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It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise and hold general strikes to protest these kinds of policies -- if we aren't willi

by cyphar 7y ago

It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise and hold general strikes to protest these kinds of policies -- if we aren't willing to take real collective action, we aren't ever going to have our voices heard. When Australia passed an even more ludicrous anti-encryption bill a year ago, the only real response by the technology community was a handful of blog posts (after it was too late to do anything about the legislation[+]) and grand-standing on twitter. Why are we so shocked when politicians don't listen to us? We act like petulant children -- small bursts of outrage, but with no consequences for the people in power. [+]: Most posts were published either a day or two before it passed through the House of Reps, and some were posted during the day of the Senate discussion and passage. I did submit comments during the comment period, but we all know that had zero effect on their decisions.

_red 7y ago
> the only real response by the technology community was a handful of blog posts Something that is rarely talked about anymore but true is that the original 'internet culture' from the early 90s is basically dead. The ethos of that age was an active distrust of government and centralized authority. Further, there was a lack of trust in politics in general. That's basically gone now. The new technologist are not just unprincipled, they are deeply political and will support whatever initiative their tribe is pursuing. Even more cynical, is how can they even be against 'spying' and 'privacy violations'? 90% of the jobs available involve doing just that. There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- icedchai 7y ago
  That age died when the general public started coming online. That was the time when people self hosted their own email and web servers. Nobody has time for that anymore. Sadly, centralization is simpler. And privacy was an illusion anyway.
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  >There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry. Exactly correct. I said elsewhere in this thread that I gave them (plus ISPs etc) the benefit of the doubt when it came to Snowden and their compliance with government requests because I could understand they were scared by sept 11th, they wanted to be patriotic, maybe they didn't fully understand the risk or the future they were building etc. If they let EARN pass and comply with it, we all need to opt out. My worry is how to get enough people to do the same. Being in the 1-10% of people not using these services is difficult (I have too many friends stuck using Whatsapp and Facebook messenger), it's uneconomic (who's buying a non-apple, non-android phone?) and it just makes it too easy for government to surveil you as your own special group.
- haunter 7y ago
  >There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry. Very well put
- Noos 7y ago
  It's hard to keep that mindset when you end up getting a lion's share of the world's wealth and power from your technology. How can you distrust yourself and your people, then?
  - klibertp 7y ago
    I'd think (if I didn't know any better) that being well-off would result in people having more time and energy to consider things like ethics or politics. I think this is how it's supposed to work, historically. Evidently, it stopped working, both in the general populace and in people involved with tech. It's not very surprising, though. The technology is mostly built by one-step-above (or outright-) autistic nerds, and marketed and sold by hyperactive pie-in-the-sky megalomaniacs. The nerds don't care that much about anything in particular (other than tabs vs. spaces), and the business types have flexible ethics. Both groups would be dangerous - for different reasons - if taken separately but taken together make for the most ethics-free industry ever. The complete inability of both nerds and founders to act as a (larger) group might be the only reason why the industry is not under regulations stricter than surgeons and soldiers are. If it were possible for this industry to actually wield the power it has, the governments would be much more pressed for securing what became a vital infrastructure. My guess is that they know for a fact that shutting down Google for a week is not going to happen, ever - and that they are content with the kinds of people that self-select into IT.
LatteLazy 7y ago
Unions exist primarily to engage with employers, not government. Governments are very weary to permit any union to become politically important for historic reasons. And any wise union thinks twice before getting involved in politics. So you'd need workers to unionize (which they have NOT done to deal with their employers). AND for that union to pick the federal government as it's first opponent (and not it's members' employers!?). AND to get that all done before this bill becomes law (and in a time of epidemic). AND then for them to win an uphill battle with the most powerful political entity on earth despite the fact that ~80% of voters don't know what you're campaigning about and if they did wouldn't care. I think the real question here is why tech companies (or rather their CEOs, founders etc) are not making a fuss. I was disappointed by the revelations from Snowden about how Google, FB, Apple, ISPs and everyone else turned over everything without asking any questions before it was even legal after sept. 11th. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt: they were afraid, they wanted to be patriotic, it's hard to say no when someone asks nicely etc. Then they were all "outraged" by the revelations. If they were really outraged, they'd be buying senators, hiring PR firms and making public statements decrying this. The cynical answer to that is that these companies have made a calculated decision not to pick a fight most users don't (yet) care about. I'd also be careful calling us petulant. Politicians ignore us because 90% of people are not informed and choose not to think about history when these issues come up. But the audience here are mostly members of the other 10%. Since we're overwhelmingly outnumbers, out voted and ignored, what can we do but be outraged, share some articles about self-service-encryption and then move on? Sorry, I've been quite confrontational in this comment. I also think there will be a lot more "outrage" than action on this. But when the possible action is very limited... Unionization would likely be positive too, I just think it would be a small part of a large and complex solution.
