The Wrong Ideas about the Wrong Things

The Personal

Some time after working for Glitch, I’ve come to realize that I had a souring relationship
with the social aspects of the American web tech sphere. The Google Photos debacle put me into a more “public” light that, nearly a decade later, has become less relevant since generative AI, among other things, has taken many visible corners of the industry by storm. I didn’t get “media training” on how to engage things like understanding digital colonialism. That would have taught me that it’s effectively taboo: instead, you take the money given you to by the venture capital firms, you do the dance and you go home. There’s some inklings of the conversation that’s become safer to speak on; but as with many other things, it came after years of demonstrated (and preventable) violence for it to be worthy of a discussion point. Organizations have come to exist like DAIR and The Algorithmic Justice League that work to actively combat, if not slow down, the bias that evolves into violence that mirrors what we saw running across the country from 2015 to 2022, with protests in the United States and abroad about police violence. It led to people wanting to champion diversity and inclusion as core tenants of their organizations.

Nowadays, these programs have fizzled out on the executive level, even before the ramping down of funding from these groups, and have devolved in some spaces into what I might call a “conference grab”. You might also see it take the shape of online classes that, at times, mirror what you find in a book at your local library. What was once a space capable of centering people routinely excluded has now become something that works to maintain the brand of those who work for companies that either directly engage in digital colonialism or work to support those kind of organizations. My disappointment with how things went down is how quickly folks seem to have accepted no concrete action from these organizations – as these issues are still relevant to this day.

After reading books like The One Device and Dying for an iPhone which confirmed my fears of the multinational and opened my eyes to the collaborative effort between state governments and private enterprise in the decimation of the global South, I went to share what I’ve learned on social networking sites and in circles. GitHub’s then-CEO defended their support of the Bush-era domestic human kidnapping and separation government initiative and since then, my profile on their site has highlighted my dissent in having to use that platform. I try to work around having to use such systems directly unless I’m forced to do so for survival (work). I do my best to make use of and advocate for the systems that I find myself defending the use of. I can’t “preach” one thing without practicing another. What I didn’t realize is that the branded tech industry has no issue with the parroting of a narrative for the purpose of posturing. And I fell for a lot of what people sold.

A good number of folks that I used to engage with early on are people I either have fallen out of touch with, have had disputes that led to serious ruptures or have effectively drifted apart due to ideological differences that were once unifying points. What I think I failed to do was not being more candid on about who and what I stood for outside of technology earlier on in my relationships. For most, it’s purely a means of gaining social security. It might have been something folks did in school, grabbed an internship somewhere and kept running until they were netting salaries and compensation that put them in the top 40% of earners in the United States. Others might have been fortunate to have family who worked in or adjacent to the industry and leaned on that to build up their own experience. In conversations, I found that using words like capitalist or class led to some reactions I didn’t expect, and at times reminded me that, for most folks engaging me, I was a software engineer first and a whole person second. Now with my recent focus on helping with the resurgence of building worker power within the salaried tech industry, I’ve found myself effectively pushed out from the social and professional facets of the spaces I used to exist in.

I don’t know what to do about that. Do I have to start over? In a way, I already have, with the communities I’ve grown in thanks to organizing. But I’m realizing that some folks didn’t really see me as a person for a long time. Nothing that I’ve mentioned about the difficulties I had at the places I worked at (like battling racism at Lyft or struggling to position myself as a contractor with black.af) seemed to have resonated with people who’ve chosen to align themselves more tightly to things I thought they’d have second thoughts on. Is it me that was misaligned or did I misread people? This is something I can spin around for months, especially as I’m looking for work in one of the worst downturns of the industry. But, as I’m learning, that’ll do nothing but keep myself frozen in place.

The Ambition

The things I’ve wanted to push weren’t Money Making Machines™️. They didn’t involve the FIRE-esque logic that folks tend to endorse. In fact, a lot of it would have required folks to invest in people that they couldn’t make a profit from. Ironically, as a lapsed Seventh Day Adventist, the idea of working to make the lives of folks who have less was something I clung to and thought that folks who championed the idea of lifting other people up would be into. It’s safe to say that it’s not the case at all. In fact, what gets the attention of folks when I poke into some spaces is what things could one make quickly to make money; effectively a means of a “digital flip” of sorts. Content creation is something I want to expand on as I’m reading something about “influencers” but I do believe it’s played a huge role into this.

I am a bit jaded from the swiftness of distance some folks have put. I’m not absolving myself of having a brash personality on some points: I don’t make it a point to passively agree on things that are of importance. I found it easier to leave these spaces. I did that in reflection of how I’ve also chosen to go, always in peace but with understanding of why I chose to leave. I’ve accepted many instances of mistakes that I’ve made over time; thinking that had to evolve, unlearning and learning and making amends. But that still leaves me with this odd void of sorts. Folks are in different places in their lives and now I come off as an “angry Black communist that runs Linux”. My laptop is coated with stickers that scream “give people money and stop spending money on war”. My bag has pins of multiple union groups all covering the branded Glitch fish logo on it. This is who I am and who I chose to be. And I am comfortable with it. I didn’t expect it to be so much of an issue to want a different world.

