I work in tech. I like the work itself and my coworkers are all nice and polite people. But their views on politics, economics and the world in general is complete dogshit.
Elon Musk? The world's biggest brain genius. Demanding fees for healthcare? Very reasonable and necessary. Inheritance tax? An unspeakable injustice. Jordan Peterson? An insightful intellectual. Learning a second foreign language in school? Waste of time when you could have programming classes instead. Learning ancient history in high school? Stupid and useless when you already know you want to work in tech. STEM? The pinnacle of prestigious human knowledge. Humanities? A ridiculous and useless waste of time. Trades? Probably okay if you're too stupid to do something better. Unions? Outdated and useless. Arts? Does not compute.
All they seem to care about is learning how to code, getting a job or starting a business and succeeding at that by being a lone Randian superman. They have no sense of broader solidarity or for the existence of something of value beyond the hamster wheel of the grindset.
I think these people are a product of an educational system that is set up to produce good employees rather than good citizens. University level education will include a few token classes on broader subjects like history or philosophy but staff and students treats them like something to get over with so you can do the important stuff rather than something of importance. And you can hardly blame them, the dog eat dog world of capitalism doesn't reward an engineer for writing sonnets or knowing labour history and consequently students focus their attention on learning stuff that will make them less likely to end up on the bottom of the hierarchy.
In essence generations has been raised to be very skilled in a few practical technical fields while being completely illiterate about everything else.
How do you deal with these people in daily life? With their idiotic reactionary beliefs and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any form of culture beyond the handful of IP rights white western cishet males are expected to enjoy?
And how do we prevent STEM lord bullshit under socialism?
As a humble CNC machinist, here's my rambling vulgar producerist take. As much as it is a problem that STEM is glorified and humanities are sidelined or deemed unnecessary, there is a stark class divide within STEM mindset as well. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics - that's all theoretical cubicle work. Sure, it is labor, but it accomplishes nothing on its own. An army of engineers in an architecture firm does not produce a building. No number of scientists is capable of arresting climate change. We've got app stores filled with millions of apps, but all they are capable of doing are reifying the present social relations, and mathematics makes no attempt at mystifying the fact that it is a purely academic pursuit.
In the context of mechanical engineering and production, my proposition is you force people to operate the machines before you allow them to build/set up the machines. Then you force them to build/set up the machines before you allow them to program them. Then you force them to program the machines before you allow them to do the glorified engineering work of processes development and industrial design. Under the present regime of production, there is a deep dichotomy between the technical labor of people who keep the factories churning, and the "enlightened" engineers and designers who go to school, sit in a comfortable office, draw a bunch of lines and arcs on a computer and, in doing so, unwittingly wield tremendous power over the conditions of potentially hundreds of thousands of hours of labor. This is not to equivocate the discipline of engineering with the social status of being a member of the bourgeoisie, but to highlight the consequences of decisions made at this level.
Engineers one way or another must be forced to pull their heads of out of their perfectly spherical, frictionless asses and think about the social and political implications of their designs, and one way to do that is to make them start from the fundamentals. Not just do some 3 month internship along the way to getting an engineering stamp, but actually engaging seriously with the production process, such that they learn how to spot the kind of engineering decisions which result from inexperience, expedience, or penny pinching and develop a genuine disdain for it. A solid education in history, politics, and philosophy can only serve to enrich this disdain.
Edit/addendum: When it comes to "tech work" A.K.A. information technology and software development, the situation is even worse. If it is an engineer's job to methodically weigh the pros and cons of various design decisions in a LIMITED social scope (e.g. will this building collapse on its inhabitants, or will this intersection get pedestrians killed. In short: "will our firm be held liable"), this methodology is almost entirely lacking in the field of computing. Yes, "software engineers" are a thing, but it is a much more vaguely defined dicipline than other engineering fields like mechanical, architectural, and civil engineering. The majority of computer technicians take pride in the notion of being a "code monkey," who moves fast and breaks stuff. For the most part, even the limited social concerns of more mature engineering diciplines are entirely abscent.
:mao-clap:
As someone who just spent hours contorted in a weird position to change a critical part, no one should be a design engineer before being a manufacturing technician.