UnseriousAcademic

If this includes their journals then I guess my stuff is off to the big LLM melting pot to be regurgitated wrongly without context or attribution.

I think it's definitely worth distinguishing between different classes of workers in Silicon Valley. It's hard to talk about tech ideology in a fully encompassing way because there are for sure dissenting voices. I think to some degree you can say it is the intersection of tech and wealth ideologies but there's definitely people that aren't wealthy that also espouse similar thinking so... tricky!

I adopt the handy framing of Silicon valley as a mindset rather than a place to help with this. There's a great photography book called Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan that is all photos and stories of the precarious workers that don't necessarily work in tech. I keep it out in my office to remind me that silicon Valley is not just the rich assholes.

Absolutely. In fact in one major survey of the values of the counterculture conducted back in the 1960s Ayn Rand was listed as one of people's major influences. There were different strands to the counterculture, one communitarian but the other about self actualisation and the individual. Both positioned themselves in opposition to the state, but differed significantly in what kind of future they wanted.

John Ganz did a good coverage of the ideological side of tech, particularly using Herf's book Reactionary Modernism that looks at the role of engineers in building Nazi ideology.

You can read Reactionary Modernism for free on the Internet Archive

Thanks for the positive feedback! I have a tendency to over explain things (so much cut text already) partly because I'm never too sure of how far down the rabbit hole I've gotten and if a general audience would be lost without it. Glad I was able to pull it together with a flourish though!

Thanks for the welcome, and yes please watch first!