by
Tom Slee
archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
Before this most recent trial, Uber CFO Brent Callinicos mentioned in a meeting with potential investors that Uber could easily raise rates to between 25% and 30%. Venture capitalist Mike Novogratz asked him a question: “You’ve got happy employees, you’ve got happy customers, you’ve got happy shareholders. The holy triumvirate are all really excited about your company. Why are you going to risk that and push the employees’ salary down 5%?” Callinicos responded “because we can."
it's about powerrrr. even the execs openly admit it
Uber has taken advantage of its drivers’ vulnerability by imposing more and more strenuous rules. Drivers must accept 90% of ride requests or they get a notification to “Please improve your acceptance rate if you want to continue to use the Uber platform.” Drivers claim to have been deactivated for being critical of the company on Twitter.
can set arbitrary metrics and drivers basically have to acquiesce. no regulators stepping in here and, as of yet, no established union structures to advocate on their behalf
also remember they must keep their rating really high (no appeal process, since there isnt a work contract)
Sharing Economy reputation systems have become fronts for hierarchical and centralized disciplinary systems, which have nothing to do with notions of “peer-to-peer” reputation, “algorithmic regulation” or regulation with a “lighter touch” through ratings. We trust strangers on Sharing Economy platforms for the same reason we trust hotel employees and restaurant waiters: because they are in precarious jobs where customer complaints can lead to disciplinary action. [...]
this is good
Linux is no longer the product of “part-time hacking.” Most of the programmers who work on the project earn a good living for doing so, just as do those who work on proprietary software. The companies that sponsor and contribute to Linux do not do so out of the generosity of their hearts, they do so for solid commercial reasons.
Linux is no longer subversive. It has moved steadily away from being an outsider to taking its place as a comfortable part of the existing commercial world. In a way, if there was a revolution, Linux has won, but it’s an Animal Farm victory. In winning, Linux has become like those it displaced: more professional, more structured, more carefully governed. Linux has not undermined powerful institutions and companies (although it has made some operating systems obsolete); instead, those institutions have learned to live happily with Linux, and even profit from it.
oh man this is so eerily similar to my open source piece for logic!
for diss: cite how open source on its own is not subversive, easily co-opted by capital, co-exist
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
[...] the most substantial rewards are allocated, on an industrial
basis, to those who build and maintain the technologies of
extraction, who hold the system’s intellectual property, and who
can trade the aggregate output of personal expression as if it were some bulk commodity like grain or beets. The real spoils,
in other words, do not go to the aspiring stars, ranked and rated
by the battery of metrics that measure Internet sentiment and
opinion, but to behind-the-scenes content hosts and data miners,
who utilize these and other metrics to guarantee their profits. The
outcome, for this latter group, is a virtually wage-free proposition.
When all is said and done, the informal contract that underpins
this kind of economy is a profoundly asymmetrical deal.
The new kind of distributed labor does not need to be performed
by payroll employees in far-flung branch locations [...] it is done either by users who do not perceive their interactive
input as work at all, or else it is contracted out online—through a
growing number of e-lance service sites—to a multitude of taskers
who piece together lumps of income from motley sources. As in
the offshore outsourcing model, the dispersion of this labor is
highly organized, but it is not dependent on physical relocation
to cheap labor markets. [...]
Many readers will no doubt conclude that this dual utilization is all part of some big-picture trade-off. After all, the social web has opened up a whole new universe of information-rich public goods—including the potential for anticapitalist organizing; really, really free markets; peer-to-peer common value creation; public access culture; cyberprotest; and alternative economies of all sorts [...] On balance, then, it could be said that the role social web platforms are playing in new modes of capital accumulation is simply the price one pays for maintaining nonproprietary networks whose scope of activity is large and heterogeneous enough to escape the orbit of government or corporate surveillance. Though the enclosers are pushing hard, the balance, for the time being, is still in favor of the commons. From this point of view, all of the free labor that gets skimmed off can be seen as a kind of tithe we pay to the Internet as a whole so that the expropriators stay away from the parts of it we really cherish.
another way of looking at the whole bundling thing (re: centrists)