The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized | Los Angeles Review of BooksThe Revolution Will Not Be Digitized<br>How employees in the tech sector see the world, themselves, and the (im)possibility of change.<br>By Dave MandlJune 4, 2026<br>Science & Technology

Economics and Finance

The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism by Robert Dorschel. MIT Press, 2025. 246 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org

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DEFINING TECH WORKERS in sociopolitical terms can be tricky. Robert Dorschel devotes the first half of his compendious study The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (2025) to pinning down this butterfly. In purely economic terms, tech workers are generally well compensated and well educated. They hold a relatively comfortable social position, which suggests they would be satisfied with things as they are. This ought to make them conservative. But politically, that designation gets muddied. Techies tend to be young (a traditionally left demographic), urban-dwelling (ditto), and progressive almost by definition. So: pro-union, Democratic (or at least not Republican), culturally omnivorous, and generally “woke” in the positive sense.

For his study, Dorschel interviewed 52 tech workers in the United States and, presumably to factor out regional bias, Germany. What he found is what you might expect: his interviewees mostly held progressive or even farther left views, but they were also protective of their social and economic status. To put it more bluntly, they expressed admirable intentions and talked a good game but rarely used their power to effect social or political change. Dorschel writes:

While my research points to a genuine longing for social change that can manifest in action beyond self-presentations, most of my interviewees’ articulations of social critique were not accompanied by reports of practices corresponding with this critique.

And:

The gap between their expressed values and reported practices suggests that while tech workers identify with ideals of social justice and critiques of power structures, there is very little evidence of these commitments being enacted in tangible, impactful ways.

And:

While there are some gestures toward institutional engagement in their general subjectivation—evident, for instance, in occasional protests, open-source activities, practices of workplace solidarity, and emergent union formations—the typical tech worker subject I encountered remains firmly anchored in an individualist [that is, self-interested] modus operandi.

You get the idea. Dorschel’s interviewees repeatedly, for example, expressed pro-union sentiments and sympathized with the precarity of gig workers, with whom they share a class position and yet also don’t. Yet they cherished their own social and economic status, and insofar as they engaged in activism, it was mostly a commitment to addressing the cultural and ableist biases built into application interfaces and data. Liberal in their attitudes and adventurous in their day-to-day lives, they are at the same time acutely aware of the dangers inherent in activism and skeptical of their power to change the status quo. They want, in Dorschel’s words, to “explore the world without risk.”

They differ from members of the traditional upper middle class in several ways. Contemporary tech workers favor “ordinariness,” preferring low-key, socially inclusive activities, like “walking their dog or having a barbecue with friends,” to more exclusive activities, like golf. Sensitive to the environmental damage inherent in extensive travel, they pursue “the right ecological way of life.” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), claimed that under neoliberalism, the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which argues that the system leads to homogeneity and alienation, has replaced the “social critique,” which opposes capitalism on the basis of its inherent inequality and exploitation. Dorschel’s findings suggest that the social critique may have reemerged among contemporary tech workers. Most of his interviewees, for example, seem deeply sensitive to gender and racial discrimination within the tech world, as well as to the precariousness of foreign workers chained to tech companies through temporary work visas. But at a time of economic uncertainty and increasing job insecurity in the previously immune tech sector, they also crave safety, shunning the subjectivity of “post-Fordism,” according to which workers are likely to see themselves as serial entrepreneurs.

Dorschel’s interviewees were pulled from two distinct groups, data scientists and UX designers (developers of user...