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You are reading issue #16 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.

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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 week I write about the Specialmatic, an aborted attempt at automating machine tool work that maintained the power and skill of the worker, and why its failure shows capitalism isn't really interested in efficiency.



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The Specialmatic, and why innovation is not linear

In the words of Noble: "A machine operator could set and adjust feeds and speeds, relying upon accumulated experience with the sights, sounds and smells of metal cutting."

Links​



Great piece by Wendy Liu about the same subject: tech workers should start organising, and when they do that's very important for a broader socialist agenda. Now is the Time for Worker Power in the Tech Industry - Novara MediaGreat piece by Wendy Liu about the same subject: tech workers should start organising, and when they do that's very important for a broader socialist agenda.

Bye... This was issue #16 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.



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A dominant narrative in present-day society about technology is that you can't stop it. That technological innovation moves in a straight line, and that every attempt to change it that line is reactionary and futile.Hence when taxi drivers resist the introduction of Uber, they are holding back progress and their actions are as futile as they are backward. When workers resist automation they are simply delaying the inevitable.Yet this ignores that technology isn't neutral, and its design is mediated by the power structures of our society and is shaped by the preferences, conscious or unconscious, of the designers and their principals. Technology generally moves in a range of alternative directions, and which direction succeeds often has as much to do with power as it has with questions of which technology is best suited for the societal challenges of the day, or even basic efficiency.I recently finished the great book Forces of Production by David F. Noble, which traces the introduction of industrial automation in the post-world war II US. In it he mentions one such alternative, abandoned technological path: the Specialmatic.The Specialmatic was designed by Felix P. Caruther, an engineer who served (like many post-war automation engineers) in the US military during the second world war, where he worked with radar technology. After the war he got into the business of making machine parts, an industry that was then being targeted by automation.In that context he developed the Specialmatic, a machine to automate certain parts of machine tool production. The Specialmatic, however, failed in favour of so-called Numerical Control (or N/C) machines. The book is quite technical about this, but essentially N/C machines allowed companies to deskill machine tool operators by pre-programming operations. This allowed N/C management to take control away from the shop floor and put it in the hands of engineers and bosses. It was developed at MIT, and the US military poured massive amounts of money into it, from there eventually finding its way into private industries.N/C eventually won over alternative approaches, but not because it was better. In many respects it decreased production efficiency. When introduced N/C operations were prone to failures, caused labour tensions and operators suffered from extremely high turnover.When N/C machines were introduced in a certain section of a GE plant, it caused a paradox Noble explained: "the part of the plant with the most sophisticated equipment had become the part with the highest scrap rate, the highest turnover and the lowest productivity."The Specialmatic in many ways alleviated those problems. Instead of pre-programmed sequences (done by engineers tied to management) the Specialmatic retained control at the level of the skilled machine operator, but combined it with elements of automation. Thereby it lightened the work of the operator, while still retaining their expertise. Essentially it allowed man and machine to use eachother's strengths.The Specialmatic was, however, never widely adopted. The might of military and MIT funding played to the advantages of N/C, whatever its setbacks. And crucially, management motives for adopting N/C often had little to do with efficiency, and more with undermining the positions of skilled operators.The forward march of progress thus made the better alternative fail in favour of the narrow interests of management, and a military/academic complex.Illuminating alternatives like the Specialmatic is interesting because it shows how technology does not go into a straight line, and it also provides a form of inspiration for left-wing technology design.It, however, also places into question some left-wing thoughts about technology. Lines of thought like fully automated luxury communism too often still leave from the notion that certain technological advances, like automation, are neutral or at least bendable to our interests. And that while motives of control and domination might actually be the motive of existence for certain automated technologies.Some technologies might not be able to be saved, and working out our own alternatives might be the only way to go. Why tech worker dissent is going viral - WIREDAfter worker organising at Google pushed back on cooperation with the Pentagon, worker resistance is now spreading across the US tech scene, with promising things showing at Amazon and Microsoft. Silicon Valley was built on cooperation with the US military and state apparatus, so that tech workers are organising against this is quite exciting.If you are a tech worker reading this, go contact organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition , and start organising! AI nationalism - Ian HogarthBlogpost that went viral on how AI will in the future become more and more of a field of geopolitical struggle, and national promotion of AI technologies will become more important to what the author calls a "techno-nationalist agenda." Interesting reading.