> I have trouble comprehending what this piece provides beyond bullshit slinging at big tech. Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?
I think the following paragraphs provide useful non-hypocritical/non-"jealous" commentary, and were the most thought-provoking for me:
> But even with stronger regulations, the manifold problems that these tech giants create for society will persist. Unlike the industrial firms that Marx and Smith wrote about, tech firms like Google differ in one key aspect: how they turn a profit. Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise. No additional labor is needed for each unit of output; profit thus becomes fundamentally extractive, or “unproductive” as Marx, or even classical economists like Smith and Ricardo, would say. For companies like Google, rent comes from owning the infrastructure through which we live our digital lives. The vast majority of Google’s windfall profits—$60 billion in 2022—come from rents.
[...]
> In the end, the tech workers themselves are not responsible for the proliferation of bullshit. Nevertheless, the work they do (or don’t do) reveals that the problem, at its core, lies in the business model of the platform economy, one that depends not on productive labor but on rents. In our present economic paradigm, rents are undifferentiated from productive work where the creation of surplus value vis-à-vis the exploitation of labor lies at the heart of profitability. Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.
(emphasis mine)
That rent-based profits allow these companies to retain vast numbers of bullshit-producing workers is less significant to me than the fact that these profits are extracted from everyday internet users. We are all made poorer from the value that Google et al are extracting from us, when they don't need that value to actually provide the services we are using. But their market dominance allows them to spend some of those profits in the service of artificially maintaining dominance, rather than on improving those services, or by extracting less value to provide the same services at a lower "cost" to us.