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With these three principles, Braverman restored Marx’s emphasis on the class implications of technology in capitalist society. Scientific management was no neutral technique for improving efficiency, but a scheme for controlling labor in its struggle with capital. The failure to appreciate this poi…

This kind of gamification promises solutions to inequality that will come faster and more efficiently than governments can deliver them by “channelizing user agency.” Inequality? There’s an app for that!

Technophobia might seem to be the only response from the Left. For every injustice, we are p…

[...] Winning a share of the fruits of automation for the rest of us requires victory at the level of the state rather than the individual workplace.

This could be done through a universal basic income, a minimum payment guaranteed to all citizens completely independent of work. If pushed by pr…

The original Luddites are similarly misunderstood. As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in a 1952 article, machine breaking was a common tactic of labor resistance during the Industrial Revolution. Rather than directing their anger at technology per se, workers broke machines “as a means of coe…

But there's a persistent divide in the tech industry on this issue between the executives and the rank-and-file engineers. The executives are always our problem. They're always thinking, "Well, what's going to maximize the profits?" It's the people who work under them who want to shape the world in…