The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller An exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work, technology, progress, and what we want from the future In the 19th century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years 'the Luddites' roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and maneuvers that they would later deploy on unassuming machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backward-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of of the antagonistic relationship between workers - all workers, including us today - and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The Luddites weren't primitive or even anachronistic - they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the 21st-century world. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labor and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is high, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the Neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a podcast we certainly appreciate you tuning in oh my gosh another podcast the way, go back and listen to all 700 of the podcasts that we have from last year. There's so many great authors we took and interviewed, and you're going to want to read their books as well.

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People have been joining over there like crazy. But there's like so many groups, and they're all pretty much the same. And LinkedIn as well. There's 135,000-size group over there you can join. but there's like so many groups and like they're all pretty much the same um and uh linkedin as well there's 135 000 uh size group over there you can join uh check that on the show uh we have and a most amazing offer author offer of an author is what we're having on the show today uh and uh this is his second book this is a book that will be coming out on February 9th, 2021. So we're amping up the anticipation for the release of this book. So you want to break out your credit card

and get ready to plunk down the pre-order on this now so you can tell all your friends that you are the first to read this book and you are at the very edge cusp of the excitement and uh the hottest latest new book how about that how about that uh i should get extra paid for this gavin uh for what i'm doing here right i'm just kidding uh we'll put an affiliate link on it and get a couple bucks uh anyway guys this gentleman's name is gavin mueller uh he has written the new book that will be coming out february 9th breaking things at work uh this is something that i do when i'm very angry but evidently there's probably more productive way he's put in his book to deal with this the luddites are right about why you

hate your job let me tell you a little bit about g Gavin. Gavin is a lecturer in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam. He's written on the politics of music, film, and popular culture for outlets including Jacobin, in these times, Al Jazeera America, In Real Magazine, Breaking Things at Work is his second book, and we want to welcome him to the show. Gavin, how are you, sir? I'm doing well, Chris. Thank you. And I think I butchered Jacobin. Do you want to correct me on the pronunciation of that?

Yeah, I butchered it when I started writing for them, but it's actually Jacobin, yeah. Jacobin. I was not close. Anyway, so give us your plugs, where people can find you on the interwebs and uh order up the book yeah uh if you want to find me uh probably twitter is the best place you can find me at gavin mueller phd just to distinguish myself from all the other gavin muellers out there um and uh if you want to buy the book uh uh, you can find it on Amazon, of course,

uh, or you can order it directly from, uh, Verso books on their website. Uh, and I think, uh, if you pre-order it, you get a free ebook along with that. Oh, wow. Get the free ebook guys. You get the back. You want to get those collectors items too. You can say that you got it before before it was um i like catching books early because i like being the first ones to read them because then i can go

hey i read it first man i was there it's kind of like metallica if you had the first album the first four albums then you then you ran on it or something i don't know anyway guys uh so what motivated you gavin what made you go you know I'm going to write a book about this subject, and then we'll find out what that subject is here in a second. It was a long process, you know, but I was kind of paying attention to some of the debates going on about, you know, how work was changing with regards to technology, what the future was going to look like, and in particular, how automation was going to lead to this kind of future where there wasn't going to be any work left. And what would that mean? Would

we all be unemployed and starving? Would we all be relaxing and playing video games all day because we have a universal basic income? What will the future hold? And, you know, there was something that was bothering me about it is that a lot of these kinds of tales that were being spun were kind of vague about, you know, the actual technologies, what work was like. And in particular, it made me think about a lot of jobs I've had. I've had a lot of different jobs. And what would happen when I got a new piece of technology or I had to master a new piece of technology that was introduced to work? You know, I have to say, it never felt like I was being liberated from, you know, drudgery. It never felt like I was leading towards a kind of post-work utopia. It always felt like I had more to do, like I was being more tightly controlled and that the way that I'd figured out how to do my job with my coworkers was being kind of, you know, upended. And I was going to have to figure everything else out. And it was a lot of crappy jobs that I'm happy don't work anymore,

was kind of the motivation to say, all right, well, what is automation? Where does it come from? What does it do to work? What do we know from history? And also, what do we know in particular? And this is really the meat of the book. What have other workers done when they've been in similar situations, when new technologies have been come on the scene and altered their, the way they've done their jobs, how did they respond and what were the outcomes from that? And so that's really what this book is about, is about, you know, I go 200 years in the past and I try to bring it all the way forward to our kind of digital present and to really ask that. And what I found was, you know, a lot of workers had similar feelings to how I felt on the job. They didn't like when those new technologies were introduced and they struggled against them, organized against them. And that, you know, even when those struggles, you know, didn't really pan

out in an optimal way, there was still a lot of value there. And I think a lot that we can learn by better understanding how things went. And if we can do that, then we'll have like a more realistic vision of what the future might hold for us and how we can create a world of work that is, you know, much more rewarding for the majority of us. There you go. So you went back 200 years, and in the title, you talk about this group of people called the Luddites.

Do you want to tell us more about them? Yeah, so, you know, some of you guys might have heard the term Luddite before it's become a kind of, you know, a pejorative term for someone who's, like, got this irrational hatred of technology, you know, a pejorative term for someone who's like got this irrational hatred of technology, you know. So they, you know, they maybe you're you're you've got an older relative who, you know, can't do email and hates it and just rails about the Internet. Oh, they're a Luddite, right? They're they have this they're they're they're just against progress. They're stuck in the past, right? Well, the Luddites were actually real people that were weavers. They worked in the textile industry at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in England. We're talking about the second decade of the 19th century, 1811 to 1815 was it, and they were really active. So these guys were textile weavers. They made clothing, and they were skilled tradespeople. They were good at what they did.

