Tech news roundup for the New Socialist newsletter

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Just my sections (on tech news), archived for posterity. The other editors’ sections are available on Patreon for subscribers only.

I wrote these every 2-3 weeks from June to December of 2018, but stopped in 2019 because of my new blog-post-every-day routine.

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December 23, 2018

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The Year Workers Stood Up to Big Tech - Bryan Menegus for Gizmodo

This article provides a useful summary of (imo) the most important phenomenon in tech news this year: the recent surge of worker organising within the heart of the tech industry.

[…] what’s been most surprising this year have been the various actions from higher up the corporate food chain of these firms, beginning with Google employees’ protestations over working on technology for drone AI at the Pentagon’s behest as part of Project Maven. Since then, discomfort about the industry cozying up to military and law enforcement interests (especially ICE and CBP) have led to calls to cancel contracts by staffers at Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Accenture, as well as resignations at Google.

This article only came out a few days ago, but there’s already been a new development on this front since then: subcontractors at Facebook, doing research for Oculus (Facebook’s augmented reality division), pushed back against their staffing agency over subpar employment practices. As I’ve written for Notes From Below, the main function of intermediary companies (in this case, Filter Digital) is to create an “arms-length structure designed to allow [Facebook] to dodge accountability while paying less for an equivalent quality of work”. The tech giant gets work done, without having to pay for benefits or add employee headcount (which could make their quarterly reports look less impressive); meanwhile, the actual workers live in an atmosphere of precarity, “one emergency away from possible homelessness”.

My intuition is that resistance within the tech industry is just getting started. Discontent within the upper echelons of the industry is spreading, whether due to ethical concerns over the products they’re building, or out of solidarity with their colleagues lower down the pay scale. The social contract that kept these companies working (relatively) smoothly during the Silicon Valley golden ages - where companies essentially bribe workers who are close to the point of production, while treating everybody else poorly - is starting to fall apart. Even highly-paid software engineers can’t be bought off forever; when some of their coworkers are treated as second-class citizens, and their products are being used to implement inhumane immigration policies, they develop a yearning for workplace control that no amount of free sparkling water will quench. The old order of unjust hierarchies and centralised control is beginning to crumble, and in its wake there is the possibility of something new.

I feel like people who don’t follow tech news are constantly surprised when I tell them about the tech worker resistance that’s been going on, just because it runs so contrary to stereotypes of tech workers being hyper-privileged and thus apathetic. Silicon Valley techies are unorganisable - we all know this. But you know, so were teachers, gig economy workers, cleaners, game developers. Everyone is unorganisable until, all of a sudden, they’re organised. And I, for one, am very much looking forward to seeing what 2019 brings. As Bryan Menegus writes in the article,

To see Americans demanding dignity in their work in an industry highly resistant towards employee organizing feels like a monumental shift in power. These may be some of the richest, most influential, and most powerful companies in history, but they still have a hell of a fight on their hands.

I highly recommend you subscribe to the Tech Workers Coalition newsletter if you want to follow these developments.

Lime and Bird worth $10B+ each or 5x to 10x more than their last valuations - FutureEngine

An interesting (if entirely uncritical) read about the valuations of micro-mobility startups, which can essentially be boiled down to ‘Uber for electric scooters’. These are more common in the US than in the UK - I haven’t seen any in London, whereas in San Francisco (where I’m currently visiting) I feel like I see there are idle scooters everywhere I look.

To me, there is something absolutely incredible about the fact that these companies can be seen to be worth $10+ billion. It’s just such a brazen case of the sheer senselessness of the capitalist drive to enclose every bit of public space you can, with the enclosure enforced through the threat of state violence. It makes me angry just to think about it. If we want scooters in our cities, they should be provided as part of a suite of municipal-level public services (municipal socialism!). There sure as hell should not be a $10 billion dollar private company behind them, collecting rent from every trip we make while relying on police protection to save their profit margins. Fuck that; “if the field cannot feed the farmer, then burn the field”. If the scooters that litter the city are lining the pockets of venture capitalists more than they’re serving the people who live here, throw them into the ocean.

December 2, 2018

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Somali Workers in Minnesota Force Amazon to Negotiate - The New York Times (Nov 20)

Possibly the first group of Amazon workers in the US that has been able to force Amazon management to the negotiating table. What’s interesting is that the workers deliberately sidestepped union structures in their attempt to get better working conditions (anti-union legislation is pretty brutal in the US anyway):

Brishen Rogers, a labor law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, said union-organizing drives were long and grueling, coming down to a yes-or-no vote. Oftentimes, Professor Rogers said, worker centers like Awood that organize along affinity lines of culture or religion can force change.

Really inspiring stuff, and a rebuttal to the stereotype that migrant workers are not organisable (this was a worker-led effort, with many of the workers being refugees who fled Somalia in the 1990’s).

Nationalize Amazon - Sarah Jaffe for the Outline (Nov 15)

A provocative suggestion, made in the wake of the whole Amazon HQ2 saga. Brief summary: Amazon made a spectacle of inviting cities to bid for the chance to host its second headquarters, then recently announced that it would be building two, in the two most predictable places: New York City and DC. So the whole affair was a ridiculous sham, essentially.

I do wonder if we need a better term than “nationalisation” for companies like Amazon/Google/Facebook that are profoundly international in scope. “Internationalisation” doesn’t quite work, as it’s already used in software systems (for adapting software to different languages/locales). “Municipalise” is a good alternative, but only relevant on the local level. “Socialisation”? “Expropriation”? Please, write me with suggestions.

Some other recommended reading on Amazon HQ2: Amazon’s HQ2 Spectacle Isn’t Just Shameful—It Should Be Illegal; The Biggest, Richest Cities Won Amazon, and Everything Else. What Now for the Rest? (with the delightful pun “Bezos ex machina”); and this tweet thread by Anand Giridharadas.

Dodge, Distance, and Distract - Will Oremus for Slate (Nov 15)

In case anyone still believed that tech companies like Facebook are somehow “better” than older types of companies, or are politically left-leaning in any substantial way:

One of the most explosive charges was that Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm, Definers Public Affairs, to publish negative propaganda about its rivals and disparage its critics, including by painting George Soros as the driving force behind anti-Facebook activism.

Plus, lest anyone forget, Facebook’s head of global policy (Joel Kaplan) is apparently best buds with Brett Kavanaugh, newly-confirmed Supreme Court Justice (& Republican) despite multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. He even threw a party for him at his house.

More recommended reading: The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire by Max Read for New York Magazine, and Where’s the Facebook Walkout? by Will Oremus for Slate.

Tech workers against imperialism - RK Upadhya for the Tech Workers Coalition blog (Nov 22)

Not news, but this is an excellent article by RK Upadhya of the Tech Workers Coalition about the role of tech workers’ resistance in a broader anti-imperialism strategy:

What is striking is that all of these protests are targeted at different points of the same general system of state violence. Military interventions abroad, the incarceration and mass deportations of migrants, and the surveillance and policing of domestic populations are all different expressions of what we can call the armed wing of US imperialism. Recognizing this fact is key in increasing the coordination and effectiveness of the efforts by all the different groups of workers and activists who are resisting this violent system.

Near the end, the author mentions the Lucas Plan as a useful political imaginary:

Ultimately, we must spread the idea and practice of actually shutting down the supply chains of imperialism, rather than simply asking for reforms from managers, politicians, and bureaucrats, who will inevitably have their own agendas. True worker power isn’t delegating the task of changing society to elites, but doing it ourselves. This should also be tied to a more ambitious program of imagining and implementing new plans for technological development that actually serves human needs, rather than the needs of warmongers and arms dealers. We ought to study and seek to bring back the Lucas Plan, a mass effort by workers in the 1970s at an English defense company — everybody from secretaries to engineers — to come up with a production and distribution plan that would not be based on arms production, but would still incorporate the skill-sets and interests of workers.

The author has previously written an excellent article for Notes From Below titled Disrupting Disruption: On Intervening Against Technological Restructuring. The author has previously written an excellent article for Notes From Below titled Disrupting Disruption: On Intervening Against Technological Restructuring. For more on how the Lucas Plan could apply to the tech industry, see Bringing Back The Lucas Plan (again Notes From Below). For a recent summary of the state of organising in the tech sector, see Tech Workers Need to Keep Organizing (Jacobin). I also recently appeared on the Future Left podcast along with Ben Tarnoff to talk about worker power in the tech industry.

(I’m actually still working on a way overdue write-up of the Lucas Plan session at TWT - should be up sometime in the next week!)

