The Luddite

In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote an essay about the culture of the tech industry, which they called The Californian Ideology. The essay is most famous for observing that tech culture "emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," an attitude with which "Californian Ideology" is now synonymous. They also propose that the ideology comes with a tripartite class structure, though this part of the essay is less well-known.

Although companies in these sectors can mechanise and sub-contract much of their labour needs, they remain dependent on key people who can research and create original products, from software programs and computer chips to books and TV programmes. Along with some hi-tech entrepreneurs, these digital artisans form the so-called 'virtual class': '...the techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communications specialists...'

They develop that slightly further later on:

[E]ach member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.

There's the "underclass" of "darker-skinned fellow humans [that] work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens." The virtual class isn't just materially reliant on the underclass; it actively seeks to automate away the need for all this "wet-ware." Though that first part of their analysis is still as relevant as when it was written, now that the tech industry has further developed, we can directly observe the class structure, which I argue is different, or has at least drifted away, from the one described in the essay.

Though once "promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur," the virtual class now starts companies hoping to be acqui-hired, barring them from truly entering the upper class. The venture capitalists that have come to dominate the industry continue their obsession with automating wet-ware — that much hasn't changed — but they've increasingly turned their attention to automating the work of the virtual class, which once, perhaps naively, felt secure. Whether or not they'll succeed, projects like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Code Llama, and Google's Gemini, combined with the decreased upwards mobility, show that, from techno-capitalists' perspectives, there are only two classes, the owners and the workers, defined by their relationships to the firm. Owners make their money from owning things, and workers earn wages from working. This is the standard leftist class distinction.

But techno-capitalists also have a novel relationship to workers. Now that the digital world dominates so much of our lives, techno-capitalists, who own said digital world, also extract unprecedented amounts of wealth from our leisure time, mining it for data, cluttering it with advertisements, and so on. To understand what this means for the role that they imagine for the underclass, we'll examine an instructive though disturbing internet subculture (consider yourself warned).

Some people, mostly men, gather in online fora dedicated to "gooning." Here's a gooner with the username "pablito," my personal favorite gooner-philosopher, describing the activity:¹

For pablito, gooning is a state of grace. To be a gooner, one must seek special knowledge ("styles and techniques... hundreds of ways"). Just like Batman learned to fight among monks in the Far East, gooners require esoteric revelations to master the physical act of masturbating. As is always the case in these journeys, mastery of the physical act isn't the end goal, but a vehicle for further (pseudo-)spiritual revelations, or in pablito's words, "[o]nce you've reached this state you're open to it all." Here's pablito again, discussing his relationship with a fellow gooner:

Also goone's don't only speak to you [..] they can reach into and touch someone as they would a person but as if touching the human skin is not actually touching the human body (sorry about that lol) but talking to the human body like anyone else

Gooning allows two people to actually connect, not through mere physical contact, but in an enlightened spiritual state that can only be achieved by masturbating together. In other words, pablito's gooner philosophy claims that the best form of sexual collaboration is, counterintuitively, not collaborating, but instead focusing entirely on the self. It's almost as if they are "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention," except the hand is quite visible.²

Gooning is neoliberalism for sex, or, at the very least, it is to sex as neoliberalism is to society. If, as economists claim, human beings make rational choices with the information available to them, and more and more of that information is porn, then the rational choice is probably to masturbate.

And herein lies the problem. I have absolutely no problem with people who prefer to spend their time masturbating, but many gooners view the rejection of connections with real people, especially women, as well as the rejection of reality itself, as self-evidently rational.

Gooning is a flow state: an extended edging session marked by mindlessness, loss of control, and total surrender. For the habitants of goon caves, it’s being enraptured by the shadows on the cave wall, and willfully shunning the sunlight of reality. Some go as far as to define themselves as “pornosexuals,” people with a sexual preference for porn over real-life sex.

Gooners are clearly recipients of "technological progress," not its creators. The subculture is inextricably linked with using the internet as we know it today. Here's someone other than pablito, explaining this relationship:

I would describe gooning as "extreme fascination" with porn not unlike a trance or hypnotic state. I don't believe you even have to masturbate if you are horny enough. Basically your mind/body are so horny that you find porn EXTREMELY exciting/interesting, and you can watch it with complete attention (like in a trance) for a long time. Very tame imagery that did nothing before (feet, upskirt, panties, twerking) become very exciting.

