This is the main argument of my forthcoming book "Knowledge Capital", but fleshed out and with more argument, which I hope will be out by the end of the year.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@redlibrarian/116215686856101373
I had the privilege of having a good mentor when I was fresh out of school. In a non-serious jovial way he one time mentioned that developers usually fall into one of two buckets: artists and plumbers. I was an artist back then, probably still am, but I made my peace with the plumbing work since there was so much to do.
I guess where I'm going with this is both the artists and plumbers are getting squeezed, but the artists have it extra hard right now. Try to be understanding.
Hm. I think what I’m saying is “artists v. plumbers” is a false distinction, and politically a dead end.
"It was black text in an Excel spreadsheet file" - where did they even find these guys?
But creative and cognitive workers, who are now finding themselves no-longer-protected from the dehumanizing processes of subsumption, need to recognize their immunity was only ever at the whim of capital, and realize that they are not naturally privileged over other workers, but are the same. There must be a slogan about workers everywhere uniting something something.
Marx calls the expansion of capitalist wrecking logic into previously left-alone areas of human work "subsumption", and this process won't stop until the last bit of surplus value is wrung out of the production process. The only way to stop it, the only chance of being crafts-people again, is revolution.
#LB . "In my 30 years as a software engineer I have always seen myself as a craftsman..." I have sympathy for the feelings of programmers, but I think what hasn't been made explicit yet is the fact that what AI is doing to them (and to writers, artists, professors, etc) is what capital has *already done* to other workers. Programmers have only been allowed to feel like craftsmen for the last few decades because capital's attention was elsewhere, ruining other workers' livelihoods.
In my 30 years as a software engineer I have always seen myself as a craftsman. Someone who takes raw ingredients and shapes, forms and molds them into what the client desires, much like a carpenter.
My job is as much artistry as it is mechanics, clearly visible in how I have experienced artistic blocks many times in my career.
Part of what has demoralized me so in this industry pivot towards genAI is seeing so many devs who I thought felt the same show careless abandon for that artistry.
/1
At sookrams for a beer and calligraphy night and there is a woman here giving full Mazzy Star and I am here for it as the kids say.
I have all my projects checked into a private Codeberg repository, including my org-mode GTD shit, with a couple of custom elisp commands to check in/check out/update buffers, and a second repo with my emacs config (which is tricky, because I'm bouncing back and forth between a pinetab2, a macbook, and a Windows 10 machine...).
ǝʌɐp
Jocelynephiliac 