As you reach the threshold of middle age, you begin to question purpose. Your purpose. Our purpose. Or, at least I do, and I am.
David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, condemns the vast majority of jobs as being useless, as "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
It’s an incisive analysis of our jobs, and how they contribute to our own self worth.
Graeber doesn’t mince words about the uselessness of most jobs, yet it increasingly feels to me as though the outcome of a great deal of work isn’t just useless, it is actively unhelpful.
This is what I ponder as I approach middle age, questioning the virtues and impact of my career. I’ve begun to feel that the tech industry often falls in the category of the actively unhelpful.
We know that the vast majority of tech jobs’ ultimate goal is about generating capital for investors. Tech work involving organising, planning, creating, and building - all of this is facilitating capital growth.
“Yes, but,” you counter, “tech is making our lives easier, more comfortable, and generating wealth for us all. It does all sorts of cool and useful stuff too!”
Sure, aggregate wealth is increasing. But not for most, unless you are a million or billionaire. The statistics are almost unbelievable. In America “Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.” CEOs there earn 350 times more than their average employee. In the UK, the past 5 years saw the the richest fifth increase their income increase by 4.7%, while the poorest saw their income fall by 1.6%.
These stories are true the world over. The world’s 10 richest men “own more than the bottom 3.1 billion people”. People can’t afford to turn on their lights here in the UK, let alone buy a home. Inequality has spiraled past inhumanity into head-spinning absurdity. The latest Oxfam report is a dire read.
What about us working less? Having more free time? At the risk of entering the territory of cliché, I will trot out the old John Maynard Keynes quote “a 15 hour work week by 2030” - and gently suggest that this is the myth of technology - or at least technology under capitalism. This is the overriding, imagined goal of tech: that it exists to automate away mundane or laborious tasks, allowing us to have more free time.
The amount of our free time has not decreased relative to technological discovery or capital growth, especially relative to our ancestors. Yes, the amount of time we work has decreased since the industrial era - yet of course this was when capitalism was nearly totally unrestrained, with little to no intervention on monopolies or workers’ rights.
Despite technological advances in the last century being totally unprecedented throughout history, we still work more than an hunter-gatherer.
But why?
Everyone has to work. Always.
Let’s say if we didn’t. Let’s say automation and efficiency stemming from tech advances meant that we didn’t need to work as much (as you would think it does now), as each workers ‘surplus value’ went up and they were able to produce more. Surplus value is what a worker produces over and above the cost of overhead, i.e. - the amount raised through sale of the product/service minus the cost of the materials, their labour, etc. With automation and efficiency increases, an individual’s ability to produce - their surplus value - goes up. Great! That means everything becomes cheaper and humanity can subsist with less labour required, right? Ostensibly, yes. But this means a company makes less profit, as goods and services get cheaper to produce as competitors accordingly race to undercut one another. It’s not as though workers can start working less - the expectation for their production increases in line with what they can produce given their context, skill and technology.
In parallel, the cost of living decreases with reductions in prices. This means that companies can afford to pay their staff less (or not in line with inflationary trends), which companies have every incentive to do. Additionally, automation means that less workers are required and that certain industries disappear altogether.
But if workers aren’t employed or paid less, who will buy goods and services?
No one. People are required to work - at least as much as necessary to ensure that they can buy products and services to enable capital growth. Regardless of any true value they provide, and regardless of the socially necessary labour time mitigated, or potentially mitigated, through tech advances.
Now there are many other factors involved, and this is a economic oversimplification, but regardless of additional complexities, the fundamental truth is that capitalism as an ideology has no interest in reducing human work hours or generating wealth equitably. We know this! But we don’t want to.
Human survivability is not the goal of capitalism. Not aligning with planet’s ecosystem. Not human flourishing. Not increasing free time.
Especially not increasing free time. To quote the philosopher Martin Hagglund, “Under capitalism we cannot transform the negative value of unemployment into the positive value of free time to lead our lives, since our measure of value is labor time.”