What they did took a lot of ability. It took a lot of knowledge. And because they were skilled, because they had that knowledge, and because they were independent craftspeople, they had a lot of autonomy over their lives. They could control the pace of work. They were really big on the quality of their goods. They took a lot of pride in that. They wanted to make sure that women and children weren't being exploited in the work. And they also developed kind of thriving communities throughout the North and the Midlands of England, where you had towns that had lots of these weavers and other textile workers who were, you know, who were making up the town. They had a pretty good livelihood. They had enough leisure time to, you know, do have hobbies and be interesting people writing poetry, doing amateur biology. The kind of things that I think a lot of people would find to be a pretty copacetic lifestyle. But then they had a problem. And the problem was the Industrial Revolution is picking up steam. Textiles are one of the most important commodities of the time because everyone's got to wear clothes. And so people are looking at how to make textiles in a more in a cheaper way.

And this meant using new kinds of technologies to that that wouldn't require a really skilled, well-paid craftsperson to do. You could get, in fact, and they did women and children to it. And you can pay them very, very little. And so the Luddites were opposed to this, not only because of their own kind of personal pride, but they immediately recognized that this was a threat not only to their jobs, but to their entire mode of existence. Their entire communities were threatened by the fact that all of a sudden you weren't going to need these guys anymore. You weren't going to have to pay them what they were getting paid. You could rely on really low skilled, low paid labor. You would have much lower quality textiles, but people were, you know, that was they were going to they were going to go with that. So the Luddites struggled against that.

At first they said, look, we have, you know, parliament passed laws. You're not allowed to do this. We're going to go to parliament and say, hey, you agreed to protect us as workers, you know, tell them they got to knock off this factory stuff. Well, parliament is busy at the time. This is 1811, 1812. If you're American, you probably learned about the War of 1812, you know, where we fought the British. They actually burned down the White House. But, you know, that was only the tip of the iceberg because this was actually like a global conflict. You have England versus Napoleon on the continent. You have strife in in the colonies in the Caribbean. So this is like a global struggle, right, that's happening. This total tumult.

If you think today is crazy, go back 200 years ago and people were really losing their minds. So they're not really listening to these weavers from up north. They're like, whatever, guys, we've got bigger problems. In fact, maybe cheaper textiles are a good thing. So the Luddites had to take things into their own hands. And so what they decided to do was say, look, we've to get rid of these factories. We got to send a message. And they became famous for breaking machines, meaning they would go around to these factories, band together, go out at night. Sometimes they had these really big hammers and they'd go to

the factories, in particular factory owners that were really not listening to them and not kind of trying to negotiate or compromise. And they would just smash the machines and say, we're putting you out of business. And this got to a point where they were smashing a factory almost every night. And factory owners started to arm themselves to fight back, to defend their factories. Parliament starts getting alarmed because, you know, this is a time of strife. There's political radicalism in the air. They don't know what's going on.

Eventually, they send more troops to the north of England than they have fighting Napoleon in France because of how freaked out they are by the Luddites. One thing that I found in my research that was really interesting is in spite of very harsh policing measures, the Luddites. One thing that I found in my research that was really interesting is in spite of very harsh policing measures, the Luddites were very good at not talking to authorities, and they had a lot of trouble discovering who was actually a part of these raids on factories, because these Luddites were very good at keeping a secret. Their communities were well organized. They had a really strong basis of solidarity. And that was something that made them both very scary for the government at

the time, but also very heroic for a lot of the people who were struggling at the time. They said, wow, look at these people. They're really, they're really, you know, sticking it to the man. In fact, some of the Luddites, in addition to breaking machines, they wrote a lot of nasty letters. There's a book of those letters that is a really fun read, actually. But in some of those letters, they would refer to Robin Hood, because the legend of Robin Hood is also from that same region of England. So they're really drawing on these myths of struggling against the powers that be, of being for the little guy, and they really captured the imagination. But ultimately, their struggle came to an end. They were rolled up. Some of the leaders were arrested. They were tried and hanged.

And the Luddites became, they were harsh punishments back then. They did not pull punches. And the Luddites became kind of synonymous with this irrational opposition to progress. Because of course, after the Luddites go, the factories kick up, you know, we learn in history class in school, oh, the industrial revolution, it made so many great things. And we really, the modern world wouldn't be what it is today without that. And so the Luddites were these kind of weird, you know, these weird backwards people that struggled against progress and struggled against the Industrial Revolution. But I think there's actually something more to that, because I think

what they, I don't think they were actually struggling against progress, because what happened for them wasn't progress. Actually, what happened for a lot of people in the first generations of the Industrial Revolution was not so nice. Some more recent history has looked at living conditions for the generations during and after the Industrial Revolution. Living standards declined for two generations. So I got to ask, you know, if you're sitting there, you see your livelihood going away, you've got kids to feed, are you going to sit there when someone says, well, wait a couple generations? Yeah, you know, until then, there's going to be a lot of starvation. But after that, things are really going to pick up. I don't think so, right? So, you know,

