The author argues that under contemporary capitalism, innovation has become as much a financial process as it is a technical one. Today’s ‘innovation’ is driven increasingly by the need to provide returns to capital, resulting in a banal, IP-backed rentiership, rather than the creation of socially useful products. Until we manage to disentangle innovation from finance, innovation itself may be the problem.

A coldly infuriating excerpt from Steven Greenhouse’s recent book Beaten Down, Worked Up, featuring the stories of gig workers whose promised ‘freedom’ turns out to be a false one. Sprinkled throughout are quotes from one gig economy CEO, who congratulates himself for offering ‘opportunities to people who never would have had them before’.

This recent addition to the growing gig economy literature provides useful historical context in arguing that the problems of the sector must be tackled ‘from above as well as below’.

Fed up with the depredations of the venture capital model? Platform cooperativism offers a powerful alternative vision where goods and services are produced to serve the community, rather than the interests of faraway shareholders.

A must-read for anyone interested in labor organizing in the high-tech sector, with anonymous stories that double as practical advice for overcoming anti-union sentiment. I also enjoyed this paper’s from-first-principles explanation of capitalism’s ideological legitimation mechanisms, drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski.

A thought-provoking academic critique of post-work politics. I don’t fully agree with the author’s description of his interlocutors’ positions, which I believe are more nuanced than he allows, but this paper is a helpful primer on the topic that reminds us to be skeptical of the hype around automation.

Something that bears repeating: the gig economy is not new! Many industries rely on worker misclassification, as this deep dive into East Coast construction workers shows us. What’s special about Uber/Lyft/Deliveroo/etc is that their technology enables them to scale up quickly, and their ample VC funding allows them to reframe exploitation as innovation.

A short piece which highlights the immorality of investing in automation technology so that more and more workers are consigned to poorly-paid drudgery while a lucky few reap the profits. Robots are nice and all, but maybe we should fix our socioeconomic system first?

I’m a fan of basically anything Ben Tarnoff writes, and his chronicle of the tech worker organizing movement is no exception. I’ve found the organizing of recent years to be massively inspiring, and I hope to see more solidarity between workers in different strata of the industry in the years to come.

A reminder that workplace surveillance, as an extension of capital’s unjust power over individuals, is a matter of human rights.