“I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over.”
19th March 2025
The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.
After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.
Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.
This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs
The basic problem appears to be that proglodytes concentrate on spending other people’s money rather than on making money that can then be spent, which means that proglodyte organizations are dependent on ‘funding’ (other people giving you money for you to spend without any profitable result), which means that the jobs are always going to be more plentiful in organizations devoted to making money than organizations devoted to just spending money. Proglodytes are basically beggars (or thieves) rather than makers.