in doing this reading, I developed a lot of sympathy for them. But I also really, not just for a kind of lost cause that, you know, maybe should have gone a different way, but also for the kind of ethos that they represented, that they should have control over how work is done, and that new technologies are a threat to that because it's not that they were against productivity. They were against a decline in working conditions, new forms of exploitation, decline in the quality of goods. And they were, I think, fighting for values that, you know, really should appeal to most people, if not most factory owners. This is, and this is a story for the ages because I can see, you know, from the Luddite story, the, you know, this going on all through the last 200 years. I mean, even up till recently, you know, you look at like the Napster and Spotify and, you know,

the eroding of music and everything else. So what are some of the things that we're facing now, or anything I missed in the history between here and now that you cite in the book that is an aspect of what we face now and into the future? Probably after the Luddites, you got about almost exactly 100 years later, you had the development of something called scientific management from a guy called Frederick W. Taylor. Right. Maybe you've heard of Taylorism. Right. That's that's named after him. What he was, he was kind of an industrial engineer, but he got his start work working on the shop floor. Right. He came from a wealthier background. And, you know, some people, you know,

they work a blue collar job, and they develop a kind of blue collar sensibility. Not Frederick Taylor. He worked in the factories, he did not like his co workers, he thought they were lazy, he thought they were dumb, he thought he was better than they were. And, you know, the feeling was mutual. They didn't really like him either. He was kind of a nervous personality. They describe it differently in the language 100 years ago, but he's kind of a sk have a problem, right? We need to revolutionize how people are working. Your problem is you don't actually know how anything in your factory is made. You own the factory, you buy the equipment, you have some kind of vague notion, but then you just let the workers do whatever they're going to do. And let me tell you, those workers are doing, they're pretty lazy. They're slow. They could be doing a better job. They could be doing it faster. Right. And so so he so what

what Taylor did is he got a stopwatch and he would just time these workers and he'd say, you got to go faster. You got to go faster. You got to work harder. Right. He would kind of invent these benchmarks. But then he would say, well, they're very scientific. But his major insight. Right. It was a lot of there was a lot of kind of dodginess around his his process. But I think his philosophy is what really, you know, was a breakthrough and kind of has, you know, led us to where we are today in that his his major philosophical breakthrough was if workers know how things are made and management doesn't, workers have the power. If management knows how things are made and workers don't, because maybe you said, okay, worker, you're only going to do one tiny little task. You're not going to do make the whole thing. We're just going to keep you focused on one thing at a time. And we're going to make sure you get

faster and faster, work harder and harder. Right. And we're going to take care of how things are made. We're going to plan everything out. Then management has all the power. Then, you know, if that worker is not doing his job, if he starts making a fuss, if he wants higher wages, if he wants to work at a slower pace, it's very easy to get rid of him because you're not going to get rid of all the knowledge that you need to make something. And so this philosophy just takes over manufacturing. It's really interesting, though, because it's a Taylor actually bites off more than he could chew. He decides he's going to go to an armory in Massachusetts where they're making munitions. He's like, I'm going to come in with my stopwatch and, you know, we'll make these

guys work hard. Well, these guys were organized and importantly, they had a union and their union had connections to politicians. So when they when Taylor comes in, says to a guy, all right, we're going to time you and make you start going faster. And the guy says, I'm not doing this. And they fire him. Everyone walks off the job. Right. The union calls Congress and Congress is like, well, what's this guy doing? He's kind of stirring the pot. He has to testify in front of Congress.

He's a nervous guy. It's it doesn't go well for him. And he actually never kind of recovers. Right. He kind of he has a health crisis and died shortly afterwards. But his philosophy survives him and other people pick it up and make it more scientific. And that fundamental element, you want to take control of the work process away from workers and put it in the hands of management is a motivating factor,

not just behind management, but in behind a lot of the technology that's introduced into work, right? If we think about, you know, so many of the jobs that have been created in the past decade, a lot of jobs that are not so good, but a lot of people are doing them. People need jobs, so they're working them. They're riding for Deliveroo. They're driving for Uber. They're working them. They're they're they're riding for Deliveroo. They're driving for Uber. They're working in an Amazon warehouse. Are they controlling the pace of work? Well, if you ask Uber, Uber will say, oh, yeah, that's an independent contractor. He's a small business person. Right. They can they can control their own pace of work, decide to work, do whatever they want. We just take a small cut. But of course, we know

we might want to be a little more skeptical of that because actually Uber is controlling that work process in a very minute way. It's got its algorithms telling people where to go. It's setting the prices. It's kicking people off the platform if they don't do it the way they're supposed to do it, all sorts of things. And so, you know, that fundamental philosophical conception by this, you know, nerdy little guy from 100 years ago is still operational in the most advanced kinds of digital technology in these new jobs that are emerging today. I just timed you and you did really well, but I think you can do it faster. So see if you can. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I just timed you and you did really well, but I think you can do it faster. So see if you can, no, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I had to do that joke. The Taylorisms. I'm going to be

walking around from here on out. Taylorisms. You've given me something new to torture my employees with. Thank you. So is, so what's your, what's your, and we'll talk about some more about AI and automation and stuff. So what do you surmise is, is there good, there evil, there bad? Do we need to make changes? What do you surmise we need to do with all this information you're covering in the book? Well, one thing I do is I look at the history, right? I mean, you know, the guys that Taylor was annoying and the Uber drivers of today are not the only examples.

