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Critical perspectives on technology: resources

Last updated: October 1, 2018.

A wide-ranging list of resources for those interested in a more critical understanding of the technology industry, grounded in a recognition of its economic, social and political context.

This was initially compiled as a companion to the March 2018 issue of Notes From Below, called Technology and The Worker, which I co-curated. That issue contains some excellent pieces at the intersection of technology and class composition, most of which aren't listed here, and I would highly recommend taking a look.

There's a lot here, with resources in a variety of formats (books, articles, podcasts, communities, individuals), and I suggest you bookmark this page and use it as a reference if you're interested in this topic. If you think something should be added to this list, get in touch.


Communities

Publications

  • Logic Magazine: an excellent print-first magazine covering technology from an astutely critical perspective
  • The New Inquiry: an independent left publication with some great pieces on technology
  • The Baffler: same as above
  • Real Life Magazine: "a magazine about living with technology"
  • Model View Culture: "a magazine about technology, culture and diversity" (though sadly now defunct)
  • New Socialist: occasionally has pieces on economic or cultural aspects of the tech industry, though usually within the context of UK politics (I'm an editor for the economics section)

Podcasts

People to follow on Twitter

(not an exhaustive list, obviously; take a look at the people I follow for a much longer list of suggestions)

Books

First-person accounts

Third-person accounts

The economics of the industry

Critical takes

  • Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs. This was a weird read (more of a textbook, with a ton of introductory stuff on both topics crammed in) but has some good insights. Written by a media professor in a very dry, thoroughly academic style.
  • The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner (available as a PDF). A Marxist take on the economics behind the tech industry. I haven't actually read this yet but I need to.
  • Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek. A Marxist analysis of contemporary technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Amazon. Quite groundbreaking, really. Highly recommended. And if you like this, I'd also recommend Srnicek's more popular book Inventing the Future, co-authored with Alex Williams, on the role of politics in directing technological change.
  • Ours to Hack and to Own by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. A good collection of essays on platform cooperatives and their potential role. Doesn't have that much to say about the wider economic context in which these co-ops would be situated, but still a good read.
  • A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark. I honestly loved this book. It's from 2004, and doesn't really go into specifics about the industry itself, but it does a great job of placing the information industry in its historical economic context, while also firmly grounded in the critical theory tradition. Highly recommended.
  • Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier-Boutang. A critical perspective on the political economy of tech, which proposes that we are in the midst of transitioning to a new mode of capitalism. Aligns nicely with Wark's Hacker Manifesto, but this one is more detailed on the specific economic characteristics of our era.
  • Not really a book, but Jacobin had an entire issue on technology called Ours To Master, which has some good stuff.
  • The Black Box Society by Frank Pasquale.
  • Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. Takes a deep dive into how inequality is algorithmically reinforced in various contexts.
  • Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. A really good critical take on why the problems with tech are actually problems with the underlying economic structures. My notes are here.

Less critical takes

  • The Industries of the Future by Alec J Ross. Predictions on the future of the tech industry. It's actually somewhat critical but this is a guy who once worked for Hillary Clinton and who seems to mostly share her very neoliberal outlook on the world, so don't expect much.
  • Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier. This is also somewhat critical—he castigates large tech companies for having too much control over for lives. Still, I think his proposed solution (the "micropayments" thing) is highly misguided and betrays a complete misunderstanding (or ignorance) of the labour theory of value, so I'm putting it in this category.
  • World Without Mind by Franklin Foer. A journalist explains the dangers of Facebook and Google having a monopoly over our media sources. I agree with his concerns, but his solutions centre around better regulation, which imo is not enough to address the roots of the problem.
  • The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent. An editor for the_Economist_ laments that technology (esp automation) is changing the relationship between capital and labour by reducing the value of labour. This had potential, but its fundamental outlook is very liberal, and doesn't do enough to question the economic landscape that led to technology being used in the way that is.
  • WTF: what's the future and why it's up to us by Tim O'Reilly. I haven't actually read this yet, but from the Medium post introducing the book, it sounds like he's saying that powerful corporations essentially need to behave better, rather than questioning the fact that these unaccountable for-profit corporations have been given so much power in the first place.

