The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized

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.