[scsilver]

You also need a developer community, standards bodies, universities, regulatory bodies. You are made valueable by the interplay of all those institutions. Guess who makes your laptop and provides access to your internet, its directories, and communication channels, the same companies you have to work for.

[minimuffins]

Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.