. Yeah. Who needs HR when you have upvotes. So in their imagination, it feels as the, because like one thing I've, doing this podcast,

one thing I've kind of see over and over again is this idea that a lot of the tech industry, especially represented by its billionaires have, that they are the kind of nominated champions of humanity, or at least some kind of, you know, Charles Murray style bell curve intellectual aristocracy who, who are going to save humanity or dominate it by dint of their own brilliance. Like of course they'd be resistant to unionization because then that just interferes with the execution of their will, which is of a higher order than anyone else's, right? Yeah.

That's a good point. So definitely there are two factors here, right? One is the fact that the people who are at the top of the industry, right? The CEOs, the founders, the investors, of course they don't want unionization to occur in any way because that's, that's directly competing with their class power. But then what's interesting in the tech industry is that even the people who would benefit from unionization, they don't like it as a concept because it infringes upon their, this idea that they're just, they're there by dint of their own merit, right?

That they managed to get these six figure jobs in the valley because they're really good because they learn how to code and they're just brilliant and that they're just somehow on a different intellectual plane than say they're Uber drivers, the people who deliver them food. And so they kind of need that. It's, you know what this reminds me of is it's, it's, it's so fucking medieval. It reminds me of the great chain of being that sort of, that, that the medieval's held to be the sort of just hierarchy of their society, that it was God, the king, the higher

aristocrats, the lower aristocrats, the knights and the commoners. And that there is just this kind of naturally ordained hierarchy that you mustn't question because any kind, any attempt to go against the hierarchy is merely going to impede the proper working of nature and is merely going to sort of distort what the natural best outcome should be. It's this weird way. I read the Unready to Union eyes. It's this weird, it's this weirdly kind of again.

I always go back to Calvinism, but it's this, it really is this sort of exogenizes every element of free will any, any element of even like human liberation that could possibly go into it. It's like it's no wonder these people are trying to automate away every job because they would imagine that in a perfect world you could just make humans a tomaton be hilarious and computers unionized, I would be the ultimate troll just as they got rid of the last human worker and the computers all got together and they were like, no, you work for me now, bitch.

That would actually be a really cool like sci-fi novel. Oh, shit, TM, TM, TM, TM, someone who knows how to write should write that. No, but your point about feudalism is really interesting because the way I see it is it's this whole like meritocratic structure that you have in the tech industry. It is kind of like a step up from feudalism, a step up in the sense that it's it feels better, it feels more there. But it's also a step up in the sense that it's not abolishing feudalism, right? It's just like, do you take the same structure and you tweak it a little bit?

And the whole point of this ideology, what justifies it is that you have to have enough mobility so that a few people from, you know, like from lower levels of society have to be able to climb up to the top. They have to be able to, you know, have this like wonderful entrepreneurial story where they go from, you know, being somewhat, somewhat poor to being this like tech billionaire. And you need a little bit of that. But the whole point of the structure, right, is just it's, it's, you know, what meritocracy is originally is just this way of justifying this like innate, like feudalist

like privilege. And I think a lot of people in the tech industry have definitely been kind of bamboozled by that. They really do believe it. And maybe I think in the last few years, some of them are starting to realize what it actually is. Yeah. So can you, can you go into that a little bit more? Like what are the efforts to build worker power looking like in the tech industry?

Yeah. So a lot of the stuff is very new. TechWorkers Coalition, I think they, I mean, they first started like a few years ago, but they didn't really have any formal efforts until I think late 2016, which is one of bunch of people joined after Bernie, sorry, after, after the 2016 election. And when, you know, people realized that I mentioned the 2016 election a while I'm glad. Yeah, no, it's like, it's, it's pivotal to what's happened in tech is, is the thing. And a lot of people who were pro Bernie and who realized that Trump was now elected

president, they're like, wow, shit, there's something really wrong with the world. I need to do more than just to go to my, you know, nice comfy tech job. And a lot of them got involved with things like DSA and also TechWorkers Coalition. And one of the, I guess like the, the main early efforts that TechWorkers Coalition got involved in was this way of using the power that people working in higher up jobs in the tech industry had to try to make some change in a way that would help the people who needed it the most. So are you talking about, say, drives to unionize, just drives to unionize like with,

like between different companies, for example? Kind of. So it's more like focusing on people who aren't traditionally thought of as TechWorkers. So, you know, we usually talk about TechWorkers as software engineers, product managers, whatever, but there are all these people working in tech, working on these tech campuses that are kind of excluded from that. They don't get money killing the Bitcoin fields. Exactly. You know, that's literally it, right? You have cafeteria workers, you have cleaners, you have bus drivers, security staff, all of these people, most of the time, they don't have the same kind of contracts. All the time they are, they're not full-time employees.

They're subcontracted, contracted out. Right? Okay. Yeah. And they don't have good protections. A lot of them can't even afford to live in the area. They have to, you know, take really shitty public transit in California for two hours every day to get to their minimum wage job. Normal. Completely normal and fine. It's a lovely world. I love techno feudalism. Idea for a game show. Family feudalism. This category is something you would build a house out of. Do I see Wotlandorp? That's a very specific reference. I don't get it. It's a very specific reference to a very specific preferred house-building material of middle-aged surfs. It's like a kind of like papier machete that you build a house out.

It's like made of modern straw. I'm obsessed with the primitive technology YouTube channel. Where's this guy? He has millions of subscribers. Isn't that just the official Huawei YouTube channel? Am I right? Anyway. It's a guy in Australia and he never talks and he just wears a pair of shorts and he's ripped as hell or he's like cut as hell. He's not ripped. It's just everyone in Australia. And then what he does is he like, he'll like build a Wotlandob house out of clay just like by like, you know, using like handmade stone axes and stuff. It's very, very cool. Now the Australians will pass now like, fuck me. Where'd you get that futuristic shit? Why don't you come over here and do racism like normal people? Stop building houses of the future.

