I think the other piece of this that comes to mind for me is that, by and large, software developers as a culture lack class consciousness.

If you're pulling down a mid six-figure tech salary, you're rich *and* you have more in common with someone in homelessness levels of crushing poverty than you do Jeff Bezos. You're the kind of rich that can own a house, not the kind that national governments consider to be too big to fail.

☭. evie (@vie@hachyderm.io)

I think it's interesting how software engineers are (among?) the most eager working class group to replace themselves with LLMs. It's interesting because LLMs do a worse job than us, we lose ability/skill to do our job the more we use it, lose our jobs, produce worse software, are less satisfied with our work, etc. Yet so many of my peers seem to be super excited about and advocate for it, while other working class groups at least detest LLMs if not even consider organising themselves to protect their trade/jobs from LLMs. Are we becoming the cops (read as: class traitors) of this techno-fascist dystopia?

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

@xgranade whether this is true depends on which metric you are using when you say "more in common". it seems the metric you have chosen is one related more to abstract notions of power and what one can get away with as opposed to how much one's basic needs are being met. i find this choice of metric in itself to be a compelling counterpoint.

@imyxh I think I made that clear by saying my comment was about class consciousness? Even in terms of basic needs, though, a labor-class millionaire is one bad emergency away from having absolutely no basic needs met, while there's no world in which that's true for owner-class billionaires.

So yeah, a lot of folks in tech believe the lie, think of themselves as owner-class instead of labor-class. A lot of shitty, shitty politics follow from that core untruth. Not all, not being reductive here, but a lot.

As an addendum, let me emphasize: if someone is making 10^{5.5} dollars per year, they're rich. My point is that economic disparity is so incredibly bad in the US that being "rich" doesn't mean one has anything meaningfully in common with "owner-class rich" in terms of political power *or* security with respect to having basic needs met. It is a mistake for someone who is rich to think that it is not in their best interest to show solidarity with other laborers.

I'm saying that *even if you are rich*, you almost certainly need a union, and you damn well ought to be fighting for labor rights. That you may not be rich in the future, and you damn well should be fighting against oppressive poverty. That wage stagnation may soon leave you unable to afford groceries, especially in the climate crisis. That all the above is true even if you don't have a shred of empathy, and only gets more true if you give a flying fuck about other people.

I'm saying that *even if you are rich*, you almost certainly need a union, and you damn well ought to be fighting for labor rights. That you may not be rich in the future, and you damn well should be fighting against oppressive poverty. That wage stagnation may soon leave you unable to afford groceries, especially in the climate crisis. That all the above is true even if you don't have a shred of empathy, and only gets more true if you give a flying fuck about other people.

@imyxh I think I made that clear by saying my comment was about class consciousness? Even in terms of basic needs, though, a labor-class millionaire is one bad emergency away from having absolutely no basic needs met, while there's no world in which that's true for owner-class billionaires.

@xgranade i guess what i'm saying is that i do not believe a meaningful amount of class consciousness can be shared between labor-class millionaires and the portion of the working class that cannot afford to own property. the metric space that the notion of financial similarity exists in is just so starkly different between the minds of those in the former category and those in the latter. and in the minds of the latter, your point about emergencies relates more to small transition probabilities between classes rather than any serious notion of similarity at current time.

put another way, you cannot honestly expect someone who lives paycheck to paycheck to think a millionaire is more similar to them than to a billionaire. so it is impossible to have a shared sense of class consciousness between the paycheck-to-paycheck and the millionaire.

@imyxh And to be sure, I am absolutely not saying that someone with immense amount of economic privilege is anything other privileged. What I'm saying is that it's a mistake for said privileged rich person to think that they're somehow no longer a laborer or sensitive to attacks on labor. The best reason to care about people in poverty is that no one should live in poverty, humans deserve better. The second best is that having one's basic needs met *now* doesn't guarantee they will be met later.

There's a massive difference between owning one home, the home you live in, that could burn down and leave you homeless, that you need to work to afford maintenance and utilities and taxes on, and being so incredibly rich that you own a city block that you can charge rent on.

They're both rich, but they're not the same.

@xgranade Chris Rock had it right: "Shaq is *rich*. The white dude who signs Shaq's cheques is *wealthy*."

As an addendum, let me emphasize: if someone is making 10^{5.5} dollars per year, they're rich. My point is that economic disparity is so incredibly bad in the US that being "rich" doesn't mean one has anything meaningfully in common with "owner-class rich" in terms of political power *or* security with respect to having basic needs met. It is a mistake for someone who is rich to think that it is not in their best interest to show solidarity with other laborers.

@xgranade do you mean 10^5.5?

@ZenHeathen There are exceedingly few things I agree with Chris Rock on, but that might be one.

@ehashman Yep. I can count, I swear.

@ehashman Thanks for catching that.

There's a massive difference between owning one home, the home you live in, that could burn down and leave you homeless, that you need to work to afford maintenance and utilities and taxes on, and being so incredibly rich that you own a city block that you can charge rent on.

They're both rich, but they're not the same.

@xgranade normally having a math degree means I can't add 🤪

As an addendum, let me emphasize: if someone is making 10^{5.5} dollars per year, they're rich. My point is that economic disparity is so incredibly bad in the US that being "rich" doesn't mean one has anything meaningfully in common with "owner-class rich" in terms of political power *or* security with respect to having basic needs met. It is a mistake for someone who is rich to think that it is not in their best interest to show solidarity with other laborers.