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THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN SILICON VALLEY  
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Cory Doctorow
March 11, 2024
Project Syndicate
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_ Deteriorating working conditions have led to a shift in
perspective, sparking an unprecedented wave of worker activism. _

, leighklotz CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

 

_A generation ago, tech workers viewed themselves as
billionaires-in-waiting, working extremely long hours at the expense
of sleep and social life in the hope of making “a dent in the
universe.” But deteriorating working conditions have led to a shift
in perspective, sparking an unprecedented wave of worker activism._

BURBANK – Tech companies were once known for making high-quality
products and treating their workers well. Now, they make inferior
products and treat their workers terribly. This is not coincidental.
It is a prime example of _enshittification_
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I coined in 2022 to describe the process through which monopolistic
tech platforms decay in the absence of any checks on their leaders’
worst impulses.

Historically, tech companies have been disciplined by four forces:
competition (the fear that users might switch to rival services);
regulation (the fear that government penalties will exceed the profits
the firm expects to realize from questionable practices); self-help
(the fear of aftermarket modifications, such as ad blockers or
third-party clients, which undermine the firm’s ability to profit
from users, perhaps permanently); and the firm’s workers –
specifically, the fear that key personnel would quit rather than obey
certain directives.

These forces are interlinked. A truly competitive industry, with
dozens or hundreds of firms aggressively nipping at each other’s
profit margins, is less able to capture its regulators. A concentrated
industry dominated by a handful of firms can easily align on policy
priorities and present a unified front to regulators, judges, and
lawmakers. But an industry constituted as a swarm of competing firms
would find it nearly impossible to accomplish such unity.

Big Tech neatly demonstrates this dynamic, with mergers and
acquisitions giving rise to an inbred oligopoly that then captured its
regulators. On one hand, monopoly power freed these firms from the
fear of regulatory backlash, enabling them to trample our privacy,
labor, and consumer rights with impunity. On the other, it allowed
them to secure the passage of new laws and favorable interpretations
of existing ones, rendering self-help effectively illegal.

Back when the internet was dominated by open platforms like the web,
users routinely resorted to self-help measures. Even today, nearly
half [[link removed]] the internet’s users
use privacy-enhancing ad blockers. But while it is legal to modify a
website without its maker’s permission to shield yourself from
surveillance, modifying an app for the same purpose is a potential
felony. In fact, just the act of decrypting an app before
reverse-engineering it could violate Section 1201 of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act
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five-year prison sentence or a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
Essentially, an app can be viewed as a website wrapped in just enough
intellectual property to felonize ad blockers.

Tech firms have thus become unshackled from the discipline imposed by
competition, regulation, and self-help, leaving labor as the last
potential check on their power. Historically, the tech sector had one
of the lowest rates of union density. Tech workers viewed themselves
as entrepreneurs engaging in peer-to-peer negotiations with other
entrepreneurs who need workers as much as workers need paychecks.

This mindset fostered a culture of punishing dedication, glorifying
being “extremely hardcore
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–  working physically and mentally ruinous hours. The elaborate
“campuses” tech companies built for their employees, equipped with
daycare centers, fitness facilities, and luxury cafeterias, were an
obvious ruse to wring unpaid overtime out of workers. But many workers
convinced themselves that these amenities were provided in recognition
of their value to their employers.

This ethos encouraged tech workers to view themselves as an ascetic
priesthood [[link removed]] on a
mission to digitize the world, even at the cost of sleep and family.
Meanwhile, as workers’ conditions deteriorated, their
bosses’ wealth soared
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But tech workers are no fools. Their prospects have diminished so
significantly within a single generation that it is no wonder that
many now view themselves as employees, leading them to pen manifestos
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off the job
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and form unions
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When I entered the sector two decades ago, the prevailing belief among
tech workers was that they were billionaire tech-barons-in-waiting who
could spend a few years at a large company before eventually founding
a startup capable of toppling the industry’s giants. Over time, the
dream shrank. Instead of aiming to disrupt the industry, tech workers
began to aspire to leave their Big Tech jobs, launch pretend startups
making pretend products, and be “acquihired
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their former employers – an inefficient Rube Goldberg way to secure
a promotion and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank even further: stick with a big company for life,
with good pay, stock options, and weekly free massages. But that dream
died when Google cut 12,000 jobs
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early 2023, just months after a stock buyback that could have paid
these workers’ salaries for the next 27 years
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Tech workers and users deserve better than this. Together, we can get
it. Nowadays, tech workplaces are white-hot
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organizing [[link removed]], as
employees increasingly reconceive themselves
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shift in perspective is also leading them to align their struggles
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those of “blue-collar” tech workers like rideshare drivers,
warehouse packers, AI data labelers, and customer-service
representatives.

Once, tech workers aspired to “make a dent in the universe
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Now, they increasingly understand themselves as a disposable source of
free cash flow for stock buybacks. But there is a silver lining
to proletarianization
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by intensifying the already-growing trend of labor unrest in tech
workplaces, it has turned a rising wave of employee activism into a
veritable flood.

CORY DOCTOROW, a science fiction writer, activist, and journalist, is
the author, most recently, of _The Lost Cause_
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Books, 2023), _The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of
Computation_
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2023), and _The Bezzle_
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2024).

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* class struggle
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* Silicon Valley
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* Big Tech
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* monopoly
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