Critical perspectives on technology: resources
Last updated: October 1, 2018.A wide-ranging list of resources for those interested in a more critical understanding of the technology industry, grounded in a recognition of its economic, social and political context.
This was initially compiled as a companion to the March 2018 issue of Notes From Below, called Technology and The Worker, which I co-curated. That issue contains some excellent pieces at the intersection of technology and class composition, most of which aren’t listed here, and I would highly recommend taking a look.
There’s a lot here, with resources in a variety of formats (books, articles, podcasts, communities, individuals), and I suggest you bookmark this page and use it as a reference if you’re interested in this topic. If you think something should be added to this list, get in touch.
Communities
- Tech Workers Coalition, an excellent group of tech workers focused on building worker power in the tech industry
- an interview with two organisers for Logic Magazine: A World to Win
- an explanation of what they do, for Notes From Below: Tech workers, platform workers, and workers’ inquiry
- transcripts of two panels at Left Forum in June 2018: Towards an Organized Tech Industry—Part One and Part Two
- The Democratic Socialists of America
- The San Francisco chapter (not explicitly tech but they often organise stuff around the industry, given the location)
- The Silicon Valley chapter (same)
- The NYC tech working group
- Tech Solidarity: a non-profit organisation connecting tech workers with their local communities
- an interview with founder Maciej Cegłowski (@Pinboard) for Logic Magazine: Solidarity Forever
- Silicon Valley Rising: they “want to raise wages and standards for all workers so they can live and thrive here”
- an interview with their campaign director for Logic Magazine: Organizing the Valley
Publications
- Logic Magazine: an excellent print-first magazine covering technology from an astutely critical perspective
- The New Inquiry: an independent left publication with some great pieces on technology
- The Baffler: same as above
- Real Life Magazine: “a magazine about living with technology”
- Model View Culture: “a magazine about technology, culture and diversity” (though sadly now defunct)
- New Socialist: occasionally has pieces on economic or cultural aspects of the tech industry, though usually within the context of UK politics (I’m an editor for the economics section)
Podcasts
- TrashFuture, an excellent left comedy podcast about tech and politics.
- Episode with Trevor Strunk on Gamergate and Games Developer Conference
- Episode with Taylor Lorenz on the Consumer Electronics Show and Alex Krasodomski on tech monopolies
- Episode with James Vincent on artificial intelligence
- Episode with myself on worker power in the tech industry + abolishing Silicon Valley
- UpVote, WIRED and Ars Technica UK co-production hosted by Rowland Manthorpe.
- Upstream, an independent podcast on economics, which occasionally features episodes on technology
- Media Democracy, which is mostly on the media but often covers tech as well
- Future Left
- Novara Media, an independent left media organisation based in London
- Government Vs The Robots on how technology will affect politics
- General Intellect Unit: “Podcast of the Cybernetic Marxists. Examining the intersection of Technology, (Left) Politics and Philosophy”. sooo good
- Politics Theory Other: an excellent new left podcast by Alex Doherty
- Team Human, a podcast on technology hosted by Douglas Rushkoff
People to follow on Twitter
(not an exhaustive list, obviously; take a look at the people I follow for a much longer list of suggestions)
- Holly Wood
- Pinboard
- Dmitri Kleiner
- Steve Klabnik
- Steve has written this excellent introduction to anti-capitalism
- Nick Srnicek
- Evgeny Morozov
- Frank Pasquale
- Moira Weigel
- Cathy O’Neil
- Ben Tarnoff
- Zeynep Tufekci
Books
First-person accounts
- Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman.
- The Boy Kings by Kate Losse. She was an early employee at Facebook and writes about her experiences there. Beautifully written.
- Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martinez. A guy who sold a company to Twitter and later worked at Facebook writes a fairly obnoxious tell-all in which he excoriates everyone in the valley while bragging about his yacht. Worth reading for the insider account of working in the industry, but I found his criticism to be pretty toothless.
