4 ms·

There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the employee "do." I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe

There can be a substantial difference between what the company and the employee "do." I walk by a twitter building every day. Probably about 500 people, maybe more. What are they doing in there? They sell ads, manage ad accounts, moderation, data protection audits... stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. Either way, that building is full of "marketing and social media" graduates doing stuff that doesn't need to be done for twitter to be twitter. Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. You could call what twitter does creative work. That resonates with me. They invented a communication method with all sorts of cultural impact and value. That's creative. But, extending that to the median employee... I think we might divert here. I think you have your finger on an interesting point, even if I don't know how to articulate it. A generation ago, a lot of the ecoomy could be measured in stuff with value that one could reason about. Cars, tothbrushes, haircuts, podiatrists.... You can count and weigh and value that stuff. Media was always more abscure. The tv viewer mightn't be the customer. The purpose of a paper might be do get a classifieds insert into your hands. Once you throw in social/user-generate services make the picture more messy. Once you go to Google/FB territory, it's all very obscure. Half of what they do doesn't have any direct economic benefit to them, it's more a way of keeping them in a massively powerful position. I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models...

xtrapolate 9y ago
Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same product with a much smaller team, at one point. Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.
  - Hoasi 9y ago
    Selling advertising online could be automated for the most part, unless Twitter really does offer personalised offering to ads buyers—which I'm not sure is the case.
    - yojo 9y ago
      At a certain spend level, advertisers want to have a single human that they can call when they need something/something goes wrong ("a single throat to strangle"). Providing this dedicated connection is also an opportunity to upsell them on more ad products. I did this work at Google for a couple years at the start of my career. They are an exceptionally analytics driven company, and would not employ these kinds of people if there wasn't good ROI
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    .. because they believe that they'll get more money from the efforts of these people than they cost? If they can sell ads that people wouldn't buy without a person on the other side, they can be worth the cost.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    Twitter has people to sell adds to companies that use people to decide to buy ads. If automation makes it easier to use fewer people to buy ads, then twitter and other ad companies would likely sell ads with fewer people in the mix. As an aside it's odd to think of twitter and google etc as a kind of modern successor to the MadMen ad house. I guess if you were being pedantic, they're more like the modern version of what the network TV commercial industry was in the 60's.
jacobush 9y ago
The economic machine used to fulfill our basic needs, to keep us varm and fed. Now, that problem is solved, we have infinite sugar and cheap synthetic clothes. So it's on to massaging our psychological needs. And the market forces who gave us cheap soda gives us the same "solution" in FB, Twitter and friends. A giant perverted maslov hierarchy for our society if you will.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. (...) I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models... What I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions is Jevon's Paradox[0], which can be summarised as: > In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand. Or more cynically: when increased efficiency creates greater demand than that increase in efficiency. I probably don't need to convince anyone here that this happens in real life all the time - we're all familiar with Wirth's Law[1], right? So I think the same applies to automation and work. If anyone hasn't seen "Paperwork Explosion" by Jim Henson (you know, the guy who made The Muppets and the original voice of Kermit, and Ernie), this is a really good time to do so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk Look at what IBM promised: freedom from administrative woes! We can go back to do real productive work! Essentially exactly what we're hearing now. Now compare it to what actually happened. At the last two universities I've worked I have seen a lot of “the administration department is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding administration department” in action. At the expense of the quality of education and science, I might add. Buurtzorg Nederland[2] got a lot of attention in recent years for breaking that trend with its simple approach to letting nurses self-organise as independent, self-managing teams (so what Agile tried to be I suppose, except for nurses). What is often overlooked is that this is basically just going back to the model that the Netherlands had up until the 1980s, but a bit enhanced with modern information/communication technology. Jos de Blok, who founded Buurtzorg, briefly that in this short TED talk[3], but my parents were both general practitioners until they retired a few years ago confirmed that this happened all throughout healthcare. With programming, we know that complexity is something that must be actively fought or it sneaks in. We even have tons of special descriptions for how that happens: spaghetti code, big ball of mud, etc. So ask yourself: why would it be different in any other human-created system? For me, this is part of the explanation for all the obscurity we see everywhere (that, and a vested interest of a number of parties in keeping things obfuscated). And my prediction is that the natural tendency of automation is to backfire, unless we actively fight this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg

xtrapolate 9y ago

Twitter was twitter before they had all those people. Sure, but it can't scale without them. How exactly is Twitter supposed to pay the bills? People use this platform because, for the most part, the basic premise is entirely free. How else can they fund the infrastructure/R&D costs?

