The aristocracy represented the ossified capriciousness of wealth distribution that Paine confronted in pre-­revolutionary America; Engels denounced the horrors imposed on workers by industrialists in nineteenth-­century England. The leaders of technology capitalism fall into a similar category today. Their much-­lauded intellect and innovations are directed toward inflating and jealously guarding the wealth they accumulate and helping their fellow captains of industry to do the same. They are indifferent to the miseries they inflict on countless people; they see themselves as noble individuals pursuing their divine right to make money. Yet this is only possible through the exploitation of labor. Which also means that organized labor still holds the power to transform society.

The survival of capitalism is also dependent on using technology to extract more from workers wherever possible. Companies are investing in technology that allows them to reduce their labor requirements through data-­driven scheduling, and the costs of such arrangements fall to workers to bear. The increasing adoption of this kind of technology is responsible in part for the rise in casualization of labor over the last several decades. Nearly 60 percent of American workers (around 80 million people) are paid by the hour, and nearly half of these are subject to just-­in-­time scheduling, with no certainty about hours or start times. When we are at work, we are watched more closely than ever. We carry devices connected to the cloud, for example, which monitor every task and the time it takes to perform. The much-­derided consumer version of Google Glass has been reincarnated as a workplace management tool, to better track every task assigned to a worker. Amazon is patenting a wristband to squeeze more out of its workers by guiding their movements so they can pack items more quickly. Employers are making the most of technology for the purposes of optimizing how they use and monitor labor.

Automation under our current system—where retraining is expensive and the welfare net is minimal—wastes the potential of both workers and technology. It creates the paradox of both increased productivity and impoverishment. Outsourcing work to machines, particularly if the task is boring or dangerous, is a highly worthwhile goal, but it is not one that we are moving toward under the current system. And those who will suffer under successive waves of automation will often be the most vulnerable layers of society—the worst-­paid, with the fewest skills and the fewest resources to fall back on in times of crisis. [...]

We are already moving into a world where work can be be flexible, self-­directed, prioritize the sustainable use of resources, and be based on trust and community-­building. It is possible to imagine how gig enterprises could be transformed into worker cooperatives to ensure that the benefits of working in this way accrue not just to company owners but also to the people who are actually doing the work. To do so might require certain interim policies, such as tax breaks for cooperatives or finding ways to facilitate the transition to worker ownership when a company becomes insolvent. It could also take the form of unions demanding a form of ownership, even control of members’ workplaces. When workers have a greater opportunity to participate in decisions about how things are done, it is easy to see how the worst kinds of work will gradually be prioritized for automation. “Bullshit jobs,” like flunkies for management or fixers of nonexistent problems, would be deprioritized, even rendered unnecessary once there was greater feedback between people making strategic decisions and people doing the work. The necessary skills for adapting to new technologies would be openly shared. This model takes the advantages of digital technology—its capacity to scale up a sense of trust and community—and distributes them far more broadly than is the case at present.