Beyond “Taming” the Tech Giants - me for New Socialist (Dec 1)

A transcript of a talk I gave at the DECODE Symposium in Barcelona in October: “To truly challenge the power of the tech giants, we need more than better regulation. We need class struggle.” Builds on my “abolish Silicon Valley” concept & explicitly links it to workers’ struggles in the tech industry and beyond.

Other recommended reading on this topic: Can We Scale Down Big Tech? by Evan Malmgren for Dissent, which reviews Tim Wu’s book on antitrust law as an antidote to the tech giants’ dominance and concludes that trustbusting is not enough:

To label antitrust as an incomplete proposal is not to accuse The Curse of Bigness of timidity. A revitalization of aggressive trustbusting is as radical a proposal as could be taken seriously in the short term, and Wu charts a clear path to temporarily forestall the social ills of an oligarchic private tech industry. Long-term solutions, however, will almost certainly require a broader reconfiguration of ownership. To do that, we will need to look to the future for answers, and not merely to a Brandeisian past.

November 11, 2018

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The coordinated Google walkout on Thursday, November 1

Let’s start with the biggest news item first: the Google walkout last week, which marked a significant step forward in the recent wave of tech worker resistance. Around 20,000 workers walked out of the job at Google offices all over the world last Thursday, at 11:10am in each timezone. Although the event wasn’t the first Google walkout of a political nature (in January 2017, there was a 2,000-person walkout in response to the Muslim ban) and although it was more symbolic than practical, as management largely ignored the organisers’ more radical demands, it was still quite inspiring and definitely felt unprecedented in scale.

This walkout was triggered by revelations around Google’s handling of sexual misconduct by executives. The most notable case was that of Andy Rubin, co-founder and Android and an executive at Google from 2005 until 2014, when he was asked to resign after CEO Larry Page was made aware of a sexual harassment claim. Not only did Rubin jump right into another venture (starting an incubator for hardware startups), he also received an exit package worth $90 million.

Infuriating, but also entirely unsurprising. In fact, that’s pretty standard fare when it comes to sexual misconduct in the corporate world, really: powerful men rarely face adverse consequences for their actions, while the women who report are marginalised, silenced, or pushed out. This phenomenon takes on a special significance in the tech industry, though, because it’s obscured by the unfortunately still common idea that tech is a ‘meritocracy’, where anyone can succeed if they’re talented enough. Even as evidence mounts that the tech industry can be an inhospitable place for many - as it becomes increasingly obvious that poor diversity in the industry can’t be entirely blamed on the pipeline problem - the prevailing response from tech leaders is along the lines of Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” feminism. Women just need to lean into their careers, and if there are structures or individuals stymying their rise to the top, they just have to lean harder. It worked for Sandberg, after all. (The myth of meritocracy is especially compelling when it works for you.)

In the last few years, some high-profile accounts of sexual harassment in the tech industry have surfaced, including that of Kelly Ellis, former software engineer at Google, in 2015, and Susan Fowler, former software engineer at Uber, last year. The latter sparked consumer boycotts of Uber and arguably contributed to the downfall of former CEO Travis Kalanick; the former didn’t even get an official apology from the company. That an action on the scale of this recent walkout didn’t happen sooner speaks to how new this sort of tech worker activism is for most of the industry. After all, given the tech industry’s notoriously low levels of low class consciousness - where even identifying as a worker is unusual - it’s not always obvious to workers at these companies what they should be doing in terms of employee activism, beyond maybe raising a half-hearted question at the company all-hands. It’s only in the last few months that the idea of tech workers exercising collective power has permeated the mainstream consciousness, thanks in large part to efforts by members of Tech Workers Coalition who helped coordinate worker-led actions to challenge the status quo (most notably, in response to Project Maven at Google).

So what was the result of the walkout? The most significant consequence was Google’s decision to end forced arbitration for sexual harassment cases (Facebook followed suit shortly after). It should go without saying that this should have been the norm already; the current system requires employees to settle with the company in private, where the company has all the power. Otherwise, management’s response was pretty mediocre - the organisers’ concerns over Google’s contractor system, which has come under fire for creating a two-tier workforce, weren’t addressed at all.

Still, that doesn’t mean the walkout was a failure. It takes time to build organising capacity, and for workers to warm up to the idea of exercising their (considerable) positional power in the workplace in order to rectify perceived injustice - especially if they’re unused to thinking of themselves as workers. I personally happened to be in San Francisco when the walkout happened, and I had the privilege of attending the demonstration at Harry Bridges Plaza where I was happy to see some quite radical signs, like “workers’ rights are women’s rights” and “workplace hierarchy enables predators. Workplace democracy now!”. Certainly not everyone who participated in the walkout would have agreed with those signs, but the fact that they were even present testifies to dissatisfaction with the current system. And I highly doubt that the anger has been placated by the lacklustre response from management - if anything, it might have stoked the fires.

If you want to read more about how the walkout was organised and what prompted it, the Tech Workers Coalition newsletter has a good summary: Google Walkout Ripples Across The Industry - Tech Workers Coalition Update 11/9. There’s also an article in CNBC, which features a brief quote from me: Google walkouts showed what the new tech resistance looks like, with lots of cues from union organizing. You can find the organisers’ original demands here: We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands.

The fight over Proposition C in San Francisco

A local ballot proposition in San Francisco, which would increase funding for homelessness services while taxing large corporations (mostly tech) a little more, passed with 60% of the vote in last Tuesday’s elections. As you’d probably expect, the ballot measure received quite a bit of opposition from the city’s wealthy tech elite, many of whom spoke publicly against the proposition or donated to the opposition campaign. One outlier was Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who publicly supported the measure and even allowed campaigners to use Salesforce HQ for phone-banking operations. (A reminder that class interests aren’t always the whole story.)

Other members of the tech billionaire class were a little more predictable, though. This statement from Stripe is particularly disappointing, not least because I personally used to admire Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison. It plays into the standard centrist tropes: homelessness is painted as a “complex” problem, without “clear-cut answers”, and we are asked to resist the pull of “polarized discourse” and “emotionally-charged, soundbite analysis”. As if “polarised discourse” is a result of irrationality on the part on those demanding change, rather than, I don’t know, competing class interests.

There’s a lot more to be said on the discourse around Prop C, and how the left can challenge that kind of framing, but I’ll save that for a longer post.

Lanetix ruling

An update on the Lanetix case (where software engineers were fired after attempting to unionise): the company was ordered to compensate the fired workers for back pay and damages. More info here: Software Company Learns a Tough Lesson About Union-Busting; Fired Workers Win Big Back-Pay Settlement. For the backstory, see this article in Jacobin.

October 28, 2018

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On Uber - entering more verticals ahead of going public; giving drivers equity; and electric cars

Last week, the FT reported that Uber would be expanding its service into more verticals (read: finding more innovative ways to exploit precarious labour). The new effort - to be launched ahead of next year’s IPO - would be called “Uber Works”, and would be styled as a temporary staffing agency for all types of “flexible work” (though the FT only mentioned waiters and security guards).

This venture should make it more clear than ever that Uber’s “secret sauce” has nothing to do with ridesharing or taxis. Instead, it’s all about harnessing technological innovation for the purpose of better connecting, controlling and disciplining workers in order to extract as much surplus value as possible. Their initial foray into the ridesharing market, then, was only the beginning - as a beachhead market, it served as a convenient springboard to help pave the path to becoming a universal platform for on-demand labour. It seems like their next main focus is food: Uber Eats has been doing well, and will probably expand further; there are rumours that Uber will be buying Deliveroo for £1.5 billion; and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has talked about expanding into the grocery delivery space, in a bizarre speech that included this gem of a quote:

Eating is something you do three times a day. So these are habits that go very, very deep. And someone needs to be the orchestration layer for people moving around cities, and I think that can be us. It’s an enormous opportunity.

In other Uber-related news: Uber is considering (along with other gig/sharing economy companies) giving equity grants to its workers, in a way that sounds superficially similar to John McDonnell’s ownership fund plan but - make no mistake - has much less benevolent intentions. For one, it would be a very individualised endeavour, about increasing individual loyalty and gratitude (in order to improve long-term profits) rather than improving workers’ collective rights. An SF Chronicle article on the proposal says:

But the financial largesse does come with a price tag, some experts say: It could discourage gig workers from pursuing other rights, including the crucial one of whether they should be reclassified as employees rather than contract workers.