This is continual, something that happens continually over the history of introduction of technology into work. The problem that I discovered is that, you know, for most of the history, particularly American history, you know, unions advocate for workers in a variety of ways. But one thing that they tended to leave off the negotiating table was control of the work process, right? Even when that became a major point of contention, right? So unions were happy to say, yeah, you need more money, you know, let's change your hours. Let's, you know, introduce some safety measures. But what they, what they, what the kind of line they never crossed was workers need to have more say over how work is done. We need to have workplaces that are more democratic, right? And so that's one thing that I think we could, that's one kind of takeaway, I think, from this book is to say, okay, this was a continually a demand from workers. I was reading about a very interesting strike, autoworkers in Lordstown in 1972, right? So this is the height of, you know, the, well, the, you know, Vietnam War, anti-war movement, counterculture, LSD, rock and roll, all of that

stuff. But you also have at that moment, new automation technologies being introduced into auto factories. At the time, General Motors is the Amazon.com of the day. It's the largest corporation of the world. Unlike Amazon, those jobs were like really good entry-level jobs. And even the workers who were unsatisfied with it recognized that. They were like, wow, I'm getting paid double what I'd get paid anywhere else. And yet there was something about that work that was just, they couldn't deal with. It's because the new machines kicked up the pace of work. Not only that, but when you work faster, you get sloppy, you make mistakes. And in an auto plant, those mistakes can be deadly. And they were. Injury rates are shooting up. But also people are looking down the barrel of a gun of,

am I going to tend this tiny machine pulling the crank the same way for 20 years. Yeah. You know, I can buy an extra car. I'll retire earlier than some of my friends, but you know, what condition is my body going to be in? What condition is my mind going to be in? These guys are looking at the counterculture and saying, people are asking more from society. Maybe we should too. Right. And, and so, you know, there's a, there's a kind of uh misnomer that like this division between hard hats and hippies and i really like this strike because it shows there was a lot of overlap in fact newsweek called the lordstown 1972 strike they called it industrial woodstock because they thought that these these guys it's funny you look at the picture now and

it's like i have longer hair than a lot of them. They were long hairs at that point wearing sunglasses. Wow. That's really hippies. Exactly. So but they were you know, they were auto workers, too. Right. They were totally blue collar guys. And and so they were rebelling against not only their management, but they also had to rebel against their unions because the unions weren't representing those grievances. So I think that's a big takeaway from this book, is that we got to think more about not just improving pay, which we should, that's important. I'm not saying it's not important, but also working conditions are important. Autonomy over work is super important. work is something that people spend a lot of their their life doing. And, you know, do we want them to be worn out, you know, stulted, you know, or do we want them to feel fulfilled in some way or to have some kind of stake in what they're doing? I think, you know, I've had a lot of jobs and the most satisfying ones, including, you know, teaching a university are the ones where I have a little bit more control, a little bit more

say over what I'm doing. And I feel like I can be, you know, creative and autonomous in what I'm doing. I'm worried that a lot of these new high tech jobs creates a very thin strata of people who are able to do that because they're programmers and a huge amount of people who have very very little freedom uh and and uh and and that i don't think that's going to create a very uh stable or enjoyable world in the future and and uh do you follow up how that affects mental health of people in being in that situation where they're constantly just chasing the cheese harder and harder being forced to i mean not, not so much. I mean, we do know that like there's a lot of kind of people who've theorized that things, you know, you and I are old enough to remember the old phrase, go and postal back in the 80s. Now we call them one of the mass shooter situation or something

like that. But this, you know, it was this kind of not a trend, but there was a series of incidents of people that worked in the postal industry who kind of ended up shooting up their workplace. And in fact, it wasn't just postal industry. It was other people. There were there was a few other cases of people working in kind of low level menial jobs doing this. They just kind of got stressed out. No one listened to them, and they took it out on the people around them, right? And so – and actually at that time, when you see people starting to go postal,

is actually when the post office introduced new forms of automation and really changed how postal work was being done, right? So I think there are clear kind of mental health issues there. I think there are also political issues, right? If work, I'm someone who thinks that people, yeah, you know, go out, vote or whatever, get involved in, you know, your community. But also I think, you know, we spend a lot of time at work. it's one of the most important parts of our life, and we need to have more say over how it goes. So that's one of my major interests is a kind of political interest, right? That we start asking those kind of questions that we're not satisfied with, you know, okay, an extra dollar an hour here and there

or whatever it is, but we have a kind of richer, more engagement with our workplaces. Yeah, and this brings up really good points about people need to be advocating for stuff. You know, Zappos was the company that I saw that was really concerned about its employees and them feeling fulfilled on the job by having more control. I know, I forget the name of the company, but there's a guy, I believe he's up in Washington or Oregon. He was the guy who cut his salary from like a million dollars down to $70,000 or he made all of his employees get $70,000 on livable wage in his area.

And I constantly see him on LinkedIn still talking about how much success that was and how fulfilled his employees were. And I talk a lot about how we've gone through 40 years of stagnant wages, but we've seen, like you say, the highest progression of automation and output from workers. And we've seen the dissolving of unions, the legislative attack on unions that have tried to take away their power, and then, you know, the fight for minimum wage. And then, you know, if you really understand what's going on with the billionaires, the Betsy DeVos,

Council on National Policy, and other groups that really want to enslave workers and pay them nothing, this is the people who fight against the $15 an hour, which really should be a whole lot higher when you think about it. Yeah, it's interesting, this whole thing. So is this something we just have to advocate for ourselves? Do we have to enlist and elect people to office that will make this fight for us legislatively? Or do we have to have CEOs that have to be visionaries and quit being dicks, basically?

Or where do we start? Well, my opinion is if you're going to wait for CEOs to stop being dicks, you're going to be waiting a long time. Actually, no, it's a great question because this is actually another piece of the book. It goes to the heart of the title. Workers aren't content to just sit and wait, right? They take matters into their own hands, just like the Luddites did.

