>>2218784>Programmers today are continuing the historical trend of building computers explicitly for bourgeois management of plantation slave laborer dynamics.>https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/About
Babbage's designs for computing machines:
<Their architectures directly encoded economist Adam Smith’s theories of labor division and borrowed core functionality from technologies of labor control already in use. The engines were themselves tools for labor control, automating and disciplining not manual but mental labor.[3]<[3]Of course, this division itself is fraught and often applied more to connote the status of labor than the capacities required to perform it.A structure that the author asserts to be mostly bullshit is somehow followed by the architecture designs of computing engines of Babbage. Wouldn't you expect these designs to be wonky crap, then? And in what ways do these designs follow, the author never explains. Perhaps what the author meant by architecture is more than the physicality but includes how Babbage himself intended to use those calculating devices. But even that doesn't quite work because calculating devices have very wide applicability, and Babbage also thought about using them in various contexts.
So what can we preserve from the argument is this: When the author says a thing has a bad structure, a bad architecture, the meaning is that
a person with bad intent can use that thing in bad ways, which is trivially true for most things with broad applicability. For example, a screwdriver has an embedded architecture of racism if a racist can use this to stab somebody for racist reasons…
<In legislation and labor policy, the concept of freedom is largely rooted in the contract: the textually stipulated (in)ability for people to come and go, to agree to terms and walk away from them, backed by law and ultimately state violence.[4]<[4]Thank you to Veena Dubal for this insight and framing.I am of course in full agreement with this bit, as is
any Marxist or Anarchist. I just find it hilarious that this statement gets a source, as if this could not have been known to the author otherwise.
<Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive.Assertion without much elaboration. The first footnote with a source that follows is about the
differences between plantation slavery and industrial work. Then some more footnotes with sources come. (Clicking stuff gives me paywall, 404, paywall or javascript fuckery I don't know, and buy a book.) These may include strong points somewhere, but if so, the author doesn't really bring them to the reader. The author concludes:
<This refusal to engage with the industrial factory’s relationship to the plantation, in turn, produces a view of work and the history of industrialization that is delinked from practices of racial domination.Let's assume for the sake of argument that the sources are right about everything, is the author's conclusion justified? The claim:
1. It is not well known that the capitalists in the west took inspiration from slavery, big time, when devising means to terrorize white workers.
2. Therefore (?) we conclude scholars have not emphasized enough the particular horrors of racial domination.
Capitalists treat people like shit regardless of race, the author's response is: How do we make it about race.
The author claims "Babbage contributed considerably" to technological development. But this is not so clear actually. Neither his Difference Engine nor Analytical Engine were finished (as the author also notes). He inspired some of the people who built working machines, but I think that would have happened anyway and around the same time.
<There are clear parallels between Babbage’s data desires and the data and metrics that plantation owners, managers, and overseers shaped plantation labor practices to collect. Both advise creating records on the number of workers needed to complete a task and tracking their speed, individual outputs per day and per task, the tools and implements required to complete work, and the capacities required to accomplish a given effort.Argument by endless repetition. Somehow the factory is infused with spooky slave-plantation stuff, because the author says so, over and over.
But what would have been different in the factories without the supposed imports of slaver's notions the author never tells us.
<Babbage also proposed mechanisms of worker valuation. In what labor scholar Harry Braverman termed the “Babbage principle,” Babbage detailed how dividing a complex task into simpler component parts, and designating these simpler parts “low skilled,” could justify paying the people who perform each part less.Justification would be a form of rhetoric. But Babbage is not giving advice in rhetoric with his principle. Here is the most simple model for the
Babbage principle: There are two tasks, one that everyone can do and one that only trained specialists can do. Whether the training is financed by the specific employer, by the trainees, by the public at large, or any mixture, the training is a cost
to society. If we want to keep the training costs to a minimum it follows that we should not employ the specialists outside their specialty, because otherwise we would have to train a higher number. Of course we might have other goals in tension with this, like reducing the psychic damage from one-sided work that Adam Smith already criticized (the author claims Smith "appreciated" deskilling lol), but
the Babbage principle is not specific to capitalism.
Then the author mentions
Babbage's stance against slavery. But this isn't repeated on and on like the plantation-in-your-computer woo and the author correctly guessed that almost nobody will read this shit until this point, so the author's
"argument
" wins in the vibe-ocracy. (By the way, I have my doubts you read the essay to the end, and I will be certain of it if you don't reply to this specific paragraph.)
Again and again, the author puts "skilled" in sarcastic quotation marks, as if this proved it an entirely arbitrary concept. Where I work the "skilled" can do the things the "unskilled" cannot do and not vice-versa.
<Babbage’s impulse not only to surveil, as we’ve already seen, but to automate surveillance is evident elsewhere. Among his many mechanical contributions is an early time clock, the “tell-tale,” which worked to record a worker’s presence or absence and “informed the owner whether the man has missed any.”A sensible invention and things like this will also exist under communism.
<As we see with Babbage’s engines, this landscape presumes the presence of plantation technologies of labor division, surveillance, and control “from above”: Babbage’s engines “work” only within these contexts.This is just as true of Babbage's engines as of your pocket calculator. In other words: Not true at all.
I would think that a shitpost if it weren't so long.
The author may be an intellectual, but surely is not intelligent. Very poorly argued piece, though I understand how it might look otherwise to a less intelligent person who is just skimming it, so you have my empathy.