The utility and practicability of these gig economy companies is hard to discern, given that many of them own nothing other than a platform. Aside from the initial capital needed, what is to prevent a group of taxi drivers from creating their own worker co-op and building an app just like Uber - ...
Back in 1983, an Associated Press article titled 'Labor Unions Are Absent in Silicon Valley' painted a bleak picture of labor in the tech goldmines that is equally true today. [...] The writers quote a labor lawyer who comments that 'the Valley is union free because its companies are very sophist...
In terms of the white-collar employees of Silicon Valley, their lack of labor unions is to be expected. Because their wages are comparatively higher, white collar professionals are historically less likely to see themselves as part of an oppressed class of laborers whose work makes money for weal...
Today, too, Silicon Valley is a highly segregated place - at least, when you compare the professional class to other categories of workers. The contract workers who make up its service sector are more likely to be Hispanic: 'While eight percent of direct-hire workers in the tech industry are Hisp...
[...] It used to be that software was something you installed on your machine; now, many software-makers have moved towards software as a service (SaaS), which involves accessing software through one's browser, without having to install anything. [...] companies like Microsoft can now 'leverage t...
IBM was rushing the production of their IBM-PC, and was in a hurry to find a suitable operating system for it. After negotiations with another company fell through, IBM turned to Microsoft's Bill Gates, who bluffed his way through negotiations with IBM management about having an operating system ...
IBM was rushing the production of their IBM-PC, and was in a hurry to find a suitable operating system for it. After negotiations with another company fell through, IBM turned to Microsoft's Bill Gates, who bluffed his way through negotiations with IBM management about having an operating system ...
[...] Tech writer Jon Evans wrote a eulogy for the Silicon Valley of yesteryear, in which he lamented that:
The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make th...
[...] Tech writer Jon Evans wrote a eulogy for the Silicon Valley of yesteryear, in which he lamented that:
The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make th...
In short, the federal money that poured into Silicon Valley was due to a fear of Soviet domination in science and engineering. In the same manner, that fear led to massive increases in defense and science budgets in the United States in the postwar years. Noticing these trends, the engineering de...
In short, the federal money that poured into Silicon Valley was due to a fear of Soviet domination in science and engineering. In the same manner, that fear led to massive increases in defense and science budgets in the United States in the postwar years. Noticing these trends, the engineering de...
Nowadays, the idea of technology is tied to a notion of progress. We all take for granted that technology exists on a scale of constant improvement and reinvention: we must cast aside old technologies in favor of consuming new ones; those with better technology are more advanced than those with l...
Nowadays, the idea of technology is tied to a notion of progress. We all take for granted that technology exists on a scale of constant improvement and reinvention: we must cast aside old technologies in favor of consuming new ones; those with better technology are more advanced than those with l...
The vast wealth of Silicon Valley - the $100,000 Teslas that zip up and down the freeways, the walled-off estates of the tech titans, the exclusive parties and the expensive restaurants - all of these do not exist because a few smart whiz kids had an idea that they turned into an app. They exist ...
The vast wealth of Silicon Valley - the $100,000 Teslas that zip up and down the freeways, the walled-off estates of the tech titans, the exclusive parties and the expensive restaurants - all of these do not exist because a few smart whiz kids had an idea that they turned into an app. They exist ...
Google uses contract labor, in a manner similar to Amazon; to save money on labor by making employees as disposable as possible. 'People would be asked to leave at a day's notice,' said Danielle. 'We were employed through a subcontractor company and they reserved the right to terminate at any tim...
[...] can the political impulses that Harris represents, the ones that come out of our generation’s distinctive experience, mature into potent collectivity? Or are they individualist from the root, bound to decay into posture and then a racket—absent the guidance of more seasoned activists, or wi...
There are moments when the mask slips, when his failure to truly engage with the humanity of the victims and survivors shines through. He often appeals to a ‘we’ that is all too clearly a cypher for his own responses to the event. “All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a ho...
One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive's world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the...
Thus ‘migrant subjectivity’ under capitalism is a false category that naturalises borders and national citizenship. By forgetting the ways in which capitalism forces us to be on the move as a systemic condition, we create and reinforce relations of hierarchy and inequality between people that are...
The debate was never in good faith. Democracy was still a decade away; the left was marginal and toothless; the old Francophiles had begun to retire. The three countries of North America signed the treaty with great fanfare. The Mexican economy grew, but not at the pace of the neoliberals’ projec...
When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not 'an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself' but 'the real movement which abolishes the present condition', it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times ...
When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not 'an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself' but 'the real movement which abolishes the present condition', it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times ...
Writing, whatever else it is doing, is always getting at something that it never quite obtains. There is always something unsaid, something that clings to writing like a shadow.
What, you might reasonably sputter at this point, has any of that got to do with politics? But if you've got this far, you've patiently waded through relatively ordinary observations about the anthropocene, guilt and genocide. So stick with it. We're almost there. The point I'm making is that, ...