Australian Elon Musk is just digging up some like clay and trying to make the brick of the future for his Wotlandob hut. Coming up, coming up with technological innovations in racism. We've created a new slur. It combines all the slurs from Grand Torino. Yeah, we've actually put all the workers into one big union by enslaving them. I mean, that's not far off. 2018 always brings you back down to the horrible pump. Yeah, no, it's pretty bad. I mean, one stat that I just think is incredible. So in some parts of

the U.S., there's this like official U.S. government low income thresholds where it's like, if you're below this threshold, then you qualify for affordable housing. And in the Bay Area, I mean, most places it's like, it's not that high, right? And the Bay Area, for a family of four, it's 117,000. That is low income. If you're below that, you can qualify for like government, you know, housing in the Bay Area costs an insane amount. It's fucking incredible. And it's like, there's a stat that was released recently that said that I think it was like 99.9% of restaurant workers would be unable to afford to like buy a house in the area. And it's like, well, then they're just going to live elsewhere, right? And it's like, you're creating this culture

where because you're pouring so much money into tech, and that's getting all these like software engineers and people like that to live in the area, that's of course going to drive up all these house prices, right? So then you have people who are actually working at Facebook or or Google on the campuses, they're serving all these like tech pros, serving them food, cleaning their offices, and they're unable to live anywhere near where they were, you know, the people that they're serving are able to live. And you're creating this like incredible, just like, yeah, neo-surfdom. Society becomes more and more like the capital from the Hunger Games movies. Basically, basically, yeah.

Bussing people in to jack everyone off and then busing them back out again. Buss going to be the future. Yeah, it's like everyone goes to work at the jacking off factory. And then, you know, goes back to the Waddle and Dark Heart. It's like a huge Trump mural on the wall with a quote from the art of the deal. Sometimes you've got to jack a man off to eat a steak. You know, Rebecca Romain was supposed to jack me off in 1992, but then she married John Stamos without telling me and I think it was unfair that she backed out. John Stamos, very small penis. Everyone agrees. John Stamos is not a billionaire like me.

He has very few real estate investments. A bad choice by Rebecca Romain. Very bad deal. Very bad deal marrying John Stamos. Yeah, so that is that the mural? Is that the inspirational quote on the... It's very long-winded with lots of weird like, punctuation and estimation mocks. A lot of random capitalization. I love it. Oh, yeah. That's the Donald J. Trump jacking off factory that everyone in Silicon Valley has to work at now because they're all weird libertarians. No, I mean, that's not true though. Some of them are. It's like you have the people who are like, I guess, who subscribe to the Peter Teal School of Thought, right?

And Peter Teal is obviously a huge Trump backer. You definitely have the people. You create a prison ship full of coders in the Bay because you can't be bothered to get anyone a visa. Do they mix blood in their protein shakes every morning? In their silence. Definitely like the top candidate. Him and Elon Musk are both going to make halt. It's just like, if we're talking about from fallout, then Peter Teal is going to be like the enclave and Elon Musk is going to do the Brotherhood of Steel and... The Brotherhood of Steel sounds so much like a date. It's from fallout from the 80s.

So I think we've kind of got this image of this industry, which is... I think the best way to understand it almost is going back to my two favorite bros of history, Adorno and Horkheimer, talking about the dialectic of enlightenment and how using sort of reason and sort of attempting to sort of reason out all of our social structures. We were able to free ourselves in the shackles of feudalism, but just put ourselves in new shackles on the basis of stuff like concepts like meritocracy, which when they're interrogated for more than two minutes, completely fall apart in their own merits, completely crack under pressure due to our enhanced interrogation techniques.

Exactly. When you waterboard the concept of meritocracy. Yeah, hell yeah. But as we know from the Marine guy, actually being waterboarded is fine, actually. Being waterboarded is cool, actually. Like, did you hear about the guy who waterboarded himself to own the lips? I think I saw that on Twitter. Yeah. It's so weird. It's where we see everything.

He's my favorite online person. My favorite part, my favorite thing about most British universities is that they'll do stuff like waterboard one another with pork. What? Really? What? I'm not sure where this is going. I went to one of the two ones, and even I didn't see that. No, that's what I mean, is those two wouldn't do it.

Yeah, the fake Durham. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. So you're told that's the exactly kind of place in Andrews. I've heard stories about this. In York, there was one, and these are all rumors, which are probably true. David Cameron fucked a pig there, too? Yeah, he just went around fucking all the meat. The ancient tradition.

David Cameron doing an inspirational pig fucking tour to school. A pig remage. So they are drugs kids. So in York, they'd be the people who were part of the fake Bullington Club. They doused themselves in port and rum and stuff like that. The funniest one I've heard is in Durham. So Durham is filled with people who are always, always resentful of the fact they never got into Oxbridge.

So they kind of go to Durham for the kind of experience of it, but not quite getting there, and also knowing that it's not quite that. Same great taste, 100% Oxbridge free. So apparently what they did was they dressed up in tail coats and stuff, and they went to like one of the working men's clubs in Central Durham and started like trying to troll them. Yeah, I mean, that was pretty much it. You just got the shit kicked out of them.

I mean, I mean, I love that. Dressing up extra fancy to get my fucking head caved in by a bunch of very reasonable people. That was your first year at Oxford, right? You only did one year at Oxford. Yeah, no, I wasn't there for very long. I think there was an immigration thing. Yeah, right, right, right. I think Durham is like a long game, like reality TV show where they're just saying,

what if we put the dumbest posh people in the country in a town with Jordies for three years of their life? Like what will happen? I think that's the... Well, people will get waterboarded with port. Yeah, and they're doing that to themselves. That's before they even encounter the Jordies. That's a great thing.

I'd say kind of what I like about... Britain and American ruling classes are both like completely odious and venal and need to be overthrown immediately. The American ruling class has this idea that it's really earned its place. British ruling class fetishizes the idea that it hasn't earned its place at all, and that it's going to sort of just be as dumb as possible, as frequently as possible, and as frivolously as possible. I do respect that more.

