We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
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This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, “let’s make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue,” no one says, “if we do that, our users will all install blockers.” Instead, the response is, “let’s make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763227/uber-video-advertising-ads-taxi-food-delivery-apps
Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.
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Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.
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This made tech workers very exploitable: their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing something heroic, which warranted “extremely hardcore” expectations - working 16 hour days, sleeping under your desk, sacrificing your health, your family and your personal life to meet deadlines and ship products (“Real artists ship” - S. Jobs).
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But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother’s funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.
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But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother’s funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.
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Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce - and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit - they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers’ confidence.
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When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It’s not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering - there’s the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
No matter how strong an individual tech worker’s bargaining power was, it was always brittle.
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Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker’s power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses’ plans with a new system based on a collective identity.
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Only through collective action and solidarity - unions - could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:
https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
But what is a little surprising - and very heartening! - is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack.
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