The rise of AI threatens the bargaining power of tech workers. However, tech workers can combine their interest in creating use value for others, groundbreaking technology, and cooperation to build coalitions that oppose Big Tech’s relentless pursuit of power and profit. Drawing on her field research, Helene Thaa reveals the potential for resistance.
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Today, the tech industry and Silicon Valley’s elite seem to have become more powerful than ever, forming a new powerful ‘broligarchy’ with influence far beyond the US. These developments emphasize the importance of understanding tech workers’ interests, attitudes, imaginaries and subjectivities. In this article, I want to engage with tech workers’ daily work experiences to shed light on how these may form attitudes that create a counterweight to Silicon Valley’s ideology.
Provincializing the Silicon Valley
Much has been said about Silicon Valley’s ideological underpinnings: A solutionist ideology promises technological fixes to social problems. More recently, the obscure musings of Dark Enlightenment have gained more attention. It combines a libertarian disdain for democracy, Longtermism and hopes for unleashed technological development even at high costs for (present) human life. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” imagines technology as a perpetual source of growth and abundance if only we unleash the full potential of the free market.
Until recently, tech firms’ dependence on skilled work was the basis for successes in tech workers’ mobilization. However, the rise of AI threatens their bargaining power, thus enabling Big Tech’s shift to the right with barely any protest. So even though research emphasizes the progressive stances of tech workers, hopes for a tech worker movement seem to be fading.
The discourse on the development of the tech world rightfully focuses on Silicon Valley as the center of Big Tech (in the West), but this focus ignores how much of the daily developments of digitalization happen in smaller companies and around the world. For my research, I conducted 17 in-depth interviews with highly-skilled software workers in Germany and Switzerland. These interviews took place between the summer of 2020 and 2021, well before Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 and just before ChatGPT caused the AI hype we grapple with today. Still, these interviews offer some insights into what drives software workers in their day-to-day work and how their work experiences can create resistance to the tech world’s shift to the right.
Ethos of coding
A first important insight from the interviews is that software workers don’t have a merely instrumental relationship with their work. They draw meaning from their work and emphasize the use-value of their product. While capitalism is based on seeking profit and thus abstracts from the concrete product of labor and the usefulness it has for the users, workers still find meaning in how their product can be helpful to others. In the interviews, most of the software workers stress how creating tools that help others or make someone’s work easier is one of their biggest motivations.
This also ties them to a certain ethos of coding. They directly or indirectly invoke the Programmer’s Oath which lays out basic ethical orientations and professional standards to create good code. Especially when they deal with clients on a day-to-day basis, considering the users and their needs becomes a vital part of this ethos. As one interviewee puts it, technology “is only there to help people live their lives. Technology is not important on its own”.
Creating useful technology that enhances other companies’ efficiency is the basis for tech companies’ profit. However, software workers’ orientation towards a useful product can also go beyond market-demands and even be the basis for critique and conflict with their own employers. This is especially the case when work organization makes it impossible to meet one’s own quality standards and contradicts the Programmer’s Oath’s principles.
Technological debt, dull coding, and curiosity
The software workers I interview often express frustration over tight deadlines and a lack of resources for the tasks at hand. The growing pace of releases results in what they call technological debt, bugs and subpar code that they hope to be able to fix later, but never find the time to actually improve in a hectic project-based work organization. While the “Techno-Optimistic Manifesto” praises competition as the engine of progress, in the day-to-day software business, it leads to ever tighter timelines which create bad code.
A second important motivation of tech workers is their high interest in everything techy. They talk about the fun they have tinkering with technology and their awe of being part of groundbreaking technological developments. They express a fascination for creating something new: Writing code seems to bring about whole new worlds and create new and faster solutions for problems and automate tasks that used to be done manually. As Clive Thompson observes, a good coder is lazy: My interviewees express a disdain for repetitive work tasks and believe they can and should be automated.
For some tech workers, this general curiosity is an important motivation for their work and it might sometimes be stronger than the wish to create something useful: There is a certain engineering attitude that is simply interested in what is possible, regardless of the use and effects of the technology. This attitude assumes that technology is a neutral tool. How society chooses to adapt technology becomes a secondary problem – one that technology’s creators need not deal with.