- wisty 7y ago
  > I think the real question here is why tech companies (or rather their CEOs, founders etc) are not making a fuss. A heavy compliance burden is a moat for incumbents. This is true in most industries - businesses only squeal about regulations if it's going to severely hurt their bottom line, if it's just an annoyance than they'll publicly claim they don't like it but also point out that it stops cowboys and amateurs (i.e. new competitors) from potentially hurting consumers.
pgt 7y ago
It seems to me that emigration is the only socially-acceptable tax revolt. I'm a South African with a BEng. degree in Electronic Engineering & Comp Sci who has been looking to emigrate. After Australia passed the anti-encryption bill, I crossed it off the list of places I would ever start a company in. Previously it was quite high on my list, but now I feel like I would be funding a corrupt state if I paid taxes there. That is also why I intend to flee ZA. (Any software companies in the Netherlands need someone a senior Clojure engineer, let me know!)
addHocker 7y ago
Because you do not protest against one law, you do not protest a party, a candidate, something temporary. You protest a process, a pipe that spews constantly right erroding legislation. You want to steer people to action, against something that is never ending? And then lament there exaustion with that? How dare you? Why not for once, take the step back, and demand meta-legislation, that forbids reopening a issue the public (reprsented or not) has decided on for another legislation period? Political activism is part of the disease by now, preventing actual change, by funneling the anger into infective measures.
throw0101a 7y ago
> It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise A better model may be a guild like actors have (SAG). Certain 'base-level' protections are agreed to with regards to health and safety, working hours, perhaps minimum salary guidelines, healthcare, retirement plans/pensions (?), etc. However things like salary can be independently determined. Paying dues would also give access to employment lawyers and dispute resolution mechanisms. Just as (e.g.) SAG makes sure everyone on set is safe (both Tom Cruise and Jane Smith who plays Waitress #2), but people can be paid according to their (perceived?) importance to the project.
- fcarraldo 7y ago
  The SAG is a labor union. “Guild” is just part of the name.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Many people instantly bristle at the word "union". It's worth distinguishing between the gatekeeping and seniority effects of a "union" as understood in the currently-not-pro-union mind and the potential benefits of a collective voice using more descriptive nomenclature.
    - runawaybottle 7y ago
      So re-brand it. How about ‘collective’? Bernie Sanders literally lost the election because he couldn’t rebrand socialism and instead called it socialism. I also don’t thing developers need a traditional labor union. We probably need baseline guidelines where non-compliant companies would be seen as ‘very lame, avoid’. Similar to a coding standard.
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      Most unions don't have "union" in their name, I don't think it's an issue of nomenclature. People know which organizations can be colloquially referred to as a labor union. That said people just have problems understanding how unions work. It's a collective voice. How that voice is used is up to the union members. If you want that to include gate keeping and seniority protections that's up to the members. If you want it to be a political lobby, same thing.
msla 7y ago
> It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise and hold general strikes to protest these kinds of policies How would that impact hobbyist software? Am I going to be run out of my job for being a "scab" if I keep developing my hobbyist projects during a strike? (Historically, "scabs" got killed, of course.) How about if it's a strike I don't agree with? Even if there's some kind of voting process on whether to strike or not, which is itself fraught and open to abuses, nothing guarantees that majority rule will be just, and nothing guarantees that anything else will result in enough legitimacy to lead to collective action. (As in: "I didn't vote to strike, so I'm not going to.")
harumph 7y ago
It's been my understanding for 25 years that folks in "IT" think it's a meritocracy. They also seem to think they're smarter than average. This is just my experience, not some statement of fact. The truth is that most of the people I've encountered don't know the first thing about their chosen career path other than "it pays well", and the bare minimum needed to not get fired. At the other end of the spectrum, I've seen HN posts detailing how the FAANG hiring process is seemingly designed to optimize for new hires that will competently read a spec and produce the correct output -- and little to nothing else. This process combined with the business practices of FAANG themselves means that the idealists and true free thinkers self-select out of the group of people applying to FAANG. For the sake of argument, assume these are actually true. Where would that leave us? With a large group of people at the top behaving like automatons, cranking out code without thinking about it. At the bottom, we have incompetence and fighting over scraps. Because everyone is convinced it's a meritocracy unionization is ruled out by default. No collective action will be possible under these circumstances. It does enable a very small number of people at the tippy-top to take advantage of the people below them to make the most user-hostile software the world has seen, of course. Those few at the tippy-top have names. But the names really don't matter when everyone else wants to be them. Because if they're replaced, someone else will fill the void. Because it is in fact a meritocracy of a sort. Except "merit" in this case means "most willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck".