For Uber, the idea makes sense: Uber has had issues with driver churn and unrest lately, and this could be a way for them to keep drivers happy without having to make a major change to their extremely lucrative employment model. It could also make drivers less likely to resort to disruptive protests or attempts to unionise. Whether it would actually be good for workers as a whole is still an open question - it might increase earnings for some in the short term (or at least the ones who get in early enough, probably pre-IPO) but it could come at the cost of damaging solidarity among workers in the long term.

Last bit of Uber-related news: Uber is trying to get its London-based fleet to switch to electric cars. Sounds like a good idea in theory, but remember, Uber doesn’t own these cars. Its solution, then, is to add a “clean air fee” to non-electric vehicle rides in London which should “incentivise” drivers to switch to electric vehicles. It’s not yet clear how this “incentive” mechanism will work, but my guess is that Uber will eventually make it financially unsustainable to drive any non-electric vehicle, and will then offer low-interest loans for any drivers who “decide” to make the switch, in a brilliant case of using its immense power not only to achieve its goal but to disguise the fact that it had that power in the first place. In the end, it’ll achieve its target of 100% electric vehicles by 2025 without having to bear any of the costs or liabilities of doing so. Any drivers who can’t make the switch will probably be summarily abandoned, since Uber isn’t legally responsible for them.

In related reading, check out a fairly pessimistic article I wrote for New Socialist last November: The Inevitability of the Gig Economy. Sadly, it’s all still quite accurate, especially this bit:

Despite the pretense that workers benefit from the flexibility these jobs offer, the gig economy is really little more than the high-tech version of the historical ‘day labourer’ market—combining corporations’ drive for cheap and plentiful labour with technological innovations that enable it.

On Nick Clegg behind hired by Facebook at a 7-figure salary

It sounds a bit like a punchline to some joke, but there is no joke, other than the bizarre world we live in. For Clegg, the decision makes perfect sense: having probably given up on the possibility of Brexit being halted, he gets to escape the UK and its tumultuous political scene for a comfortable lifestyle in California while feeling like he still has some political sway in world affairs (given that he’ll be VP of “global affairs and communications” at a huge multinational corporation). For Facebook, Clegg is a perfect hire: the quintessential corporate bootlicker who has (at least on paper) experience with the European political scene and who may be able to sweet-talk the European Union into going easy on Facebook. The fact that he’s Sir Nick Clegg probably doesn’t hurt, either. Whether Facebook is aware of Clegg’s less-than-pristine reputation among actual voters in the UK is unclear.

Maybe they don’t care - after all, they don’t really need Clegg to be popular among the masses; they just need him to represent their interests within the technocratic policy domain. And it’s probably useful to have someone who doesn’t really have a fallback. Facebook has been under massive public scrutiny the last few months, which means that the executives working under Sheryl Sandberg are probably finding it harder to do their job than ever before. And if those execs happen to have been early enough at Facebook, they probably have enough money to just quit and do whatever they want. Dan Rose, one of Sandberg’s reports who had been at Facebook since 2006, recently announced he was quitting:

He’s moving to Hawaii where his family has lived for the last year, he said, and will not seek another executive position. He plans to “stay active through advising and investing in companies,” he said.

Clegg, on the other hand, doesn’t quite have fuck-you money, and also is unlikely to go back into politics. Plus he seems to actually believe that Zuckerberg will let him have an impact on company policy (which is almost laughable in its naivety - Clegg should probably talk to the founders of Instagram or Whatsapp who’ve recently departed Facebook). It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up. Coincidentally enough, this isn’t even the first time that Facebook has hired a former Lib-Dem MP for Sheffield Hallam, either; for the last 9 years, they’ve employed Richard Allan as Director of Policy in Europe.

In somewhat related news, I came across this great FastCompany article with this excellent headline: Should we break up the tech giants? Not if you ask the economists who take money from them. The economists who were recently asked to testify at FTC hearings on whether Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc need to be broken up also happened to have been getting indirectly paid by these corporations. Not exactly surprising, but still almost impressive in its brazenness. Will Davies had a great take on it, via Twitter:

It’s been said many times, but economists-for-hire willing to attack market competition form one of the most powerful intellectual fronts of neoliberalism. The ideology of neoliberal economists in brief: “Market fundamentalism for everyone except my clients”

October 14, 2018

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The Automation Charade - Astra Taylor for Logic Magazine

A really lovely piece unpacking the economic and social implications of “automation”, and what the word conceals, from the person who coined the term “fauxtomation”. In our present economic climate, the main drive behind initiatives to automate services away - in retail, hospitality, fast food, etc - is, of course, cost-cutting, not some starry-eyed love of technological progress or modernity. In practice, this means weakening the power of labour and punishing the workers who dare to demand more than bare minimum wages.

But this form of automation isn’t just about disciplining labour by getting robots to replace them. More subtly, it’s a way of shifting the burden of work from the paid employee to the consumer - even if the total amount of work is reduced. Taylor highlights the case of McDonald’s, which has recently rolled out self-service kiosks in many of their restaurants:

Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free, while young, friendly-looking employees hover nearby and deliver meals to tables.

This form of automation is more than just a marketing ploy, as Taylor writes later in the piece:

It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.

Hence all the “robots coming for our jobs” thinkpieces, most of which seem to assume that waged labour is the only form that work can (or should) take. Taylor counters this argument by introducing a socialist feminist perspective, drawing on Silvia Federici’s work on reproductive labour:

Federici has argued that we must recognize the underappreciated, uncompensated labor that sustains everyday life, providing the foundation that underpins all manner of paid work recognized by the formal economy. Every bridge, every factory, every Silicon Valley app is merely the visible tip of a hidden iceberg of reproductive labor.

Ultimately, automation functions - at least partly - as a sleight of hand, in order to conceal the exploitation that makes a given mode of production possible. Taylor relates an anecdote about Thomas Jefferson’s dumbwaiter:

Jefferson gilded chains by making them hard to see. Slaves […] cooked hot food and put it on shelves, making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic. […] The appearance of seemingly automated abundance Jefferson so doggedly cultivated required substantial additional labor—the labor of making labor seem to disappear.

“We must think about a tech workers’ strike”: An interview with the Infoproletários - Felix Holtwell for Notes From Below

This is a very insightful interview about what it would mean to build worker power in the tech industry, from the perspective of a group of Brazilian tech workers (similar to the more US-centric Tech Workers Coalition). I loved this explanation of their politics:

We are predominantly Marxists and we analyse the reality around us through this prism. We understand that even with the higher salaries and all the advantages tech presents us, at the end of the day we are still workers like all others. We are also located in a peripheral dependent capitalist country without any project of national development; this is central to the movement and puts us necessarily in an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist position.

And this on the differences/similarities with TWC:

The TWC already exists longer than Infoproletários, but the debates about organizing IT workers are old. […] All these initiatives showed the analysis we were making was correct and reinforced the trust we had in our objectives.

Although we live in different places with really different socio-historical backgrounds, we are all a response to a worldwide conjuncture that includes a crisis in political representation (which involves the traditional unions) and an economical crisis, this time the result of the exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism.

On whether technology can be emancipatory:

Technology is never neutral and its content always reflects a class perspective. In general, it is employed according to the interest of the ruling classes. In capitalism the workers are not the ruling class, the bourgeoisie is. In such a context it is not possible that technology is emancipatory; under capitalism, it is designed to strengthen the status quo.

Most of the products we build every day at work are directed to create new ways of monitoring the work of others. How to better control production, how to see exactly what the employees are doing at work, how to better track the duration of tasks and how to better milk that last drop of production out of everyone.

Also, Felix runs the FALC newsletter, which I would highly recommend subscribing to for more left/tech news (you can find the archives here). The latest issue, “Digital colonialism and technology”, provides some background information on the interview by highlighting an important gap in the discourse around technology on the left:

What has been missing however is an analysis of how this new wave within capitalism interacts with unequal global structures. This of course doesn’t mean that organising Silicon Valley tech workers is unproductive, it is very much. But nevertheless any progressive project analysis of technology under our current phase of capitalism, and counter-proposals from the left, should also be based in an analysis of how technology reproduces colonial patterns.

I’d love to get articles rooted in this perspective for the economics section - pitch me!

