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

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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  • Cory Doctorow@mamot.frOP
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    10 months ago

    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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    • Cory Doctorow@mamot.frOP
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      10 months ago

      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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      • Cory Doctorow@mamot.frOP
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        10 months ago

        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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        • Cory Doctorow@mamot.frOP
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          10 months ago

          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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