I think, no, that's actually a really, really great way to characterize it. I think that is kind of why a lot of Americans, and just like the whole American culture, is that it's better because it is meritocratic, because it's about people having actually earned their place without, like you were saying, without interrogating this idea of what it means to earn. Whether that their idea of whether they deserve something is just something that is shaped by what they've seen in popular culture, by preconceived biases. This whole idea of meritocracy is one where it's just, like you're saying,

it just completely falls apart. But it's good enough for now that it'll let some perpetuate the kind of status quo. We're talking about the sort of, in talking about the general sort of shape, and almost like the psychoses of this industry. I kind of want to transition to where the bright spots are, because one thing that's been occurring frequently in the kind of tech news, is workers at Apple, and Google, and Facebook, and stuff are, they are agitating to not sell things like facial recognition services

to the Department of Homeland Security, and so forth. As far as they can tell, many of these pushes have actually been successful, which I'll be perfectly honest, I'm kind of surprised by that. Yeah, no, that's definitely something that's been very new for this industry. It's basically unprecedented for this industry. This idea of tech workers in the software industry, deciding that they are actually workers, first and foremost, and that their interests lie with fellow workers,

and that they actually have some collective powers, workers. That's not really something we've seen before. Usually people identify with their company, right? They're like, oh, I'm an employee at Google, I'll just do whatever Google wants me to do. And there's very little history of people pushing back against that, and if they do, it's usually individual. And then they'll just get fired, or they'll just quit.

Like James DeMore. Oh, yeah, yeah. He was fired for being too high IQ. He was too smart. He was too smart for Google. And now he and that guy who got evicted from his parents' house are both correspondents at InfoWars. Getting a job at Hentry on.

They're InfoWars comedy podcast now. Is James DeMore and Michael Rotunda? InfoWars is a comedy podcast, come on. So actually, I was at Left Forum, which is this big conference in New York City. And there is a... What's the political standpoint? Forums.

It's pro something awful. And so Tech Workers Coalition had a table, and I was there for quite a bit of it. And at one point, this guy comes up to us and is like, oh, so you guys are for building worker power in tech. Do you mean like James DeMore? And I was like, no. Not exactly.

James DeLess of that, please. What I actually love about this specifically is that they refuse to sell homeland security, like facial recognition software, right? Which would make it hilarious, because that could mean that the downfall of ICE will literally be that they've employed people who are such racist neanderthals

that all brown people look the same to them. Without the aid of computer technology, there's nothing that they can do to stop a wave of Maoist Third Worldism. Oh, God. Yeah, so I guess to go into the whole ICE thing. So a lot of this stuff, I guess just to clarify, a lot of this stuff is still ongoing,

and some of it has been successful, but we don't really know what's going to happen. The most successful recent case was Google. They had this thing called Project Maven, where they had a contract with the Pentagon to provide basically like AI for processing drone images. This is very metal, Geosolind. That's extremely, but Project Maven.

You found out about Project Maven. What did you say, Otacon? No, honestly, they love having these like stupid internal names for everything. It was just like, it was really annoying when I was there. When I was there, I was like, oh my God, this is so cool. You know, I'm part of this really cool like military thing. What kind of aid did you say that was?

It's like that and like climbing walls. How similar is the Silicon Valley stuff to like digital media? So like a lot of the things that you say about your experience working in these companies, it kind of echoes the experiences that I've had working in digital media companies, and the mentality because both the companies that I used to work for, one of them is currently undergoing like its own unionization.

The other one sort of succeeded, but it didn't. The bosses were like very good at like crushing a lot. But even in both those situations, like the process of getting to the point where they could ratify a union came at the cost of jobs. It came at the cost of like getting great. It came at the cost of like severing relationships with people because it was all built on this idea that like we exist in the system.

Like the workspace that we have is its own contained system and you don't need anything external like workers unions because you can trust us. You know, we have snack rooms. We will give you like, you know. We live in a society. Yeah, we live in a society. We live in a fun, cuddly experience economy.

Yeah, and I remember like a lot of the stuff that a lot of the stuff that like I used to get as a staff member were just things like, you know, yeah, we got like climbing. We got opportunities to go climbing walls. Um, there was like giveaway prizes where you could go abroad if you've like got X number of like hits on posts and stuff. And a lot of it was modeled on like technology, right? It was like this idea of these these guys who kind of really liked Silicon Valley

were like, how do we apply this stuff to media? I sort of feel like in some senses, the whole tech industry is like so much worse because it's been allowed to like at a certain point, media companies like have to be media companies. They can't just like go full tech. But if you're a tech company, you can go full tech. Um, and you'd be never go full tech, be aiding for you to fucking say that. VXS is just like become so much worse.

And I imagine like how that must impact on work is. Yeah, I think that that's a really interesting case. I mean, I've been pretty impressed at all the unionization that's been happening within a lot of these like these media companies, right? And a lot of them are like, like you're saying modeled on tech companies in some ways, but it's a bit different because I think for one, there's, um, you have to separate the material factors and the ideological factors. And I think in tech, the ideological factors are a little bit different

and they're really strong, right? And it's like there, there's a reason that like, you know, diversity in the tech industry is so shit, and that it's probably not going to get better like anytime soon. It's just because the people who are there, they're so convinced that they're so brilliant that they got everything, um, because they deserved it. And it's just women don't understand video. Oh yeah, exactly. Women don't. They're just, there's not good at it, right?

Exactly. And if you hire more women, you're just lowering the bar. Like there was an actual venture capitalist who said this in a recorded interview. Women can't double jump. Women just don't understand the subtleties of Epic Mealtime. Women just aren't able to hadoken. Like, I don't know what that means. But wouldn't it's a gaming reference. See, gaming, gaming's for guys, actually.

It's the only space I ever felt safe as a man. What would you do if you were on 22 Kill Street and then suddenly you started menstruating? It would be a disaster. You wouldn't call in a tactical nuke. You'd call in tactical chocolate. Oh, that's what it is. That's what it is.

I've just realized something. All tech workers, all like of these like sort of tech bros, their image of what women are is just Kathy from the comic strip, Kathy. Are you, are you all familiar with that? No, no. Okay, sorry about that. I had a brilliant name. I did it in the comic strip, Kathy.

I had a brilliant simile and you all slept on it. I'm sorry. There are going to be several of our listeners who are really, really enjoying that right now. I was just thinking of Canadian tech bros calling it people's duration. Anyway. Anyway, yeah, okay. So, so.