Fundamentally, if there isn’t capital growth, then capitalism fails. The ideology fails.
Now, I know, this isn’t a newsletter about economics, nor a smoke filled cafe, where Trotskyites conspire about revolution. But it’s not irrelevant in discussions of how to better conceptualise our work in technology to say that technology under capitalism is a facilitator of capital generation.
We can certainly imagine technology acting differently, but capitalism leads nothing uncolonised. Unless tech actively works against existing power structures, against how we must ascribe value, its overriding goal has to be capital generation.
You would think and hope that technologies were emancipatory - this is what Marx had predicted, and wanted. But one doesn’t need to be a Marxist to recognise that this hasn’t occurred.
But so what if tech doesn’t generate wealth equitably or provide us with more free time! Doesn’t it provide us with pleasure, stimulation, education and communication?
I am no luddite. My Geforce™ 3070 powered gaming rig rarely sees a day unused. The effects of technology are undeniably enjoyable - but we cannot lie about the goal of the tech that underlies that joy, nor the fact that business has no scruples in crossing ethical lines to ensure that this technology is profitable.
The benefits that are provided to users of technologies are transmuted into benefits for the corporation - negative externalities be damned. Users have to engage. Use. Use Use.
And users have to engage in ways that facilitate profit. Or often, not even profit. Just enough engagement to achieve the desired result that can only come with nonrivalrous, network-powered digitally technology: what we call ‘scale’. Tech must ‘scale’ enough to monopolise the marketplace.
We see how Twitter scaled. Then, it exacerbated echo chambers, providing pathways to extremism and misinformation, and dominating discourse among journalists, politicians and the like. Yet it still remains unprofitable, despite being helmed by the World’s Greatest Manchild.
The benefits of the current tech industry are often exclusive and marginal, yet the pernicious effects are omnipresent and tangible.
There really is no easy way to determine the benefits of tech outside of profit or the diminishing and often damaging ludic benefits of, say, a new communication vector, or a addictive iPhone game. So given this, it’s easy to simply say “all tech work is equally useless”.
I see a great deal of discourse condemns all tech work as corrupted, intrinsically and immutably, by capitalist forces.“UX is only about surveillance”. “Startups are only about accruing capital for VCs”.
Despite my - attempted - damning critique of tech I think it’s reductive to do this. Condemning with a broad brush isn’t liable to be motivating or even an effective critique. Critiquing with nuance helps us unwind or ‘disassemble’ ;) the degree to which our “Bullshit jobs” and “Bullshit tech companies” contributes to positive and negative outcomes and impacts.
We must acknowledge the scope of different impacts that tech can have, and that tech workers can generate. Yes, tech is aligned with lining the gilded pockets of the already wealthy, and rarely automates our lives in useful ways. However, we can attempt to decipher positive effects that organisations may or may not have, outside of the obvious benefits of “generating profit” or “allowing others to generate profit” or “mild stimulation for a short period”.
Broadly and messily, I think tech organisations, and the output of their employees, can be subdivided into better or worse. Take the taxonomy below, consisting of four categories.
Non/anti capitalist tech organisations
Non/anti capitalist tech orgs’ primary goal is to fundamentally alter society and wealth distribution through restructuring power configurations and questioning capitalist logic. Alternately, they might seek to escape the economic framework of profit and wealth, using paradigms such as social exchange, cooperatives, and autonomy to form parallel forms of communal economics.
Importantly, this category doesn’t primarily focus on technology as the mechanism for change - as a huge number of web3 orgs do. Nor does it include something like Facebook, which was never intended to be (literally) revolutionary but was co-opted by some people to be so (e.g. during the Arab Spring). Rather, I am talking about technology that is intended to facilitate change to make the world more equitable, safe and just for all living beings through active societal and economic restructuring.
