The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized | Los Angeles Review of Books

The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism by Robert Dorschel. MIT Press, 2025. 246 pages.

DEFINING TECH WORKERS in sociopolitical terms can be tricky. Robert Dorschel devotes the first half of his compendious study The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (2025) to pinning down this butterfly. In purely economic terms, tech workers are generally well compensated and well educated. They hold a relatively comfortable social position, which suggests they would be satisfied with things as they are. This ought to make them conservative. But politically, that designation gets muddied. Techies tend to be young (a traditionally left demographic), urban-dwelling (ditto), and progressive almost by definition. So: pro-union, Democratic (or at least not Republican), culturally omnivorous, and generally “woke” in the positive sense.

For his study, Dorschel interviewed 52 tech workers in the United States and, presumably to factor out regional bias, Germany. What he found is what you might expect: his interviewees mostly held progressive or even farther left views, but they were also protective of their social and economic status. To put it more bluntly, they expressed admirable intentions and talked a good game but rarely used their power to effect social or political change. Dorschel writes:

While my research points to a genuine longing for social change that can manifest in action beyond self-presentations, most of my interviewees’ articulations of social critique were not accompanied by reports of practices corresponding with this critique.

And:

The gap between their expressed values and reported practices suggests that while tech workers identify with ideals of social justice and critiques of power structures, there is very little evidence of these commitments being enacted in tangible, impactful ways.

And:

While there are some gestures toward institutional engagement in their general subjectivation—evident, for instance, in occasional protests, open-source activities, practices of workplace solidarity, and emergent union formations—the typical tech worker subject I encountered remains firmly anchored in an individualist [that is, self-interested] modus operandi.

You get the idea. Dorschel’s interviewees repeatedly, for example, expressed pro-union sentiments and sympathized with the precarity of gig workers, with whom they share a class position and yet also don’t. Yet they cherished their own social and economic status, and insofar as they engaged in activism, it was mostly a commitment to addressing the cultural and ableist biases built into application interfaces and data. Liberal in their attitudes and adventurous in their day-to-day lives, they are at the same time acutely aware of the dangers inherent in activism and skeptical of their power to change the status quo. They want, in Dorschel’s words, to “explore the world without risk.”

They differ from members of the traditional upper middle class in several ways. Contemporary tech workers favor “ordinariness,” preferring low-key, socially inclusive activities, like “walking their dog or having a barbecue with friends,” to more exclusive activities, like golf. Sensitive to the environmental damage inherent in extensive travel, they pursue “the right ecological way of life.” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), claimed that under neoliberalism, the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which argues that the system leads to homogeneity and alienation, has replaced the “social critique,” which opposes capitalism on the basis of its inherent inequality and exploitation. Dorschel’s findings suggest that the social critique may have reemerged among contemporary tech workers. Most of his interviewees, for example, seem deeply sensitive to gender and racial discrimination within the tech world, as well as to the precariousness of foreign workers chained to tech companies through temporary work visas. But at a time of economic uncertainty and increasing job insecurity in the previously immune tech sector, they also crave safety, shunning the subjectivity of “post-Fordism,” according to which workers are likely to see themselves as serial entrepreneurs.

Dorschel’s interviewees were pulled from two distinct groups, data scientists and UX designers (developers of user interfaces), and their responses highlight an interesting split in the tech world. UX designers work directly with users and need to understand how non-techies think and use the apps the designers help create. Data scientists, on the other hand, work only with data and generally don’t have to give a lot of thought to real-world interactions. It’s much more common for UX designers to be women, to earn less than data scientists, and to lack graduate degrees. This leads to a certain subtle bias among data scientists, who tend to devalue UX designers as “less technical” (not a compliment) and “more creative” (sort of a backhanded compliment). UX designers, for their part, possess more cultural capital. Having to keep the needs of users from all walks of life in mind, they tend to be more well rounded and empathetic, and they value social and communication skills. UX designer Tara explains:

Most of the time, I talk to my business stakeholders and participants when possible. So, most of [my] time actually [I spend] understanding these needs. I spend more time in the beginning of the whole project understanding the needs, and less time really coming up with the [design] variations.