Right. This is going in weird directions. That's right. We have, we have such a great show. Okay. Yeah. So ideological material factors. So I think the material factors in tech are quite different

just because there is so much money to go around, right? Because these companies have been so good at capturing so much wealth that they're able to pay their employees ridiculous like monster subs. So yeah, yeah, the ones that the ones who are necessary for production, the ones where it's like, it's kind of hard to find people who can do that sort of job. And the ones who are directly feeding into production into what like generates the wealth that these companies capture. So they've been very good at like showering their employees with so much money and benefits.

But at the same time, that's still a fraction of what these employees actually produce for the company in a way, right? Like collectively, all the software engineers, for example, at Google are making a lot more than they're getting. And that's interesting. It is indeed. And like that is what's causing a really interesting like political and social composition of the workforce.

And you have, you have people who just feel like there's no need for them to unionize because they don't understand what benefits union would bring them because they're making so much money. They have such great like benefits, such great salaries. It's just like, just weird. So short termist almost. It, I guess, yeah, yeah. One of my big questions, this is something I've been asking myself for a while.

And it's, it's a question I've never come to a satisfying answer to, which is that if the employees of Facebook were to rise up and seize the means of production at Facebook, what would they seize? Yeah, I know that that is a great question. I think I don't know if that exists anymore. Shit, they would, they would seize all the segues. In your opinion, what would they seize? Yeah.

So I guess just like your aunt's profiles who just like comment on all your photos going like, I haven't seen you in ages. With all the weird old people, the lip-seize in them. Taking, taking quizzes about like what only Fools and Horses character they are or whatever. Never seen only Fools and Horses. Yeah, well, nor is Wendy though. No, we don't get your fucking reference. How does it feel, bitch?

Yeah. So, so I guess like to, to relate a bit to what you're saying before about like, why would tech workers even want to unionize? In this case, in the most recent case with, you know, Project Maven with, with ICE, it's been for ethical reasons. It's been people who are usually somewhat progressive in their politics, realizing that the worlds that they're living in, the companies that they're contributing to are doing things, are complicit in things that they're not happy with.

So with ICE, you know, it was the whole, the videos of the children being detained in cages that really spurred all this reaction among workers at Microsoft and a few other companies as well that have ties to these agencies. And so they realized, we don't actually like this world that we're building. We're going to try to get our, our management to do something about it. And that's still, I mean, that's still ongoing. So what we can, I'd like to go into that in a little more detail. So what, so what, what, what, what Project Maven was, was it was AI facial recognition software?

No, so Project Maven was for drone, drones. Drone, AI drone, sorry, not facial recognition, but what could be bad about drones? AI, it was, it was AIs for drone imaging, right? Basically, yeah. And it was going to be used by ICE to. No, no, so that's different. That's a different case. So the Google case was a few months.

Let's get it, let's get it straight. Google case was a few weeks ago and that actually was someone successful in that there was an open letter and a bunch of Google engineers quit and they ended up getting Google to cancel that contract with the Pentagon. But that, I mean, that's still like one project. And it's like, you know, the US military industrial complex is much bigger than just like one contract. The ICE thing, sorry to break it to anyone.

The ICE thing was, that was more recent. That was a couple of weeks ago. And with that, the main focus was on Microsoft because Microsoft was supplying ICE with a bunch of different digital services and Microsoft tried to downplay it. They're like, oh, we're only giving them access to like email. It looks like you're trying to set up a concentration camp for Mexicans. Do you need some help with that? Yeah.

So that's different. I mean, it's different, but it's interesting that these have all happened around the same time, right? And where it's like, we're suddenly getting all of this press around. And I think it's partly just because, you know, you're just raising consciousness within the tech industry, an industry that traditionally hasn't really had much awareness of this idea of like class consciousness at all. Like it's not a thing you're taught.

Like I remember, I never learned anything about unions or like what, what, what, what does this sort of thing mean? Like what does it mean to build class power? That's not a concept I've ever come across. Something you associate with like coal mining and like it doesn't, Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't think of it as being like computer programmers or whatever. Yeah.

It feels like a relic of an earlier era. And if there's one thing that like, you know, South Virginia's love, it's this like this idea of newness, this idea that they're special, that this is like new, they're breaking new ground. One thing that strikes me, and we sort of talked about it in the beginning was, because it kind of feeds into this question of why don't we kind of view what, when we talk about class power, when we talk about like unionization, why don't we think about like people who work in, you know, technology or work in any sort of like office setting?

Yeah. You know, why is it always like coal miners and Podcasters. Podcasters, obviously, and like, you know, tube drivers and stuff like that. To the listener, we, you may be listening to this several days in advance, but we've recorded the last three episodes, one after the other. So we're still really thinking about what we were talking about yesterday, which was, why is there this liberal conception that the working class must be smeared with

coal dust? That was yesterday, wasn't it? Yeah. I'm so tired. Yeah. And I was thinking like, I was thinking about when I also had my fascination with like Silicon Valley and tech, and I really wanted to like, work and be a coder and stuff. A lot of it is because of like this culture of like hero work.

Yeah. Right. It's like this idea that, so when I, my first job was as a front-end coder, and I knew nothing about coding, so I took this like very, very quick course and a lot of that. I was surprised how much of this kind of very remedial course in programming was so rooted in like the heroes of the tech world. So it wasn't Elon Musk, but it was like Mark Zuckerberg. It was Jack Dorsey from Twitter.

It was Steve. Jack Dorsey famously, famously like the second, after Albert Spear, the second greatest architect of Nazi infrastructure. Steve Jobs is always one that shows up in like those types of slideshows. This is his idea, but like you are so, and also one thing that I've noticed where this culture really permeates is on Instagram. You know, where all these like, like these tech motivational speakers, right, the ones who like push fuel and like weird types of protein powder, and they all like work in like coding

or graphic design or like, you know, they're at home like front-end stuff. And they all kind of just say that, oh, you know, I learnt this myself. And, you know, you don't need to go to, you know, you don't need to go to university or college or anything because look at like Mark Zuckerberg and look at Steve Jobs and all that stuff. And like, there really is this very evident culture of like hero worship, which undermines the idea that in order to achieve like long-term sustainable goals, you need more than just like yourself and a keyboard, right?

