[Fragile Fidesz: Techno-Managerial Class 1/3] A critical vulnerability that reactionary forces from the Right face regarding institutional capture and hold. First: Twitter and technocrats.
I’m from an Eastern European, industrial working class, Socialist town. With Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the final straw being restoring Trump’s profile, all the true Socialists I know back home are calling for a boycott of Tesla.
If you take look at the Hungarian Post-Socialist Power Cheat Sheet, you’ll see that in the Fidesz Hegemony era (post 2010) I gave them a tiny, orange “r” in the Soft Power column. That’s an overstatement.
The highlights from the post you’re about to read are listed in this Twitter thread.
Brute force institutional capture
Fidesz struggles to increase its presence on many fronts, mostly Arts, as it’s the most visibly Left-adjacent Soft Power sector.
Whether their methods and results prove to be fruitful, useless or even counter-productive is debatable. More often than not, Fidesz makes a desert and calls it capture.
A recent and ongoing example is the battle over the University of Theatre and Film Arts Budapest (SZFE), which was taken over by the Right through Hard Power. Here’s a recent (realtalk) quote from the director of the foundation that manages the university, I let you judge the approach for yourself:
For some time now, I have seen exactly how the SZFE was designed to be the central base of the system that the Liberals have built for themselves. It’s a training facility for them, just look at the participants in political protests, where the theatre and film professions are at the forefront. They are hysterical because we have captured one of their last bases (...) Those who come out of here [under the new leadership] will represent a different tone and a different backbone (...) Re-tuning students is not an easy thing."
Theatre & film now Conservative, mkay? Signature says so. Obey! Hungry first 🇭🇺 or else!! Anyway, OBEY!! We nationalist now!
His ascendance was met by protests, strikes, cancellations (old school kind), and the rest. With him, Fidesz really kicked the hornet’s nest. Which side will prevail? I have no idea. His approach, Fidesz’s approach feels a bit too blunt, more likely to achieve destruction rather than assimilation, but I don’t know much about theatre, I can be wrong.
I do know about tech though. In tech, the story from the outside is similar, and the inside story to me, unlike in Arts, is familiar.
As Elon’s purchase of Twitter demonstrates, institutional (re)capture is no easy task.
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The birth of the techno-managerial class
In this series I’ll focus on the “techno-managerial class”, which is a subset of managerial class outlined by many starting with Burnham (1941). This class is present in both the public and private sector, and just like the managerial class, it falls outside democratic oversight. If they’re sufficiently politicized, traditional models based on self-interest doesn’t apply to them (a bit like how “woke capitalism” makes no sense if you expect a company’s motive to sell the most amount of razors).
Yet they’re not entirely devoid of self-interest, these are little people after all, they know who to truly be afraid of, who holds the real power. They tend to make political sacrifices for causes that are by and large approved by the dominant Soft Power forces; they can proudly display their activism in their Twitter bio or on their LinkedIn with no repercussion, a bit like The Teacher’s Pets Rebels.
When tech people felt they had a green light to do unethical things, actions that otherwise would compromise their careers but would be forgiven by the greater industry, Musk had to act swiftly to prevent them screwing things up: accesses were revoked and many were locked out as a preventive measure.
Act swiftly and subscribe!
The techno-managerial class is indisposable. Near-indisposable. The hardest to replace after a takeover, the very last ones to be fired, unless the upper management / human resources is suicidally clueless about the product’s actual needs. Your bottom tier programmer is a manager, even if his title says otherwise: he’s managing code, he’s a crucial cog in the infrastructure, and the longer he’s been at it, the more he himself became an irreplaceable part of the day-to-day institutional knowledge required to keep things running, to avoid a white screen of death on the users’ end the next morning.
Every programmer in a project is incentivized to make themselves indisposable, we’re talking about smarter than average people here, even the dumbest ones understand self-interest, so unless you had good mid-management (CTO-level) making sure that every single one does a job that’s well-documented and universally understandable, they will to their best (and to the product, the owner, and any future owner, the worst) to stay irreplaceable. Only the very best, most vigilant CTOs can keep a product from degenerating into a mess of entrenched gurus.
In the CTOs’ case (techies themselves), the incentive to do this extra management hassle must be recognized and honored by higher management, constantly, otherwise the CTOs also stop giving a shit, and the product will veer off the path of sustainability. This degeneration can go very quiet for a very long time, until a badly handled personnel problem among the techies makes years of product mismanagement garbage surface that will be undeniable to everyone. Since only the best possible alignment of stars would result in a tech product where the techies are easily interchangeable, a new, entrenched and entitled management class is born: the techno-managerial class.
