The Luddite

Computers are general-purpose machines capable of doing many simple tasks very quickly. They are good at taking a lot of inputs, way more than a human being could consume, and turning them into something we can understand. They take a complex world, with all its messiness, and condense it into a number, graph, dashboard, etc.

Consider the Hedonometer, created and maintained by the Vermont Complex Systems Center at UVM. This is a really good use of computers. It takes in tens of millions of tweets every day, and from those, outputs a single measurement of how happy we are, as a whole, on that day. The results are easily digestible and contain immediate insights for even the most casual reader.

This is a screenshot taken April 18, 2023. Even at first glance, you can instantly make conclusions – holidays make us very happy; disasters, shootings, and wars are bad; 2020 sucked, and so on.

Compare that to calling customer service. In the last couple decades, companies have increasingly used some sort of automated customer service support, turning what could and should be a simple human interaction into an inexplicable labyrinthian nightmare. We’re asked to state the reason for our call to a robot, only to have it tell us something incorrect back, ask us “is that correct?," and have to slowly and increasingly firmly say “NO."

What went wrong? Why is it that the UVM Complex Systems Center can handle tens of millions of tweets every day, delighting us with the results, while calling the nearest Home Depot leaves us livid? Fielding customer calls is such a comparatively simpler task. Home Depot made some $17 billion dollars in profits in 2022 – surely, they can afford to solve this problem.

This comparison hides the structural difference between the two projects, and how we sit in relation to the technologies’ creators.

If our model of a computer is that it takes the world then simplifies it for its user, then I argue Home Depot actually has solved the problem – just not for us. We are the world, not the users. Computers simplify the world, and being simplified can be an unpleasant user experience.

This is why capitalism, and any market-based economy to some extent, will inevitably create so much of its technology backwards. It crafts a world in which participating in the economy is adversarial. The atomic unit of the economy is a sale, and while the person selling something wants the highest price for the lowest cost, the person buying it wants the lowest price and the most service, i.e. cost. When I call Home Depot because my new washing machine broke, they do not want to help me, because that costs them money. It creates complexity for them, so they put a computer in front of those of us calling to complain about our broken washing machines, putting us through that bad user experience of being simplified.

Examples of this go far beyond customer service phone numbers. When you buy something and it doesn’t tell you the fees and shipping until the very end, that’s a backwards use of technology; the company is using technology to simplify their sales funnel at your expense, forcing you to carefully examine every option rather than being presented with a simple, digestible summary like a good computer program should. They're tricking you with an artificially low price and hoping once you’ve gone through the annoying checkout process (the data from which they can sell), you’re too committed to back out over an extra fee.

Online dating apps like Tinder make their money by users using their app, through subscriptions or other in-app purchases. This incentivizes Tinder to keep you on the app, meaning they are incentivized to sabotage your search for the perfect partner, after which most people will presumably leave Tinder. This is why dating apps are like a game that presents you with as many options as fast as possible. This is not how people actually interact, or how you get to know a potential romantic partner. These apps present people with an artificial bounty of options, only to leave them feeling empty and hopeless as the process goes on. Instead of taking many inputs and meaningfully simplifying them for the user, Tinder aggregates inputs and purposefully barrages users with them. It is a backwards piece of technology that maximizes engagement and reduces actual chances of success, but because everyone else now uses online dating, it has become a necessary part of the experience.

In fact, most social media is backwards technology. You fill out a profile, which tells Facebook et al your demographic information, and they use that to simplify targeting you with their recommendations and ads. From the user perspective, social media is an algorithmic bombardment of unrelated topics designed to keep you engaged and sell you stuff. From the social media company’s perspective, this process simplifies users into well-understood units for advertising.

All these dynamics emerge from the adversarial nature of a market transaction. Advocates of markets here might even be willing to concede this point, but then argue that this simply underscores the importance of competition, which forces companies to improve upon that experience. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true — that competition will force companies to improve upon the default negative user experience — why should we settle for a system that starts off with bad computer technologies and improves from there? Why default to hostile technology, only to improve upon it out of fear that others might make slightly less hostile technology than you? When I write one of these posts, I don’t start with a purposefully bad one, only to match the level of the post to the latest piece of Harry Potter fan-fiction erotica, which I assume is my primary competition. Good work happens when you actually try to do your best, ideally in collaboration with others. This is something a child could tell you that, for some reason, is forgotten in the process of learning economics.

