In March 2011, David Barrett, CEO of Expensify (“Expense Reports That Don’t Suck”), blogged about how his start-up wouldn’t hire programmers who used Microsoft’s very large and elaborate.NET framework, which — according to him — provided ready-made, assembly-line tools that turned these programmers into drudges capable of only mass-producing pre-designed code, the programming equivalent of fast-food burgers. No, he wanted passionate programmers who could write “everything from assembly to jQuery, on PCs to mobile phones, [and code] hard core computer graphics to high level social networking.”33 Barrett wanted Einsteins, not Morts — fair enough. But this is how he described his Einsteins:
As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. Sure, everyone says that. But my coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week. For example, Mich is barely 5 foot tall, but is a competitive fencer. Witold is a 6’3” former professional hockey player. Nate practices knife fighting for fun.34
Over a few days, I read hundreds of comments and blog posts debating the merits of Barrett’s case against.NET programmers; some argued that many great programmers used.NET, and that other frameworks had as many bad or lazy programmers. The discussions were long and nuanced. But nobody seemed to notice his very literal conflation of omnivorous intellectual curiosity with manly combat skills. He extends his fast-food riff—“Programming with.NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything”—but then turns the metaphor into a paean to programmer-as-blood-soaked-pioneer:
The sort of person [we are looking for] grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks — squirrels they caught and skinned while scavenging in the deep forests for survival. We don’t want a short order chef, we want a Lord of the Flies, carried by wolves into civilization and raised in a French kitchen full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs.35
“A Lord of the Flies in a French kitchen” neatly catches the geek machismo and extraordinary privilege that are essential ingredients in the cultural paradox that is Silicon Valley. Wages are so high here, Rebecca Solnit reports, that “you hear tech workers complaining about not having time to spend their money.”36 Depending on which San Francisco neighborhood you live in, your rent rose by anywhere from 10 percent to 135 percent over 2012, driven up by young techies outbidding each other.37 In the booming restaurants and cafés, there’s a general disdain for government, which is often described as fatally broken, in desperate need of “disruption,” that condition beloved of programmers and venture capitalists. Workers’ unions are regarded as anachronisms that hold back progress. Company founders chafe at any restrictions imposed by local or federal government as leftover mechanisms from a failed system which prevent the markets from working properly.38
Given these attitudes, it’s easy to conclude that Silicon Valley is a haven for Libertarians. Doing so would be simplistic. President Obama won his second presidential election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, as compared to his 22-point lead in California as a whole. Employees at Google gave 97 percent of their campaign contributions to Obama, and Apple employees gave 91 percent.39 But these denizens of the tech campuses aren’t, as we’ve seen, leftists or progressives of the Berkeley-Oakland ilk either. Rather, this new “virtual class” of digital overlords combine the social and sexual attitudes of San Francisco bohemianism with a neoliberal passion for idealized free markets and unchecked profit-making, thus producing a caste orthodoxy for people who might be best described as “hippie capitalists.”
The media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have usefully described this new faith as “the Californian Ideology,” which “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”40 This high-tech determinism dictates that through the new worldwide amalgamation of hardware and software, a frictionless “electronic agora” will come into being, allowing the profitable exchange of both goods and ideas. Individuals will be empowered, they will speak to each other across all sorts of borders and come to mutual understanding. The governments of the world — useless as they are — will fade into irrelevance because governance will be provided by the crowd-sourced wisdom of the masses, led of course by the fearless and very cool visionaries who make software and hardware, who found companies, who make billions. If you’ve “solved”—for instance — some problems in online social networking, surely you’ll be able to disrupt world hunger. Pioneering individuals will focus their skills, their genius, on one domain after another and so transform the world for the better.
Programmers and entrepreneurs tend to believe implicitly in
the liberal ideal of the self-sufficient individual. In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals — the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. The American revolution itself was fought to protect the freedoms and property of individuals against oppressive laws and unjust taxes imposed by a foreign monarch. For both the New Left and the New Right, the early years of the American republic provide a potent model for their rival versions of individual freedom.41
David Barrett’s knife-wielding, Lord-of-the-Flies programmer belongs to this mythology. Despite eating lunch in company-provided kitchens “full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs,” he is a rugged man of action. He may complain mightily about an eighty-thousand-dollar salary two years out of college, but he is a hunter and killer. A man who leads a magnificent posse of such hardened, hardcore individuals might justly say, “My coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week.”
This figuring of computing as agon, a geeky arena of competition in which code-warriors prove their mettle against all comers, demands a certain manly style from those who would win and be recognized as victors. Steve Jobs was famed not only for his success but also his aggressive rudeness; his erstwhile partner Woz describes him as a “real rugged bastard” who found it necessary to “put people down and make them feel demeaned.”42 The social ineptitude of the sandal-wearing, long-haired pioneers of the early days has been elevated to a virtue. Shouting at co-workers and employees, abrasive behavior, indifference to the feelings of others, all these constitute both a privilege earned by skill and a signifier of the programmer’s elite status. This is most true, paradoxically, in the open-source movement, within which volunteer programmers collaborate to produce programs (like Firefox and Linux) under licensing schemes that guarantee universal, free access. These volunteers must cooperate to produce viable programs; yet it is within open source that programmers most fiercely pledge allegiance to the legacy of the early neckbeards. And so Linus Torvalds, the “benevolent dictator” of Linux, dismissed the makers of a rival operating system as “a bunch of masturbating monkeys”; and so, Eric S. Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, once told an interviewer proudly, “I’m an arrogant son of a bitch,” and refused a hapless Microsoft headhunter’s form-letter inquiry with an e-mail that ended, “On that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft’s grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.”43