Practitioners At The Limit: Bereavement, Mockery and Ideology in Response to Crisis

Abstract: After decades in which the software industry heroized its technical employees, our current moment finds those employees in crisis. Economically, they are squeezed by a job market that has turned on them since Elon Musk gutted Twitter in 2022. Politically, their craft is continually pressed into the service of an ever tighter alliance between Big Tech and authoritarianism. Professionally, they find themselves less and less able to contribute anything good to anyone within business models that are running out of room to pretend they do anything but extract. Technically, they are confronted with a much-hyped technology, generative AI, that distorts their work while purporting to make them redundant. And emotionally, they are simply not ok - as designer and developer Andrew Sempere puts it, "I think the word I'm looking for is: bereft." This study draws from a series of practitioner interviews undertaken for a current dissertation in STS and from ongoing content analysis of practitioners' public statements on blogs, microblogs, podcasts and videos to argue that much of the workforce of technocapitalism is actively unaligning itself from that system's priorities and seeking new ones. Countercultural responses among practitioners are proliferating, including mockery of technocapitalists and technocapitalism, rehabilitation of Luddism, interest in organized labour, and endorsement of alternate systems including anarchism and communism. Whether software practitioners will form an organized enough response to decisively influence the crises that beset them (and, often through their products, the wider world) remains to be seen. But heightened critical attention should be paid to this centrally-located population of technosocial actors in their new and volatile state.