It's a type of culture that like they don't, it's not talked about much. And partly that's because it's like been actively pushed out, as you've kind of mentioned, within the infrastructure Silicon Valley. But I think it like speaks to something much higher about just like labor, like what labor markets are and the idea of like, you know, everyone being like self-employed freelancers and contractors and all that stuff. And that's really, you know, the whole idea of like middle-class freelancers and contractors that always rooted in technology, right?

I don't know, does that make any sense? Yeah, I mean, I think there's something interesting about like this idea of what labor markets are and how they function because what I've seen a lot of people in the tech industry just say to anyone who's not doing well, you know, if you're broke, can't make ends meet, just learn to code and you'll get a job. And it has this way of like valorizing the labor market as this determinant of what is good and what is bad, right? And it's like, you have people who are in the tech industry saying, oh, don't bother doing

an arts degree, just do STEM because that's where the money is. As if that's like a good reason to, like, as if that's like, you know, the labor market is brilliant at allocating resources. Maybe beyond art now, art is bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because more of that. Well, because if you just, if you just, and the idea that just doing STEM is, like if you just look at the fucking Jucero.

I know, I know, I know, right? Yeah. Now, I don't, I don't want to go too much into the Jucero because we may have an anniversary episode coming up where we're going to talk about a little bit more. All these humanities students, you know, they can still call their smug shit on all their podcasts, all they like, but could they have come up with the revolution idea of squeezing juice out of a bag? Yeah.

I mean, I think to that I say no. All those people all had STEM degrees. They all had prestigious degrees. They were all former CEOs. They all had beautiful, perfect, immaculate CVs and they got together. And the best thing they could printed on bone, the best thing they could do was, you know, invent nothing. I mean, this goes back to what you're saying about Adorno and Horkheimer, right?

It's just like this pursuit of this pursuit of like reason and rationality as if, and in this way we've kind of like abdicate. Well, Silicon Valley is like abdicated any sort of like moral judgment to the market, right? And, and that just means like investors like venture capitalists are the ones funding this. They're the ones who are saying, okay, yeah, you want to, you want to sell a $700 juicer? Sure. Take my fucking hundred million dollars and build it.

And that is why you have this like catastrophic waste of money that like, I mean, the way I see Silicon Valley is like, so I've started trying to like popularize this idea of abolition when it comes to Silicon Valley. We should abolish Silicon Valley, right? And the reason that's important is because it's structurally The episode title abolished Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's just, it's structurally fucked, right? Like just because of the way money works in the industry and not just within the industry,

but like the role that the tech industry has under capitalism. And the way right now, it's like, it's, it's this way for the, the wealthy to kind of like guard their wealth in this really like dispersed way. And if you think about, you know, how this happened maybe in like an earlier era, right? If you, you have a lot of money, you don't want people, you have like, you know, a ton of food, a ton of resources, you don't want the rabble to come get it. You'll hire like guards to guard your food for you. And then that's kind of like shifted now.

What we have is we have this new guard class is like the people working in Silicon Valley who are, you know, they're, they don't really know what they're doing a lot of the time. They're just doing what they're told. They're getting paid a lot of money for it. But they're essentially just like increasing returns to capital, right? They're, they're making it so that rich people can get more return for their money. And they're also at the same time creating this like corporate, um, neoliberal hellscape where people at the bottom are just like, you know, bargaining with algorithms to try to survive.

Like Deliveroo actually announced this thing recently, where they're just going to basically change the pay structure for Deliveroo writers. Oh, this can only be good. Yeah. And it's like, and what it means is that Deliveroo writers are for the most part going to make less money. And it's like hard for them to bargain with that. The pay structure is, is, is what that there's there. I imagine they've, they've introduced it under the guise of flexibility.

Yeah. Yeah. It's always about flexibility, right? And it's like, it's what people always forget. Yeah. They can bend you into an even more convenient position to fuck you in the ass. Kind of, kind of. Yeah. Because it's that if you ever introduce flexibility into a system where you have unequal power, flexibility will always redown to the benefit of the more powerful because then they can flex it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, I think, I think that's a huge, I always think it's just sort of slightly,

this is sort of overlooked sometimes, because that one of the main functions of the tech industry is to, is to perpetuate this myth that the workers and the owners are part of this same team. And that we're all, we're not, we don't have opposed interests. We're all working together in an organized way to solve collective problems. Build an incredibly epic, like vacuum tunnel. I fucking hate that shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's this idea that, oh no, well, Elon Musk, from Elon Musk down to the guy who commutes two hours

in to cater at their, you know, all gluten free, organic category. Clean up all the remains if they could have been crushed by pianos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Like, but that's it. It's a living, but that they're all in it together. Yeah. And that the fact that we can say, no, all of our oppositions, all of where our interests clash, we can sort of smooth over those divides that advance enough algorithm.

Yeah. It's sort of a sleight of hand trick. It is. And I think what makes it worse is like the, the material dimension there as well, because a lot of these tech companies, they'll give out stock or stock options to the workers. And it's usually only just like the, the software engineers or the product managers, the people who are directly working on production. Yeah. The guy cleaning up the piano squash remains isn't getting any of that shit. No, no, exactly. They'll, they'll get fired as soon as they're done cleaning up the piano remains. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

But the point is no piano remains to clean up, then why do we need you? Exactly. Exactly. It's just efficiency. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like, you see, like when Tesla announced layoffs, like everyone who's laid off was like, I was so honored to work here for you at 10 minutes. Incredible, like boot liqueur, right? And so it's weird, but it's like, it's partly the, the fact that, you know, if you're getting stock in this company, you feel like it's yours. Like, but it's also the psychological element because of the way people talk about it.