by cyphar 7y ago

_red 7y ago

> the only real response by the technology community was a handful of blog posts Something that is rarely talked about anymore but true is that the original 'internet culture' from the early 90s is basically dead. The ethos of that age was an active distrust of government and centralized authority. Further, there was a lack of trust in politics in general. That's basically gone now. The new technologist are not just unprincipled, they are deeply political and will support whatever initiative their tribe is pursuing. Even more cynical, is how can they even be against 'spying' and 'privacy violations'? 90% of the jobs available involve doing just that. There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
icedchai 7y ago
That age died when the general public started coming online. That was the time when people self hosted their own email and web servers. Nobody has time for that anymore. Sadly, centralization is simpler. And privacy was an illusion anyway.
LatteLazy 7y ago
>There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry. Exactly correct. I said elsewhere in this thread that I gave them (plus ISPs etc) the benefit of the doubt when it came to Snowden and their compliance with government requests because I could understand they were scared by sept 11th, they wanted to be patriotic, maybe they didn't fully understand the risk or the future they were building etc. If they let EARN pass and comply with it, we all need to opt out. My worry is how to get enough people to do the same. Being in the 1-10% of people not using these services is difficult (I have too many friends stuck using Whatsapp and Facebook messenger), it's uneconomic (who's buying a non-apple, non-android phone?) and it just makes it too easy for government to surveil you as your own special group.
haunter 7y ago
>There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry. Very well put
Noos 7y ago
It's hard to keep that mindset when you end up getting a lion's share of the world's wealth and power from your technology. How can you distrust yourself and your people, then?
- klibertp 7y ago
  I'd think (if I didn't know any better) that being well-off would result in people having more time and energy to consider things like ethics or politics. I think this is how it's supposed to work, historically. Evidently, it stopped working, both in the general populace and in people involved with tech. It's not very surprising, though. The technology is mostly built by one-step-above (or outright-) autistic nerds, and marketed and sold by hyperactive pie-in-the-sky megalomaniacs. The nerds don't care that much about anything in particular (other than tabs vs. spaces), and the business types have flexible ethics. Both groups would be dangerous - for different reasons - if taken separately but taken together make for the most ethics-free industry ever. The complete inability of both nerds and founders to act as a (larger) group might be the only reason why the industry is not under regulations stricter than surgeons and soldiers are. If it were possible for this industry to actually wield the power it has, the governments would be much more pressed for securing what became a vital infrastructure. My guess is that they know for a fact that shutting down Google for a week is not going to happen, ever - and that they are content with the kinds of people that self-select into IT.

LatteLazy 7y ago

Unions exist primarily to engage with employers, not government. Governments are very weary to permit any union to become politically important for historic reasons. And any wise union thinks twice before getting involved in politics. So you'd need workers to unionize (which they have NOT done to deal with their employers). AND for that union to pick the federal government as it's first opponent (and not it's members' employers!?). AND to get that all done before this bill becomes law (and in a time of epidemic). AND then for them to win an uphill battle with the most powerful political entity on earth despite the fact that ~80% of voters don't know what you're campaigning about and if they did wouldn't care. I think the real question here is why tech companies (or rather their CEOs, founders etc) are not making a fuss. I was disappointed by the revelations from Snowden about how Google, FB, Apple, ISPs and everyone else turned over everything without asking any questions before it was even legal after sept. 11th. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt: they were afraid, they wanted to be patriotic, it's hard to say no when someone asks nicely etc. Then they were all "outraged" by the revelations. If they were really outraged, they'd be buying senators, hiring PR firms and making public statements decrying this. The cynical answer to that is that these companies have made a calculated decision not to pick a fight most users don't (yet) care about. I'd also be careful calling us petulant. Politicians ignore us because 90% of people are not informed and choose not to think about history when these issues come up. But the audience here are mostly members of the other 10%. Since we're overwhelmingly outnumbers, out voted and ignored, what can we do but be outraged, share some articles about self-service-encryption and then move on? Sorry, I've been quite confrontational in this comment. I also think there will be a lot more "outrage" than action on this. But when the possible action is very limited... Unionization would likely be positive too, I just think it would be a small part of a large and complex solution.