To which another user replies with advice:

Gooning is an activity that exists entirely within individual, personalized digital content consumption. With that in mind, consider this very recent tweet from Marc Andreessen, influential tech venture capitalist and writer of the techno-optimist manifesto:

For Marc (who is notoriously sensitive to disrespect, so I will refer to him by his first name), the "plebs" in the underclass have nothing to do, and, reading between the lines only a little, deserve no say in what is done. He imagines a future in which all menial labor is automated, and the now-obsolete wet-ware of the underclass ought to be satisfied consuming what is on offer, on the platforms that he and his buddies own. The underclass is given a digital simulacra of a meaningful life, so immersed in the technology owned by people like him that even theological pursuits, like those of pablito, become confined to the meaningless solipsism of content consumption. They are forced to live in and make sense of both a digital and material world entirely outside their control. They're relegated to be consumers of the content created within this milieu, developing hyper-specific tastes, the inevitable result of the highly personalized advertising-driven content delivery systems that power the web.

In short, Marc seeks to automate away the need for the underclass, and after that, to goonify its members. Unlike pablito, Marc lacks the capacity to meaningfully communicate his vision, though he does try.³ Here's the New Yorker, describing Marc in a 2015 profile that is generously coherent in describing his philosophy:

But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He’s an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon erase such primitive behaviors as paying cash (Bitcoin), eating cooked food (Soylent), and enduring a world unimproved by virtual reality (Oculus VR). He believes that Silicon Valley is mission control for mankind, which is therefore on a steep trajectory toward perfection.

Modern finance is excessively technologically sophisticated, but Marc finds Bitcoin more advanced for the same reason that he finds cooked food more primitive than Soylent — his philosophy is purely aesthetic. Despite this ideological impoverishment, we must take him seriously, because he wishes to own the machines that automate the world, and he has the money to do so. His fully automated world supposedly leaves us free to pursue our own interests, but are we really free if we live surrounded by AI friends in the metaverse? Are you free if Silicon Valley is humanity's mission control, or if the surrounding physical world is so degraded that you choose to inhabit a corporate-owned virtual one? What is freedom without agency in a world subject to Marc's whims, or those of his friends?

Marc's vision of an underclass satisfied with AI friends and a VR world is an insult to consciousness. Any attempt to put it into practice is a direct attack on our humanity. He imagines complete domination over our lives, constraining our imagination to the most banal questions, like how exactly to queue up porn for the most satisfying masturbation experience — questions that would never challenge his power, only reinforce it. He seeks to pump us so full of content that we can no longer resist.

We can now also understand why so many techno-capitalists support Universal Basic Income, a seemingly progressive stance. This is a popular view in the tech community rank-and-file, too. The latest tech hype is always coming for our jobs, and once all the wet-ware is obsolete, the theory goes, there's nothing for most of us to do, so we must all be guaranteed an income, lest we starve. This line of thinking often contains a dangerous assumption about what exactly the post-scarcity future will look like. Like pablito's goon state, there is no one way to achieve the future, and this particular version assumes that techno-capitalists own virtually everything, leaving them with immense economic and political power, and pacifying the rest of us with just enough to afford food, rent, and streaming services. How can anyone possibly believe that these same powerful men who hoard wealth and bust unions would freely share their wealth in the form of UBI? Concessions from the powerful are always extracted, never freely offered. UBI is too low a price for which to sell control of our society, and if we take that bargain, we leave ourselves at the buyers' mercy.

Say what you might about pablito, but in a single forum post about jacking off, he did a more rigorous interrogation of his life and what he's doing with it than most in tech ever do about our profession, even considering the aforementioned fundamental shortcomings. Had our industry half of pablito's philosophical aptitude, we'd realize that life is for doing things together. We're social animals. We have a biological need to actively participate in society, to rely on each other, and to be relied on, not watch from the sidelines while powerful men make all the decisions. This is why, as developed a theory as it may be, goonerism is defeat. It's complete submission. It's an embrace of the most empty version of freedom that seeks a physical sensation so powerful as to block out the existential loneliness lurking just beyond the darkness of the goon cave. Gooners are the techno-optimist's ideal underclass, fully subservient to the content regime. Their entire existence, including leisure time, has been optimized for value extraction, an existence that they've fully embraced, and to which they've confined their entire search for joy and meaning.

Thanks to the QAnonAnonymous podcast, which recently did an episode on gooning that inspired this post. For further reading, the argument that I put forth here is mostly a simplified and adapted version of Marcuse's ideas of "unfreedom" and "repressive desublimation," which he develops in his incredible (but very bleak) book, One-Dimensional Man.