These types of organisations actively ask how economic labour could replaced with other forms of exchange and cooperation. Methods may include peer-to-peer collaborative networks involving mutual social exchange or communal labour, focussing on nonrivalrous, nonexlusive content or empowering citizens to resource, design and develop their communities. In engaging in these activities, existing economic structures are disregarded with goal of limiting, democratising and automating undesirable labour and facilitating the redistribution of wealth in fundamentally more equitable ways.
It’s difficult to find many organisations that work with these goals in mind. As noted capitalism colonises everything - it’s very difficult to create an organisation in opposition or even just apart from capitalist structures.
There are however tech co-ops whose aim is to socialise their work, helping to provide autonomy to communities and build progressive politics. These include organisations such a CoTech, the Co-operative Technologists’ network in UK or the Sassfrass collective in the US. Some socially powered platforms like Wikipedia operate as a not-for-profit enterprise that share communal labour to provide a communal good.
Others, like the Omidyar Network attempt to highlight problematic techno-capitalist ideological manifestations via cutting edge research and by putting out papers that often push back on libertarian, computationalist ideology.
But these organisations are few and far between, relative to the numbers of capitalist-oriented organisations. As my friend who works in a tech co-op that relies on funding from philanthropists and foundations says, “it’s fucking hard”. Rejecting or opposing pre-existing economic systems is a great way to be in a position where you are without resources.
But it’s clear we need more of these organisations. As Matthew Wizinsky said in his book, Design after Capitalism, “design and tech can construct postcapitalist subjectivities by reimagining ‘users’ as ‘constituents,’ [and] designing products, services, and experiences toward increased social, political, and economic agency.”
In other words, perhaps more than anything, these types of orgs allow us to imagine different ways of being, and different ways tech can facilitate that being.
Positive outcome organisations
Positive outcome tech organisations explicitly align themselves with positive outcomes as their primary goal, often stating that their goals are “beyond profit”. Think of not-for-profit organisations, tech-for-good, or even (generally) government tech work. Of course, the nature of your work with government is highly dependent on your department and on the political party in power.
It’s important to remember that positive outcome tech orgs, unlike non/anti capitalist tech, does not attempt to shift power structures that cause problematic outcomes. It instead focuses on changing outcomes within the system. It asks: “How can businesses still be businesses but pollute less? How can we align the incentives between capitalism and doing good?”
We also have to remember that positive outcome tech orgs work to reestablish and re-entrench the subjectivities of capitalism. That is, by working within power distributions, cultural norms, incentives, desires and behaviours within capitalism, they re-entrench, reaffirm and tacitly approve of all of the capitalist versions of these configurations. The ideology intrinsic to capital only becomes more ‘real’, and in becoming more real, it’s pernicious effects are increased. Libertarian thought, individualism, meritocracy, neoliberalism, hustle culture, work for work’s sake, and ‘greed for good’ are all reaffirmed. And indeed, so is what Georg Lukács called reification - the transformation of ideology into totalizing systems of objects, subjects and social relations becoming thinglike and abstract commodities.
Still, these orgs do good right? But is the good that they do outweighed by the reification of capitalism, and all of its inequities and demands?
Business As Usual (BAU) organisations
This group contains the vast majority of tech organisations, and jobs. They are general, humdrum capitalist business orgs encompassing everything from designing an app for music sharing to building a website for a transnational automobile company. These are the jobs and orgs that are focussed on generating wealth, without remorse or reflection. Sure, straplines on websites may read about “moving society forward” and “creating transparent solutions” but the fact is they are singularly focussed on building profits.
Like positive outcome tech orgs, BAU tech orgs reaffirms the ideological tendencies of capitalism and reifies, but to an even greater degree. Business as capital growth is celebrated as an unequivocal good, no matter the distribution of wealth generated. Power structures are re-entrenched. The wealthy become wealthier.
Many of these organisations aren’t actively or intentionally pernicious, but in being profit-focussed, the results only exacerbate the harmful effects of capitalism while providing marginal benefits.