You know, you're, you're excited to be building a company together. And I remember I was reading the Elon Musk biography in like 2016. Oh, yeah. And it was like, it was a very... It'd be a future episode. Have you guys read it? Because it's, it's like a, it's a flattering biography, but it's good. Like if you read it with a critical lens, I wish I could read it again,

because it's, it's fascinating. If you read about people who worked at like SpaceX, right? We're like, they feel like they don't think of it in terms of class. They don't think of it in terms of their workers. And Elon Musk is the one who gets all the credit. They're just like, this is such a cool project. I'm so excited to work on it. And they've been kind of like distracted by how cool the problem is.

I mean, at the time it was like, it was actually really cool. Like the early days of SpaceX, they were building things that no one had really done before, except I guess NASA, right? But they just, they didn't think of it like that way. I don't, I don't even know what it was, but they were just so distracted by the problem. Because the private company was doing it. That's the key thing. Yeah.

No, it's like that they just didn't think of it that way, right? It's like that was just an element that kind of escaped what they were working on. It was like, they were just totally all in on the product. And they're like, we're going to make this product the best that we can. They didn't even have time to consider the, you know, the elements that, you know, maybe we on the left would think of. They just didn't know. It was only the Soviet Union that could murder dogs with the vacuum of space, but listen to this.

I mean, there was actually a really good thread on Twitter, which is like comparing Silicon Valley to Soviet Union. Oh yeah, that was good. That was good. We've retweeted the fuck out of it. I read it as a long time Russia resident had done it, it resonated in a big way. Because the Soviet Union never ended. That's the other thing you have to remember.

Well, it's just got worse. But that's the interesting thing, right? Like, is that for all the good the Soviet Union did, and it was considerable, the thing to remember is that its faults were, I think, based on the overcentralization of power among what essentially became a state corporation. You can see the same thing happening in Silicon Valley. The same sort of the same kind of the same kind of unity of almost a sort of kitsch way of looking at the world is sort of very distorted, sort of over metric.

And this sort of same like valorization of failure as success, a sort of twisting of the idea that there can be a sort of a moral judgment that can be made that isn't just sort of bendable to the whims of power. The valorization of success for me is the wildest thing about Silicon Valley. Because you have all these people like you're saying who believe in this like massive meritocracy, like, oh, I make so much money because what I do is so valuable. So I build the right horse. But most of these companies don't even make any fucking money.

They're all funded by venture capital, like Facebook loses money, doesn't it? Facebook's doing well. They used to lose money. Yeah, yeah. Uber loses money. Like all these like supposedly like the great market disruption success story. I mean, I think it's a little more complicated than that because some of these companies are losing money because it's like a strategy, right?

And it's like the point is not it. They think that their success will be not because of the money, but because they managed to build something great and the money is kind of like just justifies it and validates in a really weird way. Like it's a really twisted ideology. It doesn't make sense. And I've also seen and you see kind of like the inverse of it when failure is also valorized.

There's this culture of saying that like, oh, it's okay if you fail as an entrepreneur because you learn. And I remember this really incredible case where there's this company, I'm not going to name them, but they raise I think seven million and they sold for less than a million. And they, okay. So here's the thing. They sold to a company that actually offered to buy my company,

which is why I was kind of like laughing because we got the same offer as them and we didn't raise any money like comparable to what they raised. So this company, yeah, you know, they sold for much less than they raised, which means obviously none of the employees got shit. And most of the investors lost some of their money too. But then the way the founder phrased it, she was like, you know, we, we did our best, but like we ultimately we couldn't take off, but I'm really, I really enjoyed the ride along the way.

And the best part was that all these VCs were lining up to say, you know, she was a great, she was a great founder. If she ever does another company, I'm going to write her the first check. You know, she's like, she did a great job. She landed the ship and it's incredible. It's a land of the ship and a huge pile of shit. She landed it. It's a carnival of idiocy, but it would be funny

if it weren't sort of churning people into dust underneath it. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of people failed early in their careers. You know, some people, they told them, you're never going to go to art school. Next thing you know, chance for a thousand year ride. Oh dear. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like it would be funny if it weren't for the fact that this was like, this is actual real resources being, you know,

out and like funnels. Did you wear a funnel towards this really disgusting world? It's just pissing it all away when it could actually be used for better things. So easy to feel hopeless if you forget that there are these glimmers of sort of class consciousness and worker consciousness. And whether that's happening among the caterers and bus drivers or among the coders who sort of are beginning to wake up to the fact that most of what they produce is just being taxed away from them by their boss.

Um, taxation is theft and yeah, taxation is theft when it comes to your fucking boss and that they're able to pay the boss tax. I pay the home tax and that they're able to resist either. They're able to kind of begin to think of themselves a labor force enough to resist on a moral basis, things that they find repugnant. Yeah. No, it's, I think it's like pretty inspiring. And what I found is that, um, so like I, when I'm on Twitter, sometimes I'll just like tweet things that are kind of like radical and hang on.

Let me finish. I tweet things about like, you know, tech workers needing to like resist, right? And it's like some people who are like actually in tech do follow me on Twitter, mostly from like when I was still in tech. And in the last few days, so like I, I was, I was on a Tiskey sour on Monday and there was like a clip of me saying that like tech workers are workers basically and they need to realize that they're, um, their interests lie with like fellow workers, right? Not, not like their bosses necessarily.

And I've seen like among the retweets, there have been people who are like actually in tech working at some of these big tech companies. And it's like, that's just really exciting. The fact that they're comfortable enough, like publicly retweeting the stuff. And that they, you know, they seem to believe it. And so it's starting to happen. I mean, that's just like anecdotal. It's kind of hard to get like actual stats for this.

No one's like calling up tech workers and being like, do you think of yourself as a worker? But it's like, it's like about your current unionization service. Yeah. And I mean, actually, so going back to what you're saying about like Facebook user sees our Facebook employee seizing the means of production. I think that's a really interesting question. And the way to answer that is like, you have to look at it like broader more structurally because what is Facebook right now?

Like we, let's not think of Facebook as a product because that's like, that's almost like a two myopic way of looking at it. Facebook is, um, is like a gatekeeper right now in this, in the global valley chains of commodity production because they control Facebook and Google together control, I think like two thirds of all digital advertising is going on in the United States. And that means they serve really key roles in just like commodity production. They're essentially taking a rent, right?

