The Ideology of Meritocracy in the Tech Industry

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The tech industry has a unique ability to quickly build a global kind of market for its product, so you can exploit a lot more customers very quickly. That allows the company to make a lot more revenue to pay these employees in a way that might not be as easy to attain in other industries. And thus, they can't kind of pay the kind of salaries that are expected in the tech industry. As we're seeing this kind of push back against labor by these people at the top of the industry, the pograms, the Elon Musk, the Mark Andreessen, all these kind of folks who are really turning toward right-wing ideology.

Paris Marx is joined by Wendy Liu to discuss what it was like to work in tech in the 2010s and why structural changes in the industry are empowering an increasingly reactionary capitalist class to strike back at workers and upend the expectations of the boom period.

Wendy Liu is a writer and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter at @dellsystem.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer wrote about how tech CEOs are inspired by what Musk is doing at Twitter
Mel Krantzler and Patricia Krantzler wrote Down and Out in Silicon Valley: The High Cost of the High-tech Dream
Jacob Silverman wrote about David Sacks and the reactionary turn of tech billionaires
Paris wrote about how longtermism is designed to justify the position of billionaires in society
Julia Black wrote about the embrace of pronatalism within the tech industry

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