Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Have a seat next to the comically large Lenin head statue over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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That’s likely part of it. I think part of it also has to do with what the U.S. materially controls. Having so much of the internet’s infrastructure in burgerland along with insider access to the companies who own and run their services on that infrastructure allows for both easy surveillance and the ability to propagate propaganda on a scale that puts TV and radio to shame. The strategic importance of workers who do the labor to enable this, along with the these workers requiring more training (both initially and continously) relative to others, puts an upward pressure on the wages.
Another factor is that it is possible to make a software product where the only thing you need is software. What I mean by this is you don’t have to go nuts on buying means of production and land in order to become a code kulak. There are exceptions to this of course (uber, amazon, etc.), and of course making good software isn’t child’s play even if it’s not rocket surgery, but you can easily have a code kulak whose business is separated from material stuff enough that they’ll end up with an even more skewed perspective of production than your vanilla petite boug.
On top of all this: remember that infrastructure I mentioned earlier? If you’re a code kulak looking to run your business, there’s a good chance you’ll use infrastructure owned by the big porkies in order to make money. With stuff like AWS, Azure, and Google cloud, all the code kulaks who want to use the convenient way of hosting their service is going to have their interests materially aligned with the big porkies.
Sprinkle in the general state of education about history in the west being shit and liberalism (and consequentially, idealism) being the way most people are brought up to think about how the world works. You’ll get programmers who are dilettantes in topics like philosophy and the natural sciences that try to use their technical knowledge as a way of understanding things that are outside of its intended scope. This ends up with a flavor of pseudery that is kind of ridiculous. You get things like James Damore, the singularity, and longtermism.
Since the wages are high due to factors I listed above, you also get the effect of people who only give a shit about money seeing software development as a way to get rich.
Combine all of the things I mentioned and you get an industry that selects for and produces some really bourgeoisified workers.