#casualization

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory owners wanted to use the machines.

The point of powered textile machines wasn’t to increase the productivity of skilled textile workers — rather, it was to smash the guilds that represented these skilled workers and ensured that they shared in the profits from their labor. The factory owners wanted machines so simple a child could use them — because they were picking over England’s orphanages and recruiting small children through trickery to a ten-year indenture in the factories.

The “dark, Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution were awash in the blood and tears of children. These child-slaves were beaten and starved, working long hours on little sleep for endless years, moving among machines that could snatch off a limb, a scalp, even your head, after a moment’s lapse in attention.

(Fun fact: in 1832, Robert Blincoe, one of children who survived the factories, published “A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy” a bestseller recounting the horrors he endured; that book inspired Charles Dickens to write Oliver Twist):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

It wasn’t just that weavers who belonged to guilds made more money — they also enjoyed more dignity in their workplaces, because those workplaces were their homes. Textiles were the original “cottage industries,” in that it was done in cottages, by families who set their own pace, enjoying amiable conversation or companionable silence.

These weavers could go to the bathroom when they wanted, eat when they wanted, take a break and walk around outside when the weather was fine.

This is in stark contrast to life in the dark, Satanic mills, where foremen watched over every movement, engaging in a kind of meanspirited choreography that treated the worker as an inferior adjunct to the machine, to be fit to its workings and worked to its tireless schedule.

The Luddites had some technical critiques of the machines — they argued, correctly, that those early machines turned out inferior products that fit poorly and degraded quickly. But even if the machines had produced textiles to match the hand-looms, the Luddites’ real anger wasn’t over what the machines did — it was over who the machines did it to and who they did it for.

I’ve written that “Science Fiction is a Luddite literature” — it’s a narrative form that can go beyond describing what a machine does, to demanding that we rethink who it does it for and who it does it to. Not all sf does this, but at its best, this is secret sauce that makes sf such a radical form, one that insists that while the machines’ functioning may be deterministic, their social arrangements are up to us:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

That’s what happens when you mix Luddism with SF — but what happens when you mix it with fantasy? I think you get steampunk.

Steampunk has many different valences, but central to the project is an imaginary world where people engaged in craft labor (lone mad scientists, say) are able to produce high-tech goods that are more associated with factories. I think it’s no coincidence that steampunk took root during the first surge of “peer-based commons production” — when craft workers were producing whole operating systems and encyclopedias from their “cottages”:

https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/make-free-love-the-machine-hate-the-factory/

These modern craft workers were living the steampunk fantasy, so beautifully summed up in the motto for Magpie Killjoy’s Steampunk Magazine: “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory.”

https://firestorm.coop/products/2624-steampunk-magazine.html

But then came the second decade of the 21st century, and now the third, and with it, the rise of something very much like the opposite of that steampunk fantasy: a new form of craft labor where the factory is inside the cottage — where an app is your boss, and “work from home” becomes “live at work.”

As with all forms of technological oppression, this movement followed the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” starting with people with little social clout and working its way up the privilege gradient to entangle a widening proportion of workers.

Among the first people to experience this was the predominantly Black, predominantly female employees of Arise, a work-from-home call center business that pretends that its employees are small businesses themselves, and so charges them to get trained for each new client, then fines them if they want to quit:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

In Amazon warehouses and delivery vans, we saw the rise of “chickenized reverse-centaurs” — these are workers who must pay for their own work equipment (as with poultry farmers captured by processing monopolists, hence “chickenized”). They are also paired with digital technology (something automation theorists call a “centaur”) but the technology bosses them around, rather than supporting them. The machine is the centaur’s head and the worker is its body (thus, “reverse-centaur”):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

The pandemic lockdowns saw an explosion in the use of bossware, technology that monitors your every keystroke, every click, every URL, every file, even the video and audio from the cameras and mics on your devices, whether or not you pay for those devices.

This is the second coming of Taylorism, the fine-grained, high-handed “scientific” micromanagement of factory workers, transposed to the home, and integrated with sensors that track you down to your eyeballs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Truly, this is the worst of all worlds. We increasingly work for large, distributed factories, and unlike the big companies of the post-New Deal era, we don’t have unions and progressive regulators who can force these big businesses to share the wealth in the form of the “large firm wage premium.”