Is it me?

The Current

With that preamble, I can go into what I’ve done so far. It’s been a mix of “info dumping” and
“preaching”. I use quotes here because this is how they’ve been described to me when I relay them back. “Info dumping” has been the moniker used when I provide information or links to things that support stances or bring light to situations that demonstrate a need for a change in opinion. I try to keep them in the same cadence that one would bring other things as to not to overwhelm. What I didn’t realize in spaces is that it’s never about the quantity but the quality. If it’s not coming from a place like MSNBC, Axios, AP or one of the “accredited news stations”; it’s not worth scoping out. If it challenges deep seated opinions too much, it’s not credible. I found this to be such a wall when talking to folks. That led me to try to read into the nature of media and conformity. Jared A. Bell has a book that I’ve found extremely insightful to the dilemma of the (unintentionally) Black right-moderate tech worker, which is also the normative state of most high-wage tech workers. The title alone was too much for folks to even consider parsing, I found, so it never went far. Media like The Internet’s Own Boy wasn’t Sundance-y for these folks so it never passed the “I’ll watch it in a month” test. Instead, folks could buy books from Jason Fried, queue up talks from DHH or from Google I/O; things more relevant to job security, which is understandable but disappointing.

The Next

What I think I’m going to try to do (and what I’m playing with continuing) is break a bit from the mold. Instead of trying to be a broadcaster of “bad news” directly, I’m going to continue writing longer form things here. The tech industry and the people most “visible” in it embrace the path of a distinguished journeyman. It’s the image of a solo crafts-person but one that’s built it on the work of many, sometimes thousands (looking at open source as a fine example). This means I’ll be continuing to talk about these topics but folding them into my web of notes and research to show the relevant bits, but for those who willingly want to learn. What I’ve learned from transformative justice advocates is that in order to engage in it, everyone has to want to participate. I can’t convince folks who run the venture firm for Google Ventures to reconsider the role that their portfolio has in genocide because they make returns on it; their personal values are too far gone to make it worthwhile. Instead, I have to focus on folks who are already curious and give them language and material that they can bring back.

There’s no point talking to folks who are so bought in to such ecosystems and have sunk decades into the Apple ecosystem (for example). By explicitly paying for more and more, we validate their commercial interest, especially as people who have larger voices in the shaping of technology. We inherently market their ideology as our own and reify everything else that goes with it. This is, in short, to say, that while your opinions might be yours; your behaviors and access is shaped by them. I want to work with and talk to people who fully understand what people are capable of. I’ve wasted more than five years pounding bricks with people who believe that they have more in common with Eric Schmidt and members of the PayPal mafia. When in fact, they have more issues in common with the people they step over at Civic Center BART Station in San Francisco or by Port Authority in New York. Why would they see themselves as peers; they have “good health insurance”.

Does this mean I have to make art? What kind of audience would actually be moved enough by it? Could I get by? The thing that pollutes my ability to find something that resonates with me is my current need to get by. I know that once I’m working a third of the day, I lose my ability to focus time in a way I might find productive. But people have managed to do a tremendous amount more with less, and it didn’t happen in a day (or night). I think I have to hunker down, at least from the angle of technology, and continue writing, ideally in long-form, my reflections with evidence and continue to work on things that defend the ideas I’d want to see to come into the world. This means exploring more examples of communal systems that operate without needing to (heavily) rely on the Big 3 for “cloud computing”. This includes fighting against the idea that digital “rentier” capitalism is the best that we can do.

What tangentially hits me is that I wanted the folks that once called me “smart” to actually mean it but it wasn’t authentic. I think it came with the space; if you’re a coder, you’re assumed to be so. I never liked the label and I reject it a lot, unless it’s tied to something that demonstrates why it’s used for me. So far, I can only think of a few times where I managed to prove this and they were all around organizing efforts. Spaces where I couldn’t look it up or read the source but I had to actually think hard and do research, versus stepping through print statements or a debugger. I never planned or wanted to be a “smart programmer” but I do want to be a smart organizer.

Figuring out how to be a better one within the realm of technology is going to require a lot of
jumps. For one, I’m aiming to bring myself to more organizing spaces, like the one Tech Worker Coalition and Collective Action in Tech are putting on in about two months in California. I had the honor of delivering a keynote to the East Coast version about the notion of control that we consent to in the workplace and how that robs us of agency. I wrote for a magazine my observing experience of the will of people who, once understanding this control and its grasp, fought for more agency over their lives at work. I wrestle with the idea of writing as a tool of organizing because it requires folks to commit to reading; which, for my “generation”, has been slowly reducing to Instagram squares of text that people can’t even source or check (ignoring TikTok and Snapchat). Reading and writing isn’t “enough”.

