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We're living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Tech firms have cultivated a thicket of laws, rules and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as "IP," a term that is best understood as meaning "any policy that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, my customers and my critics":
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To put an ad-blocker in an app, you have to reverse-engineer it. To do that, you'll have to decrypt and decompile it. That step is a felony under #Section1201 of the #DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Beyond that, ad-blocking an app would give rise to liability under the #ComputerFraudAndAbuseAct (a law inspired by the movie Wargames!), under "tortious interference" claims, under trademark, copyright and patent.
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More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don't exist, because you'd go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
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This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, "let's make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue," no one says, "if we do that, our users will all install blockers." Instead, the response is, "let's make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!"
Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.
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Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.
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This made tech workers very exploitable: their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing something heroic, which warranted "extremely hardcore" expectations - working 16 hour days, sleeping under your desk, sacrificing your health, your family and your personal life to meet deadlines and ship products ("Real artists ship" - S. Jobs).
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But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother's funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.
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Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce - and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit - they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:
But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers' confidence.
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When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It's not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering - there's the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:
No matter how strong an individual tech worker's bargaining power was, it was always brittle.
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Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker's power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses' plans with a new system based on a collective identity.
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Only through collective action and solidarity - unions - could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:
But what is a little surprising - and very heartening! - is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack.
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Think of Amazon's tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers:
Superficially, the bottom rank of the tech industry is as different from the tech workers at the top as you can imagine. Tech workers are formally employed, with stock options, health care and theme-park "campuses" with gyms and gourmet cafeterias.
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The gig workers who pack, drive, deliver and support tech products aren't even employees - they're misclassified as contractors. They don't get free massages - they get AI bosses that monitor their eyeballs and dock their paychecks for peeing:
Gig workers desperately need unions, but they also derive extraordinary benefits from self-help measures.
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When an app is your boss, another app can make all the difference to your working conditions. Take #Para, an app that fights algorithmic wage discrimination by allowing gig workers to collectively and automatically refuse any job where the pay is below a certain threshold, forcing the algorithm to pay everyone more:
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Para is fighting a grim legal and technical battle against companies like #Doordash, whose margins depend on atomized workers with atomized apps, prohibited from countertwiddling. This is a surprisingly effective tactic: in Indonesia, gig workers co-ops create suites of #tuyul apps that modify the behavior of their bosses' apps', unilaterally securing concessions that they lack the bargaining power to secure by other means:
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Tuyul apps and other countertwiddling aren't a substitute for unionization, they're an adjunct to it. The union negotiator whose rank-and-file are able to modify the apps that monitor and control their working conditions operates from a position of strength. "Please give my members more bathroom breaks" is a lot weaker than, "If you want my members to stop hacking their apps so they can piss when they need to, you're going to have to give them official bathroom breaks."
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This is where solidarity between the high-paid tech workers at the keyboard and low-paid tech workers on the delivery bikes comes in. Together, they can wring more concessions from their bosses, sure. But unionized coders can give their unionized delivery riders the apps they need to countertwiddle and increase the bargaining leverage of all the workers in the union.
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When unionized coders' bosses force them to put enshittifying anti-features in the apps they care about, unionized front-line workers can run counter-apps to disenshittify them.
Other sectors are already doing versions of this. The ouster of the corrupt leadership of the #Teamsters ushered in a new, radical era that produced historic wage/working condition gains for drivers and the abolition of the two-tier contract system that eventually destroys any union that tries it.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr Interesting. I could relate to a lot of it, esp. the bit about 2-tier salary schedules being a union-killer.
That change in leadership was possible because the Teamsters organized the #HarvardGradStudents, and those Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. At the historic conference where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between the union rank-and-file and the rules-lawyers from Harvard that turned the proceedings around:
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We are deep into the enshittocene and it is terribly demoralizing. But by understanding the constraints that kept enshittification at bay, we can rebuild them, and shore them up. Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn't just a way to get a better deal for those workers - it's key to the disenshittification of all our lives.
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
"An app is just a web-page that's a felony to make an ad-blocker for."
One should put this on badges and stickers.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr Was the #HarvardGradStudents those #UAW employees who went to the Harvard Trade Union Program (HTUP)? This was a confusing point for me in the #Intercept article and not clarified well.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr yes!!!
But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother's funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.
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