Tracing Reality: Techies Can Eat Out of a Trough
~Just one of those days, feeling like a freight train~
If you work at the type of tech job where you go to work on a “campus” (w/ unlimited work from home options), they cater your meals, they give you 150-200k to listen to techno and write in a made up computer language, you can give me a definition of the “blockchain,” your retirement plan is owning multiple properties, or you got offended by the “Queers hate techies” tag in San Francisco/Seattle because it doesn’t “understand your relationship to the means of production or that queer people work in tech too,” I don’t care about your working conditions. I don’t care about whatever “professional organization” (i.e. the 100% fake union/guild that these “union” efforts will lead too) you want to make, and it’s certainly not a part of any revolutionary workers’ movement.
I mean in every socialist revolution they were able to distinguish the differences of class composition between the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants. But of course rich American “leftists” that work in tech want to fantasize about “running their workplace democratically.” This leads self described communists and anarchists define their working-classness based on how the National Labor Relations Board does. It’s not going to happen, your White Techie co-workers will always benefit from their social climbing more than solidarity. And they will only join collectively insofar they can post theory memes online or demand everyone to recognize them as the smartest people in the room wherever they go. These jobs don’t matter, more than likely shouldn’t exist, are driving the capitalist death spiral of “efficiency” in production amidst climate catastrophe. In the event that they could create a “union” amongst say Amazon programmers it wouldn’t look like the Amazon Labor Union. It would look like a professional organization that benefits techies while they dream up new algorithms to squeeze more out of the warehouses or new anti-worker company apps.
This is NOT to say I’m anti “Tech Workers.” It’s just that these “tech workers” are more just doing the job of other regular ass workers like delivery/taxi driver, microchip manufacturer, “ghost kitchen” cook, assembly line picker, or other jobs that nominally have a use for other people that isn’t further exploiting workers (whether on the job or tracking them as consumers). Techies, however, do not have much in common with the workers who happen to work for what we’ve euphemistically called “Tech Companies.” Why take on the challenge of organizing the unorganized working class that lifts of society thru production, reproductive care work, and largely migrant labor when we could focus on today’s “high skill” crafts that produces next to nothing of value aside from speculative finance, human misery, and places for people to post memes.
Techies can do something useful though. Beyond *parodying* the executives in their office, they can plan phishing scams that shut down work, continually ask obtuse questions and never respond to emails, do as little as possible, leak info, make a company website the monkey peeing in its own mouth video (i.e. monkey wrenching), pay for my drinks, gamble on sports-reality tv-and-more on BetOnline.ag (with props on almost anything!), and most of all keep posting on web forums (for the low-low price of $6-33/month “dues” you can get access to a boring one nominally about “unions,” and get a free even more boring monthly zine). Whatever they do, there isn’t anything “revolutionary” about it, but any of this is more useful than trying to organize around techie class interests. Moreover if you’re a techie in a left organization, please shut the fuck up for once and just give the people your money.
If I had things my way the Revolutionary Workers Council would replace your cafeteria with a trough, and your co-workers would happily eat out of it if it were dressed as a healthy alternative by your boss’s boss. The techie/programmer revolutionary is not a revolutionary because of anything that has to do with organizing a trade union at their job. It means becoming class traitors. And revolutionary unionists analysis of social class needs to go beyond “can they legally form a union under the National Labor Relations Act?”