Unfree Agents - Liz Pelly for The Baffler

A fascinating look at Spotify’s Uber-like business model and the ramifications of that on artists:

Spotify forces independent musicians to work more like Uber drivers—beholden to the whim of a platform they can’t control, one whose “innovations” have undercut an industry that once provided some semblance of an organic support system. What’s more, at least one Spotify employee has referred to the company’s aspirations with the Uberish term “self-driving music,” language which points to a strategy that would see music creation and discovery become more automated and data-driven, and, as much as possible, human-free.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the way the music industry works today, but its potential Uberification through platforms like Spotify and Apple Music is hardly any better. At best, these technology-enabled disruptions to the structure of the industry could signal the demise of large record labels, thus giving more power to independent artists who could then deal directly with the platform. In practice, though, this would only be displacing one type of gatekeeper in order to create a new type: that of the technology platform itself, which Pelly describes as having the potential to become a “monstrously huge record label”. Even if Spotify feels like a scrappy (and even benevolent) upstart now, the central position it’s cementing in the industry will give it power over artists in a way that it can’t help but abuse, and always to the detriment of artists themselves:

Needless to say, signing directly to Spotify is not a preferable solution for many independent artists. It’s more likely that the onrush of contracts would serve Spotify’s bottom line, giving it the leverage to lower the costs they pay for licensing music. This is how platform economy strategies often look: invest in branding to engender a sense of “trust” with industry actors; hire newly enthusiastic if powerless individuals to work independently with increased personal risk; make use of this newfound ubiquity and wage-giving power to ruthlessly minimize costs.

This is just the ideological arm of neoliberalism dressed up with a shiny app. Convince workers that they are not actually workers but are instead entrepreneurs, not really labour but instead capital-in-waiting. This way, they won’t demand concessions qua labour - that is, collectively - but will instead transact as individual micro-entrepreneurs who compete with each other for the ability to make a living, with the promise of financial stability constantly dangled in front of them like a carrot.

On their own, these atomised individuals have little choice but to accept the terms & conditions set by the platforms that mediate their every action, even if it means that most of the value they produce is captured by the digital middlemen skimming off the top of every transaction. Collectively, however, they have the power to really shake things up, not just demanding a bigger share of the proceeds but having actual control in how things are run. The Uber strike earlier this week provided a glimpse of what worker resistance to digital platforms could look like. Let’s hope it spreads even further.

September 30, 2018

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Decentralising the Internet - Jason Prado for New Socialist

A technical account of what it would mean to decentralise the Internet, following up on the previous NS piece on the same topic by James Moulding and Irina Bolychevsky. Highly recommended if you’re curious about the technical details of centralisation vs decentralisation, and why past attempts at decentralisation have failed. As you’d expect from a piece in New Socialist’s Economics section, the piece acknowledges the political and economic context as well. I’m a big fan of the ending:

While old models of decentralisation have run their course, there are new opportunities for developing decentralised architectures and democratic organisational structures. Such efforts could achieve the twin goals of taking the internet out of the capital accumulation process and giving users meaningful democratic control over their experience.

Of course, this isn’t an inevitability; […] reversing the decades-long trend toward centralisation requires reversing the neoliberal paradigm that enabled corporate capture of the internet. This, in turn, requires state action, and a broader shift in the political climate. Questioning the hegemony of today’s tech giants is the start; the next step is proposing concrete alternative structures for a future internet.

Time magazine sold to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife for $190m - The Guardian

The headline says it all. This article isn’t an especially insightful one - it’s just reporting, with no real analysis - but I haven’t actually managed to find a good take on this yet. I’ve written a tweet thread on the topic, and was planning on writing it up into a longer article, but there wasn’t enough time before TWT took over my life. If you’ve come across a better take, or are itching to write one of your own, please get in touch!

“Slaveroo”: How riders are standing up to Uber, Deliveroo and the gig economy - Anoosh Chakelio for the New Statesman

This is a report from the Deliveroo and Uber: Striking Beyond Borders session of The World Transformed, which featured gig economy workers from multiple European countries. My favourite part of this excellent session was when Callum Cant (editor at Notes From Below) suggested that instead of rallying behind platform co-ops, we instead consider expropriating the platforms. Sadly, this remark was not mentioned in the New Statesman article.

On a related note, there’s going to be a nationwide strike on Thursday, October 4th, featuring couriers for Uber Eats alongside workers at McDonald’s, TGI Fridays and Wetherspoons. The strike has been called #FFS410 (Fast Food Shut Down 4-10) and you can find more details here.

Content Moderator Sues Facebook, Says Job Gave Her PTSD - Motherboard

Scola’s lawyers say that she developed post traumatic stress disorder as a result of “constant and unmitigated exposure to highly toxic and extremely disturbing images at the workplace,” and allege that Facebook does not have proper mental health services and monitoring in place for its content moderators.

It’s good that the dark sides of Facebook’s astronomical levels of wealth & power are finally starting to come to light. Let’s hope this is a step towards getting better working conditions (and compensation) for these workers.

Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed in Leaked 45-Minute Video - Gizmodo

By now, it’s pretty obvious to most of us on the left that Amazon’s success in retail is underpinned by its horrific treatment of workers. But it seems like that same point is now being impressed upon Amazon’s managers, too. Here’s a fascinating tidbit from the training video:

“We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates. Our business model is built upon speed, innovation, and customer obsession—things that are generally not associated with union. When we lose sight of those critical focus areas we jeopardize everyone’s job security: yours, mine, and the associates’.”

There’s a mountain of critical commentary to be written about this, but I’ll just leave you with this piece from a few weeks ago for Real Life, titled The Constant Consumer: Amazon’s mission is to make customer identity more primary than citizenship. That pretty much sums it up.

(For more on the prospects of unionising at Amazon - from a left perspective - see this Notes From Below article: A Union at Amazon?)

September 16, 2018

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Tackling the platforms: on IPPR’s Digital Commonwealth report - by me, for Autonomy (republished by New Socialist)

I wrote this in response to the IPPR report on tech platforms by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton. The report itself is quite good for what it is, and Lawrence’s piece announcing the report in the New Statesman is worth reading as well. My response focuses on two key themes that aren’t really touched on in the report: the role of intellectual property (drawing on some insights from the free software movement), and the potential of workers at these companies to challenge the status quo.

We need a state-owned platform for the modern internet - by Jimi Cullen, for New Socialist

A sorely needed piece elaborating on a simple but under-theorised idea: nationalising the “cloud” (think Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, both of which make their corporate parents a massive amount of money):

to truly have the freedom to control the way we use the internet, we should look at nationalising the infrastructure that powers much of it. In particular, we should think about a publicly owned and run cloud services provider.

I would love to develop this line of reasoning more - get in touch if you’d like to write something for us! I’m particularly interested in expanding on the education aspect, which is only touched on briefly in this article. Truly democratising technology requires empowering the wider population to effectively use the technology available - not just as “users”, but as creators. I’d also like to further flesh out a strategy for actually “nationalising” these Internet-based services: what governance models are needed, what challenges are to be expected, what a lean/iterative approach could look like. If you have ideas on that front, please, feel free to slide into my DMs.

The Win-Win Fallacy - Anand Giridharadas for The Atlantic

This is an excellent look at the ideology behind entrepreneurship, with a focus on Silicon Valley celebrity Justin Rosenstein (an early engineer at Google and later Facebook, then co-founder of an enterprise software company). This quote from Rosenstein is illuminating:

There are a significant number of opportunities—Google search being the most massive example of all time—where we simultaneously are doing something lucrative and really good for the world.

As Giridharadas notes in his piece, people like Rosenstein really seem to believe that it is possible to “do good” in the world while also accumulating massive amounts of wealth. This is the ultimate liberal capitalist fantasy, stemming from a failure to recognise that the “good” that needs to be “done” in the world includes tackling the concentration of wealth. It’s a convenient lie that socially-minded entrepreneurs and philanthropists tell themselves so they can sleep better at night, all while avoiding the potentially risky endeavour of interrogating where their wealth actually comes from.

There’s a lot more to be said about the function of entrepreneurship under capitalism, and especially its neoliberal variant. In a way, it’s the purest expression of capitalist realism: the drive for capital accumulation is distilled into a heroic myth of innovation and achievement, one that convinces those who actually want to “do good” that there is no way to do so outside of the market. This is the ideological essence of capitalism in its most concentrated form.

Incidentally, the relationship between entrepreneurship and technology is something I’d love to further explore for New Socialist. If you have thoughts on this - grounded in theory, or in personal experience, or both - pitch me!

Workers’ Rights, Silicon Valley-Style - Tanvi Misra and Sarah Holder for CityLab

A reported piece that nicely summarises efforts to build worker power in the tech industry and why they’re needed. I really like this quote:

“The ends are not better conditions for tech workers,” Bracy said. “The ends are a more responsible industry.”

