Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

tags

Automation Deskilling

Historical development of computing alongside abolition and labour struggles. Interesting discussion of “skill” as constituted by the judgments of capital and employers, reminds of “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies

Notes

Charles Babbage, a vocal champion for the concerns of the emerging industrial capitalist class who condemned organized workers and viewed democracy and capitalism as incompatible.

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Babbage’s proto- Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life attempting to build.

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envisioned as tools for automating and disciplining labor.

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computational thinking historically emerges as a mode of control during the “age of abolition,”

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sought alternatives to enslaved Black labor—particularly the question of how to control white industrial workers who persistently rebelled against industrialization,

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the contract as proof that workers freely chose such conditions.

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conditions of bondage on the plantation de�ned the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classi�ed as “free.”

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paraphernalia of the new industrial discipline bore … a striking resemblance to that of the slave plantation. Centralized surveillance, regimentation, division of labor, strictly controlled work pace, written rules and regulations were all standards pursued by every planter.”

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power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”

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The fragmentation of production, whether in the �eld or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who bene�t from de�ning and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.”

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standardized and measurable system that tasks workers primarily with compliance.

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plantation logics that view workers as quanti�able, fungible, and amenable to being arranged and rearranged from above.

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By representing people and their activities as quanti�able commodities, those wishing to exert control can do so while retaining plausible deniability about the collateral consequences of their decisions.

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fantasies of abstract mechanical control:

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“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.

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Valuation, for Babbage, was pegged to classi�cations of “skill,” which was assessed based on the scope of the task performed—a scope dictated by the employer via labor division.

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Babbage acknowledges that skill, like plantation valuation, is ultimately an index of how much pro�t a person is assumed to be able to produce. It is a re�ection of the imperatives and judgment of capital, not the person who performs the work or the nature of the work they perform.

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designations of skill—and the power that capital claims to de�ne what is and is not “skilled”—work to produce and naturalize conditions of bondage, creating a hierarchy of “deservedness” that justi�es conditions of precarity and domination for the “unskilled.”

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Racial categories structure who is deemed able to possess skill to begin with, while marking a lack of skill as a condition of unfreedom and thus a condition of Blackness.

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claiming for employers the right to de�ne “skill,” alongside the right to structure the labor processes in order to strip as much “skill” as possible from “free” workers. Such practices of “deskilling,” theorized by Babbage, serve to accomplish and naturalize signi�cant feats of control and degradation while maintaining the presumption of freedom.

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championing industry and capitalism was not a commonsense position during the early to mid- nineteenth century, when Babbage was working.

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The viability of “free” industrial labor was not settled at that time, even as it became increasingly central to British interests. And British policymakers looked for e�ective models of labor discipline to pacify and control working populations,

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abolitionism was a mainstream view at the time and connotes, in his case, less a commitment to liberation than an optimistic view of industrial capitalism that believed “free” labor regimes were capable of delivering for the British empire.

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Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (where he endeavors to mathematically prove the existence of miracles).

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prospect that Britain would be hampered in its pursuit of international dominance if it were alone in abstaining from the bene�ts of enslaved labor,

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how, in the absence of brutal enslavement, workers could be disciplined such that they could continue producing for capital without threatening pro�ts.

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“in the whitened factory, a di�erent kind of apparatus was needed to re�ne production and discipline labor, one that attenuated the violence of the plantation while retaining the relation it had established between human and machine—a relation that treated the body as (merely) another part in the production machine.”

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Babbage envisioned his engines as tools of empire,

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(Jacquard, the eponymous inventor, was once thrown into the river by workers furious at being displaced by his loom.)

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workmen are tasked not simply with obeying instructions but with tending a machine programmed to enforce obedience.

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the bene�ts he names always accrue to capitalists—including the disciplinary check that automation provides

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engage in more fundamental inquiries, examining the technologies of control that structure the core logics of computation and attending to the enabling conditions in which computational technologies are designed to work—the imaginative landscape

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confront the unmarked presence of Black unfreedom that haunts “free” labor

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