Instead, we have craft labor at sweatshop wages, under factory conditions, in our own homes and cars. This needn’t be: digital technologies are powerful labor-organizing tools (potentially), but that’s not how we’ve decided to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the radical message of sf tells us, that’s a choice, not an inevitability. We aren’t prisoners of technology. We can seize the means of computation. It starts by being less concerned with what the machine does, and homing in on who it does it for and who it does it to.

Here’s this week’s podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/03/19/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk/

And here’s a direct link to download the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they’ll host your media for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_440/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_440_-_Gig_Work_Is_the_Opposite_of_Steampunk.mp3

Here’s the direct feed to subscribe to my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

And here’s the original “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk” article on Medium:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

Today (Mar 20), I’m doing a remote talk for the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Speaker Series.

On Weds (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the @IFTF’s “Changing the Register” series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Thesis 1: The tendency to reduce adjunctification to a simple or mechanical symptom of neoliberalism forgets all that's political in “political economy.” It forgets, in other words, that the very reason to speak of political economy is to acknowledge that economy is not destiny.

2. Adjunctification did not happen all at once but is the gradual, contested, and non-inevitable result of various experiments with university labor. In the late 1960s and 70s, university administration, the primary class engaged in this experimenting, became extremely well-organized within and between institutions. (By the mid-1970s, in fact, university admins began to see their work as scientific, starting conferences & journals to organize b/w institutions.)

3. Those forms of experimentation were racialized and gendered. Problem is, admins really didn't know what they were doing at the moment. They miscalculated the kinds of investment that'd be required by the late Keynsian use of universities to absorb surplus populations. Chief among these surplus populations were black and brown youth, who in the late 60s were disproportionately unemployed. In Living for the City, Donna Murch says that in Oakland, for example, black youth unemployment was above 25%. We can't understand the expansion of universities outside of the management of this phenomenon. This was important because 1960s capital was still interested in demonstrating geopolitically that capitalism did not inherently produce and reproduce racial inequalities. This, of course, is a geopolitical situation that we cannot take for granted over fifty years later.

4. University administrations expected that black & brown youth would arrive at college and just be happy to be there. Okay, no, not really. But they expected that the primary expense they'd have to deal with in admitting these new populations would be in remedial education. They had no expectation that admitting black and brown students would trouble the epistemological foundations of the university. Or the contents of what was considered valid knowledge. Or the dominant modes of organizing and practicing instruction in the university.

5. Faced with demands for them, university administrations sought to get black studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies on the cheap.  They’d already sorta found a way to do so b/c of the massive enrollments in the newly emergent Cal State and Community College systems. They also didn't have the faculty capacity to respond fruitfully to those enrollment numbers. They responded by instituting experimental colleges in which students taught their own classes.

6. Black studies in the 1960s starts where no one wanted it to end—in student self-organization. In student self-organization, that is, under conditions of exploited and casualized student labor. And if those are its conditions of possibility, no analysis of black studies can even flirt with the idea of completion without a deep engagement with the contradictions and contractions of academic labor and knowledge production in the university.

7. Yet in spite of intense and militant black labor organization in the 60s (best example being the League of Revolutionary Black Workers), many radical black academics at the forefront of the black studies movement subordinated labor questions to other strategic priorities with regard to how the field should be organized. We have lived with the unanticipatable consequences of the subordination of these questions to this day. Its extended consequences are recognizable in the fact that we cannot recognize what's specifically _political_ about adjunctification. Because we've retrospectively explained adjunctification as a simple symptom of an economic arrangement, rather than a political strategy to stem the tide of organized intellectual radicalization (and the costs related to it), we can't fully appreciate the extent to which adjunctification is in fact a strategy that aims to enact political repression, directly or indirectly.

8. Before 1968 there was no such thing as the adjunct professor as we know it today. (This is not to say there was no precarious labor in the university, or that that precarity was not of a specifically political nature. As Bob Blauner has shown, in the University of California, five times as many non-Academic Senate workers than tenured/tenure track professors were dismissed in the 1940s and 50s for refusing to sign the anti-communist oath in the University of California.)

9. The point is that adjunctification did not congeal into an explicit & repeatable political-administrative strategy until '68 and after, and that the initial way of making adjunctification acceptable among university professors at the time was to introduce it in the fields that the predominantly white and male professoriate saw as least essential within the university, and as the greatest threat to their own authority and professional self determination. We can't understand adjunctification without understanding how it emerged through forms of consensus perpetuated not only by university administration but by the credentialed majority of the university professoriate itself. I don't see a way of doing so outside of careful attention to the conditions that made black studies and women's studies possible.