Inscriptive power
This attitude lends itself well to the relentless optimism of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. However, most of the software workers I interview seem far from the irresponsible ‘DOGE boys’ using AI to cut government programs. Within the European context, even though they might find regulations such as the Data Protection Regulation bothersome and exaggerated at times, most of the software workers I talked to seem to understand the political underpinnings of tech work: As one respondent calls coders the ‘scribes’ of the 21st century, this inscriptive power for him is a call to responsible and ethical coding. Others do demand political and social decision-making processes on the use of technology.
Just as their drive to create something useful, the fascination of creating something new might clash with the reality of working for a profit-seeking firm. Money and resources for experimentation and research are often slim. Interviewees report that real innovation is hard to achieve when firms want to see quick returns on investments. Working in highly competitive markets with tight deadlines, software workers barely have the time to automate their own work, to make real improvements to their systems or to think of genuinely new technological fixes.
Real innovation takes time and the willingness to take a risk. Both are scarce resources in most software companies. As one interviewee complains, short-term benefits for the company are valued over long-term benefits for the whole of society. This contradicts the claims of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that the free market unleashes endless potential for technological innovations.
Contradiction between cooperation and competition
A third striking finding in my material is the contradiction between cooperation and competition the tech workers experience in their everyday work lives. Tech workers often express a strong preference for the open-source-movement and highly value making innovations accessible to the public for free. They acknowledge the cooperative nature of their work and attest that they could not write code all by themselves.
Within postfordist work organizations, cooperation is valued, but at the same time is undermined by individualistic systems of promotion or flexible project organization: Interviewees complained about cut-throat behavior in their teams and the difficulties to coordinate cooperation when workers have to meet several tight deadlines in different teams. One software worker even criticized market competition more generally: He complained that he must create solutions that already exist in other firms because products are pitted against each other in the market. For him, market organization undermines his ideal of avoiding redundancy.
Even though work organization and the everyday experiences of AI-experts at companies like OpenAI or Google will differ greatly from a software worker in a mid-sized software company in Germany, these results might offer some insights into the potential of workers’ resistance to today’s Big Tech agendas. Big Tech might offer vast liberties in tinkering with the newest technology, but some of the contradictions I found might still apply in other work settings.
Organizing tech workers
This leads us to three conclusions about potentials for organizing tech workers:
Firstly, tech worker organizing requires a serious debate on what technology can and should do for society. This should include working closely with the people affected by technology. When tech workers are in direct contact with the users of their technology, they develop a nuanced interest in the use-value they create. So worker’s or people’s council’s on AI might be a step towards tech workers understanding the contradictions between the companies’ interest in profit and their interest in useful products. Debating technology and its effects with its creators and users means refuting the idea that the ethics of technology are something we can handle after technology is released: Asking how society wants to make use of technological progress must be a part of tech development as well.
Secondly, the engineering identity of tech workers might be a basis for conflict between tech workers and Big Tech. Even tech workers at the forefront of technological development in AI research can experience the limitations capitalism puts on real innovations. The idea that perfect competition creates the best and most useful technology is baseless. Companies publish mediocre technology for the sake of quick profit. Organizing tech workers must thus stress the contradictions of the free market and their interest in groundbreaking technology and focus on how even in large firms, not the best but the most profitable technology wins.
Lastly, there is a cooperative aspect of tech work that can help mobilize tech workers and build larger coalitions across different types of firms and the public sector. The experience of relying on other people’s work to build technology can be the basis for demands for more collaborative and less competitive work environments. By working for open-source solutions, these coalitions could also challenge Big Tech’s monopolistic power and join efforts to achieve more regulation of technological development.
Potential for resistance against Big Tech
The research on tech workers’ attitudes and everyday experiences reveals potential for resistance against Big Tech. Tech workers’ interest in creating use value for others, in groundbreaking new technology, and in cooperation can be combined to build coalitions that oppose Big Tech’s relentless pursuit of more power and profit.
It is their daily experiences at work and not only abstract norms and principles that can form the basis for organizing tech workers: the contradiction between the use-value of their work and the companies’ interest in making a profit, hindrances to real innovations in capitalist companies and the unproductive competition in which they oftentimes find themselves.
However, creating a more just distribution of tech’s advantages requires not only tech workers but all of us to critically rethink our uses of technology and its effects on society.