dalbasal 9y ago
scaling...it did. That is it had a ton of users using essentially the same product with a much smaller team, at one point. Paying the bills.., IDK. Presumably they've determined that these people are useful in this regard. Otherwise, why have them? But from a first principles reasoning, it seems possible to sell add without thousands of ad sellers.
- Hoasi 9y ago
  Selling advertising online could be automated for the most part, unless Twitter really does offer personalised offering to ads buyers—which I'm not sure is the case.
  - yojo 9y ago
    At a certain spend level, advertisers want to have a single human that they can call when they need something/something goes wrong ("a single throat to strangle"). Providing this dedicated connection is also an opportunity to upsell them on more ad products. I did this work at Google for a couple years at the start of my career. They are an exceptionally analytics driven company, and would not employ these kinds of people if there wasn't good ROI
- lallysingh 9y ago
  .. because they believe that they'll get more money from the efforts of these people than they cost? If they can sell ads that people wouldn't buy without a person on the other side, they can be worth the cost.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  Twitter has people to sell adds to companies that use people to decide to buy ads. If automation makes it easier to use fewer people to buy ads, then twitter and other ad companies would likely sell ads with fewer people in the mix. As an aside it's odd to think of twitter and google etc as a kind of modern successor to the MadMen ad house. I guess if you were being pedantic, they're more like the modern version of what the network TV commercial industry was in the 60's.

jacobush 9y ago

The economic machine used to fulfill our basic needs, to keep us varm and fed. Now, that problem is solved, we have infinite sugar and cheap synthetic clothes. So it's on to massaging our psychological needs. And the market forces who gave us cheap soda gives us the same "solution" in FB, Twitter and friends. A giant perverted maslov hierarchy for our society if you will.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> stuff that David Graeber wold call BS jobs. Now... I'm not in the same camp as him entirely. I think it's rash to just write off 70% of modern, white collar work as "paperwork" that could just go away.... but I'm not entirely not in his camp too. (...) I'm not sure creative is the right word, but here's somethign going on. Ever increasing (already majority) sections of the economy are producing very ethereal things, with obscure business models... What I don't think gets mentioned enough in these discussions is Jevon's Paradox[0], which can be summarised as: > In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand. Or more cynically: when increased efficiency creates greater demand than that increase in efficiency. I probably don't need to convince anyone here that this happens in real life all the time - we're all familiar with Wirth's Law[1], right? So I think the same applies to automation and work. If anyone hasn't seen "Paperwork Explosion" by Jim Henson (you know, the guy who made The Muppets and the original voice of Kermit, and Ernie), this is a really good time to do so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk Look at what IBM promised: freedom from administrative woes! We can go back to do real productive work! Essentially exactly what we're hearing now. Now compare it to what actually happened. At the last two universities I've worked I have seen a lot of “the administration department is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding administration department” in action. At the expense of the quality of education and science, I might add. Buurtzorg Nederland[2] got a lot of attention in recent years for breaking that trend with its simple approach to letting nurses self-organise as independent, self-managing teams (so what Agile tried to be I suppose, except for nurses). What is often overlooked is that this is basically just going back to the model that the Netherlands had up until the 1980s, but a bit enhanced with modern information/communication technology. Jos de Blok, who founded Buurtzorg, briefly that in this short TED talk[3], but my parents were both general practitioners until they retired a few years ago confirmed that this happened all throughout healthcare. With programming, we know that complexity is something that must be actively fought or it sneaks in. We even have tons of special descriptions for how that happens: spaghetti code, big ball of mud, etc. So ask yourself: why would it be different in any other human-created system? For me, this is part of the explanation for all the obscurity we see everywhere (that, and a vested interest of a number of parties in keeping things obfuscated). And my prediction is that the natural tendency of automation is to backfire, unless we actively fight this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSoWtXvqsgg