Is tech socialism really on the rise?

Part 2 of our interview with writer/ethicist Ben Tarnoff

In Part 1 of my conversation with Ben Tarnoff, co-founder of leading tech ethics publication Logic, we covered the history and philosophy of 19th century Luddites and how that relates to what he described in his column for The Guardian as today’s over-computerized world.

I’ve casually called myself a Luddite when expressing general frustration with social media or internet culture, but as it turns out, you can’t intelligently discuss what most people think of as an anti-technology movement without understanding the role of technology in capitalism, and vice versa.

At the end of Part 1, I was badgering Tarnoff to speculate on which technologies ought to be preserved even in a Luddite world, and which ones ought to go the way of the mills the original Luddites destroyed. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the topic, Tarnoff offered the disability rights movement as an example of the approach he hopes will be taken by an emerging class of tech socialists.

TechCrunch: The Americans with Disability Act has been a very powerful body of legislation that has basically forced us to use our technological might to create physical infrastructure, including elevators, buses, vans, the day-to-day machinery of our lives that allow people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go places, do things, see things, experience things, to do so. And you’re saying one of the things that we could look at is more technology for that sort of thing, right?

Because I think a lot about how in this society, every single one of us walks around with the insecurity that, “there but for the grace of my health go I.” At any moment I could be injured, I could get sick, I could acquire a disability that’s going to limit my participation in society.

Ben Tarnoff: One of the phrases of the disability rights movement is, “nothing about us without us,” which perfectly encapsulates a more democratic approach to technology. What they’re saying is that if you’re an architect, if you’re an urban planner, if you’re a shopkeeper, whatever it is, you’re making design decisions that have the potential to seriously negatively impact a substantial portion of the population. In substantial ways [you could] restrict their democratic rights. Their access to space.

We can take that principle and apply it to a lot of digital technology as well. The executive class who’s making decisions about how certain technologies are built and implemented are necessarily driven by profit considerations because they exist within this competitive capitalist landscape. We need to build the social power that can force them to take different considerations into account, because all of us are affected by these technologies in one form or another. “Nothing about us without us.”

Now what are those precise mechanisms where we develop modes of participatory input and control over these technologies? This is where we need to be creative, even entrepreneurial, about how we develop these modes of power. But between the Scandinavian Labor Movement in the 70s and the disability rights movement more recently, we have some interesting models to start thinking with.

I still find myself wishing you would put on some kind of Apple keynote-style presentation: “Here are the technologies and companies Luddites should feel good about, and build more of.” I have this image in my head of going down a list of companies like we were on MSNBC evaluating political candidates or Bloomberg News speculating on tech stocks, like, “Hey, Salesforce. Salesforce has a big ethics arm. They say everybody needs databases, so are they an example of a company that’s going to continue to exist in the Luddite world? Do they have potential to do good? Who else?”

But that’s because I’m thinking like a capitalist, right? I’m trying to oversimplify things?

I would say, in part, this is thinking about a division of labor. There are mitigations companies can undertake and often employees have been some of the loudest voices for these types of changes. And those mitigations are very important, [for example,] when we’re talking about the ecological impact of digitization, the shift of data centers to renewable energy sources, the development of greener AI strategies. There’s a team of researchers in Massachusetts who I linked to in my piece who are starting to think through, “how do we constrain the energy usage associated with training machine-learning models?” These are mitigations that can be very productively pursued within the confines of these firms.

But there is a division of labor here, right? Because even if we can pursue those mitigations within the boundaries of these firms, if what we’re talking about, ultimately, is transforming the deeper causes of these problems, then I think that work has to happen in the broader society, and it has to involve mass mobilization and social and political transformation.

So, maybe that helps frame it in a somewhat more constructive way. I’m not saying initiatives within those companies are pointless. I mean, thousands of Amazon workers are coming together and demanding that Amazon management comes up with a climate plan to significantly reduce their emissions on an aggressive timetable to stop working with oil and gas companies who are major consumers of their cloud products. These are mitigations I think would have a tremendously positive effect. I don’t think that alone will bring us to a post-carbon egalitarian society. Broader work needs to be done, but there’s a lot that can be done within these companies.

