Though automation is presented as a neutral process, the straightforward consequence of technological progress, one needn’t look that closely to see that this is hardly the case. Automation is both a reality and an ideology, and thus also a weapon wielded against poor and working people who have the audacity to demand better treatment, or just the right to subsist.

But if you look even closer, things get stranger still. Automated processes are often far less impressive than the puffery and propaganda surrounding them imply—and sometimes they are nowhere to be seen. Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid.

Remarkable technological changes are indeed afoot, but that doesn’t mean the evolution of employment, and the social world at large, has been preordained. We shouldn’t simply sit back, awestruck, awaiting the arrival of an artificially intelligent workforce. We must also reckon with the ideology of automation, and its attendant myth of human obsolescence.

If what we encounter on Facebook, OkCupid, and other online platforms is generally “safe for work,” it is not because algorithms have sorted through the mess and hid some of it from view. Rather, we take non-nauseating dips in the digital stream thanks to the labor of real-live human beings who sit before their own screens day and night, tagging content as vulgar, violent, and offensive. According to Chen, more people work in the shadow mines of content moderation than are officially employed by Facebook or Google. Fauxtomatons make the internet a habitable place, cleaning virtual public squares of the sort of trash that would chase most of us offline and into the relative safety of face-to-face interaction.

Today many, though not all, of the people employed as content moderators live abroad, in places like the Philippines or India, where wages are comparatively low. The darkest tasks that sustain our digital world are outsourced to poor people living in poorer nations, from the environmentally destructive mining of precious minerals and the disposal of toxic electronic waste to the psychologically damaging effects of content moderation. As with all labor relations, race, gender, and geography play a role, determining which workers receive fair compensation for their labor or are even deemed real workers worthy of a wage at all. Automation, whether real or fake, hasn’t undone these disturbing dynamics, and may well intensify them.

Jefferson gilded chains by making them hard to see. Slaves (“members of the slave community” as the video awkwardly dubs them) cooked hot food and put it on shelves, making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic. The same hidden hands whisked away dirty plates just as quickly. Slaves also stood at the ready in the basement, waiting to load up any wine the master and his guests required. The appearance of seemingly automated abundance Jefferson so doggedly cultivated required substantial additional labor—the labor of making labor seem to disappear.

The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate.

Capitalism needs workers to be and feel vulnerable, and because automation has an ideological function as well as a technological dimension, leftists must keep intervening in conversations about technological change and what to do about it. Instead of capitulating to the owning class’s loose talk of automation as a foreordained next phase of production, we should counter with demands that are both visionary and feasible: a federal job guarantee that provides meaningful work to all who want it or job sharing through a significant reduction in the workweek. When pundits predict mass unemployment following a robot takeover, we should call for collective ownership of the robots and generous social benefits detached from employment status, including pushing for a progressive variation of a universal basic income under a rallying cry that updates the 1970s socialist feminist slogan to Wages for All Work—not just the work that bosses recognize as worthy of a meager paycheck.

Still, something was lost with the rise of personal computing. One clue comes from a 1978 article by the leftist tech activist group Boston Computer Collective. Writing in the radical science magazine Science for the People, they took aim at the hollowness of the personal computing revolution, reviewing Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a widely circulated book celebrating that revolution.

Making computers more widespread would not "pave the way towards a just society" they argued. Smaller machines would not mean more personal power and less corporate control. [...]

In subsequent decades, their critiques seem to have proven correct. Decentralization and personalization - watchwords of the personal computing and internet era - did not automatically serve as forces for liberation. Rather they were something of a Trojan horse: a way of making computer technology so intimate that it brought profit-making and corporate power into every aspect of our lives.

Ten years ago, most of what we were interested in was on the open web. It was at the other end of a URL. Even if it was on a private website, you could scrape it - and you could worry later about whether you were violating the terms of service.

That's not the world we live in now. Stuff is inside apps - it's not scrapable. The interesting behaviors happened on Facebook and Twitter. So establishing long-term relationship between those who want to dispassionately study those behaviors and the private entities that have all the data is a huge imperative for me.

It requires walking through a minefield. On the one hand, if all you're doing is calling out the companies - well, it's their data, and they're not going to want to share it with you. On the other hand, if you get too close to them then you get the data but you don't always go where it follows.

Elite segments of the tech sector sense that the political fissures exposed by Trump's victory are entwined with plutocratic entrenchment and diminished opportunities for the working class. So they are eager to prove that they can ease economic malaise by bringing growth to regions with very little of it. And the instrument of that growth, they believe, is venture capital.

The Comeback Cities Tour belongs to a long tradition. Venture capital represents a very small part of US GDP, but it plays an important ideological role. In times of crisis, when financiers have felt the need to justify their activities to the broader public, they have held up venture capital as a force for good - as an engine of technological development and economic growth that benefits everyone. Venture capitalists risk their own money to build companies that contribute to a dynamic economy. The reality, however, is that the benefits of venture, like those of the financial sector as a whole, flow primarily to rich investors. Throughout its history, venture capital has been successfully deployed to conceal this reality, soothing popular hatred of the bankers while advancing their agenda.

The worldwide decline in corporate profitability in the last half century has led investors to chase easy sources of profit. Sometimes that leads to investment in high-growth technology firms - many of which turn out to be duds or scams, or simply elaborate schemes to lower labor costs in existing industries. But the consistent result, as Robert Brenner has argued, is "a world economy in which the continuation of capital accumulation has come literally to depend upon historic waves of speculation, carefully nurtured ad rationalized by state policy makers." Venture capitalists help propel the waves of speculation upon which our current regime of capital accumulation depends.

The paltry funds pledged by investors following the tour indicates how seriously people in regions decimated by decades of capital flight and austerity should take the comparison. We can blame venture capitalists for not taking risks, but recent history has made it clear that the system is designed so that risk falls onto the public, and the rewards go to the people who already have everything. Maybe we should stop outsourcing our dreams to people whose imaginations are bounded by the bottom line.

But acquiring our assets was also a way to justify paying us a lot. If they're only going to pay you 2x the normal salary, then that can take the form of a very nice job offer. But if they're going to pay you more like 8x or 10x, it breaks the whole idea of salary bands, which is how big companies organize compensation by experience level. So buying your assets is the backdoor—it’s a way to get away with paying certain people much more.

As far as what they're buying—yes, they're avoiding paying more for a potential competitor later. But the inherent value in a talent acquisition comes from acknowledging that most projects in software fail. Finding a team that can actually ship something that gets out the door is rare. Even at big companies, most projects will not see the light of day. So to find a group of people that have managed to build something—even if it's small, even if it's humble—means they're probably a team that works well together. So they're worth a premium. That's the theory behind it, at least.

Also, they could make us sign a contract that locked us in for a long time. The deal to acquire our startup was a lump of cash and a job offer. We had to take both together. About half of the payment came up front, in the form of the cash. And the rest would come to us through salary and stock-based compensation on a vesting schedule over the course of four years.