You don’t believe that they are more powerful than the average wage slave that they share an accounting spreadsheet with? Ever heard about programmers unionizing? Why should they? The whole world, including the upper management always treated them as weirdo monks, so they shrugged and turned their field into a monastery, long ago. Monks don’t need a union, that would be a downgrade.
Every institution that relies on tech people will have its own monastery that you need to deal with, if you were to take it over.
Conquering the Monastery of Twitter
There were and are a lot of rumors on how Musk is handling the takeover. Thousands were fired, which is the least interesting part, most of them weren’t essential, they did not belong to the techno-managerial class, making them either easy to replace, or just simply redundant.
This is “a day in the life of a Twitter employee.” No wonder @elonmusk is firing 75% of them - TikTok
The most interesting part of the story centered on techies leaving, conspiring in company chat rooms and having to be locked out of the system before they can do any harm. This lead to rumors like this one:
Elon Musk brought in a group of his SpaceX software engineers the first day he took over the company.
Fact check: probably false. Wishful thinking by civilian fans. It kind of sounds plausible, but this is not exactly how software is made. SpaceX’s primary goal doesn’t involve running some cloud crap that has to scale globally.
It’s like Google buying a game studio and replacing the core developers with Google people: highly improbable. Google has great engineers, but their profile is not game development, it’s not even general client-side application development. Tech experts are very smart and very adaptable people, but this level of instant interchangeability is beyond even them; to outsiders, cheering Elon on, it’s believable; but they also believe that you kill a computer by shooting the monitor.
An added difficulty of doing a human resource swap like the one above is the replacement team’s lack of institutional knowledge; the larger the infrastructure, the less likely it can be pulled off without a hitch. As I noted above, if development has been mismanaged for while, you just bought a minefield that only the veterans can navigate, and Elon, even during his acquisition attempts, hinted at Twitter’s infrastructure being in disarray. This could have been a bargaining move, and after he acquired the company, a motivational one, in either case it fuelled speculations on what the company spent a billion dollars every year as research and development.
What we do know is that he showed at 1:00 am up to reassure the remaining devs that staying loyal to him (and the product) worths it.
I can help with Turbo Pascal
He wants to gain support among the truly essential workers of an internet company, those who belong to the techno-managerial class. He can fire HR, marketing, trust and safety and all the diversity officers, Arts-adjacent middle managers, Twitter would continue to work perfectly fine as a web service: it’s the techno-managerial class that no modern internet product can do without.
Apparently they discussed the system’s architecture:
He also insists on getting weekly reports from teams, which is way below his station, and regularly posts techie updates on Twitter’s development, hinting at a reassuring, fellow tradesman kind of micromanagement which is unusual for his corporate caste — which is the very highest one imaginable.
The closest example that comes to mind are 1990s rumors about Bill Gates randomly popping up in obscure code reviews all over Microsoft, and responding to hundreds of emails a day.
On June 17, 1991, I started working for Microsoft on the Excel team. My title was “Program Manager.” I was supposed to come up with a solution to this problem.
I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done.
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper.
[…]
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
… and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
[…]
He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
Elon is willing and able to go hands on to assure that his takeover is successful, his new property won’t implode due to internal dissent from the techno-managerial class.
But even he can’t do it alone.
How easy it is for Elon “Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink” Musk (resident of Silicon Valley) to find five star tech talent who can help him lead his battles?
So far only two prominent names are rumored: a notorious PS3 hacker with a big mouth and an encryption guru who openly holds radical Left wing opinions.
That’s the menu Musk can choose his generals from to oversee his takeover. Tech talent that’s willing to aid you when you’re trying to piss the Hegemonic Liberal Glacier in half is hard to come by. The loyalty of those who do show up is to be tested; they will be under a lot of pressure, an unprecedented amount of pressure both personally and historically, incentivized and threatened to stab you in the back, rage quit and disavow you when the going gets though.
Side note: the absolutist twitterati having to move onto Mastodon, a distributed platform, is a heartwarming slap in the face of utopianist federalists (the overlap on European Twitter between the two groups is huge).
They bitch about janitors going wild on these servers, true believers™ perishing to friendly fire. Having these lunatics exist at the mercy of the petty tyrants of their own making is an additional delight to my inner chaotic neutral side.