- Disrupted by Dan Lyons. About his time at HubSpot. Also pretty obnoxious, sadly.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Ben Horowitz is now a name partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and I guess this book is meant to justify his present amount of wealth and power by showing us all the “hard things” he went through to get to where he is now.
- John Patrick Leary has written a good critique of it for The New Inquiry: The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History
- Live Work Work Work Die by Corey Pein.
- Excerpt at NYMag
- Episode of The Discourse podcast featuring Corey Pein as a guest
- Review for Salon by Keith Spencer
- Review for The New Republic by Shuja Haider
- “Like The Turk, Silicon Valley is an impressive automaton hiding a con job. Beneath its carefully constructed appearance of meritocracy are the world’s most powerful people, pulling strings, turning gears, and winning every time.”
- Review for the New York Times by Nikil Saval
- Appearance on a podcast with Doug Henwood
Third-person accounts
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. A little too bright-eyed. Good counterweights below:
- Paris Marx for Jacobin: Elon Musk is Not the Future
- Hamilton Nolan for Splinter: Elon Musk Is an Asshole (short and to the point)
- Jemima Kelly for the Financial Times’ Alphaville (of all places!): The world doesn’t need more Elon Musks
- Jacob Silverman for The Baffler: The Madness of King Musk
- Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. Chronicles the early days of Twitter. Really well-written.
The economics of the industry
Critical takes
- Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs. This was a weird read (more of a textbook, with a ton of introductory stuff on both topics crammed in) but has some good insights. Written by a media professor in a very dry, thoroughly academic style.
- The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner (available as a PDF). A Marxist take on the economics behind the tech industry. I haven’t actually read this yet but I need to.
- Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek. A Marxist analysis of contemporary technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Amazon. Quite groundbreaking, really. Highly recommended. And if you like this, I’d also recommend Srnicek’s more popular book Inventing the Future, co-authored with Alex Williams, on the role of politics in directing technological change.
- Ours to Hack and to Own by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. A good collection of essays on platform cooperatives and their potential role. Doesn’t have that much to say about the wider economic context in which these co-ops would be situated, but still a good read.
- A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark. I honestly loved this book. It’s from 2004, and doesn’t really go into specifics about the industry itself, but it does a great job of placing the information industry in its historical economic context, while also firmly grounded in the critical theory tradition. Highly recommended.
- Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier-Boutang. A critical perspective on the political economy of tech, which proposes that we are in the midst of transitioning to a new mode of capitalism. Aligns nicely with Wark’s Hacker Manifesto, but this one is more detailed on the specific economic characteristics of our era.
- Not really a book, but Jacobin had an entire issue on technology called Ours To Master, which has some good stuff.
- The Black Box Society by Frank Pasquale.
- Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. Takes a deep dive into how inequality is algorithmically reinforced in various contexts.
- Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. A really good critical take on why the problems with tech are actually problems with the underlying economic structures. My notes are here.
Less critical takes
- The Industries of the Future by Alec J Ross. Predictions on the future of the tech industry. It’s actually somewhat critical but this is a guy who once worked for Hillary Clinton and who seems to mostly share her very neoliberal outlook on the world, so don’t expect much.
- Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier. This is also somewhat critical—he castigates large tech companies for having too much control over for lives. Still, I think his proposed solution (the “micropayments” thing) is highly misguided and betrays a complete misunderstanding (or ignorance) of the labour theory of value, so I’m putting it in this category.
- World Without Mind by Franklin Foer. A journalist explains the dangers of Facebook and Google having a monopoly over our media sources. I agree with his concerns, but his solutions centre around better regulation, which imo is not enough to address the roots of the problem.
- The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent. An editor for the_Economist_ laments that technology (esp automation) is changing the relationship between capital and labour by reducing the value of labour. This had potential, but its fundamental outlook is very liberal, and doesn’t do enough to question the economic landscape that led to technology being used in the way that is.