If Jeff Bezos wants to help low-income people why not just pay them better? - Marina Hyde for the Guardian

The headline pretty much says it all. Jeff Bezos - the world’s richest person - recently announced a $2 billion dollar fund targeted at homelessness and schools for low-income communities. This is about ideology more than it is about charity; for Bezos, it’s an opportunity to take the “same set of principles that have driven Amazon” and import them into the education system, by treating children as customers.

This is horrifying on multiple levels. For one, the dark human costs behind “the principles that have driven Amazon” are increasingly clear as more and more stories about its appalling treatment of workers come out. For another, the commodification of education at the preschool level is a terrifying concept.

Taking a step back, though, this saga really demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of philanthropy. Similar to other efforts by other tech billionaires, this is essentially the use of philanthropy as a moral shield. Money is allocated to broadly the same purposes - at least on paper - but without any form of democratic control (making it unlikely that it will actually address the problem), while also allowing Bezos et al to present themselves as humanity’s saviours. Great deal for these guys, but terrible for everyone else.

September 2, 2018

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Amazon and its warehouse workers

Stories on the horrible working conditions at Amazon warehouses - as well as the highly impressive coordinated direct actions taken by workers - continue to mount. Amazon, well aware of the negative PR potential here, has launched a bizarre PR counter-offensive that appears to consist primarily of paying employees to tweet positive things about the company (things like: ‘I even get to use a real bathroom when I want”). So it’s not great for them that Bernie Sanders - currently the most popular politician in the US - is weighing in on this, attacking the injustice of CEO Jeff Bezos being recently named the richest man in the world even as his employees rely on food stamps. Even the right-wing media has picked up on this, with Tucker Carlson on Fox News echoing Sanders’ critique of Bezos:

Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. Many of his employees are so poor, you’re paying their welfare benefits. And he’s not the only tech billionaire offloading his payroll costs onto taxpayers. This is an indefensible scam. Why is only Bernie talking about it? - @TuckerCarlson

Calls to nationalise Facebook from the left and the right

Speaking of the trend of conservatives hitting upon left-wing ideas: Steve Bannon was recently profiled in Vanity Fair as calling for something akin to nationalisation:

“I think you take it away from the companies. All that data they have is put in a public trust,” Bannon explained. “They can use it. And people can opt in and opt out. That trust is run by an independent board of directors. It just can’t be that [Big Tech is] the sole proprietors of this data . . . I think this is a public good.”

Whether it’s genuine or opportunistic, Bannon’s criticism of the concentration of power within Silicon Valley is, at least, accurate. The fact that someone like Bannon is making this argument, whereas liberal politicians are more likely to court Silicon Valley capitalists than to hold them accountable, is worrying. Mainstream politicians & pundits haven’t yet grasped the dangers of Silicon Valley’s monopolistic tendencies & the resulting power they accrue, and there’s a real risk that Bannon being correct on this front will lead to legitimation of his other (terrible) views in the eyes of people who are dissatisfied with the status quo. The left has been developing this train of thought too - Lewis Bassett’s article in Jacobin this week, responding to Corbyn’s speech about democratising the media, is excellent - but alas, lefties aren’t getting profiled on this in Vanity Fair.

Incidentally, some of the conservative backlash against Silicon Valley is cultural/political, rather than economic. Much of it comes out of a perceived hostility to conservative viewpoints, in the form of claims that Facebook et al are censoring right-wing media because of ideological intolerance (and not because it’s dangerous and/or poor-quality), as well as in the form of dissatisfaction among conservative-leaning employees at these companies, who complain about the cold reception for political views that are not “left-leaning” (read: views that are sexist, racist, homophobic, etc etc). Now, this is hilarious to anyone on the actual left in these companies, whose political views also get a cold reception, especially from leadership. But it’s also quite concerning, and it’s something that attempts to build worker power within the tech industry will have to deal with.

Software engineers who were fired for attempting to unionise will be reinstated

Great news for anyone who’s been following the saga of Lanetix. Earlier this year, a group of software engineers at an American software development company unionised and were subsequently fired. Now, the National Labor Review Board has backed the software engineers, ordering the company to reinstate the workers with back pay. The gender dynamics of the case (and relation to the rise of coding bootcamps) are especially interesting:

Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp, as did the female engineer fired in November.

“It became increasingly clear that their strategy was divide and conquer—flatter a handful of us in the hopes that we would go along with their plans, and not put up a fight when they fired half of our co-workers,” Westergard adds.

As Will Luckman (of DSA-NYC’s Tech Action Working Group) says in the article, the incident makes it clear that tech companies - despite their employee-friendly image (free food! kegs in the office! stock options!) - still “operate like traditional industrialists and will go through old fashioned methods of suppressing workers”. This often involves using the contractor system to dodge responsibility, as a recent Bloomberg article on Microsoft contractors who were also fired after unionising demonstrates.

(For more reading on the labour dynamics of coding bootcamps, I’d recommend these pieces in Notes From Below: Organising Silicon Valley’s Shadow Workforce; Diversity, Scarcity, and Labour in Tech; and Prospects for Organizing the Tech Industry.)

Skepticism about worker power in the tech industry

David A. Banks recently published an article in The Baffler that was quite negative on the (progressive) possibilities of building worker power in tech:

There is no guarantee that a union of affluent software engineers will axiomatically fall on the right side of history. Even autoworkers, that venerated core of twentieth century American organized labor, according to the historian Kenneth T. Jackson, sided with management when they joined the American Road Builders’ Association, a pressure group dedicated to convincing the federal government to build the American highway system and all the other supporting infrastructure for car-oriented, racially segregated suburbia.

I sympathise with most of the points in the article, but don’t really agree with the implied pessimism - the author seems to think that tech worker unions are inherently flawed, akin to police unions or something. There’s a nice rebuttal to this line of reasoning in the latest episode of General Intellect Unit, an excellent podcast at the intersection of tech and Marxism, which draws on the perspective of railway workers in the 19th/20th century. These workers also controlled key infrastructure, and were a well-off strata of the working class, but despite their relative privilege, they still managed to be militant and not reactionary.

The advertising-driven backbone of digital infrastructure

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales, from Bloomberg. I spent enough time in the advertising technology world (running a startup) to never be surprised when something like this comes out. One of the things you learn when talking to potential customers/partners/investors in that field is that using data for better-targeted advertising is an extremely lucrative business that is very difficult to effectively regulate, which means it will keep happening, with or without consumers’ consent. The first two paragraphs of the Bloomberg article are indicative:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

But most of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

This story is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot of super shady stuff going on in this industry, some of which I’ve personally witnessed, some that I’ve heard through the grapevine, and I’m sure lots more that I haven’t heard about. And it’ll keep happening, because the structural incentives to do so (even if some consumers are angry) are so strong. For advertisers and tech companies, it makes financial sense to invest in data-linking to increase the effectiveness of advertising, and because it’s quite easy to do this in the contemporary digital landscape, it would be silly not to. Regulation will only get you so far; to curb privacy violations like this indefinitely, we’d have to excise advertising from the backbone of the Internet, which would necessitate larger economic changes.

A piece on culture under platform capitalism

Not really news, but I came across this excellent piece in Real Life Mag (I tweeted some screenshots here) which fleshes out the cultural phenomena that arise from platforms’ peculiar political economy. Highly recommended reading.

August 19, 2018

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(I finally finished my dissertation this week! 10,000 words on the political economy of Silicon Valley. I might post an abridged version somewhere at some point. If you’re interested in the full thing, drop me a line - ilostwaldo@gmail.com)

Freedom Isn’t Free - me, for Logic Magazine

I’ve shared articles from Logic Magazine (an excellent independent publication on tech from a highly critical perspective) before, but this is the first one written by me! This is on the failures of the open source software movement - specifically, how it never meaningfully connected with broader ideas around radical politics.

I personally fell in love with the free & open source software ethos when I was a teenager, and I completely agreed with the idea that intellectual property was a terrible thing that crippled innovation. Unfortunately, no one ever explained to me that intellectual property was a necessary part of capitalism, and that the only way to really fight back against it involved a larger political struggle to transcend capitalism. So I basically wrote the piece that I wish had existed when I had just started getting into this stuff, because then I would have discovered the left way earlier.

A Union at Amazon? - anonymous, for Notes From Below

Notes From Below recently came out with their third issue, The Worker and The Union, and this 4,500 word piece on what it would take to organise a union at Amazon (written by a warehouse worker) is spectacular. Just the right amount of dense & theoretical while also bringing in real-life, up-to-date examples. I personally found it really inspiring, though it does show how monumental of a task it is.