Although, this inconvenience may further reinforce their belief that only One System should remain, only that can achieve the universal ordnung that would put their minds at ease. Their kind in absolute control of it, of course.
Does Fidesz have its own, Hungary-proportioned Elon Musks, specializing in certain fields? (The answer is a surprising kind of, in some areas, ending in amajor but. More about this later, behind the paywall 😎)
Does Fidesz, as it tries to convert Hard Power to Soft, capturing institutions one after another, have the ability to transform them into one that’s loyal to the Right, or all they can achieve is to get the ownership on paper and watch helplessly as the property (brand) burns down?
For now, it seems like the latter is more likely. It’s a major fragility of Fidesz, and Conservatives around the globe in general.
Teach leans Left
Tech leans Left. Why? That investigation could fill a Big Sunday Post.
Sometimes your anecdotal evidence is so overwhelming that looking for the cause is an irrelevant post mortem. In my experience, I’ve never met anyone in tech who was Center-Right or Conservative. Extremists? Sure, both Left and Right. Mainstream Left? By default, all of them.
Maybe Liberalism’s (both old and new) popularity among them is related to the broader Left’s tolerance, acceptance and celebration of antisocial behavior.
Popular culture in the 2010s also targeted their specific kinks and hobbies. To undersocialized people, parasocial relationships with products can become the essence of defining their personal and group identity. Whoever tries to prevent me from watching Funny Nerd Family season 9 is literally out to kill me. You’d be shocked to discover how messed up the priorities of emotionally atypical individuals can be (don’t look).
This is a Christian server! — remember the ancient meme. Mixing Conservatism and tech is an old joke, it’s like oil and water. On this Substack it’s not a joke though, no swearing when you
So tech leans Left, and it will continue to do so, no change in sight. It was never really a question, otherwise 90s fiction would have treated the oncoming Information Age in a more dystopian manner. When it did, the imagined horror wasn’t Digital Fundamental Christians programming creationism into kids brains. Conservatives didn’t lose any battle; they refused to show up, from the start.
Maybe that’s the short answer: tech leans Left, because had it ever tried to lean Right, it would have fallen on its face. Keep this in mind for Part 3!
A government of lawyers
Whatever Fidesz manages to capture, on paper, more often than not turns to dust. When it doesn’t, the end result is stagnating and creaky.
Fidesz is a party made up of lawyers. Fidesz governments have long been called — pejoratively — as governments of lawyers. So they’re no dummies, per se, but their talents’ dynamic range is very constrained.
Years ago I promised myself that I will never give political advice for free. Now Substack allows me to make good on this promise. There’s way too much money, even in Hungarian politics, and I gave away way too many memes for free. I love it when they show up here and there, in both social and traditional media, but enough is enough.
Giving away stuff somehow earns you less respect than charging for it: people happily take free stuff, but instead of gratitude, their subconscious tells them that you’re a sucker, so they won’t even credit you afterwards. This ends, here.
It’s an exercise in mutual respect, and a cheap one at that.
It’s worth a peak, I’ll truly be letting the juices flow behind the paywall👌🏻💦:
(edit: 🧱🧱 former location of paywall. press F, paychads 🧱🧱🧱)
Welcome to the VIP area! Here’s your crown, PayKing: 👑
Have a Vodka Red Bull on the house!
I like lawyers like the next guy, but they do have serious limitations.
Money talks and capitalism works. Kind of. Just don’t skimp on keeping the little guys content after your takeover, the masses that are essential to run the operation. Lawyers understand this much.
Fidesz, globally, is a mouse. Locally it’s an elephant. As it stomps around with well-earned Hard Power and huge bags free play money, trying to balance/revenge/shake up the Soft Power dominance of the Left, fighting a kultur- and institutional capture kampf, their lawyer and lawyer-adjacent thinking imagines the finish line right where the signature goes; once the paperwork is done, the institution is ours.
The little people below can stay. No harm to them. The slaps only fly high. But it’s not just benevolence on Fidesz’s part: they have no ready army of interchangeable little people when these takeovers happen. They have no option but to keep the managerial class within the institution (including the techno-) in place.
So the usual messaging is that a few heads very high up might roll, as expected, but when the ink dries, the conquest is assumed done, and everyone below can just come to work tomorrow as if nothing has happened. It’s that simple, right? I don’t know, ask Elon Musk.