Writing doesn’t seem to move people in the way that something like tangible direct action could. It could inspire people towards it; hence the history of literature being contraband when made widely available. But I think that, with the Internet and in turn, corporate social media, this has been rendered moot. Facebook and Google engage in a level of soft censorship by way of opaque algorithmic ranking and since this is considered a feature, not a bug; it’s not possible to help nudge people to be more vigilant about what and how things appear in front of them. Using the Internet as a primary means of organizing and liberation is engaging the pseudo-viable idea that the tools that build it can take it down. This line of thinking contributes to my contention with domain names at the center of Internet sovereignty, as they’re commercially leased but state-controlled, like telephone lines, since their inception. This propels me to look at “decentralized” solutions that could work over the Internet stack but don’t have to. None of that works immediately, however, to help folks demand better working conditions. For some, folks are so well off, it doesn’t really matter that 10% of their company got laid off. Maybe they’ll stay in touch if they were friendly but rarely can you see public displays of material support.
That kind of behavior would put the professional managerial class in companies (directors, upper managers and the like) in an awkward social position (but that’s usually a fleeing point). I have to imagine that I’m focusing on the wrong people.

At a certain point, my thinking on what to do begins to turn into trying to understand how folks can develop this false emotion of apathy. I understand it from the migrant perspective, in a need to preserve themselves as it’s already made to be difficult to support oneself. But for those who can throw $5,000 USD at an angel investment where they see workers in precarious situation needing $100; I don’t get it from a humane perspective. I understand the logic of the capitalist perspective, but I don’t understand how you can pick between a lottery ticket versus helping someone out. American influences are deeply intertwined into tech culture and one of those is the notion that success and failure is cultivated individually. It’s their fault for losing their job. It’s their fault that they’re homeless. It’s their fault that they’ve been laid off. That morphs into a form of self-righteousness that reminds me of the metaphorical bricks I’ve welted my knuckles against. And it’s worse within kin circles, in my observation. The need to “get the bag” means you’ll also use that bag to beat anyone who gets in your way; unless they can also provide you with more to put in your bag.

Where does this leave me?

The Exit?

I realize that I’m potentially asking for too much from folks at times. I’m coming to the realization that most folks will not agree that everyone should have their basic needs met. That scares me. In the United States, as much as we like to talk about progress and innovation, 11.5% of the country is poor, according to the government’s approach. But a grassroots coalition group that followed the ideals of America’s most hated-turned-loved-and-on-every-Black-neighborhood-boulevard Negro of uniting the bottom classes has noted that this percentage is way too low. We’re closer to 140 million people being poor or low-income. This number defends and supports why gig work, digital influencers and so many other forms of “side hustle” jobs have grown to be people’s most sought after form of work, especially when corporate America makes it so hard to secure work. Folks in the tech industry, as long as they remain in the castle of silicon do not see this (or just choose not to; again using the Protestant ideals of individual failure and revival). I want more folks to understand that we work on systems that both contribute and control how this work and that if we don’t act, we will be next. With more than 80,000 workers laid off over the last few years in the tech industry and more to come as AI demands more capital and the need for growth of corporate profit remains corporate policy, I don’t understand the fear of wanting to work to build moats collectively. We speak so much about strength, about performance, about resiliency, but is that only allocated to machines? I can’t imagine that we are truly this frightened.

There’s a notion in some (Marxist) circles that the poor are kept poor as to keep workers motivated from defying the status quo. In the tech industry, this should be clear to see, especially on social media as, save a few rag-to-RSU stories, people do not talk about the impact of their work beyond what it provides to the interest of business. For spaces that are meant to foster human connection, I see this as the wall: it’s already a non-starter to even talk on these concepts. Even outside of class, the pillars of racism, sexism, transphobia and xenophobia are the policing guard rails on what people can and cannot say online. It’s in poor taste to talk about racism at companies unless it’s a story of survival, then it can be made to make one into a “model” of persistence, with no call to action to have these organizations change outside of hiring a consultant (who doesn’t even have much authority to make change; they’re not on the board nor in the executive suite, they’re on payroll). Sexism is why we still see high levels of turn over for women and femme folks in the industry, despite the literal existence of the industry being based on their labor. The term debugging came from a woman! The industry aligns tightly with the iconography and mentality of the financial sector (as made clear with Sheryl Sandberg’s lean in philosophy of work) and there’s no real room for anything else.

Is it me, then? Am I doing “too much”? Am I asking for more than people can care about? Is it that it’s too dangerous to consider these ideas, even in semi-private spaces? Regardless of the first question, I won’t stop working to close this gap and I’m hoping that I can join other folks who’ve been doing this for longer – some of which I’m lucky to lean on for support. This is hopefully a way to give those on the fence or who’ve been confused a peak inside my mind, where I’m at and why I won’t stop talking about the things that I do. We need to do better, myself included.

Thank you lee for offering and taking some time to check this out prior to publishing!