Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff

In trying to face down the union, Google’s “director of people operations” (a failed euphemism for human resources if ever there was one) made a predictable argument for technology’s ability to solve labor problems by allowing the company to engage “directly with all our employees”—much in the fashion that Amazon engages “directly” with its customers, each individually. What the technologists working at the very heart of the world’s biggest tech companies realize, however, is just how disempowering such individuation can be. They are the ones programming the platforms that do this to us, so they’re more than aware of what it means for themselves. As one member of the union’s executive council explained, Google’s own actions have generated this feedback. As the engineer explains this irony, “sometimes the boss is the best organizer.”