Amazon is a great example; I’ve written about that as well as other obvious examples of what you’re suggesting, such as Uber, and Lyft and other gig workers rallying around AB5 in California. The Google workers in Pittsburgh who just successfully voted to join the Steelworkers Union is a real parallel, a striking parallel to what you just described in Scandinavia. There’s a lot.

Actually I would like to ask, though: What are the prospects for a company like Salesforce in the Luddite future? I think of them specifically because, well, you grew up in San Francisco, right? Do you go home every now and then and you see how the city is changing?

Yeah.

What do you think of the Salesforce Tower? And have you seen the accompanying giant new transportation center and what’s now called Salesforce Park?

I don’t think it was finished the last time I was home.

I visited the city recently and felt the need to spend some time there. It’s a giant topped by presence, topped off by this big park seemingly inspired by New York City’s The High Line. It all struck me as Salesforce’s statement that, “you guys might be paying a lot of attention to Google and Facebook and Apple, but we’re just as big.”

It’s a very complicated feeling when I go home, just to speak in a more personal vein. It’s a city I still really love. It’s a city I grew up with. It’s a city that really made me who I am in all the important respects, but it’s a city that I really hardly recognize anymore. I lived there, actually, for a few years as an adult as well, working in tech. Left a couple years ago. But even in that capacity, it was hard not to feel a certain sense of estrangement from the city. So, I don’t know. It’s a very complicated feeling for me because on the one hand I work in tech. I have a lot of friends in tech. On the other hand, I’m from San Francisco, and my parents are fortunate not to be among the many families who are being displaced by the tech boom. But the signs of that displacement are everywhere.

And I think every time I go home, it frankly feels even more dystopian. Just the juxtaposition of intense poverty and public misery, particularly in the streets of SoMa and on Market Street and of course tech wealth. And there are a lot of great organizations and organizers on the ground who are fighting the good fight. It’s not a lost cause by any means, but it’s a very melancholy feeling for me, to be totally honest. Yeah.

Are we all going to need database software in the Luddite future? Should Marc Benioff, who seems to be joining the fight against billionaires, ironically, feel confident in the future of his own product? Or would you challenge the need even for some of these core products that have come to really embody the tech revolution?

It’s a good question and to be honest I’m not totally sure. I don’t think that I would be the one to answer that question. Again, to the extent that we’re thinking of how to democratize these decisions, I would defer to democratic processes to ultimately make those choices. It’s an interesting question, which may actually segue us to the socialism portion of the conversation, which is that among the many long-running debates — and there are many within the socialist tradition — one is to what extent can the machinery of capitalism be taken over and put to different purposes? There are certainly some in the Marxist tradition in particular who see capitalism as generating this great technological apparatus that can simply be picked up, and within very minor tweaks, transitioned into the engine of a socialist society.

I personally don’t find that vision totally credible, but there are certainly, historically, a significant number of people on the Marxist left who see that transition as fairly seamless; who could see something like all of the range of technologies today that have been generated under a capitalist social arrangement transitioning seamlessly into a socialist society, which is somewhat hard to believe, but again, has ample precedents. I mean, the Soviets: Lenin loves Taylorism. They see these forms of labor discipline that have been developed under industrial capitalism and think that, “Oh, this is perfect for building a new socialist society.”

Taylorism?

Sorry. Taylorism being the school of management associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is really the father of scientific management. In the late 19th century, he undertakes a series of studies of workers in order to try to more precisely organize their movements around the factory. And it’s really the birth of management theory, which of course goes through its own evolution.

Not to be the guy who’s dodging the question by asking another question, but this question of, “What can we use? What, from this society, can we bring with us into the next society?” is a very challenging and contested question. And, again, at risk of sounding like I’m deferring it, this has to be a democratic process. That’s why I would always look to see what are the parts of society in motion. What can we learn from social movements? How do we broaden out? Because it’s very easy for someone like me to assume a technocratic role and provide a laundry list of, “These are the technologies that are okay. These are the ones that aren’t. This is the model legislation that we should use to get to a better place.” And I think that it’s not really aligned with the best parts of the socialist tradition.

We’ve already touched throughout this conversation on a number of points in your Logic essay “From Manchester to Barcelona,” which does begin to envision what the relationship between socialism and technology could look like in a healthy way.