The rest of the issue is worth checking out as well. I’d especially recommend this inquiry on the lack of unions in the international aid sector (and how that relates to struggles in the Global South), and this piece by Hettie O’Brien (who has written for our economics section!) on possibilities for worker resistance under monopoly capitalism.

How to Beat Uber - Chris Brooks for Jacobin

Earlier this week, a court ruling in New York City landed a blow to ridesharing corporation like Uber and Lyft operating within city limits, by placing a cap on vehicle licenses and, as a result, “essentially forcing them to pay their drivers a minimum wage”. Up until now, Uber, Lyft et al have been operating in a kind of regulatory grey zone under the aegis of their lean platform model, which allowed them to evade treating their drivers as employees even while directing their work conditions and pocketing their surplus value. This victory - pushed forward by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which united traditional taxicab as well as rideshare-app-using drivers - is quite inspiring, and hopefully it catalyses a wave of similar rulings in other jurisdictions. (In London, things have been stalling on this front: TfL’s Uber ban from last September was successfully appealed earlier this summer, and Uber was granted a license to continue operating until late 2019.)

Can Silicon Valley workers rein in big tech from within? - Ben Tarnoff for The Guardian

Good overview of the recent surge of interest in building worker power in the tech industry, by someone who’s written a lot of great stuff on the topic.

August 5, 2018

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Apple’s $1 Trillion Milestone Reflects Rise of Powerful Megacompanies

There’s a lot to be critical about in this article, which covers the rise of “megacompanies” like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, etc while only timidly venturing that this might be a massive problem. Still, it does at least attempt to present the facts: corporate profits are at an all-time high, and are increasingly resembling a winner-takes-all distribution wherein most of the gains are accruing to a handful of companies. The tech giants are, of course, at the vanguard of this, on the back of the power they command over more and more of the digital sphere:

Apple and Google combined now provide the software for 99 percent of all smartphones. Facebook and Google take 59 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising in the United States. Amazon exerts utter dominance over online shopping and is getting bigger, fast, in areas like streaming of music and videos.

A useful way of thinking about these behemoths is as the forefront of what McKenzie Wark calls the vectoralist class, which “thrives by extracting surplus information on a global scale”. Their role in the global economy is similar to finance, in the sense of their wealth being virtual: instead of owning the means of (physical) production, they merely control key gateways to digital infrastructure so as to facilitate their drive to commodify everything they can. This $1 trillion-dollar milestone for Apple might be a fairly arbitrary one, but it does highlight the urgent need for the left to take these tech giants seriously, which means addressing the structural factors leading to their current dominance.

The Role of Technology in Political Economy by Yochai Benkler

This is a really excellent meditation on two contrasting perspectives on the role that technology plays in rising inequality. First, we have the mainstream approach, nicely summarised by the concept of skills-biased technological change: assuming “reasonably efficient markets”, technology stratifies workers by technological skill, and allows those who are more productive to reap more of the rewards. The critical approach, on the other hand, sees markets as always “pervaded by power”, and thus skewed in ways that are never neutral; technology is always deployed on uneven terrain, and its effects can only be properly understand by looking at bargaining power and class interests.

This blog post is essentially an exegesis of the first approach, and it’s well worth reading to understand 1) why the mainstream view is so popular; and 2) what that view is missing. Summarised neatly in the last paragraph:

So, the fundamental problem of the leading mainstream view is that it takes both markets and technology as having a more-or-less natural and necessary shape, and fails to see how institutions shape both markets and technology in ways that can reinforce or moderate patterns of inequality.

Life Aboard the Rocket Ship: An Interview with an Anonymous Engineer - Logic Magazine

Logic recently unpaywalled this interview from their latest issue, Failure. It’s a rare honest look inside the heart of Silicon Valley, and there are some really insightful takeaways for anyone who’s curious about how the tech startup world actually works, and what “success” actually entails. Lots of this resonated with my own experience in the industry, which I wrote about for Notes From Below earlier this year.

One of the reasons stories like this so rarely get published is that people who manage to succeed on the tech industry’s terms have a tendency to, well, believe their own bullshit. It’s so easy to believe the whole “meritocracy” spiel if you’re personally benefiting from it, by virtue of having been deemed worthy by the existing system. And people who believe in the system are unlikely to question its core tenets. They might throw up their hands about the addictive power of social media, and may bemoan the lack of diversity in the industry, but most of them fundamentally believe the (very neoliberal) ideas that gave the industry so much wealth and power in the first place. Consequently, you’re not going to find many insider perspectives as critical and as frank as this one, so I highly recommend reading this.

My favourite bit is the ending, where the problems with contemporary Silicon Valley are rightly linked to the economic relations lurking beneath:

So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive.

Jeff Bezos’s fortune has come at the expense of workers and society not receiving their fair share - Carys Roberts for OpenDemocracy

As Jeff Bezos’ net worth continues to climb (currently around $150 billion), more and more stories have come out about the horrific treatment faced by Amazon’s actual workers, many of whom are paid crippling wages and forced to endure physically debilitating work while Bezos ponders “converting [his] Amazon winnings into space travel”. That Bezos’ unimaginable wealth is linked to the worsening plight of his employees may be obvious to anyone on the left, but it seems like recognition of that connection is creeping into public consciousness as well. Amazon Prime Day (last month) was met with consumer boycotts while some of its workers in Europe coordinated direct action.

Given the strategic importance of Amazon’s logistics network to its financial viability, the possibility of worker militancy at key choke points is quite exciting - it could cause huge disruptions in ways that would be difficult to match via consumer-only actions. If you’re interested in that topic, I’d highly recommend a podcast discussion on the power of logistics workers hosted by Pluto Press, centred around their (recently released) book Choke Points.

Outbound Facebook Infosec Chief Alex Stamos Wrote a Note to Staff Urging Major Reforms - Gizmodo

Facebook has had a difficult week - and that’s more than just the title of the memo that former exec Alex Stamos wrote to announce his departure. The memo, which declared Cambridge Analytica as an ethical turning point for the company, was refreshingly critical of the current leadership’s failure to adequately address the issue, and quite frank about the necessity for radical change:

We need to deprioritize short-term growth and revenue and to explain to Wall Street why that is ok. We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues.

While this is heartening to hear, remember that this comes from a former exec. As Tech Workers Coalition tweeted: “Sounds great! But execs don’t make this happen. Only workers do.” A company the size of Facebook requires more than some suddenly-enlightened execs deciding to behave ethically; given that it’s a public company, there’ll have to be some sort of structural ballast to ensure such ethical awakening aren’t quashed by the vagaries of the market. The fact that Facebook lost $120 billion in market value last week - not due to ethical qualms on the part of investors, but merely because growth is projected to slow - just goes to show the power of shareholder discontent. Combating such a powerful force from above will require, as Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in the Guardian, “a global political movement”. To me, that has to include building power from below - i.e., building worker power in the tech industry, within the belly of the beast itself.

Organising Silicon Valley’s Shadow Workforce - Me for Notes From Below

This article connects nicely to the last point just above. How do you build worker power in Silicon Valley? Well, the first step is to recognise that not all tech workers are coddled software engineers with tons of stock options. I wrote this article in response to a reported piece by Bloomberg from last week highlighting the ever-growing numbers of contractors working at Google and other tech company campuses, who are often paid less and denied benefits. In the midst of this wave of rising political consciousness in the Valley - primarily as the result of discontent with the ethical implications of the products being built - the separation of full-timers and contractor could present an important point to agitate around.

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July 22, 2018

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Interview with Nick Dyer-Witheford, for Historical Materialism

A good read on how technology changes the relationship between the worker and their environment. Here’s a quote in response to a question about his 2016 book Cyber-Proletariat:

“Proletariat” continues to be relevant because it names the antagonist against which capital continuously hurls these technological disruptions and so-called revolutions of work and production. […] This offensive takes a triple direction—the outright elimination of human labour by automation; the cheapening of human labour via the electronic supply chains of globalization; and the evasion of human labour by financialization, transposing capital’s transformation of money into more money into a realm now almost entirely taken over by computerized risk modelling and algorithmic trading.

Elon Musk Should Tweet More, for Gizmodo

If you’ve witnessed Elon Musk’s increasingly bizarre Twitter meltdown over the last few weeks, then the title is pretty self-explanatory. The public spectacle may have a silver lining:

The captains of industry we venerate for their perceived brilliance are often huge dumbasses when it comes to anything other than accumulating a lot of money and turning it into more. Time and time again, ignorance of this key fact has proved disastrous for the American people. Public acts of self-dick-stepping might be the only way to dispel the myth of the benevolent rich genius for good.

