#proletarianization

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The enshittification of tech jobs

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/25/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

[kaapstadmk]

Here's a nugget for the critical reading crowd

Yes, I know, doctors are late to the game, only now experiencing what many job classes went through 30-50 years ago. Yes, yes, we're a privileged class.

What my point is, is that we are all, all of us, being proletarianized. Even those of us who were over thought of as classically wealthy are now pawns to the owner class

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"For Wells is a petit bourgeois, and of all the products of capitalism, none is more unlovely than this class. Whoever does not escape from it is certainly damned. It is necessarily a class whose whole existence is based on a lie. Functionally it is exploited, but because it is allowed to share in some of the crumbs of exploitation that fall from the rich bourgeois table, it identifies itself with the bourgeois system on which, whether as bank manager, small shopkeeper or upper household servant, it seems to depend. It has only one value in life, that of bettering itself, of getting a step nearer the good bourgeois things so far above it. It has only one horror, that of falling from respectability into the proletarian abyss which, because it is so near, seems so much more dangerous. It is rootless, individualist, lonely, and perpetually facing, with its hackles up, an antagonistic world. It can never know the security of the rich bourgeoisie or the companionship of the worker. It can never rest on anything, for it is always struggling to better itself. It is the most deluded class, for it has not the cynicism of the worker with practical proof of bourgeois fictions, or the cynicism of the intelligent bourgeois who even while he maintains them for his own purposes sees through the illusions of religion, royalty, patriotism and capitalist ‘industry’ and ‘foresight’. It has no traditions of its own and it does not adopt those of the workers, which it hates, but those of the bourgeois, which are without virtue for it, since it did not help to create them. This world, described so well in Experiment in Autobiography, is like a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, and without even the saving grace of tragedy.

Everyone seeks to escape from this marsh. It is a world whose whole motive force is simply this, to escape from what it was born to, upwards, to be rich, secure, a boss. And the development of capitalism increases the depth of this world, makes wealth, security, and freedom more and more difficult, and thus adds to its horror. More and more the petty bourgeois expression is that of a face lined with petty, futile, bewildered discontent. Life with its perplexities and muddles seems to baffle and betray them at every turn. They are frustrated, beaten; things are too much for them. Almost all Wells’s characters from Kipps to Clissold are psychologically of this typical petit bourgeois frustrated class. They can never understand why everything is so puzzling, why man is so unreasonable, why life is so difficult, precisely because it is they who are so unreasonable. They are born of the irresponsibility and anachronism of capital expressed in its acutest form. And they do not understand this.

The ways of escape from the petit bourgeois world are many. One way is to shed one’s false bourgeois illusions and relapse into the proletarian hell one has always dreaded. Then one finds a life hard and laborious enough but with clear values, derived from the functional part one plays in society. The peculiarly dreadful flavour of petit bourgeois bitterness is gone, for now the social forces that produce unhappiness – unemployment, poverty and privation – come quite clearly from above, from outside, from an alien world. One encounters them as members of a class, as companions in misfortune, and this generates both the sympathy and the organisation that makes them easier to be sustained. ‘It’s the poor what helps the poor.’ The proletariat are called upon to hate, not each other but impersonal things like wars and slumps and booms, or classes outside themselves – the bosses, the rich.

It is the peculiar suffering of the petit bourgeoisie that they are called upon to hate each other. It is not impersonal things or outside classes that hurt them and inflict on them suffering and poverty, but it appears to be other members of their own class. It is the shopkeeper across the road, the rival small trader, the family next door, with whom they are actively competing. Every success of one petit bourgeois is a sword in another’s heart. Every failure of one’s own is the result of another’s activity. No companionship, or solidarity, is possible. One’s hatred extends from the workers below that abyss always waiting for one, to the successful petit bourgeois just above one whom one envies and hates.

The development of capitalism increases both trends, the solidarity of the workers and the dissension and bitterness of the petit bourgeoisie.

It is also possible to escape upwards. Many are called. All who do not sink into the proletariat strive upwards. Only a few are chosen. Only a few struggle into the ranks of the rich bourgeoisie. Wells was one of those few. The story of this sharp, fierce struggle and its ultimate success in terms of his bank passbook is recorded in Wells’s Autobiography.

