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How tech changed global labor struggles for better and worse

Seize the means of computation!

Cory Doctorow
8 min readDec 2, 2022
An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker’s Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst’s ‘American Weekly’ magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker’s signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining tog

The original sin of both tech boosterism and tech criticism is to focus unduly on what a given technology does, without regard to who it does it to and who it does it for. When it comes to technology’s effect on our daily lives, the social arrangements matter much more than the feature-sets.

This is the premise behind my idea of the “shitty technology adoption curve”: if you want to do something horrible to people with technology, you must first inflict it on people without social power and then work your way slowly up the privilege gradient, smoothing the tech’s rough edges by sanding them against the human bodies of people who can’t fight back.

Thus we see the rise of all disciplinary technology, especially bossware, which started off monitoring forced prison labor, then blue-collar workers, then pink collar workers (like the largely female, largely Black work-from-home customer service reps who work for Arise):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

The pandemic saw the spread of bossware to affluent, “high-skilled” white-collar workers, from doctors to teachers to IT workers, as the idea of being monitored continuously in your own home, from camera to…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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