Spectacular Tech Bros
August 19, 2020
Last night I encountered this passage while idly rereading the first chapter of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle:
Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life. (Debord, 2014, p. 11)
Earlier I had come across this Twitter thread:
the intolerable aspect of professional programming, and some other white-collar labor, is that your work is utterly disconnected from production that other people understand.
— Chris Johnson (@spiderfoods) August 16, 2020
when you get off work, there’s literally nothing you can express to other people about how your day went
Having once been a programmer myself, the thread touched some memories of the fear and loathing that comes with this kind of work. As the author points out, much of the alienation stems from the complete absence of any shared social context in which the fruits of the labour can live and take on meaning. Social isolation is produced by the obscurity of particular technical problems, the extreme divisions of labour within particular projects or companies, and also the Balkanisation of codebases and technologies across the wider industry. Running parallel to this (and closely related) is the fact that a huge slice of the work that many programmers do is a repetition of something someone else has already done, and ultimately redundant. As the person doing it you are well aware of this, an awareness that jars horribly with the overwhelming stress of pointlessly tight deadlines and spiralling accountability. The author writes, aptly, that as a programmer there is a sense that you are doing little more than “monetising loneliness.”
The most insightful part of this thread, in my opinion—and the point that links with Debord—concerns the influence the alienation experienced by programmers in their work can have on their attitudes to leisure-time and personal identity.
in response, developers either 1) become 100% neckbeards, or 2) cultivate this rather sickening affect of throwing themselves into yuppie hobbies; your identity = your cool second life; burning man, or hiking trips, or japanese woodblock carving. the digsuting tech bro vibe.
— Chris Johnson (@spiderfoods) August 16, 2020
The disgusting tech bro vibe is theorised as a kind of overcompensation, arising from the need to claw back some semblance of meaningful productivity from a working regime constituted almost exclusively by meaningless productivity. Now consider this from Debord, writing in 1967:
Due to the very success of this separate production of separation, the fundamental experience that in earlier societies was associated with people’s primary work is in the process of being replaced (in sectors near the cutting edge of the system’s evolution) by an identification of life with nonworking time, with inactivity. But such inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity. It remains dependent on it, in an uneasy and admiring submission to the requirements and consequences of the production system. It is itself one of the products of that system. There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified-all real activity having been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a “liberation from work,” namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation within work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity stolen through work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced. (Debord, 2014, pp. 9-10)
The DTB—a figure truly at the cutting edge of the system’s evolution—identifies themselves with what they do in their non-working time, the cool second life. But according to Debord’s logic this second life must always be subordinate to the first, in some way its product. The vibe becomes disgusting in the apparent arbitrariness of those yuppie hobbies, their seeming lack of basis in life-world particularity or genuine passion, as if contrived purely to signify productivity. At play in both the work and leisure of the DTB is an implicit concept of productivity as time-quantised abstract labour. This allows work and leisure to exchange for the other as equivalents (leisure time later can be bought with work time now). It is this tacit ideology of productivity that lends credibility to the bourgeois fantasy of liberated work: the creative industries freelancer, the digital nomad, the tech ninja selling their creative, cognitive and/or emotional labour three days a week in order to free up the rest for Personal Projects.
The truth is that creative labour cannot be sold by the hour, and it does not sleep. Capital knows this, which is why it has no complaints about owning it for “only three days a week.” In fact it encourages it, introducing an array of mechanisms of temporal blur across all sectors—flexi-hours, rolling contracts, delegated self-management—all in the name of giving workers greater control of their leisure time, while in fact giving itself the means to dip into it as it pleases. In proliferating their vibe, the DTB, the very icon of neoliberal self-realisation, actively produces the illusion of temporality that underwrites the ideology: the promise of liberation through the recovery of time-sliced productivity. But this can never amount to the true productivity of socially situated concrete labour, which requires free-roaming experimentation in unbounded time—a condition unsatisfiable when leisure-time and work-time trade against each other at standardised rates.
Alienated labour at the cutting edge is therefore an active functional component in the production of new forms of alienation in other areas—nowhere more so than in the exploitative gig economy—in more than one way. Not only via the technological platforms that are its direct products, but also via the ideological alibi provided by the DTB’s spectacle of leisure-time productivity. Those within reach of the cutting edge stand at something of an important point within the nexus of production and ideology. To escape the nexus, I want to suggest, is to first shatter the productivist illusion of time-quantised abstract labour. What this requires is a reorientation in the way we think not, in the first instance, about habits of consumption, but about our habits of production. The question should not be how much time do we sell to capital, but what type of labour do we sell. To sell “three days worth” of creative labour is to have fallen into a trap—in effect capital now owns it in its entirety. What we should be doing is refusing to place our creative, intellectual, and emotional labour on the market (or actively removing it, de-professionalising). To do so is to concretise this labour, to strategically refuse to trade a use-value as exchange-value, thereby making it available for redirection into concrete life-worlds. This point still holds even if it means having less time to do so: capitalism’s productivist temporality was never more than a devil’s bargain.
References
- Debord, G. (2014). The Society of the Spectacle (K. Knabb, Tran.). The Bureau of Public Secrets. [PDF]