So my kind of recommendation, including for like people who are on the political left, who want to improve the conditions of workers, who might have a lot of great ideas about, you know, new legislation and regulation, you know, I'm not opposed to any of that. But I think we also need to really pay close attention to what are workers doing, right? To me, a lot of the visions of these like fully automated, no working, no work utopias, that's the kind of mistake they made is they weren't really paying attention to work and what workers are doing. And I think when you start looking really closely, you'll see that workers are, especially around technology, they're adapting it to their own needs, they're subverting it, they're breaking it, sabotaging it for all sorts of reasons, right? One example that

I think is really powerful, because it's actually an example that is successful, more successful than the Luddites in a lot of ways. It's also a bit counterintuitive. One of my examples of Luddites in our current moment is actually open source computer programmers. So a lot of people might say, whoa, wait, Luddites hate technology. Computer geeks love technology. They're totally opposite. But Luddites didn't actually hate technology. What they hated was technology, you know, taking away their autonomy at work. And if you look at in the 90s, when I first got online, the big villain there was Bill Gates, Microsoft, the Borg. He was Darth Vader, right?

Now he's a cuddly guy you know helping the world or he's you know he is like a kind of q anon satan yeah evil vaccine guy but um uh but we don't need to get into that i just saw i just saw someone sent me like a meme this morning or actually it's from like hn it's like a real post that's going around oh yeah it shows like this giant uh antenna stick that you you could not put in a human body without having some serious problems of infection. And they were claiming that that was what's been injecting the Gates virus. So anyway. Yeah, you'd feel that when it went in.

So why was Bill Gates villainized in the 90s? Not villainized by crazy conspiracy theorists. He's villainized by computer geeks, right? He is a computer geek. He's like, here you should be their hero what was the problem bill gates sold software right he sold and he wanted people to buy software and there was a huge culture uh uh that had had roots back into computer science communities at universities of people that they were programming for fun. They made little programs or games to entertain each other because they wanted to learn, because there were a lot of other, that was what people were doing in the early days online. They're, you know, only really people who are really good at computers were online. And so,

and they, and they, so how did they do this? How did they, you know, form these communities? They did it by sharing the code. They would say, look, I have a program. This is how it works. You can look at the code, take a piece of it, copy paste, make your own program. That's fine. I don't care because we're doing it for a different reason. We're doing it because we want to make something cool. We want to enjoy, we want to learn. And we really think we'll make the world a better place this way. And what they did is they called it free and then open source software, because it was open. You could look at the code, the source code and learn from it and adapt it, right?

Bill Gates said, oh, this is a problem for me because I want you to buy software. I don't want you to build software. And if you're looking at the code, that's my that's my property. Right. That's that's my copyright. I'm going to I'm going to get you. Right. You guys are pirates. And so this guy, Richard Stallman, eccentric computer programmer in out of MIT created alternative licenses. He said, okay, copyright is one thing, but I have this new license. In fact, it's new GNU license. And it says anyone who takes anyone's, first of all, first rule, anyone can look at my, the code of my programs under this license. The second rule, you can look at it and you can take my code if you want it. If you like it and you want to use it in your program, that's fine. The second rule is if you use my code in your program, you have to follow my rules, not the rules of copyright, which means you have to let other people look at this. And so this creates an entire ecosystem of free and open source software where it's not corporations in control. It's grassroots computer programmers who are doing

it for themselves. And they get so many people involved and so passionate about this. They create an entire operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows, which is Linux, right? That's the origin of Linux. It's a 16 year old kid in Finland who posts online and says, anybody want to help me build an operating system? And thousands of people did. And they were, and they succeeded. And today, you know, maybe, maybe some of your viewers are, you know, use Linux on their computer. For a lot of people, that's a steep learning curve, but even if you don't use it, even if you've never heard of it, a lot of your hardware, like for instance, your router, a lot of the stuff

that's happening over at your ISP that gives you your internet, that's all running on Linux because it turns out a lot of those free and open source software programs that people made are really, really good pieces of software. So we have this community of people who rebel against the imposition of this copyright technology so that they can have control over their own conditions. And they're so successful that we still have open source software today. And in fact, one reason why programmers are some of the best paid, most independent jobs around is because there's so much open source software out there that you can't have a company like Apple or Microsoft saying, oh, all of our stuff has to be done on our code. You have to use these open source software libraries. It's also driven a ton of innovation. The guys that made Uber, you think they programmed that app from scratch? No, no, no. They were

snatching stuff off of GitHub and slapping it together with duct tape. Okay. That's driven the entire app economy. It comes from all these free and open source software communities. So it's a great example of something that happened recently. It wasn't even a bunch of unionized people. It was a kind of online sort of subculture that created something that has really shaped the future of technology and done so in ways that I think are pretty interesting. Not perfect, but open up a lot of possibilities for thinking about it. So these are our high-tech Luddites of today that I think we can learn a lot from. So the power is in the people then. The people need to advocate for

themselves. Well, I think if you could boil my philosophy down to anything, I would say power to the people would be one way to do it there you go i was just reading this morning and i brought this up uh amazon seeks to block workers from voting by mail in landmark union drive this is from uh theguardian.com and uh 5 000 workers in bessemer uh bessemer bessemer alabama to vote in landmark effort it's kind're, they're doing the same thing that we just said with our election, whether they don't want the, the mail-in ballots. Um, but here's another attempt at, uh, at what's going on. You know, uh, one thing, one problem we have in America, and this is, uh, one of the problems we have with both politics and, and workforce is, is this, um, this, you can make it, you can be successful sort of dream

