One of the biggest mistakes I made in my journalism career lay in assuming tech companies would have the back of their workers, because they depend on human talent rather than muscle. (The picture is from a book on computer coding.)
The tech oligarchs who made their piles in the last decade have become just like other oligarchs. No worse, but certainly no better.
The latest round of layoffs is especially egregious. It’s not how many were let go. They were mostly the pandemic overhang, an adjustment as life returns to “normal.” It’s how they were done, and who was targeted. Firing via e-mail? No warning for families or teams? It sends the message that people don’t matter.
To the oligarchs they don’t. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel – they’re one-way guys. They care about themselves, no one else. They don’t really care about technology, or what it can do. All they care about is how much money it is making for them right now.
There was, once, a difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The wealth creation of the last decade eliminated the difference. Wall Street doesn’t care about the long-term, about the need to keep investing in the new across the chasm of a recession, or the talent that is tech’s raw material. It cares about this quarter, about today’s trade.
What’s funny is that the horrors now being visited on the Valley are 10 times worse on Wall Street. Layer after layer of management has been eliminated, as the industry has gone online. More and more of its wealth is in fewer and fewer hands, and those hands care nothing about the people who made the wealth. Just as they don’t care about the technologists of the Valley.
If the current era has an analog in American history, it’s to what we call the Progressive Era. Plutocrats accepted regulation because it was in their best interest to do so. They did it grudgingly, but they did it.
What tech needs is for tech plutocrats to accept a compromise on behalf of their infrastructure, the human talent that built them. We can’t depend on the noblesse oblige of the Roosevelt family. The necessary force will come from workers. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as above-it-all because we work on keyboards and may work at home. We’re no different than our great grandparents in their sweatshops. They stood up. We need to do the same.
There are many ways to stand up. Open source is one way. Politics is another way. If action to improve our lives through technology is to come, it’s going to be pushed from the bottom up.
From us. From you.