- WTF: what’s the future and why it’s up to us by Tim O’Reilly. I haven’t actually read this yet, but from the Medium post introducing the book, it sounds like he’s saying that powerful corporations essentially need to behave better, rather than questioning the fact that these unaccountable for-profit corporations have been given so much power in the first place.
- An excellent critique of it by Molly Sauter for The Outline: Why is anyone listening to Tim O’Reilly?
Very uncritical takes
Read them to understand the enemy, esssentially.
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel. On why/how startups should strive to become monopolies
- A very thoughtful review by Guy Patrick Cunningham for Los Angeles Review of Books: Citizen Thiel
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. A guide to building a “lean” (agile, iterative, responsive, etc) tech startup.
- Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. A bunch of essays that are mostly about how great Paul Graham is. An (unfortunately) semi-seminal work. You can find the essays for free on his website.
- The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. On open source. This actually isn’t that bad, though the author has some really weird views these days (mostly when it comes to women).
- The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. A very techno-optimistic book that only ever pays attention to the mainstream economic narrative (completely ignoring any alternative, more heterodox narratives), which means mainstream economists love it.
Articles/essays
First-person accounts
- Aakash Japi for Hacker Noon: Getting Laid Off In Tech. A thoughtful first-person description of recent layoffs at Snap, connected to deeper insights about the role of the work ethic and the “meritocracy” fantasy in tech.
- Aaron Timms for The Baffler: The Artificial Intelligentsia. An incredibly powerful account of working at an overhyped “artificial intelligence” startup in NY.
- Anna Wiener for n+1: Uncanny Valley. A beautiful and mostly fictional (but still quite accurate) account of what it’s like to work at a startup in Silicon Valley.
- Dan Hon on Medium: No one’s coming. It’s up to us..
- Me for the first issue of Notes From Below: Silicon Inquiry. On my own experience in the tech industry, first at Google then at my own startup.
- Joe Toscano on Medium: Why I’m Leaving the Golden Handcuffs of Silicon Valley Behind to Educate the World.
- Min Li Chan for The Point: The Google Bus
On ideology
- The absolutely amazing editorial for Logic Magazine’s issue on Failure: Project Runway
- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron: The Californian Ideology. A analysis of the techno-libertarian ideology of the valley (as promulgated by publications like WIRED) from a media studies perspective.
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus for Wired: One Startup’s Struggle to Survive Silicon Valley’s Gold Rush. An insightful look into startup culture (from 2014).
- Erin Griffith for Wired: Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re The Good Guys. They’re Not.. The title says it all.
- John Harris for the Guardian: Don’t just teach kids to code – teach them to question Facebook and Google
- W. Patrick McCray for Los Angeles Review of Books: Silicon Valley’s Bonfire of the Vainglorious, a review of one book about Silicon Valley’s obsession with transhumanism & “curing death”, and one book about various characters in Silicon Valley (including Thiel fellows)
- Evan Osnos for The New Yorker: Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
- Fred Turner, in an interview for Logic Magazine: Don’t Be Evil
- Odrán Waldron for New Socialist: Please Solve Life: How Transhumanism Distracts Us from Silicon Valley’s Class Warfare
- Samuel Earle for the Times Literary Supplement: How tech companies like Facebook think that they can become God
- Miya Tokumitsu for Jacobin: In the Name of Love
- Anil Dash on Medium: 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
- LibrarianShipwreck: Be Wary of Silicon Valley’s Guilty Conscience: on The Center for Humane Technology
- Jacob Silverman for The Baffler: The Techies Who Said Sorry
- Holly Wood on Medium: Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten. An old favourite, in response to a highly confused essay on economic inequality by startup dinosaur Paul Graham.
- Corey Pein for The Baffler: Blame the Computer. On, among other things, the authoritarian tendencies within the tech industry.
