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[...] networked digital information technology has become the dominant mode through which we experience the everyday. In some important sense this class of technology now mediates just about everything we do. It is simultaneously the conduit through which our choices are delivered to us, the mirror by which we see ourselves reflected, and the lens that lets others see us on a level previously unimagined.
just really pretty
This shrunken workforce will be asked to do more, for lower wages, at a yet higher pace. Amazon is again the leading indicator here. Its warehouse workers are hired on fixed, short-term contracts, through a deniable outsourcing agency, and precluded from raises, benefits, opportunities for advancement or the meaningful prospect of permanent employment. They work under conditions of “rationalized” oversight in the form of performance metrics that are calibrated in real time. Any degree of discretion or autonomy they might have retained is ruthlessly pared away by efficiency algorithm. The point couldn’t be made much more clearly: these facilities are places that no one sane would choose to be if they had any other option at all.
Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep and restoration, their family life, or their other obligations. (In the UK and elsewhere the practice is tolerated, the terms of such employment may be specified by so-called zero-hour contracts, which offer no guaranteed minimum of shifts.) [...]
good way of thinking about it tbh
Other, less central aspects of the visions we’re presented of a world without work might trouble us as well. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin fetishizes fully automated logistics, without considering how often logistics workers specifically have constituted the most radical faction of industrial labor. Without for a moment romanticizing the circumstances that gave rise to their militancy, we might want to remember how frequently in the past it’s been workers toiling in the most oppressive industries who have offered themselves as the insurgent brake on unfettered capital accumulation. On our way to a world of total automation, we may often have time to contemplate what a society winds up looking like when its most mutinous voices have fallen silent.
hmm something to think about
cite re: workers in most oppressive industries
This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. [...]
this is a great way of thinking about technology, and it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's essay about linux vs apple. it ultimately comes down to power: how much control do you have over your device, versus how much does it control your life?
"The elevators work. They just give priority to the market-rent side. You'll get an elevator when none of these folks need one."
Salima grasped the system and its logic in an instant. The only reason she'd been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they'd make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build fifty stories instead of the thirty that the other buildings in this neighborhood rose to. There was a lot of this sort of thing, and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units, what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing.
But now she saw an important truth: even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it [...] the logic of a mulish child who wanted to make their displeasure known.
the writing style is heavy-handed but this system is cool (in a chillingly realistic dystopian way)
Having a place to live that was truly hers made a huge difference in her life. Something about the stability, the confidence---hell, just having a reliable place to do laundry every night---it all added up to the sense that she was finally exiting the endless limbo she'd lived in all her life. Her earliest memories were of being on the move with her parents, one camp and then another, then an uncle's house for a while, then another camp, then temporary apartments, then the crossing to America, the camp, the shelter. All that time, she'd had the sense that her life was on hold, that she was floating around like a leaf in the breeze, sometimes snagged on a branch and sometimes lofted up to the clouds, but never touching down, never coming to rest. It meant that she never really thought about her life more than a few days in advance. Now, in her own home, she was thinking about what her future held.
this is written in such a generic way (i feel like a writer who'd actually lived this could have made it so much more colourful and powerful) but it's a good encapsulation of the importance of stable housing at least
[...] After years of spinning in place, she had finally started her life in earnest, with a place and a job and friends who were nearly family. This was a reminder that her current life was a tissue-thin surface covering the world she'd lived in before.
man this paragraph is just crying out for some poetry. it's such an evocative topic! why is the writing so prosaic?
[...] It was pretty esoteric, this idea of bankruptcies by distant companies. What did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke? Did they see them as just weirdly nonfunctional gadgets they had to work around, like the bad touchscreens at the shelter? Or did they see them as the enemy, something that they were at war with, the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will?
[...] They've been watching the darknet boards, they know that everyone's been figuring out how to jailbreak their shit while we've been getting restarted, and they figure all those people could be customers, but instead of paying for food we sell them, they'd pay us to use food someone else sold them."
Salima almost laughed. It was a crime if she did it, a product if they sold it to her. Everything could be a product.
charging for jailbreaks, this is pretty genius tbh. great demonstration of how the legal system (especially IP) artificially creates the conditions necessary for the market to flourish (reminds me of Geoff Mann on neoliberalism as both deregulation and reregulation)