by
Ben Tarnoff
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The problem is that we don't have many levers of control over big tech companies. The traditional stuff doesn't work. Usually, if a company is doing something a lot of people think is unethical, you can boycott them. You can't really boycott Google or Facebook. You're not their customer to begin with. Their customers are advertisers and publishers. Also, they're monopolies. They're centralized and they benefit from network effects. Boycotting them means cutting yourself off from the online world. People just won't do it in numbers.
And shareholder revolts won’t work because these companies are structured so that the founders always have full voting rights. Zuckerberg is going to run Facebook no matter if he only has one share. That’s how it’s written. As for the media, the press isn’t going to say anything bad about Facebook or Google because those are the main outlets for journalism right now.
That really just leaves the employees. Tech employees have an outsize force because they’re very expensive to hire and it takes a long time to train people up. Even for very skilled workers, it takes months and months to become fully productive at a place like Google because you have to learn the internal tooling, you have to learn how things are done, you have to learn the culture. It’s a competitive job market and employee morale is vital. If people start fleeing your company, it’s hard to undo the damage.
So tech workers are a powerful lever. And knowing that fact, it seems unwise not to use the best tools at our disposal. The point isn’t to improve our economic well-being, but to pursue an ethical agenda.
Maciej on why a tech workers union is important
There's long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about "democratizing" some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet's openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.
Trump and Steve Jobs have different aesthetics—black turtleneck versus golden combover—but their bedrock assumptions about how the world works are essentially the same. It has been convenient for some tech CEOs to adopt apparently progressive politics, because that has been a way to obtain the immigration policies, educated workforce, and general goodwill they need to consolidate their power. But they're not programmed, so to speak, to care about democratic process. Fascism—in the classical sense of a strong-arm alliance between government and industry—aligns much more neatly with the culture of startup bros and venture capital and unicorns. We can already see the CEOs starting to line up behind Peter Thiel in their embrace of Trumplandia. It is a kind of homecoming. It probably feels quite liberating for some.
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 a positive way, and who aren't as tied to that overriding profit motive.
on why large companies might see ending net neutrality as an opportunity
[...] Technology and power are implicated in one another historically and in contemporary social arrangements. There is no experience of technology that is not at the same time an experience of a kind of social power, but it does not always involve domination. [...]
[...] part of technology design is precisely the art of making clear to the user what they can and cannot do with it. Technology design always involves both a closing off of the technology's innards into a "black box" and the projection of messages on its outer surface that will guide the user into successful operation of the artefact. There is a concealed politics here, akin to statecraft. How technological artefacts are presented to users involves a politics of design that reflects features of the social content. It is here that we find the politics of the relationship between technology and social power. [...]
[...] a second dimension to the operation of power. This involves influence and authority, rather than force and coercion. Analysis of two-dimensional power draws attention to the way that compliance is secured from subject populations by making them perceive the world in such a way that certain questions are not asked. Exercise of this kind of power proceeds not by making threats but by suppressing problems before they are thematized in any public discourse. If two-dimensional power is used effectively, the result will be that people are influenced into doing what the powerful want them to do, or they may simply see it as the obvious right thing to do. Here it is not necessary to deploy a superior capacity for violence in order to exercise power. [...]
drawing on Steven Lukes, who himself draws on Robert Dahl's one-dimensional conception
[...] As members of a society in which extensive technology use has made access to goods, like illumination, simple and convenient, we have lost our appreciation of the centrality of revelatory experience and of our own activity in determining that experience. We have closed on possibilities of revealing the world other than those that conform to the model of throwing a switch to get what we want. Modern culture is uniquely embedded in technology and in consequence we have a limited view of the world, which Heidegger calls "enframing". What is regrettable about technology is that it obscures or even destroys other ways of finding meaning. And the kind of life that it opens onto is one in which means and ends are separated so that we find ourselves performing instrumental routines aimed at consumption, rather than appreciating the full range of meaning possibilities available to us as a matter of existential fact. [...]
[...] He uses the metaphor of "mechanical petrifaction" to convey the sense that by instrumentalizing our actions in the pursuit of efficiency we have effectively deprived ourselves of any reason for acting in the first place. Weber's thesis is that modernity is the cultural experience of abstraction; it is life in a uniquely ordered, regimented society in which formal rule-following overrides any attachment to substantive principles or values that are not susceptible to rational, scientific analysis. [...]
whoa
[...] technology can embody valid knowledge and constitute a set of reliable, seemingly neutral tools or points of leverage over nature and at the same time constitute an instance of prevailing, hegemonic social rationality and so be implicated in social power. [...]
on Andrew Feenberg's critical theory, developed to address the mistaken (in his opinion) assumption that technology is predominantly being used to oppress workers simply because capitalism is "scientific"