"Thing is, when the company that pays you actively wants to track everyone, there's little you can do as the person that creates tech form them."
You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.
There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't enjoy as much as your current job stability and paycheck, but the choice is always there.
> There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company
This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.
Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action? Their owner employers sure are organizing adversarially in a multitude of ways in the open and behind closed doors
> Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action?
If you mean software engineers when saying "tech workers" because unions make it harder to fire people. There's not much that makes a software engineer's job harder than a bad engineer who isn't getting fired and is destroying the quality of the product and the code and creating work for everyone else to fix, all the time.
Unions also result in gaining seniority by time spent in a job instead of competency, and that's also a miserable experience, when someone incompetent is dictating the engineering work. In software engineering you want people who are technically proficient and capable of mentoring to assume leadership positions and positions of increased responsibility, not people who've been there the longest.
Software engineers in my first hand experience have been able to organize around coordinated action to get their employer to improve their conditions and pay without unions necessarily. One simple example of that is to coordinate around pay transparency
Tech workers disproportionally 1) believe in meritocracy, and 2) believe that the existing arrangement in IT is it, or at least closer to it than it would have been with unions in the picture.
Why that is the case is another interesting question.
Which is to say that even very intelligent people can be very vulnerable to believing in things which are patently false provided that the end result is the ability to continue to live in a state of complete denial, and a world of pure imagination, where no action is required on one's own part and you can just continue to hope that all of this is a temporary aberration that will get better on its own :)
Obviously. Why else would people on hacker news advocate for all the socialist economic policies that humanity just spent the entire 20th century proving don't work?
Sadly history repeats so we'll probably just have another "cultural revolution" and "great leap forward" in the 21st century.
I disagree. I think most tech workers identify more with their employers and their class than their own status and that of their colleagues. They’re moving up, fast, and they’re satisfied with their prospects more than anything they might get from solidarity.
In Marxist terms, lumpenproletariat is a close approximation, but a weird accident of history.
That's not strange is it? If you're making 100k+/year, you're well into bourgeois territory, and FAANG benefits are practically near-instant-owner-class. Why would you expect anybody getting that kind of money to identify with the lower classes?
Sure, and many people getting less still own stocks via 401(k) etc. The important question is whether a person can live entirely off their rents, or they have to work for someone else for a living.
That depends on your baseline, of course. Or to answer your other question:
> Why would you expect anybody getting that kind of money to identify with the lower classes?
I don’t expect it, though I do have deep solidarity myself. Because, to return to the middle of your response:
> If you're making 100k+/year, you're well into bourgeois territory, and FAANG benefits are practically near-instant-owner-class.
I can speak to six figures, and I’m in no way into bourgeois territory. I’m approximately as comfortable as middle class boomers, ie I can make financial decisions to benefit my aging family with some hope I’ll still be comfortable myself. I don’t own anything in the sense meant by “bourgeois” in this context. I may yet, in the sense of a retirement plan. That’s a middle class aspiration. Which, having grown up poor and then broke and then getting by… I recognize very much is still working class.
There certainly is a larger segment of the tech work force than the general population which has reason to believe it can cross the bridge from gentry to ownership… but it’s still a minority of us and it’s mostly scraps. I don’t expect most of my colleagues to be comrades, but I certainly don’t agree with their class analysis which you have expressed so clearly.
> Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action?
I am not actually so much resistant to unions, as I do not see what benefit I’ll get from them. What exactly in my life would have changed for better if I had been a part of a union? Just one thing, can you name?
Vacation? I have unlimited days off, and my request was never rejected.
On call? They paid me $500 a week to have a cellular phone officially, but at the same time unofficially everyone was strictly forbidden to call it. It was an internal political move by the engineering department (see our commitment to this new product? we even put Mike on call), turned into an additional benefit to best engineers.
> If you have ever gone up against HR over anything ever, a union would have benefited you.
My wife (who is one of the best teachers in California, documented) was fired exactly because of the union rules. The principal wanted to keep her so much, that the district turned his desire into a political tool: oh you want to keep L? she is a good teacher? sign this paper (some financial cover up) and we will give you the money to keep L. The union did not care is she a good teacher, or not. Less seniority? Go away (but we keep your $1000 union fees).
My favorite counter-example is a collective action of about a thousand medical workers in SF Hospital demanding from Facebook an increase in censorship (and the censorship is impossible without surveillance).
Why do you think a union will support your ethical choices? And if it would not - you’d have to quit the company and the union, loosing not only your salary, but also union fees.
That well has been poisoned in the US. It's tough to find any extant union which isn't a corrupt sellout organization leeching off the workers they're supposed to represent. It's hard to change, because laws around unions are designed to lead to the current situation. Cross-industry/informal/extra-organizational action and coordination using the internet is probably a far more workable idea than traditional unions.
Yes. I've also worked in a few union shops and experienced it myself. I'm a socialist through and through, but what is called a union in the US is not an organization of and for the workers, it is a co-opted parasitic extension of corporate and government policy. Workers can and should organize, but restricting ourselves to following the controlled opposition is stupid and self-defeating.
> You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.
If you had a union, or even a professional association whose code of ethics had teeth, you could refuse without having to quit. It's incredible to me that in 2022, most programmers are still anti-union.
They do have a say. Their labour is being purchased from them, not appropriated. They can say no (individually or together) and ultimately they can walk away.
As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.
> As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.
It may be more effective in terms of salary and working conditions (though I doubt that in software engineering I would have been able to get better pay through collective).
But in terms of ethics?
Individually, it’s almost impossible to make me support surveillance and censorship. But a big collective is much more vulnerable to manipulation. Comes 9/11 and you’ll get “collective” support for Patriot act, comes 6/1 and you’ll get “collective” support for censorship.
You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.
There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't enjoy as much as your current job stability and paycheck, but the choice is always there.