9/15/17

i'm thankful, in the evening after my good day at work, to have felt an oof at the ring of truth of this tweet. i'm thankful to have thought of this kind of thing back when i worked as a secretary at the university and before i entered the world of technology, where historically there had been two full time secretaries and one part time receptionist (the latter being the role i started at) but when i came on as a full time person, they stopped hiring people for the part time role because i was much more efficient and productive than the person who had my job before me. i'm thankful for the strange mixture of pride and shame realizing that made me feel.

i'm thankful for the app the company i work at now makes, which i think is useful and cool and powerful and which i love working on every day and which employs all of these other amazing and smart and wonderful people who get to do what they love every day. i'm thankful that i know for a fact the app we produce makes other people's lives easier and better, but i'm thankful to play devil's advocate and posit that lots of people who work at tech companies that i think, unlike my company, are toxic and bad, probably genuinely and not incorrectly feel the same way about the places that they work and the things they work on and how they affect other people and the world. i'm thankful to recognize that i don't have an answer to that contradiction, even though that's uncomfortable. 

i'm thankful that my company feels genuinely progressive in myriad ways, moreso than others where that sense of progressiveness is a paper thin veneer, and that, to offer just one example, it has profit sharing for all employees, so that gains in efficiency and productivity do actively translate to better compensation for all of us. i'm thankful, though, to wonder this friday (which is my favorite day of the week at work because in the afternoon i get several hours to work on fun projects that both aid in my personal development and help others at the company) about how though that's great for us in our walled garden, whether the things that our app allows people to automate has resulted in the elimination of jobs for people at the companies that use the app. i'm thankful to hope that instead, the app helps workers who are already understaffed and overwhelmed find ways to hold on to their jobs and do the impossible things that are expected of them by management, which is something that i do believe we make possible all the time, but i'm thankful to know that i may be letting myself too easily off the hook with that image and that it's probably not that rosy.

i'm thankful to know that this is not specific to tech companies or to my company at all but one of the central problems of capitalism, that gains in efficiency generate profits which don't filter back down to the workers who are responsible for those gains or to a government that can use that money to provide for the general welfare of all people in the country but instead are siphoned off by the rich and used to further buttress their towers of wealth. i'm thankful that i work with lots of people who i think believe that same thing. i'm thankful to have read a chapter in life in code last night where at the meeting of a cryptography conference at the turn of the century (i'm thankful that the essays in the book sometimes feel very dated and yet at the same time totally of the moment) all of these mythic techno-libertarians like neal stephenson and tim berners-lee and whitfield diffie came out surprisingly with the argument that the only way to defend privacy from the encroachment of corporations was through collective action as a labor force of knowledge workers and lobbying for government regulation. i'm thankful to have read about this on my apple phone in the kindle app where i bet all sorts of information about what i read and how i read it is being is being tracked and stored in order to sell things to me.