Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist

User-facing software is about politics the same way architecture (like for buildings) is political: sure there is a lot that software and buildings can do to make people do one thing instead of another, but they don't change the fundamental things that drive us. This article tries to exaggerate the impact software design actually has.

I’m not sure that Silicon Valley thinks politics don’t exist, so much as it’s that elites (VCs, big corporation CEOs) spend a lot of time/money defining for labor what is and is not political (e.g. their class position as labor relative to elites). This frees up elites to then nakedly use politics to serve their own interests, speaking as the "voice of tech."

This article seems to fall into the trap of collapsing that class divide, even as more and more tech workers are awakening to the power of labor solidarity. That's unfortunate in the face of things like workers at Google acting collectively to stop the company from pursuing work with the military.