They don’t need to turn to Elon for experience though, Fidesz has plenty of former takeovers that had resulted in a disaster (PR and value); in fact, no formerly Liberal-adjacent brand survives contact with Orban’s extended national capitalist universe. Since in these series I’ll focus on the personnel problems, I leave the problem of brand cancellation by the Left for another day; just keep in mind that some people, especially within the techno-managerial class, get grumpy and jumpy once their checks start coming from Bad Man Orban or one of his fellow Extended Marvel Universe villains, even if they still go to the same office to sit at the same desk in the same chair to do the same job as before.
Fidesz is not entirely clueless in personnel matters: if I want to be charitable with hypothesizing, the National University of Public Service was founded in 2012 partly because Orban’s high intellectual circle is well aware of Burnham, so they figured that the long term solution to the problem of the managerial class is to train the new generation on their terms.
The university's primary goal is to educate future public administration officials, military and law enforcement officers (through BA and MA programmes) and to develop the skills and know-how of current members of public service (through further training programmes). Moreover, UPS also functions as a think tank for public service (through PhD programmes, joint conferences and individual research activities of lecturers).
No Bitch Skills: a case study of bad talent management
On how Hungarian Conservatives fail to nurture the occasional, useful technocrat that falls into their lap.
I’ll be mourning of Dávid Vitézy, a former internet autist turned public transport tsar; he seems to end up on the losing side of palace struggles, I would assume that he’s unable and unwilling to play that game. He’s a technocrat, and a good one. Stands out.
Stinky Spice
According to my BKV friends, Dávid Vitézy (an independent but Fidesz-driven member of the transport company's supervisory board) is a psychopath, a homosexual, and still lives with his mother, not a good person. Obviously, my BKV [Budapest transport company] acquaintances do not like Dávid Vitézy very much, but they do not know him professionally, so they demonise him as a human being.
But why is this twenty-something malaise poking so much at the mighty BKV, anyone may rightly ask.
— Defunct blog about Budapest, 2008
Despite being connected to Fidesz by blood, Vitézy is not a party apparatchik: his maturity from a person who argues online about tram schedules (founding member of the Urban and Suburban Transit Association, VEKE, in 2000, at the age of 15) into one who can get actual projects done happened to coincide with the beginning of the Fidesz Hegemony era. He’s as neutral as it gets: those who get nitpicky about his allegiance are committed to tribal warfare to an unhealthy way, thus can be disregarded. Vitézy had plenty of chance to go Death Con 3 on behalf of Fidesz in the past 20 years, yet he stayed professional, no matter how much pressure was put on him to do so by both sides.
Vitézy, as far as transport management goes, is world class. Yethe’s just got ousted from an appointed position, again. This periodic rise and fall is so well established now, that we can name it after him theVitézy-cycle: essential technocrat gets job, does well, then, out of nowhere, he gets the knife and no explanation is given to the public (Fidesz is terrible with communication on its better days, and when it comes to sudden personnel changes, their PR truly hits rock bottom, even ISIS is more forthcoming with justifications on why one, previously lionized militia leader was burned in a cage than the Hungarian government.)
He shouldn’t just be treasured in Hungary, he should be treasured anywhere, as far as public transport tsars go in metro areas. Yet, whenever Fidesz appoints him to do a job, he always ends up getting canned after a while, pushed aside by internal politics like some anomaly. A fundamental mistake.
Losing him shows a huge problem with intra-governmental talent management: Vitézy is not the kind who strikes me as an expert of intrigue and gossip; force him to play politics with full-time politicians and he will always lose.
There can only be five Spice Girls in a class
Politicians within Fidesz are very similar to politicians in great, stable parties everywhere: the top ones are like the mean girls in high school, obsessed with one an other, knowing that only five of them can be the Spice Girls of the class. This constant bickering, even if they had any real world skills outside law to offer, is to the detriment of their ability to get things done.
In an environment where intrigue is the primary selection pressure that defines career advancement, you can never have enough of your energy devoted to it. Those who wish to ignore intrigue, to focus on the task that they were appointed to handle, those who refuse to play the game of musical chairs, will eventually find themselves without a chair.
Vitézy is a good example of the essential technocrat that Fidesz sucks at attracting and safeguarding:
He has:
Actual, real world skills (comfortable close to the metal)
Leadership (bullet stops with me on the projects I manage)
He lacks:
Intrigue (he doesn’t want to be any Spice)
What Fidesz would have to do is to make the Spice Girls within the party, which they have plenty of, get off his back, and channel their bitch skills into protecting the likes of Vitézy. They should also make it clear to him that he doesn’t have to get involved in the palace games, he just has to focus his job.