Further consider that, in a capitalist firm, the workers themselves are not decision-makers, meaning they too end up being simplified. Unlike a theoretical economy of worker-owned cooperatives participating in some sort of market, which would still suffer from the dynamic described above, capitalist firms are owned by shareholders often not involved in actually doing the job itself. These owners view labor as complexity to be managed, not individuals or even meaningful stakeholders. The people who get to decide and implement technologies will treat them as such.

This is why the work-from-home era started by COVID has also led to a boom in spyware for bosses. There has been a barrage of articles in outlets like Wired, the New York Times, CBS, and many more bordering on outrage at the proliferation of spying. This kind of technology contributes nothing to our society. It exists because it allows company owners to simplify the complexities of labor. It is a manifestation of the hierarchies into which we organize ourselves, rather than a productive contribution to our collective material well-being, which I am led to believe is the point of the economy.

Perhaps most infamously, we have the examples of Amazon warehouses. Amazon invests heavily in technology that controls and tracks every second of every warehouse worker. Technology is supposed to make our lives better, and yet, from Vice:

Amazon tracks and records every minute of "time off task" (which it calls TOT) with radio-frequency handheld scanners that warehouse associates use to track customer packages.

[...] [W]orkers can receive a written warning for accumulating 30 minutes of time off task in a day one time in a rolling one-year period. They can be fired if they accumulate 120 minutes of time off task in a single day or if they have accumulated 30 minutes of time off task on three separate days in a one-year period. Examples and sample spreadsheets provided in the documents show Amazon tracking, down to the minute, the amount of time individual workers spent in the bathroom and infractions such as "talking to another Amazon associate," going to the wrong floor of a warehouse, and, as an example, an 11-minute period where a worker "does not remember" what they were doing.

A set of guidelines for TOT reveals that Amazon asked managers at JFK8 in 2019 to use a tracking tool every shift to identify a “top offender," the person who accumulated the most time off task in a shift as calculated by inactivity on their item scanner. The manager was then required to ask the top offender about their whereabouts for each time stamp registered in the system as unproductive, and discipline them when appropriate. Each shift “managers will use the TOT tool to identify and engage the top offender per manager," the guidelines say. As an example of this, Amazon shows a summary of how a manager might ask their employees to account for how long they used the bathroom at a certain time of day: "Amazon Associate understands the process. AA stated he was in the bathroom for the 10 TOT. Coached AA on the TOT policy." The New York Times first reported that Amazon tracks TOT “top offenders" at JFK8.

While Amazon managers were trained to write up the “top offender" per shift, they could interrogate at least three workers about their whereabouts per shift, the documents show. A template for a worker who registered 47 minutes of time off task on March 17, 2019 shows that Amazon’s tool registered the five blocks of time as TOT. Subsequently a manager asked the worker for an explanation for what they were doing during each block of time.

This is a fucking nightmare. It is such a backwards use of computers that it is grotesque. I have nothing but the deepest contempt for any software engineer working on technology that has a hard-coded quota of human suffering, in this case enforced by ensuring that managers write up at least one worker per shift. This is the explicit rejection of worker humanity, replacing it with automated human suffering. If you write code for this, or something substantially like this, you are a bad person.

Most examples are less shocking, but these backwards hierarchical technologies exist everywhere, and they make lives worse. Consider this USPS tracking system, which tracks where each carrier is at all times. This is how PostalReporter.com, interviewing a supervisor, explains how it works:

In Layton, DMS helps support carriers on their routes. “When you see someone struggling … you can go out and identify what issue that carrier is having," said Stricklan"

Now take a look at some comments:

You can clearly see what is happening here. To the supervisor, this provides a neat, clean interface from which to understand what their workers are doing — how computer technology is supposed to work — but to the workers, and to anyone else who has ever had a job, it is obvious bullshit that only makes their lives worse. In other words, it's backwards.

I have written about this before, but we do have examples of computer technologies that work wonderfully well. I started this with the Hedonometer, but there are more, and they don’t necessarily have to come from academic institutions. They tend to be less hierarchical, non-adversarial, and often based on open-source protocols. Podcasts, for example, are released via RSS, allowing anyone to release a podcast or create a podcast app, meaning the consumers themselves set up the information flow. This results in a much better and healthier user experience. Compare that to YouTube, which is fundamentally similar service but owned by one company, and which famously leads people down right-wing pipelines, quite literally ruining lives solely to keep us engaged.

Technologies are reflections of the organizations that make them. If we continue to organize our society around maximizing corporate profit, then our technologies will reflect capitalist assumptions that consumers and workers are resources to be managed and exploited. If we want computers to be helpful and pleasant, if we want them to help us understand and interact with the world, we must make computer technologies in collaborative environments, otherwise we will continue to find ourselves being unpleasantly simplified on the wrong end of the computer.