They have been for a while. I live in Seattle and what I have seen in the time I have been here is eye opening.
When I first moved here, Seattle still had the last vestiges of being a union town. There was a working waterfront and if you went to a bar downtown by the water, you were just as likely to end up talking to a fisherman as a white collar worker.
Those were the early Microsoft years and the end of the Boeing years (before Boeing merged with McDonell-Douglas). One of the things that struck me as we moved into the Microsoft world was with our college alumni club. It has always been for everyone, but the Microsoft people formed their own breakout group. They defined themselves as an "other". That should have been a warning sign.
Seattle has been affected by this way of thinking more than most places. The tech people don't want to live in the visceral world. They stay home. Downtown is a ghost town because the tech people don't shop in stores.
I go to a small, recurring party in the summers with people who are mostly tech workers. Conversational going is heavy. The people are nice enough but seemingly incapable of small talk. Men in their fifties still talk about gaming. It's isolating.
And now, these former whiz kids are being aged out by the companies they championed and the technology they embraced. They are lost and unmoored.
I mention all this because I have seen this shift right in front of my eyes, this depersonalization, loss of community, and the way one set of people is easily discarded in favor of cheaper, younger employees, and now, of course, AI. This is the world the tech bros want. A demoralized work force, uncertainty, fear, and lack of loyalty. That's the person Elon Musk is and there are plenty more just like him waiting in line. We've ceded everything to these assholes and they're laughing at us.
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