A Guide to Surviving Techbro Capitalism, Part 1/3
What is Techbro Capitalism?
Techbro Capitalism is my term for the economic system technical workers find themselves in, in America, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere. It is the same hellscape of end-stage capitalism in which everyone cannot afford rent on two full-time paychecks, but it is specifically that hellscape as experienced by workers labouring for e.g. Elon Musk (and executives who still think Elon Musk is brilliant).
It is the “record profits, also layoffs” environment in which typically highly skilled, in-demand, well-paid staff have their paycheck destroyed for no good reason, or are told they have to get back to the office when it’s worse for everyone, or suffer any of a thousand other indignities both petty and grand.
I want to start this depressing article with some happy news. There are good people in leadership. There are people who act ethically, in the best interests of other human beings, who mentor and encourage and improve the quality of life for their coworkers and who create teams that provide astonishing value for their companies.
These bosses deserve the respect and loyalty that they earn, and when you find yourself working with them you should watch them carefully to learn how you might want to treat others when your experience gives you seniority. The first piece of bad news is that these people will inevitably be fired, and the second piece of bad news is why.
Line Go Up
Your good boss will get fired for the same reason you will get fired; because firing employees makes Line Go Up. Treating employees well generates long-term value, and treating them like replaceable parts generates short-term profit, and companies that don’t burn long-term value for short-term profit will lose investors and die.
Companies that grind down and lay off employees still die when the company runs out of money after destroying relationships with customers, suppliers, and advertisers, and eventually cannot sustain revenue. Some companies only lay off employees as a last resort when nothing else will generate increased profit. Some companies will lay off employees as a first option because it is easier than optimizing the business. Every company will eventually lay off employees.
This is the guiding truth of surviving techbro capitalism; you are being exploited, you will be discarded, and the only trust you should put in your employer is that they will exploit, underpay, and eventually fire you.
Cory Doctorow wrote a well-received article in 2023 about the “enshittification” of TikTok. His article focused on the experience of platform users and the inevitable degradation of product quality he attributes to market forces. His piece doesn’t mention that the same experience happens to employees of these companies, and he doesn’t have time to delve into why the stock market makes enshittification inevitable, but he does make the problem and the pattern obvious.
The TL;DR of what causes enshittification is that Milton Friedman predicted stagflation in the 70s and as a result political leaders in the 80s took the rest of his blindly optimistic, anti-union, anti-regulation neo-liberal economic theory seriously. Minimal regulations on corporations result in maximal profit-seeking; hence, enshittification.
Welchian Enshittification
In 1981, famous CEO Jack Welch exposed the weakness of depending on social contracts (which he broke) absent regulations to require standards of behaviour from corporations. Jack Welch proved that workers could be exploited to degrees that were deeply unethical and only occasionally criminal, and consumers could be abused to levels that would destroy companies — but not before billions were made in profit. He paved the way for the sort of urinating-in-a-bottle employment standards and picture-of-a-shirt-on-a-shirt product quality that corporations now aggressively pursue.
Since the 80s any corporation that doesn’t engage in this “Welchian enshittification” of their company will not see the unending quarter-after-quarter rise in profits that Welchian enshittifiers do, and investors will flee. Most companies that have investors now face the decision either to lose investment because long-term success cannot show Line Go Up, or to pursue an unending increase in profit that leads to enshittification and implosion.
This is why your stable job for a big tech company will end abruptly and without cause for you and ten thousand people just like you. The executives will be required by the stock market to demonstrate consistent, unsustainable rise in profit or they will lose investment and the company will die.
Big corporations are in a constant cycle of firing huge numbers of people to reduce expenses for Line Go Up, failing to replace their work with contractors, shovelling profits into stock dividends and buybacks to satiate investors, and spending substantial time and money to rebuild those teams so profits rise until the cycle starts again or the company runs out of cash for dividends, and implodes like a homemade submarine.
This is why your awesome startup that cares about people and wants to assure you that they see you as a human will, eventually, fire you and your boss and all your coworkers. The founders will be offered tens of millions of dollars by venture capitalists to “grow the company.” Those VCs will sit on the board, and the board will require the CEO to show them charts where Line Go Up.
To make Line Go Up the CEO is going to have to (eventually, and probably uncomfortably, but inevitably) act exactly like Jack Welch proved he could, and like every CEO in the West does except where they’re not allowed to. A typical corporation is, as Doctorow put it in his article, a “paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora”
Part 2 of this series will dive into the specific methods Welchian enshittifiers use to extract value and underpay tech workers. Part 3 of this series will conclude with specific and practical advice on how to survive.