- Willie Osterweil for The New Inquiry: Liberalism is Dead, on the corporate fascism of Silicon Valley
- Carmen Petaccio for The New Inquiry:
- Universal Basic Bullshit, on the support for Universal Basic Income within Silicon Valley
- This is Not a Simulation: “The computer simulation hypothesis reveals how the American liberal elite questions everything except the insufficiency of liberalism itself”
- The always excellent Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel for The Guardian: Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself
- “But these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires. Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform.”
- “Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit. This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.”
- “In other words, “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics. Shifting to this model not only sidesteps concerns about tech addiction – it also acknowledges certain basic limits to Facebook’s current growth model. There are only so many hours in the day. Facebook can’t keep prioritising total time spent – it has to extract more value from less time.”
The economics of the tech industry
- Daniel Joseph for Real Life: Two-Faced (a stellar piece analysing the cultural aspects of platform capitalism, as well as the political economy underneath)
- same author, same publication, a year earlier: Code of Conduct. “[…] platforms are technologies for the production of distribution itself, and if platform capitalism is about distribution, then it’s primarily about space. Platforms create a space in which specific forms of exchange can occur, and set the terms for those exchanges, all while extracting rents.”
- Peter Frase for The New Inquiry: The Future Bubble
- really excellent piece on the venture capital model of funding companies in Silicon Valley, and how that relates to the rest of the economy
- Leif Weatherby for LARB: Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism. A very impressive overview of several relevant books:
- Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (I haven’t finished this yet; super long)
- Machine, Platform, Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson (haven’t read this yet. Sounds like it’s broadly accurate in describing trends, but its authors come from a particular normative perspective, as Weatherby writes: “Subtract the ghoulish enthusiasm, and this is one of the most compelling descriptions of the present I have found anywhere.” Also: “Brynjolfsson and McAfee imagine a fully automated luxury communism for the very, very few.”)
- Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (which is good, if incomplete)
- Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind (some good stuff but I disagree with a lot of his conclusions)
- Scott Galloway’s The Four (haven’t read this yet)
- David Graeber for The Baffler: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
- Evgeny Morozov:
- interviewed for Nesta: In conversation with Evgeny Morozov on big data, identity and the Silicon Valley hegemony (from 2015 but still very good)
- interviewed for the New Left Review: Socialize the Data Centres!
- for the Guardian: Will tech giants move on from the internet, now we’ve all been harvested?
- for The Baffler: The Taming of Tech Criticism
- another one for The Baffler: The Meme Hustler, a very extensive and critical look at the Tim O’Reilly “brand”
- Nick Srnicek for the Guardian: We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why
- Jimi Cullen for New Socialist: We need a state-owned platform for the modern internet (on nationalising cloud computing plaforms)
- Me on digital strategy and UK politics for New Socialist:
- Hettie O’Brien for New Socialist: Monopoly’s Fallacy
- Malcolm Harris for Medium: The Singular Pursuit of Comrade Bezos
- David Dayen for American Prospect: Big Tech: The New Predatory Capitalism
- Ted Chiang for BuzzFeed News: Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
- Matt Cole for Salvage: Platform Capitalism and the Value Form
- Matthew Lawrence for Political Economy Research Centre: Control under surveillance capitalism: from Bentham’s panopticon to Zuckerberg’s ‘Like’
- Shoshanna Zuboff: Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization . Academic paper, and a very important one.
- Ben Tarnoff for The Guardian: Big data for the people: it’s time to take it back from our tech overlords
- Interview for Logic Magazine: Safiya Umoja Noble and Sarah T. Roberts on the Problems of Platform Capitalism
- Sam Lavigne for The New Inquiry: The Networked Assembly Line, on how fears of automation and AI are really just fears of the worst tendencies of capitalism
- the program for an intensive reading group on Platform Capitalism
- K. Sabeel Rahman for Logic: The New Octopus. On tech monopolies
- Ben Tarnoff for Jacobin: A Socialist Silicon Valley
- Francesca Bria for openDemocracy: The robot economy may already have arrived
- Grace Blakeley for Novara Media: Robots Aren’t Coming for Our Jobs – Capitalists Are. A really excellent perspective that considers the ideological drive that led to “globalisation” (a highly suspect nominalisation if there ever was one) being blamed for problems created by capitalism.