Bitch skills have a place, politics is one, but you need a few pimps on top, or else the bitches will run wild, making the environment toxic to mousy technocrats.
Pro politicians are unavoidable: there’s both an internal darwinian pressure that makes Spice Girls raise to the top, and there’s an external pressure that makes thick-skinned bitches a necessary bulwark against the other side’s thick-skinned bitches: a government of professionals is a naive dream.
“If our politicians were engineers, we’d be on Mars!“ — concludes the teenager after watching pop-science TikToks for 3 hours (I assume those exist, didn’t check). The world doesn’t work that way, not even the teenager’s own little world, that’s why he gets no pussy. A government made up exclusively of Spice Girls however is very alienating to essential technocrats.
If you have pimps on top who the Spice Girls fear, a balance can be maintained. Fidesz does have such pimps, yet, evidently, the girls — for now — are allowed to run wild.
For effective politics, Spice Girls must take precedence; for effective governance, they must not be allowed to have dominance.
Case Study #2: This this Library!
On January 21st, 2017, a video was uploaded to YouTube showing a group of student protesters at the University of Washington chanting "Who has the power? We've got the power" are interrupted by a man saying "Hey hey hey, this is library."
— knowyourmeme
This is Library Guy offers a compact juxtaposition to underline this effect: you need people like him in power positions to govern effectively, but in order for a party to get into power, it needs the loud ones who are willing to dedicate their time to activism, instead of studies.
Technorcratic talent, in order to make it to governance, needs protection from the political environment.
Orban’s ugly girl talent pool is bone dry
They have some hot shot, young economists; dedicated and visionary, running around right now to keep the country from collapsing. But you can count them on one hand, the same names show up over and over. That’s a small pool even for a country of only 10 million.
Fidesz also has a TED-Talk guy, but he’s more of an organizer / haute visionary, he won’t be overseeing tech people any time soon (or fool them that he’s competent enough to be respected). He lacks hard the tech muscles, he’s a Spice Girl wearing Google Glasses.
That’s all that comes to my mind. I’m running out of technocrats in prominent positions. It’s all lawyers and Arts people. Did I miss someone while scraping the barrel? If so, please
4400 words seems plenty on this aspect. In Part 2 and Part 3 I’ll focus exclusively on tech. For now, and incident to ponder on that should bring us back to this field: the national consultation hack and its consequences.
Isn't Lazar doing exactly what you recommend? (A lot of people think Lazar Janos is the 2nd option if Orban is gone from pm position in Fidesz, and it is probably true...) Lazar is the biggest Pimp and he has a lot of "young" smart technocrats around and below him in his ministry department in a big position…
"That’s all that comes to my mind. I’m running out of technocrats in prominent positions. It’s all lawyers and Arts people. Did I miss someone while scraping the barrel?"
I can think of two guys righ off the bat: Boszormenyi Nagy Gergely and Bekesi Marton.
Orban is one of the smartest I know, but he is an old head, you probably have to prove your loyalty for years to become someone big in Fidesz dunno, don't care.. They probably have more "talent" around Fidesz…
Orban has got too cocky, he was never a humble man, but after how he handled the Ukraine-Russia war, I think that's a new level of fuckery... I could not care less about Fidesz…
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Isn't Lazar doing exactly what you recommend? (A lot of people think Lazar Janos is the 2nd option if Orban is gone from pm position in Fidesz, and it is probably true...) Lazar is the biggest Pimp and he has a lot of "young" smart technocrats around and below him in his ministry department in a big position…
"That’s all that comes to my mind. I’m running out of technocrats in prominent positions. It’s all lawyers and Arts people. Did I miss someone while scraping the barrel?"
I can think of two guys righ off the bat: Boszormenyi Nagy Gergely and Bekesi Marton.
The first seems to be in a good position for Fidesz, the other one became the biggest Spice Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjcneRkG0k0&ab_channel=Partiz%C3%A1n
Orban is one of the smartest I know, but he is an old head, you probably have to prove your loyalty for years to become someone big in Fidesz dunno, don't care.. They probably have more "talent" around Fidesz…
Orban has got too cocky, he was never a humble man, but after how he handled the Ukraine-Russia war, I think that's a new level of fuckery... I could not care less about Fidesz…