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Not to take away from your point because I think it holds, but I've read this "Forces of Production" book. It mischaracterizes what the true struggle was. It wa

Not to take away from your point because I think it holds, but I've read this "Forces of Production" book. It mischaracterizes what the true struggle was. It was CNC vs. "playback" technology (where it recorded the XYZ axes movements by a trained machinist) - the latter produced inferior parts and was very laborious to reprogram (you had to start over, not change a variable, etc.). There were a lot of points / quotes in the book with management talking about reducing / commodifying labor, but I'm not sure this book is the best to cite as support for this. I suspect Chomsky is taking Nobel at his word, but the book is noticeably biased toward Marxist thinking in thinking everything is a class struggle whereas the technology actually was superior. Funny enough the operator-programmer lines are blurring today as CNC code is now generated on essentially a compiler/debugger that simulates the machine. Machine programmers are scarce and now (even sans unions) are actually able to demand high prices in the same way a web developer can in our business.

calibraxis 14y ago
I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "objective" (those claiming to be objective generally don't analyze the dominant ideologies they promote), but at least Noble is clear about his perspective. I think you can see some of the struggles even in programming. I've spoken with managers who are honest about wanting replaceable coders, and won't willingly choose a technology which swings the balance of power away from them. (Which means they'll likely prefer Java over certain other contenders, even if they actually happen to believe this replaceable-cog strategy costs them more time and money, thereby lowering profits.) (That's why many are attracted to startups; some of these counterproductive constraints are relaxed, due to the sheer difficulty of success.)
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle. I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code. In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.
- gruseom 14y ago
  Great comment. The connections you make to software management and to the liberation of startups (if I may put it that way) strike me as spot-on.

calibraxis 14y ago

I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "objective" (those claiming to be objective generally don't analyze the dominant ideologies they promote), but at least Noble is clear about his perspective. I think you can see some of the struggles even in programming. I've spoken with managers who are honest about wanting replaceable coders, and won't willingly choose a technology which swings the balance of power away from them. (Which means they'll likely prefer Java over certain other contenders, even if they actually happen to believe this replaceable-cog strategy costs them more time and money, thereby lowering profits.) (That's why many are attracted to startups; some of these counterproductive constraints are relaxed, due to the sheer difficulty of success.)

nickpinkston 14y ago
Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle. I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code. In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.
gruseom 14y ago
Great comment. The connections you make to software management and to the liberation of startups (if I may put it that way) strike me as spot-on.