Very uncritical takes

Read them to understand the enemy, esssentially.

  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel. On why/how startups should strive to become monopolies
    • A very thoughtful review by Guy Patrick Cunningham for Los Angeles Review of Books: Citizen Thiel
  • The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. A guide to building a "lean" (agile, iterative, responsive, etc) tech startup.
  • Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. A bunch of essays that are mostly about how great Paul Graham is. An (unfortunately) semi-seminal work. You can find the essays for free on his website.
  • The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. On open source. This actually isn't that bad, though the author has some really weird views these days (mostly when it comes to women).
  • The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. A very techno-optimistic book that only ever pays attention to the mainstream economic narrative (completely ignoring any alternative, more heterodox narratives), which means mainstream economists love it.

Articles/essays

First-person accounts

On ideology

The economics of the tech industry

On venture capital

  • Kim-Mai Cutler for Logic Magazine: The Unicorn Hunters
  • Eric Paley for TechCrunch: Toxic VC and the marginal-dollar problem
  • Steve Klabnik: Is npm worth $2.6MM? (from 2014). On VC investing in the open source ecosystem. Some of the predictions turned out to be wrong in light of GitHub's recent acquisition by Microsoft, but it's a still thoughtful and intelligent read.
  • On the rise and fall of Theranos, a blood-testing technology "startup" which was valued at $9 billion at its peak
    • Blood Will Out by Rachel Riederer, a review of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood.
      • I really like this one line, after a litany of examples of how the company was obviously fraudulent: "None of this stopped Holmes from regarding herself as a kind of prophetic figure who was going to change the world."
      • Also: "The heckler is a good reminder of what Holmes goal was: to put her machines into homes and healthcare settings across the country, whether they worked or not."
      • The last paragraph is just stunning: "As Theranos’s story wraps up [...] my mind turned to the ambitious nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, and to the basic idea of her company. A portable blood-testing machine that was small enough to install in a local pharmacy or a home. A wide battery of tests from a single finger prick instead of a large draw of venous blood. It is a good and useful idea. And I wonder if Theranos might have fulfilled its promise—in some form. [...] If Holmes had allowed the company to drop some of the sexier and more impossible parts of her plan [...] could it have worked? We don’t know, because Holmes had to be a “unicorn,” something impossibly glamorous whose only flaw is not being real."
  • Some interesting thoughts in this Bloomberg article (scroll ahead to the People are worried about unicorns. section):
    • "I have to say, if SoftBank is going to become the entire market for hot private technology startups, then every valuation is going to be marked-to-SoftBank, and the numbers will start to lose their meaning." (On SoftBank valuing WeWork at $35 to 40 billion, less than a year after its last round when it was valued at $20 billion)
    • the article also features this fascinating quote from Fred Wilson: "CEOs and their talent organizations frequently tell me that it is easier to recruit people to companies that have raised at eye popping values. This is particularly perverse because the higher the valuation, the less money the employee will make on their equity. But, it seems, the talent market is looking to the investment community to signal to them what companies are worth working for."