Still, interviewees from both groups noted the importance of these “soft” skills, which hardcore techies from decades past might not have.

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Some encouraging public activism on the part of tech workers has been in the news recently, including anti-ICE protests by employees of Google, Salesforce, and Palantir. But to the casual observer, there are otherwise few signs that attitudes in the tech world have changed much since the publication of Paulina Borsook’s book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (2000), a depressing examination of the antisocial, hyper-individualist culture then dominant in Silicon Valley. (Borsook’s book is set to be reissued later this year.) On the contrary, things seem to have gotten worse. A recent article in the Financial Times describes what writer Hannah Murphy refers to as “grindcore” culture. As the founder of one Silicon Valley–based AI start-up put it, “the current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs.” This doesn’t seem to track with the “mindfulness” that so many of Dorschel’s interviewees claim is important to them. Though it’s impossible to avoid news stories about toxic tech bro culture and its impact on young male behavior in general, Dorschel insists that the “Californian Ideology” (as Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s influential “critique of dotcom neo-liberalism” called it) is in decline.

Still, it’s odd that none of Dorschel’s interviewees extol hypercapitalist Ayn Rand, long a hero among Silicon Valley techies. Where have all the Rand acolytes gone? Noting that the majority of his interviewees claimed to have voted for center-left parties, Dorschel speculates that they may be exhibiting the “interviewer effect”—telling an interviewer what they think he wants to hear, or what they feel is socially acceptable to say. But that same effect could be coloring any of their answers. Are some of these socially conscious techies the equivalent of the purported “shy Trump voters” who felt the need to hide their support of Donald Trump when interviewed? Or is toxic cyber-libertarianism now limited to just the Peter Thiels and Marc Andreessens at the very top of the tech hierarchy? Is cyber-libertarianism in fact endemic to Silicon Valley but not to the other parts of the United States and Germany where the rest of Dorschel’s interviewees were located? (The main difference between the interviewees based in the US and Germany, incidentally, is that the Germans were generally more concerned with data privacy, whereas the Americans were focused on data bias.) Finally, the question begging to be asked: could Dorschel’s cohort of 52 interviewees have been too small a sample to be truly representative?

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In the second half of his book, Dorschel asks how the subjects he studied in the first half—positioned in contradictory fashion “between labor and capital, and […] between emancipation and domination”—can mobilize to organize tech workers across the Global North and South and the more and less privileged sectors of the industry. The radicalism of the tech workers in Dorschel’s study should not be overstated, but they do tend to be vocal critics of contemporary capitalism and, despite their privileged position, largely disillusioned with neoliberalism. With their knowledge of the almost limitless technology they control, they possess an inordinate amount of power. “Their expertise brings with it the possibility of building new technical tools and platforms from which to challenge capital,” Dorschel writes. Whatever their faults, he therefore views them (and not the traditional Marxian proletariat) as the likely agents of change. What might trigger change? Among other things, he suggests that the most highly compensated techies need to swallow their pride and recognize that they’re ultimately in the same boat as the lowliest gig workers, and then band together with them and unionize. Simply raising consciousness is not enough since capitalism has an uncanny ability to co-opt would-be radical movements.

But how have the events of the past year changed likely scenarios? Job security in tech is significantly lower than it has been in living memory. AI is decimating the ranks of tech workers. The pay hierarchy is now unimaginably steep, with AI experts making tens of millions and those in the middle and lower ranks finding that they’re no longer needed at all. Stock options, virtually a religion in the tech world, are being cut. Will this newly hostile environment spur previously serene techies to fight for a more equitable world, or will they—a group concerned above all with social and economic status, and unaccustomed to job insecurity—be cowed into submission? Dorschel hopes they will come to understand that they are now expendable, and thus not so different from the precarious gig workers and “permatemps” who have earned their sympathy but heretofore been regarded by them as a class apart.