Project Runway - Editorial for Logic Magazine’s issue on Failure

Logic Magazine is a print publication on technology, and the only tech-focused publication that consistently takes a critical perspective. They’re excellent, and you should consider subscribing, though it’s a shame that they only print 3 times a year. The editorial for the next issue is especially biting, as it carefully unpacks the idea of “failure” within the tech industry’s psyche and shows how deeply imbricated it is with the Valley’s outward-facing display of being innovative and meritocratic and ultimately correct:

[…] it was all right for a handful of former failures to accumulate vast amounts of money and power, so long as what was good for Silicon Valley was good for humanity. If tech was the future, why would anyone, or any regulation, want to stand in its way?

The system may be working exactly as it is supposed to. If so, is the definition of success we have been using wrong? What if the success of Silicon Valley is failing most of us?

The full issue will be released later this summer, and includes a piece by me on the lost political potential of the open source movement! There will also be some really spectacular first-person stories about failing up within Silicon Valley, which I’m personally quite excited to read.

The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it, by Brett Scott

A good illustration of the way technological innovations - which can affect people’s lives in very visceral ways - are predominantly deployed according to corporate interests, not democratically-determined needs. In this case, the financial industry is trying to move more and more transactions into the digital space, citing “convenience” and “consumer preference” when the true motive is, as always, profit. As consumers, we’re helplessly “nudged” along and ultimately unable to offer anything more than token resistance. This, of course, undermines the neoliberal narrative of “consumer choice” - but, as Scott explains in the article, a more fruitful way of looking at the situation would draw on Marxist concepts like Gramsci’s “hegemony” and Althusser’s “interpellation”. The slow transition from cash to card is an attempt to delimit our imaginations by changing the realm of possibility, so that we can no longer imagine a world without the financial industry:

We must recognise every cash machine that is shut down as another step in financial institutions’ campaign to nudge you into their digital enclosures.

Worker Surveillance and Class Power, by Brishen Rogers

Really thoughtful piece by a law professor on how new technologies for surveilling workers are used to disempower workers as a class, with some examples drawn from Uber. The point of monitoring technologies is, of course, to rinse out so-called “inefficiencies”: to “push workers to perform harder, faster, and for less”. Data gathered from constant surveillance builds a map of how workers are using their time, which is then used to “squeeze out nearly all downtime”. This has implications for the traditional view of the nature of the “firm”, drawing from economist Ronald Coase’s work on transaction costs:

In a Coasean approach, the challenge of monitoring workers outside the firm may be a transaction cost that encourages the firm to bring them inside as employees […] Yet where firms can develop near-perfect knowledge about workers’ performance, the calculus changes.

What this implies is that ever-improving technology for monitoring and disciplining workers shifts the contract-vs-employee balance, incentivising firms to outsource/offshore work as long as they can still guarantee an acceptable degree of efficiency/productivity. This definitely corresponds to what we’re seeing with the gig economy - not just the more visible manifestations (Uber, Deliveroo), but the increasingly global chain of gig workers whose efforts are mediated and accordingly surveilled by platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk who, of course, retain most of the power.

Rogers ends by suggesting that countering this trend requires building power from below, rather than merely trying to play regulatory catch-up:

[…] a strategy of worker empowerment and deliberative governance rather than command-and-control regulation […] new forms of unionization and collective bargaining could address the everyday invasions of privacy or erosions of autonomy that arise through technological monitoring. […] Workers could also be woven into state and federal policy-making in a more sustained fashion. They could be guaranteed seats on new administrative boards established to consider responses to technological change, for example, or given a formal role in a more robust industrial policy that aims to create high-skill jobs and to train workers to take them on.

How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System, by Antonio García Martínez for WIRED

I’m sharing this with reservations, because I’ve read the author’s book Chaos Monkeys and I find him to be a mildly repugnant human being whose criticism of capitalism never goes beyond a bleak and futile dead end (to be snide, it goes something like: “Capitalism is bad! And communism is also bad! That’s all I got!”). Having said that, however, this piece isn’t a bad diagnosis of how Silicon Valley functions today, which he describes as:

[…] highly stratified, with little social mobility. It’s feudalism with better marketing. Today’s “sharing” economy resembles the “sharecropping” of yesteryear, with the serfs responding to a smartphone prompt rather than an overseer’s command.

There’s a vignette describing an app-mediated grocery delivery which is nicely grounded in an analysis of the political economy of Silicon Valley:

Often, the order will contain errors, revealing that the buyer didn’t quite know what he was buying (fancy cheeses are particularly risky). You’ll peck at the app and leave a tip to assuage your conscience and avoid thinking about the soaring—and largely unshared—returns to technology and capital.

Where I disagree is with his pessimism around the potential of collective action to transcend the current state of things. He identifies four main classes within modern-day Silicon Valley: “The Inner Party of venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs”; “The Outer Party of skilled technicians, operations people, and marketers that keep the trains belonging to the Inner Party running on time”; “The Service Class in the “gig economy.”; and “the Untouchable class of the homeless, drug addicted, and/or criminal”. He views the Outer Party as having the most potential for “nonviolent political hope”, but doesn’t seem to think their common interests extend much beyond “street cleanliness, crime, schools, and transit.” Tech Workers Coalition would beg to differ - these people are still workers (despite being well-compensated for now), and there is so much potential if they organise as workers, even if it’s initially triggered by ethical concerns rather than the more orthodox avenue of material circumstances.

AI Nationalism, by Ian Hogarth

The central prediction I want to make and defend in this post is that continued rapid progress in machine learning will drive the emergence of a new kind of geopolitics; I have been calling it AI Nationalism.

This has been on my radar for a while but it’s quite long so I only just got around to reading it. The author is a startup founder and investor whose views are definitely more aligned with that community than they are with the left (although he does cite Nick Srnicek! But he also cites Paul Graham …). Still it’s worth reading if you want a better understanding of AI, and I do mostly agree with the author’s vision for how AI should be governed in the long run (by an international organisation, kind of similar to the open source model).

Where I think we disagree is on the primacy of AI as a thing in itself, rather than just a tool wielded by corporations - partly as a way to distract from bigger questions around economic structure and power and politics, really. Seems to me that the author falls into the same pattern (intentionally or not) that Grace Blakeley describes in an excellent piece on globalisation and automation: framing AI as if it’s some natural force is a great way to evacuate politics from the discussion in an almost exculpatory way. The (neoliberal) political climate is treated as fairly static, and the possibility of class struggle - the idea that AI and other tech could actually be deployed against the grain of present-day class relationships - doesn’t seem to be a consideration.

He may be right, of course; the only real way to prove that narrative wrong is to build a mass movement intent on shifting power away from the capitalist class, and the jury’s still out on whether that’s happening quickly enough …

July 8, 2018

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London police chief ‘completely comfortable’ using facial recognition with 98 percent false positive rate - The Verge

The Metropolitan police is trialling the use of facial recognition technology at public events in order to find wanted individuals by their mugshot. As stated in the headline, the false positive rate has so far been 98% (‘meaning that 98 percent of the “matches” it makes are of innocent people’), and there have been no successful arrests. Feels like a standard case of technology fetishism, where the adoption of a particular kind of technology is seen as an innovative step forward no matter what the data actually report. The accuracy may or may not improve over time, but either way, the fact that this technology is being so enthusiastically adopted by a repressive arm of the state feels quite dystopian.

The surveillance economy and its discontents - Socialist Worker

On the other side of the Atlantic, facial recognition technology is in the news for slightly different reasons: less for its inaccuracy, and more for who is (or could be) using it. Amazon’s “Rekognition” service, which helps its customers to programmatically identify objects in images, is already being licensed to police departments, and could theoretically be used by even more controversial agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This article goes into some of the recent incidents of resistance among tech workers at companies like Google and Microsoft (mentioned in the previous roundup) and sketches out what could be done by Amazon workers to force a change.

Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags - Locus Online

An interesting, somewhat critical take on Facebook by a sort of techno-utopian left-liberal who’s done a lot of activism around privacy. Last sentence: “Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.” I’m personally not a fan of the narrative that some people are incorrigibly racist - it’s definitely one that Clinton played up during the campaign, with her “deplorables” comment - but it does put the whole Cambridge Analytica issue into perspective. I also liked this line: “For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.”

Survival of the Richest - Douglas Rushkoff for Medium

A really excellent first-person piece that deftly reveals the terror that certain extremely wealthy elites feel about the future. Many of them no longer seem to feel in control of what the future will bring - instead, recognising that the present levels of inequality are unsustainable, they’re making contingency plans for when the pitchforks inevitably start coming out. Rushkoff ends the piece by advising these elites that it would be better to take steps to reduce inequality now, in order to avoid this reckoning, to little avail: “They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone.”