They're like extracting rent from these valley chains anytime someone buys something that gets advertised on Facebook in some way, right? Like part of that money, which maybe could have gone to the labor if they had, like the people actually making these products, if they had more power, is instead going to these companies at the top of these chains, just extracting rent. And so if we think about it in terms of that, then it's like, what, what are you see? Like what's, what are the means of production? Right? And it's like, it gets really complicated because,

because it's an advertising company, it's not directly about producing things. It's about, um, the distribution and it's like, we kind of need to, um, update our understanding of how this works because I know, I know like Marx talked a little about, um, you know, the fact that, uh, the costs of like advertising, whatever are, you know, they're not directly part of the, of production. They're part of like distribution in the market. And it's, that just like makes it really hard for us to think about this in a Marxist lens. You have to like update that a little bit and figure out how do you deal with these

big tech companies who are like really changing the world and changing the way the economy works in this way that just like, you know, Marx could never have predicted probably. Because that's the weird thing is by seizing on an entirely unnecessary element of production, right? Like, because marketing only occurs when overproduction occurs. And then you need to rely on pure commodity fetishism to sort of distribute your products. Because Facebook, I would never have bought a spinning. Because you can't rely on use value. But then again, one like Facebook, like for all of its faults, like Facebook does

provide something that people consider valuable. It provides for, it provides a, a stable way to stay in touch with people from your life. It provides the album that you might need, you know, when you, when you buy it, provides Spain 08. Always, always there when you need it. Provides the meat. It provides Boomer memes. It provides baby boomers with important ways to share about how Donald Trump is going to put Obama in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. And like the endless minions, minions, like meme tropes, massive shout out to the Twitter

account at absurd conserver memes, which is one of my absolute favorites. It also shout out to cursed Boomer images. Yeah. That's another good one. No, but it's, but it's, it's at Facebook on the back of, and this again, it says, because it's all full of contradictions on the back of this thing that's totally unnecessary and enabled by something, by marketing, which is a pernicious force is able to provide a service to people that they value. Yeah. And so I think the question is how do, how can you organize labor power to excise the

marketing from Facebook and then simply provide people the infrastructure to stay connected with one another, which they value? I mean, that's a billion dollar question, right? And that, that is, you're right. Like that is the right question. How do you separate the, the good parts of the technology produced by these companies from their just like really shitty business model? And, and that's a question that can apply to basically all of these companies, right? And I remember, so when, when Uber got its TFL license revoked, like last September,

and I remember just like thinking about in terms of, you know, Uber's the technology is kind of useful because it's about coordinating things, right? But right now it's just, it's being used in a way that is not good for most of us. It's not not good for the drivers and for us as citizens, it means we're relying on this like network of, you know, like individual cars when we should be really building better public transit. So we don't need this as much in the first place, right? So you have to figure out a way to like extract the good parts of this technology from the bad parts. And for that, you do need work or power. You need people in the tech industry who know how these platforms work, who know what they should be doing to be able to figure out like

what can you build in its place? And that's something where it feels like you need on some level some sort of like government to like get involved in some way, but it's like hard to know how. And you also need people who are in these industries to, yeah, to like unionize, right? And to actually like use technology for good for everyone. For me, this is what's so good about the current political hellscape that we inhabit is because like people in these industries are waking up to the idea that they can actually just change this themselves without the government if they like hold their own companies to ransom. Because before they were like, well, if I just vote for the Democrats, everything will be fine.

Whereas now you can see that like the Republicans are like immigrant concentration camps and the Democrats are like, maybe a bit less ice, maybe vanilla ice. They're like, well, let's be simple to each other. Right? That's what they're saying. Like, they're completely just like losing the threat and it's just like the total collapse of the center ground right now. And no, you're right. Like it's just in Trudeau. Like it's it's awful, but at the same time it's opening up new possibilities. And this is almost like, I don't want to sound too like accelerationist, but maybe this is the only way. Like the only way out is like through.

This is what it took is that is that is under is that under successive sort of center left and center right, but fundamentally liberal governments. His Cameron was a liberal. George Bush was a liberal. Clinton was liberal. Obama was liberal. All these people were liberals is that fundamentally there was a there was a voter contingent that was basically kept comfortable in the middle classes. This sort of subaltern class has never has never been comfortable. And the and the and the the accelerationist case is that you have to make the middle classes uncomfortable. You have to shock them somehow.

And so I I don't think water pooled the middle classes with Paul. I think and I'm not saying that ice is in any way worthwhile or justifiable, but one of the facts of ice and one of the facts of the excesses of the use of ice and ice's roles of rogue agency has been to push ordinary liberals who would consider themselves a political beyond the pale and forced them to become political. I imagine many of these coders who are taking action against ice, which we have to remember, was doing all of this shit under Obama too. But the sort of gross excesses of it has forced them that the field they have to

take action within their workplaces. And every time you get a juice in a pub, 25 cubes, a bullish ice, there's like there's like 50 millijews in that glass. Don't think I don't know. I don't think I haven't made it. You ain't fooling me with those cubes, homeboy. I think then in that case, your policy proposition, abolish Silicon Valley is downright reasonable. I mean, the way I would say it is like, it's not just about like, you know, fucking new king, the region or something, right? Like that's not what I mean. Let's not rule it out.

That's not what I mean when I say about Silicon Valley. What I mean is the point is to restructure society and the economy in such a way that the excesses that we see with Silicon Valley are not possible, right? It's like, it's a fundamental transformation of the economy because the reason Silicon Valley is so bad right now, it's not, it's not like it came out of nowhere, right? This is just like, you know, a microcosm that amplifies the problems with capitalism. And so, you know, if you want to abolish Silicon Valley, well, no, you got to change a lot of things. What are these problems with capitalism?

Are there any fundamental contradictions to capitalism? We should do an episode on this. Dude, guys, do you think maybe that like capitalism is not that great? Holy shit. I just realized something. Play Silicon Valley with Nature Valley. Everyone's, everyone's just making granola. Don't be an anarcho-primitivist. Someone asked her on the Trash Future Curious category, anarcho-primitivists. And I was like, no, of course we're not.

