is the “managerial class” in the room with us right now

i’m not gonna pretend to be the communist understander, but the idea that capitalists would pay workers to work against their own class interests (and against other workers) is a feature of capitalism

OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there’s a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you’re gonna hit it big! In this way, it’s important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.

And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you’re given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There’s a lot of persuasive points here that still aren’t widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.

There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of “new features” over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn’t really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.

But even then, I still don’t trust OP’s conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude’s writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like

The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line, that line being drawn by the rich, the haute bourgeoisie.

Replace “righteousness of the proletariat” with “grace of the saved,” “privileged status” with “fallen nature,” “haute bourgeoisie” with “liberal elite” etc. and you’d have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude’s a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.

fortunately the account (that i never interacted with) has my account blocked, so i couldn’t make them angry by pointing out they’re engaging in typical intelligentsia behaviour of assuming that only heavy industry workers are workers.

This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…

The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].

Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.

Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.

https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932

Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.

I don’t really agree with the second part, but the first part rings true. It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript. As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.