where I want to become a millionaire someday. And you're like, I should throw rocks at billionaires that don't pay people enough, but someday I might be a billionaire, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut. And in the meantime, like the old, what's that online from Fight Club, we all think we all grew up in an age where we thought we would become millionaires and we're slowly finding out that we're not and we're getting very angry about it um but but uh you know there's there's some other books or authors that we've invited on that talk about rampant out of control capitalism capitalism is great it's a

great program but there is a point where it can become an oligarchy. In fact, we have, I think, someone up next in the next hour talking about oligarchies in America. And so it's kind of weird. We sell our soul out in it from American sense. We're like, well, maybe I shouldn't be a jerk to the millionaires because someday I'll be a millionaire and be a jerk and I'll just want to exploit people. Yeah. It's you know, this is the, the, you know, the American dream. Right. And I think I mean, it's a powerful ideology, right. To do exactly what you're saying, which is to take, to get people to kind of check their legitimate grievances, right. Because, well, things will work out in the end. I'll be rich in the end, et cetera, et cetera. I think fewer, I think that's,

that fewer and fewer people believe that that's the case, right? And I think that, you know, we're seeing a lot of kind of political activity on the left wing of the spectrum and a lot of, you know, I'm really pleased you mentioned this unionization drive at Amazon because it's super important for a lot of reasons. Because I think people are recognizing, you know, that it doesn't just happen by nature. That we have to fight for the things that we want to see in this world. And, you know, by not fighting or by losing those fights for a long time, we've gotten into a situation that we need to get out of, right? Amazon is a great example of a lot of the things I'm talking about, because one of the things that really drives unionization efforts or other forms of worker organization at Amazon is the working conditions, which are extremely constrained by technology. I don't know if you've learned much about what it takes to work at an Amazon warehouse. This is also a

great example of how automation is not going to lead to a post-work utopia. Amazon has tons of robots. Their workforce has increased by 50% this year. They've had experiments with fully automated warehouses that have not worked out very well at all. The dexterity required to pick is what they call it, to pick through packages, to sort them and to get them into where they need to be, to wrap them, et cetera, to box them, to do all those kinds of things. It's very hard for a robot to replicate. So instead, so what are those robots doing? What's that automation doing? It's not replacing people because we have thousands and thousands more people working in Amazon warehouses. Well, what it's doing is it's tightly controlling every move they make.

And Amazon takes this Taylorist stopwatch principle to the total extreme because what they do is they outfit their workers with trackers, scanners, sometimes wearables. So they know every precise movement that someone makes, right? And exactly how long it takes someone to do their job. They call that the rate. And oftentimes the warehouse will publicize the rate. And if you're on the bottom of that, so everyone, imagine that, imagine you're at your job and everyone knows you're the slowest every time. That really hurts, but it doesn't just hurt because if you're on the rate for too low, if you don't hit the minimum rate, you're gone. And it's very

hard to get around that. Although some workers have tried to figure out ways to kind of game the system. And what this allows Amazon to do is it allows them to rationalize and eliminate any kind of downtime that someone has. So you are constantly working. If you look at what people say about these places, they say it just drains you utterly, right? You are a shell of a person when you're done with your shift. You are so tired. You have no autonomy, right? And so these are poor-conditioned jobs.

The other thing is they make you work faster and faster. And just like with the autow auto workers that I mentioned before, that leads to lots of injuries. Amazon's the most dangerous workplace in America. And this was before COVID. And we know that now with COVID, these warehouses have been a source of outbreaks. The big warehouse in Minneapolis at one point had a COVID infection rate at four times the level of the rest of the community. And those people, they don't stay in the warehouse. What do they do? They go home, right? And then spread it throughout their communities. So, and Amazon, they cut every

corner you could imagine, right? Sure. Their press releases talk about, we've given out 2.5 billion in bonuses and we've got a hand washing stations and every, you know, every 10 feet or something, right? When you boil it down to per worker, it's, you know, people are getting an extra hundred bucks a year. It's nothing to really write home about. But the point is these working conditions are very bad and technology is a huge component of that. It's definitely the main part of the recipe to get people to have no control over what their own bodies are doing, right? So that they are as productive as possible. And what that means is they get injured. Amazon pressures them. You have to report to their medical center

and they're like, well, how could you know that the rotator cuff injury was from our package? Maybe maybe you banged it playing basketball. You know, it's hard to identify. It's not like your arms get severed. Right. It's a it's an injury that builds over time. They use every excuse in the book to avoid, you know, letting people have time off. If you take time off, that can be a demerit and cost you your job. But they also have no problem running through people just like ringing them out. Turnover at an Amazon warehouse is 100%, which means their entire workforce in their warehouse will be different in a year. That means no one lasts more than nine months to a year. So and and they don't care. You know, one thing that I've, when I've talked to people who worked at Amazon warehouses, one thing they say is this is the easiest job to

get I've ever had. You know, you show up, you fill out a form. They don't, they don't even look at it. They don't care because you're just a piece of meat to them and they know you're going to be gone in a few months anyway. So I don't think this is a good way forward because this is really what we're looking at as far as the future of work. We're not looking at living like the Jetsons or Star Trek. We're looking at Amazon workers. This is where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created. They pay, again, they pay better than working at Dollar General or something like that in a lot of places. But people are totally wrecked by them and they have no say over what they're doing.