Absolutely not. Every, every anarchist's parents have a zone one flat that's very swanky. Do not trust people who say they're anarchists. Stop sub-tweeting people on our podcast. Nate, edit that out. Okay. So, Wendy, thank you very much for coming out to the caliphate today. Yes, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me and helping us out with this.

The lads, thank you for being here and football's coming home. It's coming home. It's coming home. It's coming. I still don't really know what that means, but okay. It's coming home when, when, when, when football turn around to you and say, daddy, I'm coming home. Hand smashing nut button.

We're going to get cocks by Croatia. When you, when you nut, but football keeps sucking. I know that the, the, uh, the hand should be smashing a button that says knighthood. No, knighthood for Jordan Pickford though. Oh hell yeah. Hand of jord. Not to be confused with Jordan Peterson. Jordan Pickford's in Jordan. Jordan Pickford pick to Patrick Pickle Peterson before criticizing the net of another

consider the lobster with its enormous actually attempting to put the ball in the goal. You're merely conforming to the feminization of society. I actually went through a Jordan Peterson phase. I'm sorry to admit. Oh, this episode's not over then. Oh yes. Slam it in. What was your favorite rule?

No, so it wasn't that. It was like, it was ages ago back before like he, you know, warmed his way into public consciousness. Like I, I watched Jordan Peterson before he was cool. You're an OG. You're a hip surgeon piece. I think this was like 2016 and I watched like a bunch of his videos on YouTube and I was like, okay, this is interesting.

I mean, he was doing like unboxing and like epic bacon challenges. He was like, I'm, I'm unboxing a new gender. I hope it's one of the only two that there are. I'm going to eat 14 cans of whipped cream to demonstrate why women are inherently weak. I'm going to eat more cans of whipped cream than any woman in the workplace ever could. Don't forget to like share and subscribe. So wait, what do you see in him? I'm going to prank my mom.

So Jordan Peterson's pedophile uncle Vito, oh God. Okay. No, so I just, I watched like some lectures that he recorded, right? It was like him talking about myths and society and gender and I remember at the time, okay, this is kind of sad, but like I was going through a phase where I just felt like I needed to read more and like learn more about the world. That's how he gets you. That's how he gets you.

He gets you at the vulnerable stage. No, but I was lucky in that I was watching those and I was read like watching other philosophy videos, but at the same time I started reading like left stuff. Okay. So, and then I was like, you're trying to be like the true centrist, right? I didn't even know like what he was ideologically. I just, I didn't know.

I just, someone recommended his videos to me. I was like, okay, I'll check them out. You're taking a holistic approach. Well, I was like, I want to understand more like social science humanity stuff because I had never done any of the stuff in years. You study lobsters. Did you hear about this philosopher who I think is very interesting? And he kind of like, he kind of gets everything really well.

His name is Joe Rogan. Dude, have you ever tried DMT? Actually, I think my mind's. I think Wendy hit on the best description of Jordan Peterson inadvertently because you said like, I was trying to get into reading more. And then I discovered Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is totally the philosopher for people who've just heard of reading. These things that you kind of open them and there are words that are like the funny shapes

in science. No, it's cause it's cause everyone who reads him is always like usually a STEM person. And so they've never like heard of social science philosophy before. That's it. And so like, oh my God, he just invented society. Yeah. It's like, it sounds deep. If you are like, if you're like, dumb as shit.

Yeah. Well, it's like you seem very shallow understanding. Long tweet called 12 rules for life. Yeah. So, okay. So I think it's really interesting, right? Like that you were on this knife edge of you could have fallen into going on the Joe Rogan experience instead of many less popular, but cooler podcasts.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I guess, I mean, I think what drew me to the left is the fact that like it, it is ideologically more coherent and appealing in a lot of ways, right? And it's like, maybe there's an alternate universe where I just like went full like fascist. I don't think so. But I think it's just like, you know,

It's extremely big dickhead. I'm like Joe Rogan who definitely showers. But I do think, I mean, I think my own personal story gives me hope for a lot of other people I know where it's like, it's not that they're just, it's not that they're incorrigible. It's that they just haven't been exposed to a lot of the ideas on the left. And I think that if they were to be exposed in the right way and to have time thinking about them, they'd be like, Oh yeah, actually, this makes sense. Hell yeah.

That's how we abolish Silicon Valley. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That's literally how we do it. Radicalized tech. We're gonna do all these kids on the right.

They're from broken homes. You know, like they were just, if they were taken in by nurturing left-wing podcast, we could, we could, we could be the change. Totally do three men and a baby. What is that? It's a movie or a show or something from the 80s. Sounds like a snuff film. Night.

Um, okay. So Wendy, for, I think, I think I tried to do the outro, but then you said the Jordan Peterson thing and we had to, no, no, we had to stick on it. Do you not apologize for that? That was the best way for the show. You don't apologize for that at all. Never apologize. Never apologize.

It shows weakness. Never apologize to children or they'll tear you limb from limb. Have you ever seen a lobster? Apologize. No. Um, Wendy, thank you very much for coming out. This has been a long time coming. And I'm very glad to have had you on.

It's been a pleasure. It really has. Thanks for having me. This has been fun. Thank you for being smart because we're so dumb. We're so dumb. Thank you to JinSeng for our theme song. Here we go.

You can find unspotify. You can find us unspotify now. Yeah, we're rappers now. Do we, do we get like some pitiful sum of money every time someone streams us unspotify? I don't know. I don't think so. I feel like, because if you have a song unspotify, you get money. Podcasts are different because they're worse than songs.

Depends on the song. We're rappers now. Yeah. I mean, it's not like we're doing that song Goddy. Should we claim that it's rap? It's like really freeform experimental rap. It's very freeform beatless rap music. Yeah, we're soundcloud rappers.

We'll become one of those court cases that's taught in every law school, like trash future versus Spotify. Trash Future versus Chief Keef. And he just came and murdered all of us. No. So thank you to JinSeng and also commodify your descent with a t-shirt from Lil Comrade. Yeah. And also, you know what?

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Good night, everybody. Good night.