Some try to escape into the world of art or pure thought. But this escape becomes increasingly difficult. Take the case of the artist in the young Wells’s position. A dominating interest in art will come to him perhaps as an interest in poetry, in the short story, in new novelist’s technique. Painful and unproductive at first, his study of his craft will also be uneconomic. It will not pay. But how is he to live? Is he to proletarianise himself? Is he to starve in a garret on poor relief? But starvation in a garret as an outcast despised member of the community will necessarily condition his whole outlook as an artist. He will write reacting with or against proletarianisation, or as an unsuccessful petty bourgeois, or as an enforced member of the lumpen-proletariat, and all society will seem compulsive, rotten and inimical to him. Moreover, art itself in that era, being the aggregate of art produced by these and their like antecedent conditions, will be more and more outcast, turned in on itself, non-functional, and subjective, it will be the sincere, decadent, anarchistic art of a Picasso or Joyce.

It was impossible for Wells, imbued with this burning desire, to escape from the petty bourgeois hell, to accept art as an avocation, a social rôle, and be driven in on himself as an outcast from bourgeois values. He could only accept it as a means to success and the best road to cash. His autobiography reveals the early stages of his struggles in the literary market to attain five-figure sales and a five-figure income." - Christopher Caudwell, “H. G. Wells: A Study in Utopianism,” in Studies in a Dying Culture. First published posthumously by Bodley Head in 1938.

[stevensaus]

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Today’s links The enshittification of tech jobs: Our last line of defense has fallen. Hey look a...

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Archive Links: ia

[vivitalks]

best types of brennan NPC

autism haver

stoner

frat bro who has unlearned hypermasculinity so hard that he's gone 100% the opposite direction about it

anticapitalist proletarian

the most insane person you've ever met

[briteredoctober]

RadFems are such a plague. They’re actively siding with fascists and harming women’s rights as a whole just so they can be transphobes while calling themselves “progressive.”

Read some Simone de Beauvoir or Raya Dunayevskaya and learn what feminism actually is instead of killing the movement with idpol.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

[ashcremated]

clocking into work like where’s your anger where’s your fucking anger

[jadwiga-abremovic]

The dumb, mildly fetishist "traditional wife" blogs like making posts about husbands choosing their clothes.

Throughout much of human history, WOMEN chose their husband's clothes, not the other way around.

Why? Usually, the women had made the clothes right down to weaving and colouring the fabric. Men wore the clothes their wives and mothers made for them, sewed for then, or even bought for them. They did that, and made damn sure to be happy about it, or they wore nothing at all.

That's why matching family sets of traditional folk costumes are a thing.

Never forget; he's not a ~trad husband ~, he's a loser that thinks the fucking stepford wives is a viable 21st century economic model and an accurate portrayal of history.

[rei-ismyname]

Merry X-Men Holiday Special Highlights

Happy holidays, everyone! It's been about a year since I started posting about the X-Men on Tumblr and if it wasn't for all the lovely folks who engage and discuss it wouldn't be so enriching. I'm super anti-capitalist and anti cultural Christianity so it's less 'Happy Christmas' and more 'I wish y'all the best.' ❤️💚

I wonder if Lockheed speaks Hebrew

Here's Kitty Pryde celebrating Chanukah in Genosha and remembering her father. Leading the special with an explicitly Jewish character observing a Jewish holiday is great, but the notion of saving the world by becoming president of the USA is a dubious one. The USA is an imperialist entity built on deep seated systemic inequality and worse. Even the most progressive of presidents is beholden to that. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but Kitty is kidding herself about 'saving the world the right way.'

Nature Girl hates Christmas, and it's hard to argue with her reasons. The parts about warmth are weird to me because I live in Australia where Christmas is always hot AF. One of the few days I hope for rain, tbh.

I'm not sure if Bobby quite understood what 'eschewing capitalism' means but this looks pretty fun. That tie dye X-Men tee slaps and I want one. I wonder what Kubark thinks of this human holiday.

This story with Magneto coming around on the pointlessness of lighting menorahs does the rounds every now and then, though not as much as I'd expect. The kids are particularly plucky and eloquent, and the one who emphatically tells Magneto he's wrong is a legend. I'm fond of any story where Magneto rethinks his beliefs, and this is a nice one.

It took me a while to notice that this is written by Charlamagne tha God, possibly because it's kinda funny to imagine Ororo knowing who that is. Idk why, I've just never seen any stories indicating that she's into Hip Hop culture. I like that it's a rejection of turning the other cheek where bigoted assholes are concerned. You can't reach some people, and there's no obligation to exhaust yourself trying. Fuck em. The Michelle Obama mention is a bit on the nose.

Old man Logan is cutting firewood and being gruff, as he does. Kurt gives him a picture of himself, which is a baller move. I was under the impression that this Logan was an alternate reality Logan, and doesn't have a particularly close relationship with these X-Men. Nothing about Logans makes sense, sometimes you just have to accept it as cute and cool.