- Stacy Mitchell for The Nation: Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market
- I really like this: “Amazon will undoubtedly respond to any effort to rein it in by making its dominance seem like the inevitable outcome of technological progress. When Bezos was asked several years ago about his company’s effect on publishers and booksellers, he responded: “Amazon is not happening to bookselling; the future is happening to bookselling.” Bezos would like us to believe that we shouldn’t expect to enjoy the benefits of the digital revolution without surrendering our markets to Amazon’s control.”
On venture capital
- Kim-Mai Cutler for Logic Magazine: The Unicorn Hunters
- Eric Paley for TechCrunch: Toxic VC and the marginal-dollar problem
- Steve Klabnik: Is npm worth $2.6MM? (from 2014). On VC investing in the open source ecosystem. Some of the predictions turned out to be wrong in light of GitHub’s recent acquisition by Microsoft, but it’s a still thoughtful and intelligent read.
- On the rise and fall of Theranos, a blood-testing technology “startup” which was valued at $9 billion at its peak
- Blood Will Out by Rachel Riederer, a review of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood.
- I really like this one line, after a litany of examples of how the company was obviously fraudulent: “None of this stopped Holmes from regarding herself as a kind of prophetic figure who was going to change the world.”
- Also: “The heckler is a good reminder of what Holmes goal was: to put her machines into homes and healthcare settings across the country, whether they worked or not.”
- The last paragraph is just stunning: “As Theranos’s story wraps up […] my mind turned to the ambitious nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, and to the basic idea of her company. A portable blood-testing machine that was small enough to install in a local pharmacy or a home. A wide battery of tests from a single finger prick instead of a large draw of venous blood. It is a good and useful idea. And I wonder if Theranos might have fulfilled its promise—in some form. […] If Holmes had allowed the company to drop some of the sexier and more impossible parts of her plan […] could it have worked? We don’t know, because Holmes had to be a “unicorn,” something impossibly glamorous whose only flaw is not being real.”
- Blood Will Out by Rachel Riederer, a review of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood.
- Some interesting thoughts in this Bloomberg article (scroll ahead to the People are worried about unicorns. section):
- “I have to say, if SoftBank is going to become the entire market for hot private technology startups, then every valuation is going to be marked-to-SoftBank, and the numbers will start to lose their meaning.” (On SoftBank valuing WeWork at $35 to 40 billion, less than a year after its last round when it was valued at $20 billion)
- the article also features this fascinating quote from Fred Wilson: “CEOs and their talent organizations frequently tell me that it is easier to recruit people to companies that have raised at eye popping values. This is particularly perverse because the higher the valuation, the less money the employee will make on their equity. But, it seems, the talent market is looking to the investment community to signal to them what companies are worth working for.”
The gig economy
- Me for New Socialist: The Inevitability of the Gig Economy
- A shorter post I wrote about Uber, back when I didn’t have a platform other than Medium: Don’t put your faith in Uber
- This n+1 editorial on ridesharing: Disrupt the Citizen
- cryoshon: Why the Sharing Economy is Awful
- Paris Marx for The Bold Italic: How the Gig Economy Profits Off of Desperation
- Facility Waters and Jamie Woodcock for Viewpoint Magazine: Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo
- Lorenzo Zamponi for Jacobin: Bargaining With the Algorithm. A rundown of organising efforts among workers for food delivery startups like Deliveroo & Foodora
- Brett Scott for How We Get To Next: Reversing the Lies of the Sharing Economy. So, so good
- “we should call out Uber for what it is: a company in control of a platform that originally facilitated peer-to-peer renting, not sharing, and that eventually transformed into the de facto boss of an army of self-employed employees. And even as “self-employed employee” might sound like a contradiction, that’s the dark genius of the Uber enterprise. It took the traditional corporation, with its senior managers responsible for controlling workers and machines, and cut it in two — creating a management structure that need not deal with the political demands of workers.”
