i’m willing to wager that the overwhelming majority of privacy enhancing technology users are also members of various labor aristocracies like software engineers and it makes me wonder how much longer they’ll be able to cling onto their petite bourgeois inclinations as the rest of the fascists do their best to crack down on usage.
I wouldn’t say the majority of us are in any kind of “labor aristocracy” unless they got lucky and cashed in early in the tech boom or moved to management and executive positions. Most of us are seriously underpaid or laid off. Without labor unions and with corporations pretending that LLMs can replace any experienced, well paid engineers, many companies have purged all of the experienced engineers and hired low paid contractors and handed them “AI” and told them to do all the work. Not saying all, but the vast majority, in the US at least, has been decimated in the last fee years.
that’s how i got my start in the field – being a seriously underpaid contractor replacing their engineers. lol
also: the defining characteristic of a labor aristocracy is their tendency to align themselves with the ruling class – not how much money they have or what position they hold in the field. that’s why most are seriously underpaid (i sure was); get laid off in so many waves (ditto for me here too); and don’t have labor unions.
it’s a bit like why brown people or foreigners join ice or why women or queers join maga. people in the western world – ESPECIALLY the united states – are intentionally not taught to think critically for themselves so they’re unaware of the bits and pieces of our respective western cultures that enable the ruling class to make us not want unions and accept that layoffs are just a normal part of life.
it’s no different than the people voting against their own interests because they’re convinced by misinformation and AI is just the newest introduction into this gestalt that we keep reinforcing upon ourselves.
Definitively lived this.
When you are poor is like if options did not exist and when you want something you are expected to have rich money and a wallet on fire if you want to be taken seriously in the face of those. Mostly seen this in north/central europeans and USonian circles.
Is like the expectation that if you are an illustrator por a designer you have to afford a Mac, own an iPhone and be dumb in tech because you want it easy and you have money and time (parents made it easy for you) so you can dedicate yourself to your passion.
When you dont have any of that “skill issue”.
