AI & Labour Futures
In a recent piece for Tech Policy Press, Betsy Masiello provides an overview of labour policy in light of the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, highlighting “recent green shoots in the labor movement” which “suggest shifts in the power dynamics between labor and capital” (however nominal), and how “companies often have a tendency to gesture at solutions without putting their advocacy muscle behind them.”
Masiello is self-aware, though, about her idealistic proposals. As she concludes:
It would be a step forward to simply acknowledge that today’s system is not up to the challenge of the AI era. Some individual leaders have gestured in this direction, but I’m talking about something different: imagine the industry collaborating to publish a seminal report detailing the concrete ways in which current policy frameworks may not be up to the task…Imagine a 2024 where the leading tech companies have banded together to stand up an independent, apolitical commission on labor and tax policy.
Of course, while Masiello acknowledges this as an “idealist’s dream,” my frustration with most tech policy analysis is the simple fact that we can’t seem to talk about the thing we always talk about: capitalism. We know these tech companies aren’t going to do any of this, especially unprompted. Masiello notes that it would be unsurprising for them to only engage with any labour policy “in slow motion, waiting until the last minute,” but she also suggests “they have shown more willingness to see regulation and policy as critical to making the technology a success and addressing real concerns.” Based on what — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s blog posts or his company’s internal research on the topic? This is the standard tech playbook, as companies from Facebook/Meta to Google have long publicly welcomed regulation while simultaneously putting their money into lobbying efforts to accomplish the exact opposite outcome. I don’t see these large AI companies doing anything resembling “more willingness” to actively do anything to address these concerns beyond typical peacocking.
As Adam Seth Litwin recently noted in the New York Times:
In the past, management would often make nearly all technology-related decisions before negotiations even began. Workers and their unions were excluded from early conversations about technology — including ones that could open up a range of issues around use and deployment that would benefit both workers and employers.
Moreover, “when labor has sought to simply resist or impede technological change, it’s been completely run over.” This is the tragic legacy of the defeat suffered by the Luddites at the onset of the industrial revolution, a group that specifically fought so that workers would have a say in the governance of technology in their workplaces, and capital and the state worked together to stifle this impulse (let me plug Brian Merchant’s new book one more time lol). As a result, workers have been left out of these decisions ever since, and the AI boom is only the latest instance of a historic battle.
As Litwin points out, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) making sure the use of AI in scriptwriting was a key issue at the negotiating table with Hollywood studios is a hugely significant political and cultural moment for the rest of us, whether unionized or not, to take notice. The WGA’s strategy was undoubtedly effective. “Studios could have encouraged guild members to use [AI] as a productivity-enhancing tool, but without attendant compensation. They also could have circumvented W.G.A. members altogether. Instead, this deal guarantees a contractually mandated context in which A.I. can be utilized — one that benefits, rather than impedes or replaces, the workers.” And so, a useful precedent is set, not just for other industries looking to negotiate on AI, but to address new technologies in general — a return to the Luddite model, whereby workers should always be part of the conversation on technology from the very beginning.
What is Tech Media For?
I have some sympathy for tech reporters, who are often deep in the internet muck, digging around for stories, bizarre online trends, or whatever else is strange and exciting among the braindead millions posting through it all. Not that much sympathy, though.
It goes without saying that the tech media failed us for many years, far too eager to buy into the hype of countless exploitative and empty startups, or too wrapped up in journalistic access to accurately report on the companies they were supposedly meant to hold to account. In the last few years, as the so-called techlash has taken shape, the picture has become somewhat clearer — think of the recent launch of 404 Media. This is a good thing, even if the techlash has seen very little actual policy reform (at least in North America), and many tech newsrooms have likewise shuttered according to the impossible demands of digital media.
More recently, though, I’ve noticed an odd shift in some tech coverage, perhaps best epitomized by Vox tech reporter Rebecca Jennings’ recent article, “You gotta just ignore annoying tweets.” To state what may be the obvious rebuttal, Jennings, an otherwise excellent reporter of internet trends and subcultures, wants to have it both ways, and that just doesn’t cut it in 2023’s discursive media landscape.
Jennings begins by referring to a tweet that annoyed the hell out of her, about how if you see someone filming a video in public, the right thing to do is to wait for them to be done before walking by and potentially ruining the video. I remember seeing the same tweet, and it is, indeed, pretty annoying, and hilariously smug — “If you can’t do this then you don’t deserve to be part of a civilized society.” Jennings then lists the many things about the tweet that pissed her off, and notes, of course, that she had “already lost”:
The tweet had got me, and getting got by bad tweets is loser behavior. So I’m writing this as a reminder to myself, but also as a reminder to the nearly 20,000 people who quote-tweeted it: You simply have to ignore discourse bait.