- “A platform corporation really only owns two things. It owns algorithms hosted on servers, and it owns network effects—or people’s dependence. While the old corporation had to get financing, invest in physical assets, hire workers to run those assets, and take on risk in the process, a corporation like Uber outsources its risk to independent workers who must self-finance the purchase of their cars, while also absorbing losses from their cars’ depreciation or the failure of their operations. This not only separates corporate managers from ground-level workers, it places the major burden of financing and risk on the workers.”
- “This is a venture capitalist’s wet dream. Give a startup minimal capital to hire developers and run media campaigns, and then watch as the network effects ripple over the infrastructure of the internet. If it works, you’re suddenly in control of a corporation built with digital tools, but extracting value from real-world, physical assets like cars and buildings. The entity holds itself together not via employment contracts, but rather by self-employed workers’ dependence on it to access the market they rely on for their survival.”
- “We have a hard time seeing systems. We find it easier to see what’s tangible and in front of us. We see the app, and we see the driver’s car icon moving along the streets on their way to pick us up. What we can’t see is the deep web of power relations that underpins the system. Instead, we are encouraged to fixate on the flat and friendly interface, the shallow surface layer of immediate experience.”
- “Of course, if you want to put a positive spin on this kind of work, you can call it flexible, decentralized micro-entrepreneurship. But pan out, and it looks more like feudalism, with thousands of small subsistence farmers paying tribute to a baron that grants them access to land they don’t own.”
- (parts of this article are eerily similar to my piece for NS, which was published a few months after, but I swear I didn’t read this until after I wrote mine)
On fully automated luxury communism
- Brian Merchant for The Guardian: Fully automated luxury communism
- Aaron Bastani for Vice: Britain Doesn’t Need More Austerity, It Needs Luxury Communism
- Andrew Elrod for Dissent: Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector
- A critique of FALC, for libcom: Fully automated luxury communism: a utopian critique
On worker power within the industry
- In the games industry
- Maurice Reclus for Freedom News: Trade unions and the tech void
- Jamie Woodcock for Notes From Below: Prospects for Organising the Videogames Industry: Interview with Game Workers Unite UK
- Ben Tarnoff for The Guardian: Can Silicon Valley workers rein in big tech from within?
- Alex Press for Vox: How Silicon Valley workers are revolting against Trump’s immigration policy
- Me for Notes From Below:
- Me for Novara Media: Now is the Time for Worker Power in the Tech Industry
- Joe Corcoran in a presentation at Isle of Ruby 2018, aimed at fellow developers: What’s Good?
- Alex Press for n+1: Code Red, an absolutely stellar longread on organising the tech sector
- Moira Weigel for the Guardian: Coders of the world, unite: can Silicon Valley workers curb the power of Big Tech?
- Siddharth Patel for Jacobin: Tech Workers: Friends or Foes?
- Ben Tarnoff for The Guardian: Tech’s push to teach coding isn’t about kids’ success – it’s about cutting wage
- Jonny Bunning for The New Inquiry: Capitalism with a Fluffy Face. On tech companies being happy to open up their offices to dogs (to keep workers happy), but not unions.
- Ben Tarnoff interviewing Björn Westergard for Jacobin: Coding and Coercion (on the Lanetix firing)
- Rick Morgan for CNBC: SurveyMonkey defies Silicon Valley labor caste system, offering contract workers full benefits
- Ben Tarnoff interviewing an anonymous Google employee about Project Maven, for Jacobin: Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon
- Tanvi Misra and Sarah Holder for CityLab: Workers’ Rights, Silicon Valley-Style
- I really like this quote: “The ends are not better conditions for tech workers,” Bracy said. “The ends are a more responsible industry.”