wisty 7y ago
> I think the real question here is why tech companies (or rather their CEOs, founders etc) are not making a fuss. A heavy compliance burden is a moat for incumbents. This is true in most industries - businesses only squeal about regulations if it's going to severely hurt their bottom line, if it's just an annoyance than they'll publicly claim they don't like it but also point out that it stops cowboys and amateurs (i.e. new competitors) from potentially hurting consumers.

pgt 7y ago

It seems to me that emigration is the only socially-acceptable tax revolt. I'm a South African with a BEng. degree in Electronic Engineering & Comp Sci who has been looking to emigrate. After Australia passed the anti-encryption bill, I crossed it off the list of places I would ever start a company in. Previously it was quite high on my list, but now I feel like I would be funding a corrupt state if I paid taxes there. That is also why I intend to flee ZA. (Any software companies in the Netherlands need someone a senior Clojure engineer, let me know!)

addHocker 7y ago

Because you do not protest against one law, you do not protest a party, a candidate, something temporary. You protest a process, a pipe that spews constantly right erroding legislation. You want to steer people to action, against something that is never ending? And then lament there exaustion with that? How dare you? Why not for once, take the step back, and demand meta-legislation, that forbids reopening a issue the public (reprsented or not) has decided on for another legislation period? Political activism is part of the disease by now, preventing actual change, by funneling the anger into infective measures.

throw0101a 7y ago

> It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise A better model may be a guild like actors have (SAG). Certain 'base-level' protections are agreed to with regards to health and safety, working hours, perhaps minimum salary guidelines, healthcare, retirement plans/pensions (?), etc. However things like salary can be independently determined. Paying dues would also give access to employment lawyers and dispute resolution mechanisms. Just as (e.g.) SAG makes sure everyone on set is safe (both Tom Cruise and Jane Smith who plays Waitress #2), but people can be paid according to their (perceived?) importance to the project.

fcarraldo 7y ago
The SAG is a labor union. “Guild” is just part of the name.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Many people instantly bristle at the word "union". It's worth distinguishing between the gatekeeping and seniority effects of a "union" as understood in the currently-not-pro-union mind and the potential benefits of a collective voice using more descriptive nomenclature.
  - runawaybottle 7y ago
    So re-brand it. How about ‘collective’? Bernie Sanders literally lost the election because he couldn’t rebrand socialism and instead called it socialism. I also don’t thing developers need a traditional labor union. We probably need baseline guidelines where non-compliant companies would be seen as ‘very lame, avoid’. Similar to a coding standard.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    Most unions don't have "union" in their name, I don't think it's an issue of nomenclature. People know which organizations can be colloquially referred to as a labor union. That said people just have problems understanding how unions work. It's a collective voice. How that voice is used is up to the union members. If you want that to include gate keeping and seniority protections that's up to the members. If you want it to be a political lobby, same thing.

msla 7y ago

> It's strange to me that technology workers are seemingly unwilling to unionise and hold general strikes to protest these kinds of policies How would that impact hobbyist software? Am I going to be run out of my job for being a "scab" if I keep developing my hobbyist projects during a strike? (Historically, "scabs" got killed, of course.) How about if it's a strike I don't agree with? Even if there's some kind of voting process on whether to strike or not, which is itself fraught and open to abuses, nothing guarantees that majority rule will be just, and nothing guarantees that anything else will result in enough legitimacy to lead to collective action. (As in: "I didn't vote to strike, so I'm not going to.")

harumph 7y ago

It's been my understanding for 25 years that folks in "IT" think it's a meritocracy. They also seem to think they're smarter than average. This is just my experience, not some statement of fact. The truth is that most of the people I've encountered don't know the first thing about their chosen career path other than "it pays well", and the bare minimum needed to not get fired. At the other end of the spectrum, I've seen HN posts detailing how the FAANG hiring process is seemingly designed to optimize for new hires that will competently read a spec and produce the correct output -- and little to nothing else. This process combined with the business practices of FAANG themselves means that the idealists and true free thinkers self-select out of the group of people applying to FAANG. For the sake of argument, assume these are actually true. Where would that leave us? With a large group of people at the top behaving like automatons, cranking out code without thinking about it. At the bottom, we have incompetence and fighting over scraps. Because everyone is convinced it's a meritocracy unionization is ruled out by default. No collective action will be possible under these circumstances. It does enable a very small number of people at the tippy-top to take advantage of the people below them to make the most user-hostile software the world has seen, of course. Those few at the tippy-top have names. But the names really don't matter when everyone else wants to be them. Because if they're replaced, someone else will fill the void. Because it is in fact a meritocracy of a sort. Except "merit" in this case means "most willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck".