CONCEPT
The Technology Class
The specific social class — builders, founders, investors, platform owners — whose particular way of seeing the world has been universalized through the AI transition as the common sense of the age.
The technology class is not identical to the tech industry's workforce. It is the specific stratum whose interests and worldview have achieved hegemonic status through the AI transition. It includes the founders, the venture capitalists, the senior engineers, the platform owners, the organic intellectuals whose analyses shape public discourse. Its common sense — about inevitability, individual adaptation, market distribution, and technological neutrality — has been exported to the broader culture through the institutions of civil society the class controls or heavily influences. Understanding this class as a class, with specific interests and specific mechanisms of hegemonic reproduction, is the precondition of analyzing the AI transition as political rather than merely technological.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The class emerged from the specific institutional history of postwar American computing: publicly funded research that produced the Internet and the foundational AI breakthroughs; a venture capital ecosystem that commercialized the results; a regulatory environment that permitted the concentration of platform power; and