The issues you raise transcend computers and technology. They are new twists on an old problem faced even by those of us who are privileged enough to live in formal democracies. The reality that we have very limited say over vast domains of social and economic life -- how we collectively decide what is to be produced, how it is produced, and how it is distributed.
Great thinkers have had much to say about aspects of these questions. For instance, Marx identified four core dimensions of alienation as integral to the emergence and practice of capitalism. We still study these in sociology today because the concepts are so important. They affect all of us, regardless of whether we are producing or consuming.
I wish I'd had the chance to learn about some of these ideas earlier in life. My first job upon graduating from University was as a programmer with a large IT transnational corporation. I had to sign a job contract saying that whatever I thought of on the job belong to them -- for instance, I couldn't take an idea I figured out while on the job, and start my own company with it. Considering the principal product of my work was to be my ideas, expressed in the form of applied algorithms, that's a really big deal! For instance, if I were to develop a genuinely novel idea, it was theirs. It was to be appropriated as their property and turned into a commodity, with patent protection if required. From Marx's perspective, that's an example of the computer programmer being alienated from the product of their work.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at nvidia. Ex-biologist. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon and Bluesky.
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The broader social context
Date: 2014-09-24 10:53 am (UTC)Great thinkers have had much to say about aspects of these questions. For instance, Marx identified four core dimensions of alienation as integral to the emergence and practice of capitalism. We still study these in sociology today because the concepts are so important. They affect all of us, regardless of whether we are producing or consuming.
I wish I'd had the chance to learn about some of these ideas earlier in life. My first job upon graduating from University was as a programmer with a large IT transnational corporation. I had to sign a job contract saying that whatever I thought of on the job belong to them -- for instance, I couldn't take an idea I figured out while on the job, and start my own company with it. Considering the principal product of my work was to be my ideas, expressed in the form of applied algorithms, that's a really big deal! For instance, if I were to develop a genuinely novel idea, it was theirs. It was to be appropriated as their property and turned into a commodity, with patent protection if required. From Marx's perspective, that's an example of the computer programmer being alienated from the product of their work.