Simone Robutti

Big Tech is laying off thousands and thousands of tech workers every week.

Twitter has been taken over by a right-wing child with no ideas on how to run an established product.

Venture capital is being redirected to new fields more and more frequently: web3 wasn't a thing 3-4 years ago, it was all the rage last year and now it seems like it lost its momentum. Same for self-driving cars and other empty promises of the Silicon Valley. While these cycles are normal and many don't deliver, they are clearly accelerating.

Inflation, global financial instability, supply-chain disruptions are making this trend worse.

I feel the time are coming for western tech workers to collectively enter adulthood: they always felt special, protected, untouchable, exactly like a spoiled baby. Media representation of tech workers reinforces this mindset both inside and outside of tech culture.

Now material conditions are changing and a vast majority of them are being confronted by their mortality, by their limitations but also by the fragility of their privilegy.

Past traumas of massive layoffs in tech are too far away in the past. A past where the industry was smaller and these shocks were local. This one though promises to be global, deep and shake the feet of clay upon which the golden tech industry is built. Will it be a collective trauma? Maybe.

The hope is that it will ultimately shift the self perception of tech worker and liberate energy for change, accelerate unionization, bring conflict over technology and how it's created.

Silicon Valley failed to deliver on the techno-optimist dreams of the 90s, it's clear we are not gonna go to Mars following a lunatic with too much money, no one is coming to save us and for sure not tech oligarchs. It's time to take responsibility and become adults.