And Amazon, being a high tech company, is also drawing on some of the most high tech surveillance capabilities. They've literally hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which was used to break unions 150 years ago in extremely violent ways. But they're surveilling everyone, both at the Amazon warehouse, as well as at Whole Foods, because they want to snap, snip any kind of unionization or organizing in the butt. And I think this is what we really have to see is technology is actually being used as a weapon to really immiserate people and to prevent them from, you know, living the lives that I think almost anyone would say people deserve to live. And if that's the case, we have to struggle not just against the companies, but we have to struggle against a lot of the technologies that these companies have been using on their workers. Wow, that's just extraordinary and like i say i have friends that will be like you know they'll they'll talk

about how great jeff bezos is and and they'll talk about how great uh elon musk is and i'm like i you know they really don't seem like all that sort of guy you know a lot of people still uh talk about how great steve jobs was and if you knew steve jobs he's incredible prick yeah uh and an asshole and and you know destroyed a lot of people i mean the the thing that he did where he regulated people's wages or the ability to go to other places in silicon valley was a huge scandal and they still do that today the companies still collude because that's again that's a way to you if you force people to stay you control them a bit more right um they we google got in trouble for it a few years ago but there's every indication That's a way to you. If you force people to stay, you control them a bit more. Right.

We Google got in trouble for it a few years ago, but there's every indication that this kind of collusion continues. I don't think the Trump administration was going to bother with those things. We'll see if Biden changes. But Silicon Valley is very the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley are very copacetic. So so we'll have to see. One thing that I've learned a lot from is I live in Europe now. And some things are different. Some things are the same, right? Amazon warehouses are here. They have a lot of the same problems. But what they do have that we don't, that Americans, most Americans don't benefit from, is they have a lot of regulations around privacy and around how technology can be used that makes it so these companies can't just do whatever they want. And if they break the rules, they get in trouble.

They have to pay fines. They have to change the way they do things. And I think that's one really nice thing to see because a lot of times, you know, we talk about, well, wouldn't it be nice if work was like this or like that, or, you know, politics were different. But we're kind of just coming up with a kind of fantasy that, you know, what if everything was different, right? But here, we actually have an example of in reality, it is different. It doesn't have to be the way it is in the US, you know, they have more humane conditions here. Again, it's not perfect. There are problems. Right. And I think there will continue to be problems. But one. But, you know, we there's much less inequality and and working conditions are better. Wages are better. And a lot of the technology, particularly surveillance technology. There are strong kind of prohibitions

about that. In France, there's actually one kind of interesting thing I learned too. I'm an academic. I buy a lot of books. When I first moved to the Netherlands, they didn't even have Amazon, so I couldn't buy stuff there. But when they did get it, the books weren't cheap. I was so used to these massive cost cuts in Amazon, you go on, you could probably find my book for, you know, less than the publishers selling it on Amazon. That's because they, they deliberately sell books at a loss to drive out competitors, drive out, you know, the small bookstores that when I was younger, that was like a big part in getting really inspired and getting passionate about reading and learning. And here, you know,

in France, they actually have a law that you're not allowed to sell books below cost. And it's specifically to protect independent bookstores who don't have that option that a big player like Amazon does. So it's been very educational. I would say Europe, France in particular, because France actually stopped the Industrial Revolution for a generation. England failed, but France won for a little bit, but is a much more kind of Luddite continent. And I think that it makes the quality of life much better. I think, you know, I really wish that my friends and family back home could have some of the benefits that I do here. And just not just me personally,

but you see around people are happier, you have more leisure time, you have less anxiety about, you know, how am I going to pay my bills? What if I get hurt? You know, what's my insurance going to be like? Again, it's not perfect. It's maybe not even trending in a great way. But it is a real example of how things even in a kind of advanced capitalist economy could be a little bit better. This has been awesome, man. You know, I saw the,

I saw stories in France and I can't remember what movie was, maybe it was a Michael Moore movie, but they, they showed about how in France and other European countries, like the companies that are based here gladly do business over there and they pay much more benefits, much more health insurance. You know, some of these countries even have, if you're pregnant as a mother, they have someone who comes by and helps after birth, they come by and help,

they give them time off. The quality of life is just so much better. And, you know, over here, people will be like, well, then, you know, they'll have to lay off more people and they won't do business here. Well, they're, they're gladly doing business in these other countries and they're still making a profit doing fine they're they're willing to to to do this um it was funny when you were talking about the amazon uh work um thing that's going on there it reminded me a lot of foxconn i'm like maybe that's what we're headed to we're all just gonna be like foxconn like eventually amazon just be like you don't have to go home. You can sleep in the cots with everybody else in the rooms there. Yeah. I think this is one thing that

technology also does is it makes it a lot easier to globalize your production. So that means, yeah, why would you make stuff? It is an issue that Europe can face and struggles with, is that good working conditions, companies want to work where they're worse. So, you know, why pay American wages when you can, you know, move overseas? And technology is a big part of how that happens, of how companies coordinate these global supply chains, how they manage, you know, the logistics of all that happens, of how companies coordinate these global supply chains, how they manage, you know, the logistics of all that. And so it's not that it's just a political decision. It's also, you know, technology is involved in that. But what that does is, yeah, it's going to create a kind of pressure, downward pressure, right? Right now, China, you know, their economy is,

you know, very different than it was even 10 years ago. They actually have a huge middle class now. But their working conditions, they have this system called 996. You have to work nine hours a day, six days a week is the standard. And, you know, and that seems shocking to us. And yet, when I think about some times that I was scraping to get by, I probably wasn't too far from those kinds of conditions where they weren't always quantified. But if I had actually bothered to sit down, I don't think I would have wanted to do this and map out like how much work am I actually doing? You know, I don't think I would have looked much better, you know, if I'm working multiple jobs. I've got some freelance position. I've got to, you know, prepare for a lot of meetings or classes or something like that.