- Rick Paulus for The Atlantic: A New Kind of Labor Movement in Silicon Valley
- I was quoted in this piece, and wrote (a possibly unnecessary) clarification of my comments here
- LibrarianShipwreck: Challenging the Tech Companies from Within
On open source
- Ashe Dryden: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
- Kyle E. Mitchell: The Mendicant Maintainerati
- Rob Hunter for Jacobin: Reclaiming the Computing Commons
- Gavin Mueller for Jacobin: Microsoft and the Yeoman Coders (on Microsoft acquiring Github for $7.5 billion in June 2018)
- “While there’s a lot of hype about gift economies and good vibes, when you’re doing an economic analysis, you have to consider the sector as a whole, not the intentions of a few members. One of the few to do this well, Swedish researcher Johan Söderberg, analyzed free software as part of labor under capitalism. Because so much code is available at no cost, open-source programmers effectively cheapen software by creating a base of code freely available to all — in Marxist language, they’ve cheapened those commodities by reducing the socially necessary labor time required to create them.”
- “The changing terrain of digital capitalism means the old strategies of coding freedom won’t work. So instead of attempting to decentralize tech, to better preserve an ecosystem of independent businesses that stay small and promise to be good, coders should strive for democracy at work instead.”
- Also see episode 20 of General Intellect Unit, which analyses this article in detail & also links the labour aspects of the article to the “industrial union” concept discussed in Prospects for organizing the tech industry
- Me for Logic Magazine: Freedom Isn’t Free
- Gavin Mueller for Boundary 2: Digital Proudhonism
- this is a beautifully-written academic paper that connects Marx’s critique of Proudhon to the popular contemporary view that networked technologies will kill middlemen and allow for a flourishing ecosystem of independent producers (a view popularised by Lawrence Lessig, Paul Mason, Cory Doctorow, etc)
- it’ll be slow reading if you don’t have a background in all this, but it’s so so good and thought-provoking
- the crux is that production is a social process, and that artisanal-type models that would turn us all back into individual producers who exchange goods freely on the market is reactionary and, ultimately, misguided
- Jan Corazza: A short critique of Stallmanism
- this is SO GOOD and I wish I had read this before I wrote my piece for Logic
- “Free software activists should accept that software freedom is not an isolated issue, with its own, completely independent value set, but is just one aspect of a wider struggle for justice, and that we can never achieve full software justice under capitalism. Once freed from this isolated logic, the next obvious step is integrating it into our advocacy, critiques, and educational material.”
On accelerationism
- Malcolm Harris for The New Inquiry: Turn Down for What?
- Andy Beckett for The Guardian: Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
- The Verso blog: Beyond Endless Winter: An Interview with Nick Srnicek: a really interesting and wide-ranging interview about not just accelerationism but also platform capitalism, science fiction, and cryptocurrency.
- Leftcom: Back to the Future: Rebranding Social Democracy, a critique of Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future
On cryptocurrency
- Doug Henwood for Jacobin: What’s Behind Bitcoin Mania?
- Mike Beggs for Jacobin: The Dumb Money
- Jack Chadwick for New Socialist: Bitcoins and Beanie Babies
- Tom Walker for Red Pepper: Bitcoin and the bandits: how Wall Street captured the Occupy of money
- Adrienne Jeffries for The Outline: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
On Cambridge Analytica
- Evgeny Morozov for The Guardian: After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data. Really good overview of the wider context of the problem
- Juan Ortiz Freuler for Open Democracy: The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a drop of water trickling down the visible top of an iceberg. Focus on decentralizing power
- Laurie Laybourn-Langton for Open Democracy: The oldest sins in the newest ways
- This Twitter thread from the NYC DSA chapter’s tech working group
- Yasha Levine for The Baffler: The Cambridge Analytica Con
- Branko Marcetic for Jacobin: They Didn’t Even Need to Hack Facebook
- Paul Mason for Novara Media: Choice: Break up Facebook – or Take It Into Public Ownership? I Am Not Kidding
- Will Davies for the London Review of Books: Short Cuts
- Tom Walker for Red Pepper: Deleting Facebook isn’t enough: The rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’