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You are reading issue #8 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter. If you have not done so yet, you can subscribe at the this link Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings.



This issue will be dedicated to the Lanetix unionisation drive, and why organising coders is important.

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Why Lanetix is key By all counts Lanetix is a pretty boring startup. They make software to aid logistics' processes and are based in San Francisco. They raised two rounds of capital, a series A round in 2014 for an undisclosed amount and a series B in 2016 for 9.2 million dollars in 2016.



Now, however, it might be the focal point, or at least another step, towards pushing the labour movement forward.



In January Lanetix decided to sack all non-management coders from its U.S. team (read this



The fired workers are now trying to get that decision overturned with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and in the absence of a decision are protesting Lanetix with support from unions, the DSA and organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition.



So why is this important? Programmers are notoriously well-paid workers in an industry that is known for its divide between workers. Amazon has its warehouse workers, Apple has its Chinese electronics assemblers and Facebook its moderators: all low-paid workers doing unpleasant work. At the other end you have well-paid, often highly-educated, workers like programmers, managers and marketing staff.



It's easy to see this higher layer as a workers' aristocracy. So why should we care about programmers organising?



First there are clear cases where they are treated like shit. Companies like Amazon and Tesla have strong reputations of sucking these kinds of workers dry and then spitting them out. Secondly they occupy a key position in current-day capitalism. By all counts Lanetix is a pretty boring startup. They make software to aid logistics' processes and are based in San Francisco. They raised two rounds of capital, a series A round in 2014 for an undisclosed amount and a series B in 2016 for 9.2 million dollars in 2016. Crunchbase says they employ between 11 and 50 people.Now, however, it might be the focal point, or at least another step, towards pushing the labour movement forward.In January Lanetix decided to sack all non-management coders from its U.S. team (read this Bloomberg report ). The dispute started earlier when in November the company fired a female worker who had been serving as a mouthpiece for workers' demands. Grievances included punitive use of performance reviews and pay imbalances between male and female workers. In January Lanetix announced the entire programming team (who had been trying to unionise) would be made redundant and their positions moved to Eastern-Europe, a classic case of punitive outsourcing.The fired workers are now trying to get that decision overturned with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and in the absence of a decision are protesting Lanetix with support from unions, the DSA and organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition.So why is this important? Programmers are notoriously well-paid workers in an industry that is known for its divide between workers. Amazon has its warehouse workers, Apple has its Chinese electronics assemblers and Facebook its moderators: all low-paid workers doing unpleasant work. At the other end you have well-paid, often highly-educated, workers like programmers, managers and marketing staff.It's easy to see this higher layer as a workers' aristocracy. So why should we care about programmers organising?First there are clear cases where they are treated like shit. Companies like Amazon and Tesla have strong reputations of sucking these kinds of workers dry and then spitting them out. Secondly they occupy a key position in current-day capitalism.

Capitalism works by constantly renovating itself. Not in the sense of some vague notion of ever-present innovation like often proclaimed by capitalist 'futurists', capitalists are often quite conservative towards making innovative investments. Rather there is a constant flux of the relative importance of sectors.

Capitalism constantly renews its leading industries, from cotton to iron production, to railways, to steel, to chemistry, to car-production, to eventually information technology. Capitalism constantly invents new sectors, new occupations and new profit opportunities.





Why this is important shows Timothy Mitchell in his book Software is the current vanguard of capitalism, having a lever there will be key for a renewed labour movement.Why this is important shows Timothy Mitchell in his book Carbon Democracy , where he describes how democracy evolved out of the struggles of workers in vanguard industries at that time, mainly coal and transportation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the vulnerability of these mechanisms and the concentrated flows of energy on which they depended had given workers a greatly increased political power. Large coal strikes could trigger wider mobilisations, as happened with the violent strike that followed the 1906 Courrières colliery disaster in north-eastern France, which helped provoke a general strike that paralysed Paris. The most common pattern, however, was for strikes to spread through the interconnected industries of coal mining, railways, docking and shipping. In Britain, the miners, railwaymen and transport workers organised three great national strikes in 1911–12, formalising their relationship in the Triple Alliance created on the eve of the First World War. The coordination of strikes, slow-downs and other forms of sabotage enabled the construction, at certain moments, of a new political instrument: the general strike. ‘A new force has arisen in trades unionism’, warned Winston Churchill, who as home secretary in Britain confronted this novel threat. ‘Shipping, coal, railways, dockers etc. etc. are all uniting and breaking out at once. A general strike “policy” is a factor which must be dealt with. - Carbon Democracy p.23

Links

Here are some links with interesting news from the past few weeks.

Risk models, as generated by economists, actuaries and physicists, are all science fictions, inasmuch as they represent a reality that has not yet come about. In a system such as capitalism, which undergoes change over time, the division between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ value is not absolute or fixed. This, after all, is how financial bubbles occur: when collective imagination starts to become mistaken for an empirical reality. It was a similar ambiguity that led to the global financial crisis, whereby mathematical models of a non-empirical future started to be treated with the same level of confidence as the empirical past. Capitalism rests on traffic between the imaginary and the real; it’s not just that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, but that air is constantly materialising into solidity.

Some countries have done a much better job at sharing the gains and making sure that everybody's bought in. Others have been much more social Darwinists about it, and the U.S. is very much at the extreme of that among industrialized economies, of going, ‘rah rah,’ to the winners and ‘too bad for you,’ to the losers.

Essentially workers in the then vanguard industries of capitalism: coal mining, railways and shipping, had great power over the functioning of capitalism. They used these own dynamics of capitalism against itself: they threatened to sabotage the sectors propelling the system forward. Those threats gave us democracy according to Mitchell, a new emphasis on oil, however, broke the power of these workers.Controlling key sectors of the economy is important for bringing capitalism to heel. Software is the key capitalist sector today, and Lanetix might just be a key case for organising it. Economic science fictions - Red PepperInteresting article about the significance of science-fiction, and how it relates to economics. Is tech dividing America? - PoliticoInteresting interview with David Autor, mainly about automation. He raises some interesting points but is eventually hampered by his own status-quo ideas.

Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers - Techcrunch

Uber launches a self-driving truck pilot in Arizona, at the same time Google opens one in Atlanta.

How it works is that Uber will load up the freight on a conventional, human driven truck who collects the load from the shipper and then does a short haul run to a transfer hub. The short haul truck then loads its cargo onto a long-haul freight transport, which is autonomous for the purposes of these trips. That self-driving test truck handles the highway driving for the longer portion of the trip, handing it off once again to a human-driven trip for the short haul cap to the overall journey.

Andreessen Horowitz leads $18 million investment in satellite startup Astranis - Venturebeat

That venture capitalists are investing in space technology seems to suggest its ready for mass commercialisation.

“Cell towers can be relatively cheap to build and install, but solving the problem of connecting those cell towers to the internet is currently difficult and expensive,” wrote Gedmark. “By providing lower-cost satellite bandwidth for telcos and carriers to lease, they can put down towers and get people online in places they never would have been able to … otherwise.”

Will 2018 be the year of the neo-luddite? - The Guardian

Some of the problems in this article are probably overstated, yet it is an interesting thought that recent tech-utopianism is breeding a counter-reaction that might get a whole lot more radical than digital detoxes.

If the recent speculation about jobs and AI is even close to being correct, then fairly soon “luddite” will join far-right and Islamist on the list of government-defined extremisms. Perhaps anti-tech movements will even qualify for the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme.

Bye... This was the eight issue of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.



This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are very much welcomed.

Please let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com or via Twitter @AutomatedFully