Bossism

“Bossism” is the writer John Ganz’s term, captured in Kyle’s The Renaissance of Rise and Grind - Research notes, for an emerging tech worldview: “a belief that the people who build and run important tech companies have ceded too much power to the entitled, lazy, overly woke people who work for them and need to start clawing it back.” In the research, the figures associated with it are Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, who (per the cited NYT reporting) are “seizing an opportunity to tug the tech industry’s culture sharply to the right.” Musk’s Twitter takeover — mass firings, demanding employees attest they were “extremely hard core,” talk of bankruptcy — is the canonical case study, with elite cheerleading from bosses framed partly as “class solidarity” and partly as leftover goodwill from Tesla and SpaceX.

Context: John Ganz is a political and cultural writer (Substack newsletter “Unpopular Front”); “bossism” is his coinage for a reassertion of owner/manager power against labor in the tech sector, articulated in his commentary on the post-2022 “tech-lash.”

Where this appears

• The Renaissance of Rise and Grind - Research — Ganz’s definition of bossism quoted; Musk’s Twitter management style and the Andreessen/Thiel cultural shift cited as its expression.