Lambert here: A little bit more sophisticated and “tech bros,” so a welcome development. Though (from the summary below) I have to say that “grounded in Foucauldian and Bourdieusian analysis” comes under the heading of a secularized Matthew 6:24No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. .
“The social codes and class identity of tech workers” [Shahpour S. Akhavi, LSE Review of Books (CC BY 4.0)].
Robert Dorschel‘s The Social Codes of Tech Workers is a sociological study of class identity among mid-level digital labourers. Drawing on interviews with American and German data scientists and UX designers and grounded in Foucauldian and Bourdieusian analysis, this is an illuminating insight into an important but understudied class within digital capitalism, writes Shahpour S. Akhavi.
Will tech workers act on their code?
Robert Dorschel’s The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism seeks to fill a curious gap in social-scientific attention to digital labour. While much has been written about the elite entrepreneurs at the top of the tech sector and a fair bit also about the invisible labour and gig workers at its bottom, the great mass of workers in the middle – those who design, deliver and maintain digital products – are under-studied. Dorschel, a digital sociologist at Cambridge, focuses on this group to illuminate their present and potential engagement with class issues. He does so in terms set largely by Foucault and Bourdieu, speaking to how workers’ historical and institutional context, and their corresponding subjective self-image, influence their sense of class. Relying on interviews with American and German data scientists and user experience (UX) designers, in addition to discourse analysis of institutional study program descriptions and of job postings, he uncovers a set of variegated and often contradictory “social codes” in the builders of today’s digital society.
Tech workers’ inactive activism
To begin with, Dorschel finds broad and genuine inclination toward social critique among this relatively well-favoured segment of society. The book’s first two post-introduction chapters historicise the emergence of such critique and tie it (and its limitations) to what he calls a “hybrid professional selfhood” that prioritises “translating and balancing needs” (66). Tech workers, Dorschel says, long “to be simultaneously middle-class wealthy and morally worthy” (117). He finds strata of varying critical inclinations, from “affirmative” workers allied with technocapitalism to “radical” ones who fiercely criticise it, with most in a “reformist” middle range favourable to greater government regulation (19). Conflicting interests of publics and profits, however, are unsurprisingly glossed over in institutional material that presents tech roles as entrepreneurially cutting-edge and innovative. (No funding sources are identified for the study programs whose promotional materials are analysed, though one suspects at least some of them depend on corporate largesse.)
The third and fourth chapters uncover more multivalence: In lifestyle, tech workers adopt stances of “comfortable exploring” (“sheltered living at the edge of new developments”), “ordinariness” (preference for lowbrow recreation, like board games or running, even at relatively high income level – albeit within preponderantly cosmopolitan settings), and “mindfulness” (specifically about work / life balance) (18). In identifying ordinariness, Dorschel aligns with Bialski, who describes an ethic of “good-enoughness” among software workers that extends to professional practice. On the other hand, the description of such workers as zealously mindful of boundaries between work and home runs counter to some literature (eg Cote and Harris) and to the exhortations of tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sergey Brin.
Then too, in terms of class formation, Dorschel finds that “while tech workers identify with ideals of social justice and critiques of power structures, there is very little evidence of these commitments being enacted in tangible, impactful ways.” Though goaded by the excesses of tech’s monopolisation, hype, and entanglement with authoritarianism, these workers seem loath to part decisively with their “individualist and deeply incorporated modus operandi” (114). Altogether, Dorschel considers tech workers to “form a contradictory class fraction that is only partially realized” (119).
Justice-seeking and its co-optation
Even before such realisation can have a chance of being complete, Dorschel finds aspects of it are being coopted. The book’s fifth chapter applies Boltanski and Chiapello’s “spirit of capitalism” construct, which he finds at work in a new way, appropriating this time not a class’s “artistic” critique (taking exception to capitalism’s truncation of subjects’ creativity and self-determination), but tech workers’ moral critique (their identification of tech-mediated injustices and harms). The chapter details numerous smarmy ways – from Facebook’s 2022 “Data for Good” campaign to “AI alignment” efforts to corporatised hackathons – in which capital has assumed the trappings of justice-seeking and insurgency for the sake of assuaging and conscripting socially-minded workers.
Nevertheless, the book’s final pre-conclusion chapter contemplates the potential of tech workers’ contradictory positionality to advantage them against an unjust system, a system they can “glitch” by crossing ostensible boundaries (as, for example, Amazon software workers have done by showing solidarity with warehouse workers). “Given [their] multiple levels of inscription power” – the literal and direct determination of software’s contents – “tech workers would be a crucial grouping to be won over for class alliances,” Dorschel writes (157).
Contrasting identifications of the tech worker
Time and again, Dorschel analyses his population of study as simultaneously one thing and another – both capitalist and critical, adventuresome and comfortable, combining (ideally) “the technical virtues of a Steve Wozniak with the communicative virtues of a Steve Jobs” (82). This hybridity seems eminently believable for a population suspended between technology and society; between vaunted tech wealth and pressing techno-social crisis; between geek joy and digital harms. The contradictions run deep, but in a sense, they have for a long time. The “Californian Ideology” described by Barbrook and Cameron in the mid-1990s, which Dorschel characterises as an incarnation of libertarian hyper-capitalism, was in fact itself a mongrel of libertarianism and supposed counter-cultural leftism. To navigate such contradictions, it seems plain tech workers will have to discern – not only individually but together – which parts of the programme they are engaged in are genuine, and which prosocial.
Dorschel’s interviews occurred between 2020 and 2022, just before Chat-GPT debuted and Elon Musk gutted Twitter, setting off a trend of layoffs (many justified by executives in the name of AI). Without reproducing industry hype, the world of software certainly moves apace, and today findings such as “most tech workers feel relatively secure on the labor market” (126) and “Current developments around AI lend tech workers even greater powers to influence societies” (176) may be in need of an update – as Dorschel himself affirms. He also indicates that study of tech workers’ practices might yield more insight on how those practices relate to workers’ subjectivity. (He stipulates that this would require ethnographic methods, but short of these, abundant professional literature and practitioner commentary are available.)
Studying collaboration and power
Attention to practice might also reveal interactions between worker subjectivities in software collaboration, which brings data scientists and designers together more rarely than, say, designers and developers, or developers and testers. Developers, who form the largest discipline in software work, were excluded from Dorschel’s sample in part to focus on newer, more emergent roles and in part because UX and data science set up “contrastive sampling” with a higher confidence of generalisation for findings in common. At the same time, just as most software workers are developers, most software work is collaboration, and such collaboration remains under-studied even after this valuable contribution to the sociology of tech work.
There may be some question whether tech workers enjoy as much inscription power as Dorschel suggests, since use of that power contrary to owners’ wishes is highly discoverable in an informated work environment, and punishable by a variety of workplace, civil and criminal measures. That said, a large class skilled in the production of techno-social outcomes at scale is indeed a class to be reckoned with. And considering it is a group whose patent dissatisfaction with current injustices has likely only grown since this book’s publication, it is one whose allyship is – as Dorschel vividly establishes – devoutly to be wished by anyone interested in a just and sustainable technological future.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.