There is a legitimate point of contradiction in the minds of the professional class, as they assume that they are adding value to their firms and are therefore entitled to a share of that value in wages.
They don’t see the value of investment dollars or the cult-psychology of the C-levels who consider labor purely a liability. They see their work as productive and meaningful, at least to the company’s bottom line. And so when they generate a bunch of new value only to have their jobs terminated before they can reap a payout, they’re confused and frustrated by the seemingly illogical nature of the decision.
But then they all go back out and seek other jobs at lower salaries, with fewer benefits, and under harsher labor conditions. They end up working for another set of businesses who all got credit from the same folks that rewarded their last set of employers with new investment for layoffs. And they go through the same cycle of productive labor -> constrained payout -> early dismissal, never really putting the pieces together because its all obscured at the highest levels of financialization.
A lot of this is the result of Econ 101 level propaganda. A lot of this is the fetishization of commodities and the magical realism of financialization. A lot of this is people simply not having the brain-space to draw conclusions from individual life-experiences ten years removed from one another. I don’t begrudge folks for missing how the three-card monte of wage labor works, because its a difficult trick to follow. But, at some point, you can’t argue with the results. They’re getting more revenue and you’re getting less pay over time. You don’t need to follow the card to know the game is rigged.
I spent most of the last twenty years screaming at coders that all the coding academies and magnet schools and boot camps were a sinister conspiracy by silicon valley to proletarianize them, but did they listen to me? Did they organize? Did they union-maxx? DID THEY BUILD A SINGLE DEATH ROBOT? No> NO! THE FOOLS!
“No bro, open source is the solution. Im not some sort of free software brainwashed radical. We are going to give up copyleft protection to the software we create for the most freedom ever (expat “MIT” license) Trust me, it’s not like companies with astronomically more capital than us can exploit our labor to corral people into nonfree software.”
Few years later…
“proprietary software is inevitable, stop fighting against it. It’s okay that microsoft scanned all our code for their machine learning algorithim, i will still use github (owned by microsoft) because Im not some gnu loving weirdo”
Oh tech people are completely incorrigible. They have their nose shoved so far up their libertarian asses that they can’t conceive of group action and collective bargaining.
There is a legitimate point of contradiction in the minds of the professional class, as they assume that they are adding value to their firms and are therefore entitled to a share of that value in wages.
They don’t see the value of investment dollars or the cult-psychology of the C-levels who consider labor purely a liability. They see their work as productive and meaningful, at least to the company’s bottom line. And so when they generate a bunch of new value only to have their jobs terminated before they can reap a payout, they’re confused and frustrated by the seemingly illogical nature of the decision.
But then they all go back out and seek other jobs at lower salaries, with fewer benefits, and under harsher labor conditions. They end up working for another set of businesses who all got credit from the same folks that rewarded their last set of employers with new investment for layoffs. And they go through the same cycle of productive labor -> constrained payout -> early dismissal, never really putting the pieces together because its all obscured at the highest levels of financialization.
A lot of this is the result of Econ 101 level propaganda. A lot of this is the fetishization of commodities and the magical realism of financialization. A lot of this is people simply not having the brain-space to draw conclusions from individual life-experiences ten years removed from one another. I don’t begrudge folks for missing how the three-card monte of wage labor works, because its a difficult trick to follow. But, at some point, you can’t argue with the results. They’re getting more revenue and you’re getting less pay over time. You don’t need to follow the card to know the game is rigged.
I spent most of the last twenty years screaming at coders that all the coding academies and magnet schools and boot camps were a sinister conspiracy by silicon valley to proletarianize them, but did they listen to me? Did they organize? Did they union-maxx? DID THEY BUILD A SINGLE DEATH ROBOT? No> NO! THE FOOLS!
ugh, I had this argument with a coworker who insisted that we “were of another class”
Lol. that sounds frustrating.
“I’m built different, das capital does not apply to me”
Das capital:
he said us. he was trying to convince me medicare for all was bad because of a healthcare shortage. a necessary one.
“No bro, open source is the solution. Im not some sort of free software brainwashed radical. We are going to give up copyleft protection to the software we create for the most freedom ever (expat “MIT” license) Trust me, it’s not like companies with astronomically more capital than us can exploit our labor to corral people into nonfree software.”
Few years later…
“proprietary software is inevitable, stop fighting against it. It’s okay that microsoft scanned all our code for their machine learning algorithim, i will still use github (owned by microsoft) because Im not some gnu loving weirdo”
lol really the same person?
Oh tech people are completely incorrigible. They have their nose shoved so far up their libertarian asses that they can’t conceive of group action and collective bargaining.