The gig economy

  • Me for New Socialist: The Inevitability of the Gig Economy
  • This n+1 editorial on ridesharing: Disrupt the Citizen
  • cryoshon: Why the Sharing Economy is Awful
  • Paris Marx for The Bold Italic: How the Gig Economy Profits Off of Desperation
  • Facility Waters and Jamie Woodcock for Viewpoint Magazine: Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo
  • Lorenzo Zamponi for Jacobin: Bargaining With the Algorithm. A rundown of organising efforts among workers for food delivery startups like Deliveroo & Foodora
  • Brett Scott for How We Get To Next: Reversing the Lies of the Sharing Economy. So, so good
    • "we should call out Uber for what it is: a company in control of a platform that originally facilitated peer-to-peer renting, not sharing, and that eventually transformed into the de facto boss of an army of self-employed employees. And even as “self-employed employee” might sound like a contradiction, that’s the dark genius of the Uber enterprise. It took the traditional corporation, with its senior managers responsible for controlling workers and machines, and cut it in two — creating a management structure that need not deal with the political demands of workers."
    • "A platform corporation really only owns two things. It owns algorithms hosted on servers, and it owns network effects—or people’s dependence. While the old corporation had to get financing, invest in physical assets, hire workers to run those assets, and take on risk in the process, a corporation like Uber outsources its risk to independent workers who must self-finance the purchase of their cars, while also absorbing losses from their cars’ depreciation or the failure of their operations. This not only separates corporate managers from ground-level workers, it places the major burden of financing and risk on the workers."
    • "This is a venture capitalist’s wet dream. Give a startup minimal capital to hire developers and run media campaigns, and then watch as the network effects ripple over the infrastructure of the internet. If it works, you’re suddenly in control of a corporation built with digital tools, but extracting value from real-world, physical assets like cars and buildings. The entity holds itself together not via employment contracts, but rather by self-employed workers’ dependence on it to access the market they rely on for their survival."
    • "We have a hard time seeing systems. We find it easier to see what’s tangible and in front of us. We see the app, and we see the driver’s car icon moving along the streets on their way to pick us up. What we can’t see is the deep web of power relations that underpins the system. Instead, we are encouraged to fixate on the flat and friendly interface, the shallow surface layer of immediate experience."
    • "Of course, if you want to put a positive spin on this kind of work, you can call it flexible, decentralized micro-entrepreneurship. But pan out, and it looks more like feudalism, with thousands of small subsistence farmers paying tribute to a baron that grants them access to land they don’t own."
    • (parts of this article are eerily similar to my piece for NS, which was published a few months after, but I swear I didn't read this until after I wrote mine)

On fully automated luxury communism

On worker power within the industry

On open source

  • Ashe Dryden: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
  • Kyle E. Mitchell: The Mendicant Maintainerati
  • Rob Hunter for Jacobin: Reclaiming the Computing Commons
  • Gavin Mueller for Jacobin: Microsoft and the Yeoman Coders (on Microsoft acquiring Github for $7.5 billion in June 2018)
    • "While there’s a lot of hype about gift economies and good vibes, when you’re doing an economic analysis, you have to consider the sector as a whole, not the intentions of a few members. One of the few to do this well, Swedish researcher Johan Söderberg, analyzed free software as part of labor under capitalism. Because so much code is available at no cost, open-source programmers effectively cheapen software by creating a base of code freely available to all — in Marxist language, they’ve cheapened those commodities by reducing the socially necessary labor time required to create them."
    • "The changing terrain of digital capitalism means the old strategies of coding freedom won’t work. So instead of attempting to decentralize tech, to better preserve an ecosystem of independent businesses that stay small and promise to be good, coders should strive for democracy at work instead."
    • Also see episode 20 of General Intellect Unit, which analyses this article in detail & also links the labour aspects of the article to the "industrial union" concept discussed in Prospects for organizing the tech industry
  • Me for Logic Magazine: Freedom Isn't Free
  • Gavin Mueller for Boundary 2: Digital Proudhonism
    • this is a beautifully-written academic paper that connects Marx's critique of Proudhon to the popular contemporary view that networked technologies will kill middlemen and allow for a flourishing ecosystem of independent producers (a view popularised by Lawrence Lessig, Paul Mason, Cory Doctorow, etc)
    • it'll be slow reading if you don't have a background in all this, but it's so so good and thought-provoking
    • the crux is that production is a social process, and that artisanal-type models that would turn us all back into individual producers who exchange goods freely on the market is reactionary and, ultimately, misguided
  • Jan Corazza: A short critique of Stallmanism
    • this is SO GOOD and I wish I had read this before I wrote my piece for Logic
    • "Free software activists should accept that software freedom is not an isolated issue, with its own, completely independent value set, but is just one aspect of a wider struggle for justice, and that we can never achieve full software justice under capitalism. Once freed from this isolated logic, the next obvious step is integrating it into our advocacy, critiques, and educational material."

On accelerationism

On cryptocurrency

On Cambridge Analytica