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 presented with a purportedly politically neutral tech-based solution, which promises to solve the problems of the dispossessed without ever disturbing the privileges of the powerful. In such a depoliticized climate, it is no surprise that some radicals have come to be suspicious of technology, to see social relations of domination inscribed in the forces of production themselves.

Such an attitude, however justified, does an injustice to the legacy of socialist thinking on technology. From the beginning of the modern workers’ movement, concerns about the place of technological progress in the attempts to confront “the social problem” have been central to socialist theory. If we examine some of the positions that shaped socialist thinking on technology, we can use them to reconstruct a role for those who refused to let what Brecht called “the new bad things” rest in the hands of gamifiers and disruptors.

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 point is clear in Lenin and Gramsci’s discussions of Taylorism and Fordism, and leads quite directly to the one-sided conclusions they reached about the applicability of Taylorist techniques in post-capitalist society.