Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
The difference between the people you call proletariat and the people you refuse to call proletariat is often luck. Luck is fickle and can swing both ways. A manager at a bank is absolutely proletariat, they’ve just been given a bit more money and told they’re no longer proletariat. This is because it’s way easier to keep workers and management at each other’s throats than to have everyone target the real source of the “orders from above”.