Glob does stuff! Is that meant to be mistletoe? We don't have it down here. He nails up some plant matter and then chills by himself. Little bit depressing, but I can't talk.

Bobby Drake has a party! Interestingly neither Jewish nor Christian, but a pagan holiday that's become a bit more popular (like Christmas and Easter.) Hope is watching Cable do... something, in a recorded message from when she was the universe's most unpopular baby.

Some kids are sharing the rumour that Magneto merked Santa, which is hilarious. It's obviously untrue, not least because Santa is Mags' mutant brother. Kurt lectures them.

Jubilee beats up Arcade (yay!) and quotes Home Alone, rescuing Shogo (who's spending this Christmas as a dragon in Otherworld.) I really don't like Arcade, though he has done two excellent things. Torturing Sinister and creating the Proletarian - worker's hero of the Soviet Union.

Nightcrawler and Storm show up and Christmas is really just a backdrop for a light anti-capitalist tale. Cool! I'd expect Cyclops to be in this book, but no. It's Chuck-less as well.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech workers spent a whole generation conceiving of themselves as entrepreneurs who bargained, nerd-to-nerd, with other entrepreneurs who needed workers as much as workers needed paychecks.

These workers allowed themselves to be convinced that being “extremely hardcore” — that is, working body- and mind-ruining hours (without overtime pay) was a badge of honor.

They let themselves believe that their bosses gave them gourmet cafeteria food, “on-campus” fitness centers and daycare because they were valued workers — and not because this created the conditions where workers could be induced to put in longer hours without additional pay.

They conceived of themselves as ascetic monks, a priesthood that labored every hour God sent to bring digitization to the world. Meanwhile, their bosses’ wealth soared, even as their own working conditions deteriorated.

Tech workers may be prone to the same rationalization and self-deception as the rest of us, but (like the rest of us), they aren’t fools. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.

As conditions and prospects worsened, tech workers’ identities as workers emerged from a generation-long coma. They penned manifestos, walked off the job, and formed unions.

-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles

[soup-mother]

They can try to silence me if they want to but they can't hide from the truth. Blended soups are Bourgeois. cut that shit out, that's not a soup anymore it's some other shit

[apas-95]

most anarchists don't outright say they want to abolish building codes (or organisations) - but, practically, when the question of enforcement comes down to it, it's a different story. building codes that are not enforced are not building codes, they're fun suggestions. if you are not ensuring that all, in this case wheelchair ramps, are up to code, you functionally do not have building codes. it's the same issue as with organisation - without a concept of democratic centralism, 'what if the organisation decides to do something that a small subset disagree with' generally receives no solution other than just 'those people just won't do what the organisation decides', which in practice means there does not exist an organisation at all, just a group of people who currently happen to all agree on something, and will disintegrate when they stop happening to agree. in practice there can be no actual collective action, no ensuring wide conformity to codes and programs, without some form of central authority to make reference to. 'just let the village's Ramp Inspecting enthusiast decide if it's fine' does not a building code make.

[femalethink]

Why procreation should be "a fact of nature" rather than a social, historically determined activity, invested by diverse interests and power relations, is a question Marx did not ask. Nor did he imagine that men and women might have different interests with respect to child-making, an activity which he treated as a gender-neutral, undifferentiated process.

In reality, so far are procreation and population changes from being automatic or "natural" that, in all phases of capitalist development, the state has had to resort to regulation and coercion to expand or reduce the work-force. This was especially true at the time of the capitalist take-off, when the muscles and bones of workers were the primary means of production. But even later — down to the present — the state has spared no efforts in its attempt to wrench from women's hands the control over reproduction, and to determine which children should be born, where, when, or in what numbers. Consequently, women have often been forced to procreate against their will, and have experienced an alienation from their bodies, their "labor," and even their children, deeper than that experienced by any other workers. No one can describe in fact the anguish and desperation suffered by a woman seeing her body turn against herself, as it must occur in the case of an unwanted pregnancy.

—Silvia Federici, "Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation".

[croifox]

Do people remember that one trans man who joined nazi organization Atomwaffen Division because their violent masculinity made him feel validated as a man in the ability to objectify and repress others (even though, of course, if his "brothers" had known he was trans they would have excised and brutalized him)? Maybe relevant to how trans men on the internet act toward marginalized trans women sometimes.

[mityenka]

it's kind of insane to me how people write things like that. marxism was not invented on tumblr during the last 2 years. like oh you know there's this book actually.... and this other book....

[merrymarvelite]

Cover of the Day: X-Men #124 (August, 1979) Art by Dave Cockrum, Terry Austin, Gaspar Saladino