So. So, yeah, I mean, we're you know, how is this stuff going to change? I think that, you know, yeah, we need to ask for, you know, better regulations, we need to kind of have changes in the political establishment. But I think we need a kind of deeper, more granular changes, which means we need to kind of start changing workplaces. And that's going to come from workers who are fed up with their conditions, and who also have a good understanding of how things work, where they are. And when we start listening to them and helping, not just telling them what to do, but actually watching what they're already doing and help to kind of accelerate those kinds of things. Right. For them to say, look, I worked at Amazon. I know all the abusive technology that we need to reform.

I'll tell you all about it. I know how it works. Those are the kinds of things where we can start making progress. My worry is, you know, even if we had, I mean, it's not the biggest worry, it'd be a big improvement, but some of the failings of past moments in history that I talk about in my book, where you did have really strong kind of pro-worker movements who were politically influential is, again, like I mentioned before, those kinds of conditions were left off the table. The people who were running those movements were like, well, technology is just neutral and it's going to increase productivity and we're all benefit. And it turned out that wasn't the case, right? That was

a mistake. So we need to kind of put put those kinds of issues back on the table. Right. That's kind of one of my main agendas in writing this book is to try and get get those kinds of issues to for. Yeah, I want politicians to talk about them, but I'm really interested in everyday people talking about them and understanding how they can kind of connect with other people who are having similar problems. And, you know, let's start working through it, start organizing, you know, is it unionizing or doing other things to kind of chip away at some of this accumulated power by these massive corporations? And that's really important, the power back to the people, because one of the problems we have, especially with Citizens United, is there's more and more of these corporations that own these politicians and they just play to their donor class.

As we go out, Gavin, this has been a wonderful discussion, and I encourage everyone to pick up the book. Give us your plugs so that people can order the book up from you and where to find more about you on the interwebs. Yeah, I guess the easiest way is you can – Breaking Things at Work is published by Verso. You can order it from the Verso website if you want to avoid the Jeff Bezos Borg. At the same time, you know, no one no one's hands are perfectly clean. So if you go on Amazon and preorder it, I think it boosts my stats a bit, which can help me out a little. I confess, I don't know how all of this works, but other people told me this. I'll leave it up to anyone who wants to purchase it. You may eventually, my first book I wrote was about, based on my dissertation, and it was about piracy. Not to my knowledge is my book available that way, but I imagine it will only be a matter of time, not necessarily endorsing that, but I think my number one priority is for people to read it. You know, I don't, I'm not anticipating,

you know, I've left the American dream behind, Chris. I'm not thinking I'm going to get to become a millionaire off of this one. I'm really in it because I think that the research in the book is interesting to people. Their stories are interesting and relevant to people. And I just want people to read it and check it out. If you want to follow me, Twitter's probably the best place. You know, I have a Facebook too, but I'm trying to use that less and less. I don't have, I don't actually have a LinkedIn because I'm not very professional in that way, I guess. But Twitter, you can find me, Gavin Mueller, Ph.D. You can Google me.

You'll find all sorts of things I don't want you to find about me. There was an alt-right hit job on me a few years back. Oh, wow. I think that's gone down in the search rankings over time. Don't pay attention to that stuff. But you can find me on Twitter. You can find my website, gavinmuller.com. You can email me, gavinmuller, at Gmail. I really do try to respond, you know, and I always appreciate hearing from people. But yeah, you know, other than that, yeah. You know, I encourage you guys

to, I'm not, I'm not your guru, you know, I'm just another guy here trying to figure out things like everyone else. I, what I would really love to hear is, you know, if any readers have their own experiences with technology at work, where they had to struggle with something, solutions they came up with, maybe even, you know, things, you know, breaking a few rules or laws. I'm not going to snitch. I'm not that guy. But I'm really interested in those kind of experiences, too. I'm kind of, you know, I want to know what everyday people are doing. So. So, yeah, again, I'm really happy to be here. I enjoyed my conversation with you tonight, Chris. And, you know, I hope people check out the book and learn a little bit about kind of the history of work in technology and the struggles that have taken place.

And maybe we can all work together on creating a future that benefits a lot more, that benefits the majority of us, right, instead of a slim minority. There you go, guys. All encapsulated in one big pitch there. Gavin, thank you very much for spending some time and sharing us the details of your book. Thank you very much, Chris. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Me too. Pick up his book, Breaking Things That the luddites are right about you about why let me do that over breaking things at work the luddites are right about why you hate your job by gavin mueller uh check it out order it up you know it's funny when i say that title breaking things at work remember that old meme from like the early days of the internet where that guy would go crazy and he just broke his whole cue hole and he broke you know keyboard over the monitor and stuff oh yeah oh yeah i have

a great i have a great collection of those memes there's actually a lot of garfield uh versus a computer uh comics that i that's my like kind of particular niche that i really enjoy garfield with the chainsaw on the computer yeah that's what that always reminds me of, breaking things at work. So check it out, guys. Order it up and get the advanced copy. It'll be out on February 9th, 2021. So coming up here, I think, another week or two. Be sure to grab that. Also,

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