Okay. First of all, though, you just spent a good chunk of your article doing the opposite of that, but more importantly, this is also, in a sense, a negation of your job as it has been honed in recent years. I’m sorry, but what is the vast majority of internet reportage if not articulating the discourse du jour for the rest of us? Jennings notes that, without the internet, we wouldn’t know about all the weirdos out there and the insane things they believe or pretend to believe in a trollish way, so why pay attention to it at all — but, you know, we don’t live in that world, and someone who reports on these people for a living making this argument is a bit suspect!
She correctly argues, of course, that the platforms will never stop rewarding discourse bait, because “the people in charge of them want us to stay angry at each other’s bad ideas instead of them, the ones who make money from every second we remain cringing and tense on our phones.” Yes! But instead of keeping up this critique, we instead turn to how this is making us “grow ever more antisocial,” it’s “making us less human,” and that this is “how societies end.” Let’s be clear: it is entirely within a tech reporter’s rights to be absolutely tired of this, totally exhausted at catching up with each new day’s absurd discourse, and regurgitating it back to use with crucial context and clever analysis. I’m tired, you’re tired, etc. But if your answer is just to do something else online, like curating a wedding board on Pinterest, play Wordle, or comment on everyone’s Instagram Stories (as Jennings suggests), I think we might want to reorient what we ask of tech media. Ideally, it’s not about summarizing what “microcheating” is, or highlighting the coolest videos on YouTube, but it’s the critique of the structures that organize this experience in the first place. Don’t hate the player (insane tweets), hate the game (capitalist platform incentives).
Stray Thoughts on Productivity
While in Edinburgh, in addition to working on my dissertation, I’m collaborating with a scholar here for a project related to Twitch and other livestreaming platforms and how they essentially create an environment where streamers are encouraged to monetize every aspect of their lives — their identity, their lifestyle, their everyday decisions, their sleep.
I’ll have more to say about this as it develops, I imagine, but in various discussions with colleagues here, I’ve been thinking more generally about productivity itself within the digital economy. We know the story well, the hustle, the entrepreneurial spirit, all of the factors that emphasize financial precarity and influence us to do what we can in the name of economic survival. For those streamers, it makes a certain amount of sense to monetize everything, because the platform allows it and facilitates all the tools you need to make it happen, and there’s theoretically a pathway to make a living from letting people watch you sleep or pay to decide what outfit you’re going to wear today. It’s barely different from the Web 2.0 influencer era, as social media stars found inventive ways to use the platforms to sell themselves as the product.
In these discussions, though, I’ve been thinking more about how often those of us that critique these systems are likewise caught up in this drive for productivity — we spend our time deriding what capitalism does to us, while at the same time devoting almost every waking hour to our work, critical of the always-on economy but seemingly helpless to resist it. Classic Marxist subsumption, right?! As the man himself put it:
With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete revolution takes place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labour, and in the relation — within production — between the capitalist and the worker, as also in the social relation between them.
While I find this compelling in a self-centred way, thinking about how myself and others who think through these critiques of capital also never feel like we’re doing quite enough within the capitalist university setting, it also, naturally, speaks to larger, long-standing and fundamental socioeconomic forces of where value lies. What is the value, economic or social or otherwise, of a livestreamer providing some form of intimacy for thousands of disparate viewers? What is the value, economic or social or otherwise, of the “free labour” we provide to platforms every day by scrolling endlessly through variously-remunerated user-generated content? I don’t know, man, maybe I should revisit my Marx some more, but have I mentioned that I’m tired?
Ephemera
There’s too much to read when it comes to what is happening in Gaza, but here is just one: “It’s worth questioning why Palestinians don’t hear calls for peace when they are forced to endure daily misery in Gaza, when they are denied the right to resist unjustified killings in Jenin, when they are driven from their homes in Jerusalem, or when they are imprisoned for chanting “no to apartheid” in the West Bank. The world often remains silent in the face of these ongoing injustices, and only speaks up when Palestinians exercise their legitimate and valid right to self-determination and self-defense against a cruel occupation. Only then can we hear loud condemnations.”
Rob Horning continues to be, I think, the best writer on generative AI and What It All Means, and this recent post is a doozy, including this line that kind of took my breath away: “Forgetting is not as dramatic as using editing technology to paste smiles over people’s faces, but it is more insidious.”
RIP Terence Davies: “It’s impossible to imagine, however, that Davies’ cinema will ever be forgotten by anyone who has seen a frame of it; his monumental films held candles as vigils to the form itself, and now without him, we will – we must – keep that flame burning.”
Song Rec: “Depends” by thanks for coming