I work in tech. I like the work itself and my coworkers are all nice and polite people. But their views on politics, economics and the world in general is complete dogshit.
Elon Musk? The world’s biggest brain genius. Demanding fees for healthcare? Very reasonable and necessary. Inheritance tax? An unspeakable injustice. Jordan Peterson? An insightful intellectual. Learning a second foreign language in school? Waste of time when you could have programming classes instead. Learning ancient history in high school? Stupid and useless when you already know you want to work in tech. STEM? The pinnacle of prestigious human knowledge. Humanities? A ridiculous and useless waste of time. Trades? Probably okay if you’re too stupid to do something better. Unions? Outdated and useless. Arts? Does not compute.
All they seem to care about is learning how to code, getting a job or starting a business and succeeding at that by being a lone Randian superman. They have no sense of broader solidarity or for the existence of something of value beyond the hamster wheel of the grindset.
I think these people are a product of an educational system that is set up to produce good employees rather than good citizens. University level education will include a few token classes on broader subjects like history or philosophy but staff and students treats them like something to get over with so you can do the important stuff rather than something of importance. And you can hardly blame them, the dog eat dog world of capitalism doesn’t reward an engineer for writing sonnets or knowing labour history and consequently students focus their attention on learning stuff that will make them less likely to end up on the bottom of the hierarchy.
In essence generations has been raised to be very skilled in a few practical technical fields while being completely illiterate about everything else.
How do you deal with these people in daily life? With their idiotic reactionary beliefs and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any form of culture beyond the handful of IP rights white western cishet males are expected to enjoy?
And how do we prevent STEM lord bullshit under socialism?
As someone who works in a cushy office occasionally writing code for a living, what you’re describing is fundamentally the result of labor aristocracy. The STEMlords are the ‘good ones’ of the working class that capital dangles like a carrot in front of a donkey to convince the rest of the workers that if they just put their noses to the grindstone a little bit harder they too can play foosball with free beer in an air conditioned office, and they are indoctrinated to play the part and bribed with treats to convince themselves that they deserve it.
I am fully aware that the companies I’ve worked for are completely fucking worthless in the real world and deliver absolutely nothing of value, and I’m surrounded by people who are thoroughly convinced that whatever widget they’re working on is revolutionary and going to transform the world. But they think that way because admitting that you’re a lucky bastard who gets paid an obscene wage to refactor an API thirty times in a row instead of doing anything that actually benefits anyone in any material way in complete opposition to everything you’ve ever been told is a wall of cognitive dissonance to work through and they’re bribed heavily not to, so they don’t and double down on bazinga-brain shit instead. Their material conditions encourage them to just sit back and enjoy the gravy train, and that along with the propaganda they’re exposed to for every second of every day breeds reactionary thought.
I started coming up with some spiel about how to break this down under a less toxic system, but Porkroll already knocked it out of the park so I’ll just throw a +1 to his “make engineers dogfood what they make” idea.