 You know all the random unforced tech layoffs are just labor disorganizing, right? That's it. That's all they are. They're making us play musical chairs with our jobs to keep us from ever building enough trust to organize. Their ideal outcome is a labor pool that's too traumatized and reactive to act collectively. Just pushing everyone into a scarcity mindset on purpose. It's the whole US economy writ small. 25 comments
Also, yes, it's not a coincidence that AI hype is happening at the same time as disorganizing layoffs. In their fever dreams, they really do own intelligent machines rather than employ intelligent people. But they rationally know that's not going to happen. But they can make you afraid it will, and they can embed AI shit into the all the tools you have to use, so that you can do no work without renting the necessary tools from your boss.  🗣 📣 LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!!! ❝ They're making us play musical chairs with our #jobs to keep us from ever building enough trust to organize. Their ideal outcome is a labor pool that's too traumatized and reactive to act collectively.❞  @jenniferplusplus i learned the phrase "labor discipline" from Clara Mattei's book (The Capital Order) and now i see it everywhere. i think you're right about the labor disorganizing. i think it might also be simple cruelty, because that's been capitalists' preferred way of disciplining labor for at least a century (Mattei's book has the receipts). @walruslifestyle Yes, it's as much a habit as a conscious choice they're making. They feel their power is under attack, and they're responding semi-reflexively by using that power to hit back as forcefully as they think they can sustain. It's sort of a financial controlled escalation. Which is to say they take and retain control by doing more violence than they think their enemy can match. @jenniferplusplus I suspect that is giving them too much credit for malevolence. Most CEOs I’ve met have the strategic skills of a flatworm. (Although the effects are of course exactly the same to the workers). CEOs are herd animals and will do whatever the other CEOs are doing. Musk triggered them all into a stampede. @whalecoiner @jenniferplusplus not sure if it was Musk so much as interest rates and our black swan event, Covid The VC Tech crowd literally ginned up a bank run on themselves that was entirely avoidable and had nothing to do with interest rates or COVID. @ericjmorey @ado @whalecoiner  @jenniferplusplus @ericjmorey @ado @whalecoiner You know Theil fancies himself Sauron right? No, REALLY! @whalecoiner I may be over selling how consciously reasoned their actions are. There's at least as much habit and reflex as planning. But calling it herd mentality is underselling how much coordination they do. They talk about these things. Not even all that secretly. As much of that dialog happens in business journal op eds as it does in direct conversations. @whalecoiner @jenniferplusplus Some CEOs are just pieces of shit. Some are not. Actions are how we determine which is which.  @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io inter-company guild time! They want us to play musical chairs with the companies, why not form inter-company labor orgs?! @atax1a They bother because for them it's about power, and power exists in its application. So at some level they have to. Having power they won't use is the same as not having it.  @jenniferplusplus i mean, that's kind of what we were trying to say when we were leaning on our twitter coworkers to organize meaningfully. but apparently the entire time we were doing that, some white people were going around "organizing" a dinner-party-type union that had "politeness" bylaws that were designed specifically to keep me out. @atax1a one might hope they learned a lesson from that experience, but I'm sure if they did it was exactly the opposite from what it should have been. @jenniferplusplus the white-privileged segment of the labor pool disorganizes itself on its own, and the capitalists pushing on it certainly aren't helping, but from our perspective it seems redundant. @atax1a I think the capitalist pressure there is calibrated to keep the white privilege beneficiaries from ever being secure enough to grow beyond the comfort of that privilege. @jenniferplusplus yep, but we can't talk about that around white workers, because it sets off their fragility response and makes them think we're "racist against whites". @jenniferplusplus I really think the answer to this is exterior organizing outside any single org. ERGs etc struggle with this because they are *owned* by the corporate entity, that makes them fragile. @runewake2 I think fragile isn't even the word. They're compromised from the start. Sort of a master's tools situation. |
Gregory's Server
And, yes, they're aligning their disorganizing along racial and gender lines. In part because they themselves are racist and misogynist, and in part because it's effective. They know that many other people are also racist and misogynist. Likely most people. It's learned behavior and that's what this country teaches, after all.