Pernicious tech organisations
These are tech orgs whose main goal is to exploit and extract, and who are either uncaring towards, or ignorant or in denial of their pernicious effects. These are companies who extract the environment in damaging ways, who exploit and cause suffering in animals and humans, who extract data for use in surveillance tech. There are certainly blurred lines here - one could say that Facebook and Google sit within this context as they operate on a model of data harvesting for adtech for the vast majorities of their profit. Google and Facebook are far more data harvesters and sellers than they are social networking and search tech. For others, like Amazon, Tencent, or mSpy their damaging effects are far less ambiguous.
We know this category of organisations well now, since the ‘techlash’ started some years ago, and tech’s honeymoon stage came to an abrupt end.
It seems to me that we need to live in a world that non/anti capitalist tech organisations want, but the feasibility of them radically restructuring the world sadly seems distant, barring severe crisis (well, more severe than we have now). I think we have to, to some degree, rely on positive outcome organisations to claw back some ‘good’ from tech. I wonder what would happen if most, if not all, business was positive outcome tech. What would that world look like?
It’s challenge to say as it can be very difficult to parse and be certain of positive outcomes, or define exactly where a business sits within the above taxonomy, given the complexity of a business’ operations and its multidimensional effects.
As an example, take a tech platform like Glassdoor, which allows people to evaluate and review working for just about any company. Where would Glassdoor sit within the taxonomy? It perhaps helps to rearrange power structures by attempting to hold corporate actors accountable, so it may be a bit anti-capitalist. It aims to improve internal behaviour within organisations, so that’s a positive outcome. Yet it’s decidedly profit driven as most companies are, and it sells data to 3rd parties. So where does it sit?
I think it’s difficult to answer, but I think it’s vital for us to try. (Glassdoor seems to me to be mostly a BAU org). To help us consider the relative benefit or harm an organisation does, I think we can ask the following questions of the companies:
Do the company’s business outcomes redistribute power relations ?
Do the company’s services or products help to redistribute wealth or resources?
Does the company’s products/services involve socially, ecologically or cultural progressive causes or facilitate outputs of this kind?
Does the company’s direct or indirect activities cause suffering, hardship and/or premature death of living beings?
Is the company’s explicit goal to reduce suffering, hardship and/or premature death of living beings?
Does the company provide utility to individuals in immediate, tangible ways other than allowing their customers to extract more profit from elsewhere?
Does the company have or solicit private equity?
Is the company’s goal to scale and exit?
Does the company get profit from extracting and selling personal data?
Does the company contribute to or exacerbate climate change or ecological damages through its direct activities?
Does the company seek to limit impacts of its own and other companies’ activities on climate change and other ecological damages?
Does the company involve all those affected by its products/services in the design of its products/services?
Does the company truly seek to enhance anything other than personal or business productivity or automation?
Does the company acknowledge or address how it re-entrenches existing socio-economic dynamics?
Is the company’s product/service truly different from competitors?
What has the company done to prove its product/service is truly beneficial?
Does the company repress or contribute to repression of political, press or other freedoms?
Does the company contribute to educational, communication, entertainment, or information products or content that are helpful or harmful?
Does the company choose which clients/customers it works with based on ethical considerations?
Has the company taken the time to research answers to any of the questions above that apply to it?
You’ll notice that these questions aren’t about the internal characteristics of the company - such as whether they have a flat hierarchy, or inclusivity policies. Rather, they are concerned with the active outputs and outcomes of the company vis-a-vis their primary profit-making activities. I'm aware that often the two groups of characteristics are related, but in this case - the case of whether the company adds to moral goods - has less to do with whether a company social structure is progressive, and more to do with the actual substance of their business and its relation to society and the environment.
There’s undeniably an enormous amount of careful analysis we need to conduct on our work, on the organisations we work at. Certainly tech under capitalism isn’t aiding us as it should, but there are scales of harm and benefit that tech companies can be placed within. It can be difficult to be certain we have a full understanding of these complex dynamics, but we can be certain of one thing: tech isn’t a good in and of itself.
And if you say, “But AI is a game changer - it will save us”, I only have one thing to say: