There is no 'middle' between working and owning · Tech Workers Coalition↓Skip to main content<br>Table of Contents
You are not a tech bro (via Radical Graffiti)Why is it that many tech workers don’t really see themselves as workers?<br>As a member of Techwerkers, I have a pretty clear idea of what kind of a world I and my fellow members like to live in, and which direction to go when building such better world. But to make sure we’re on the same page and that we’re not wandering aimlessly, having lost track of our goals, together we’ve decided to actually write down our vision and mission statements. I can recommend doing this. As you go through the process of explicitly formulating your vision, and brainstorming strategies, many patterns become clear.<br>During one of the brainstorm meetings, there was a single virtual sticky note that stood out to me. It said that an obstacle to many, many of our goals and aspirations is that tech workers often don’t really see themselves as workers.<br>Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Of course we’re workers, it’s in the name! We go to work most days of the week and what we do there is work. So, what else could we be? Yet at the same time I see colleagues and online strangers actively rooting for the filthy rich tech oligarchs, hoping they’ll become billionaires any day now, and cheerfully embracing technologies explicitly aimed at automating us out of our jobs.<br>So let’s explore what I mean by that. Let’s talk about the difference between doing work and accepting our shared position as the working class; let’s talk about the myth of the ‘middle class’.<br>One startup away from being a millionaire #<br>Many workers in tech are quite privileged compared to other workers. We’re generally well-paid and have good job security. We have cool jobs and skills, we’re the ‘magicians’ who know how to make your phone do all the cool thing it does. We’re the engine of the industry that has transformed the modern life and produced countless massive corporations, billionaires, and a trillionaire.<br>In such an environment, it’s no wonder that many of us keep aspiring up. We’re just one great idea, one successful startup away from becoming millionaires, aren’t we? We obviously have more in common with the tech bro oligarchs than the janitors that clean public bathrooms, right? The fact that we don’t actually own multiple villas, luxurious yachts and don’t hold power over global politics and economy is just a temporary inconvenience after all!
you’re unimaginably more likely to become homeless than to win at the game of capitalism<br>But at the end of the day, we’re unimaginably more likely to become homeless than to become one of the winners of the game of capitalism. There’s literally a shortage of 396.000 houses in the Netherlands, while there are merely 14 billionaires living here. As tech workers we are just as vulnerable to market changes beyond our (individual) control as any of our neighbours is. How many of us make a decent salary, but still feel inexplicably stuck in the economy – not even owning the roof over their heads due to the housing crisis, constantly worried about the livelihood of their family whenever the next round of layoffs comes and our jobs get automated away, constantly feeling exhausted and burnt out no matter how cool their job looks from the outside?<br>The labour you provide #<br>What makes this outlandish dissonance materialise – despite it being so outlandish – is arguably our shared belief in the existence of ’the middle class’. There’s no clear, universal definition of that term, there’s no material distinction between this class and the others – just a vague feeling that someone’s not poor, but not rich either. Just like us! The Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, for example, even claims that the Netherlands have seven distinct social classes, with bizarre class labels and as a collection neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.<br>But when you start digging deeper, trying to understand where the middle class actually begins and ends, you quickly realise that it’s just an illusion. Ultimately, people’s economic situation boils down to just two things: the labour they provide and the assets they own.<br>Of course, that distinction doesn’t always hold on the individual level. There are people who do a salaried job while also running a business on the weekends. There are people that Marx would call petite bourgeoisie: small business owners who own their means of production, but still have to work to survive. But even with the nuances considered, the point is that our actual place in the economy isn’t determined by some number fitting into an arbitrary income range – but the question of whether or not you have to work (or rely on state or community support) in order to survive.<br>If you...