I’m not saying anything new to point out how it seems like even five or 10 years ago that would’ve just been an almost silly conversation to try to have because there were people talking about socialism and there were people talking about tech, sure, but the idea of bringing them together just would’ve been laughable. Now social media is tech, and tech is social media, right? The amount of pixels spilled on social media over discussing socialism in the last few years, perhaps thanks to people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, although I think one needs to also thank people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and maybe Elizabeth Warren and many others as well, has been tremendous. Even Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, reportedly, and I’ve had this confirmed to me by people within that company, spends a lot of time talking to his employees about Marxism.

I’ve heard that as well.

He says, apparently, that Palantir and other software companies are the Marxist dream because the workers are now the means of production.

Well, I’m fairly generous in my definition of who and who isn’t a socialist, but I can fairly confidently put Karp out of the tent.

I also don’t usually like to exclude people, but in this case we can make the exception to exclude. But anyway, you’re not alone now in envisioning the intersection of socialism and tech.

For people who probably follow a lot more about tech than about socialism, but who are often very thoughtful and are coming to recognize more and more the injustices in which they and their employers are participating, what do people most need to think about as they start to look at the tech world in which they’re immersed, from a more socialist lens?

Well, we might start with a definition of what a socialist society would look like. As you’d imagine, because socialist tradition is fairly large, this is a contested question. But the way that I would define it is a socialist society would be one in which everyone has the resources that they need to lead a dignified, self-directed life, and has the opportunity to participate in the decisions that most affect them. Now, we could have a discussion about how we get from here to there, which is often the hottest point of disagreement within socialist circles, right? How precisely do we get from a highly unequal society in which those conditions are really, certainly not met for the majority of the world’s inhabitants, to one in which we can start to satisfy those two conditions for more and more of the people who live on the planet?

The only decent society I can imagine is one in which each person has sufficient potential, sufficient freedom, to actually become a person that gets to make choices. It’s not that we’re trying to open every possible path to every person, but the ability to love and be loved, to learn, to grow, to live without undue threat of violence and oppression, and prejudice and discrimination, that those are the basics. Call it human rights, if you will, maybe. What’s the relationship between language around socialism and language around human rights, in your mind?

I think you put it well. Ultimately, it’s a question of human dignity. To what degree are people given the opportunity to realize their potential, to create themselves? There’s almost a spiritual component to it. But I should add that an important element that I think the socialist perspective generally shares in its many variants is that capitalism makes it impossible to create a society that satisfies those two principles. That capitalism, as a historically specific way of organizing human societies that emerged somewhere around the 15th, 16th century in Europe and has now become generalized throughout the globe, militates against a society in which, again, everyone has the resources to lead that dignified self-determined life, and the opportunity to participate in the decisions that most affect them.

Because the purpose really is to create exceptions to the rule of humanity, right? In a world of several billion people, there may be multiple billion people who are experiencing a great deal of freedom and possibility under capitalism…

But capitalism lives by generating very intense forms of differentiation among people. Class is absolutely critical. It also intensifies differences along the lines of race and gender. But it does so because capitalism runs on accumulation. Capitalism [facilitates] self-sustaining growth. And in order for the accumulation engine to continue, it needs to create generalized market dependence. So, our access to our means of survival is mediated by the market. And this is, again, a historically specific situation because under feudal Europe that wasn’t the case. The life of a peasant certainly often wasn’t pleasant, but they had unmediated direct access to the means of their subsistence.

They were growing their own food.

Right. So, the new forms of domination that capitalism creates and constantly generates through its pursuit of ever greater accumulation, accumulations for its own sake is, again, what is at the heart of social inequality. It’s also at the heart of ecological disaster, as we discussed before, because one doesn’t have to be particularly radical to observe what happens with a system that is premised on infinite accumulation with an environment of very finite constraints. And you see that contradiction manifesting more and more aggressively today.

My last question that I ask of all my interviewees is: How optimistic are you about our shared human future?

That’s a very good and very difficult question because the answer may change depending on the day and the time of day.

Right. Like, how much serotonin and dopamine you’ve got up there right now bouncing around in your brain.

Precisely. So, as you know, I recently became a parent, and I think in many ways that’s forced me to feel more optimism about the future because the future is much more concrete to me than it was before, I think particularly when I think of the climate projections around 2050, which previously seemed like a fairly abstract number to me. When I think about how old my daughter will be, it doesn’t feel abstract anymore. So, I think optimism is really a matter of necessity at this point for me.

Thank you very much for taking the time.