Worth reading in full, but here are some more great quotes: “They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader?” / “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” / “Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion.”

Union defeats Deliveroo in latest round of gig economy rights case - The Independent

A small victory for IWGB in a complex legal battle over the way Deliveroo has classified its riders as self-employed. (Deliveroo has, weirdly, also claimed this latest ruling as a victory - I’m not entirely sure why.) While it’s great that there are some legal advances, the judicial side is certainly not the whole story, and it’s worth keeping an eye on Deliveroo riders’ autonomous struggles in response to changing conditions. For instance, Deliveroo recently announced changes to its payment system that could lead to falling wages, which has led some riders to decide to strike.

Let’s make private data into a public good - Mariana Mazzucato for MIT Technology Review

A good overview of the problems with allowing the private sector to monopolise and monetise our private data, by Mariana Mazzucato who’s usually quite good on these issues. The crux of it is giving the public greater control over technology, as summarised by this quote: “the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs”.

What if people were paid for their data? - The Economist

A much more questionable take on private data (unsurprising given where it’s published). This sort of reasoning - succinctly described in the headline - is pretty understandable in our woefully neoliberal times, when the natural tendency is to marketise anything that could potentially be a market. As if markets were this magic wand for fixing power imbalances. While this kind of argument is sometimes tempting for the left - if only instrumentally, as a strategy for diminishing the power of the tech giants - I worry that buying into this framing does more harm than good. Yes, privatised data has resulted in the growth of extremely wealthy multinational tech giants like Facebook and Alphabet (Google), but the socialist response to that is not to somehow charge them for the right to access our data. That only reinforces a neoliberal narrative. The proper response would to push for decommodification of data, and transforming the economy such that these companies are no longer able to exist in the first place (in other words: abolishing Silicon Valley).

June 24, 2018

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The last week has been a banner week for worker power within the tech industry, primarily centred around US tech giants’ role in the military-industrial complex. In the previous newsletter, I linked to a Jacobin article on workers at Google who campaigned internally to cancel a contract with the Pentagon (involving drone strikes). Since then, quite a bit has unfolded throughout the rest of the industry, most of it prompted by recent revelations around “forcible separation” of children from their parents by US federal agency Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The general trend has been of growing internal discontent around the tech industry’s role in supplying services to agencies like ICE, not just at the level of the executives, but at the rank-and-file level as well. The first four articles below are an attempt to map out the different focal points of employee dissatisfaction, with Microsoft being a key locus for now but unlikely to remain that way for long.

My personal take on the matter is that this current wave of employee mobilisation within the industry is unprecedented for tech, and if the anger is channeled in the right direction, there’s a possibility that this could spark something much bigger. After all, the unethical practices of the tech industry go way, way deeper than this most recent spate of anger around collaborating with repressive US federal agencies. If enough workers within the industry take notice and decide to do something about it—by seizing worker power in a way that would be completely at odds with the top-down, profit-driven ethos of the industry at large—that could have a major impact on the industry and, by extension, the economy at large. Only time will tell if this is a watershed moment or not.

The case for building worker power at Microsoft - Notes From Below (June 19)

Myself, on the backstory behind the Microsoft-ICE contract and why employees taking collective action may be the best way to force change.

Amazon Workers Demand Jeff Bezos Cancel Face Recognition Contracts With Law Enforcement - Gizmodo (June 21)

In the spirit of Google & Microsoft, Amazon workers are getting in on the protest, this time over facial recognition software (called “Rekognition”) which is being provided to US law enforcement. Workers are also calling on the company to stop providing cloud services to Palantir (co-founded by prominent Trump backer and “malevolent Silicon Valley billionaire” made flesh, Peter Thiel), which itself provides quite shady software services to a variety of law enforcement agencies.

Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts - Bloomberg (June 21)

A small number of “influential” software engineers at Google were able to put up a roadblock in the company’s plans to secure contracts with the US military simply be refusing to build a specific feature. This occurred several months ago but wasn’t reported at the time.

Silicon Valley’s questionable ethics are finally being challenged… by its employees - WIRED (June 22)

An excellent summary of the situation, complete with a guide to external organisations (such as Tech Workers Coalition and the Industrial Workers of the World) that could be help for anyone interested in workplace organising.

How Tech Companies Conquered America’s Cities - The New York Times (June 20)

In a different vein, Farhad Manjoo writes about the slow creep of the tech sector into the municipal sphere, whether it’s via privatised services or electoral lobbying. The big question that the article attempts to answer: “How did tech companies become America’s most-powerful local power brokers?” It concludes, soberly: “[…] there was a time, in America, when the government paid for infrastructure and the public had a say in important local services. With Ubers ruling the roads, Birds ruling the sidewalks, Elon Musk running our subways and Domino’s paving our roads, that age is gone.”

‘Facebook is taking everything’: rising rents drive out Silicon Valley families - The Guardian (June 20)

Gentrification: the Silicon Valley edition. Another look into the human costs of the housing crisis in the Bay Area.

Here’s How That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter - BuzzFeed News (June 21)

An excellent piece of investigative journalism into the human costs of installing technology as a mediator for consumer interactions. In this case, chain restaurants across the US have been adopting a tablet called a “Ziosk”, whereby customers can place orders directly from their table and, later, rate the service of their server—the Uber model, but for restaurants. In other words, this is using technology to automate the process of disciplining workers (as potential earnings are reduced for servers with lower ratings) while outsourcing managerial tasks to customers. Brilliant for capital, and terrible for labour.

Another Failed Silicon Valley Exec Gets a Crypto Project - WIRED (June 22)

Just the absolute epitome of the “failing up” culture within the startup world. A few years back, Lucas Duplan founded a tech startup while he was still a student at Stanford University and managed to raise $30 million USD from some of the Valley’s most prestigious names. That startup, Clinkle, not only offered pretty much nil in the way of actual innovation but was also plagued by chaotic (mis)management, and so the company burned through its cash within a few years. Now, though, Duplan is back, having raised a fund from “his family and outside investors”. This is an excellent illustration of a phenomenon I wrote about for Notes From Below earlier this year, in my piece Silicon Inquiry:

There are no real consequences to failure. If your startup runs out of money, or you have to sell for less than you raised, rest assured because you’ll probably be able to raise more money in the future. As long as you have a half-decent slide deck and fit some rich person’s preconceived notions of a good founder, you’ll never have to get a real job; your material needs will be taken care of by the Silicon Valley Basic Income.

The American Right Wing Had Another Great Week Online - The Intercept (June 22)

An intriguing piece explaining why tech companies like Twitter and Facebook don’t do more to curb the alt-right, even though they technically have the ability to deplatform people for breaking TOS (including, but certainly not limited to, Trump). This article lays the blame at the feet of tech CEOs, who are more interested in preserving existing power relations - even if they are fundamentally unjust - than in challenging the status quo. For example, Twitter will suspend users who publish the phone number of White House advisers or the personal details of ICE agents, while doing very little to challenge neo-Nazis except where required by jurisdiction. This is where augmented worker power could be really transformative - if enough Twitter/Facebook employees demanded internal change …

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June 10, 2018

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Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble? - Nautilus

An interview with John Carreyrou, a journalist who started writing a series of exposés around Theranos (a blood-testing startup) in 2015, marking the beginning of the company’s downfall. Theranos became a poster child among Silicon Valley unicorns around 2013, when it was valued at $9 billion (having raised around $700 million) only 10 years after it was founded. It was also an extreme example of the “founder cult” mythology in Silicon Valley—Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO, dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to start Theranos and managed to assemble an exceptionally impressive set of advisors and investors (impressive on paper, at least; it’s unclear what value Henry Kissinger would contribute to the field of medical technologies). This interview has some decent insights on both the specifics of Theranos, and what it reveals about startup culture as a whole.

Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon - Jacobin

An interview with an anonymous software engineer at Google about Project Maven (an internal nickname for a highly controversial contract with the Pentagon, using Google’s machine learning technology to improve accuracy for drone strikes). A few days ago, Google announced it would be cancelling the contract, primarily as a result of internal pressure after several employees resigned in protest. Some excellent discussion of the possibilities of harnessing power from below in order to influence corporate decisions in the tech industry, sketching out the challenges ahead as well as the opportunities. More details on Project Maven here: https://gizmodo.com/google-plans-not-to-renew-its-contract-for-project-mave-1826488620

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