The Lawyers of Silicon Valley

I recall that when Andrew Yang ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for the Presidency back in 2019-2020 it seemed that many a person thought he had a "tech" background. He didn't. He was in fact a lawyer, not a computer scientist. It also seems that he spent his working life in the Northeast. Yet even when you pointed this out to people they still insisted he was a Silicon Valley technologist--because he had been associated with high-technology enterprises in various capacities.

So far as I know Mr. Yang never misrepresented his educational and professional background, work experience or personal knowledge, certainly not in such a way as to make one think he had been anything other than a lawyer who after that training had later been involved with various businesses, among which there were "tech" enterprises--and all this, again, in the Northeast. However, that in its way makes the misapprehension more worthy of remark, rather than less so. Even when one sets aside the specifically geographical foolishness ("tech" does happen in other places besides California's Bay area!) the public has had certain associations instilled in its minds here, namely tech = technical "genius" = single-handed inventor of some hugely important piece of hardware or software that should make us Oooh and Aaah.

All of this sounds extremely simple-minded, even by the standards of the Edisonade claptrap so beloved of certain ideologues, but then, that is what conventional wisdom tends to be, one reason why defenders of the status quo so fear and hate those who call things by their proper names--with tech no exception. The equation of tech "entrepreneurship" with personal "genius" and personal invention that "brings good things to life" has been crucial for the legitimation of its fortunes in the popular mind, and indeed for the whole economic model that has enabled the making of those fortunes, neoliberalism. "Love your cell phone? Then you have to accept the whole package, including all the things you probably don't love about Actually Existing Capitalism, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE," they tell them, and a good many people readily believe it to the point of shouting down anyone who tells them differently, believing their personal selfishness touched whenever anyone points to the sweatshops of the Pearl River delta. Meanwhile a great many people (among them, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin!) work hard indeed to sustain the myth of the overlords of tech as supermen who all by themselves made everything that matters, rather than just having been in a position to benefit from the work of others because, within the framework of a particular social system, they had "picked their parents well," displayed quite ordinary business training (a J.D. or an MBA rather than a BS--or at least, that particular kind of BS) and quite ordinary business shrewdness (buy low and sell high), and the entirely undeserved good luck that a Friedrich von Hayek, unlike the singers of meritocracy, was honest enough to admit plays a very large part in the life of a capitalist society. Meanwhile even those who have had some technical training, and done some technical work themselves, were apt to, after an expensive private education, raise sums of money from friends and relatives that are unimaginable for the 99 percent in an age when a significant minority cannot raise a mere $400 in an emergency, all as they traded on family connections in other ways even less imaginable for most (What, you don't have a parent who hobnobs with Fortune 500 CEOs?) that soon meant they were not writing any code or doing anything else that might be called "engineering" (unless you mean, of course, "financial engineering").

By contrast those who actually do the brain-work of creating the products are individuals lured into their cubicles by the promise of a Great Career who instead found themselves toiling obscene hours in metro areas with an obscene cost-of-living that eats up every penny of those initially colossal-looking salaries as they barely scrape by until the time comes when they are laid off to be replaced by fresher, hungrier, cheaper and generally more up-to-date and docile personnel as they depart their supposedly Great Career to, for lack of alternatives, begin their next--perhaps teaching in a public school, perhaps stacking shelves at a big box store, with very little to show for their youth as the dreams of techno-financial glory grow ever more remote. Because were people to know the truth they would be much less awestruck, and much less tolerant of the stupid and vulgar swagger of the "tech entrepreneurs," and the way that the media (in lieu of another word beginning with the letter "f" that more accurately but less socially acceptably describes what they do) flatters them. Still, it may be that the narrative, a piece of idiocy from the start, is losing its hold on the popular imagination, with not just the left that could never have bought into it given what it really means to be of the left (i.e. not some postmodernist identity politics-monger), but persons of the mainstream, and even the right, seeing through the increasingly wide cracks in the facade, and spotting behind it enough of the unattractive reality to make them a lot more cynical about the narrative they have been peddled.