Sam Dee opens his article “Computers Are Technically Work”^[1] with the provocative question: “What stops the tech industry from organizing?” Unfortunately, he provides no answers. Rather, he engages in a rather dire misreading of a talk I gave at Circuit Breakers,^[2] a conference dedicated to tech worker organizing (and as a sequel to the 2023 labor notes conference on that theme, the only one of its kind ongoing in the United States).^[3]

Dee raises two central arguments. First, that the talk does not engage with the work of “content moderators, Amazon Mechanical Turkers, QA testers, and the like.” In a sense, this is true. But the sense is that the talk is not, at core, about engaging with any form of tech work–it is about the political economy and business cycle of tech itself. From that standpoint, as it concludes, it makes some brief observations on the structure of labor in the tech economy, by means of the two-department model of Marx in Volume 2 of Capital, from which the talk derives its structure. In this, it raises a few examples of work that falls in either of the departments (production of the means of production, production of articles of consumption) or outside of both. It is true that adding classifications of some of the overlooked categories Dee mentions could have enriched that section. Easily remedied–content moderators and workers who provide support would tend to fall in department 2, those who train LLMs in R&D, and QA would tend to fall in department 1 or R&D depending on if they worked in production of physical goods or software respectively.

However, Dee makes an error which I critiqued in my previous article, “Who Are the Workers, and Why Does it Matter?”^[4]–a confusion of any sort of detailed technical analysis of structural issues of power and position with some sort of either strategic claim on where organizing is important (it is important everywhere!) or moral claim as to why some workers are more “worker-like” than others (and hence somehow superior?), and in particular a misunderstanding of the category of “productive” labor in a Marxian sense (or in this case even a vulgar sense). He goes on to treat this analysis as seeking to “devalue” labor, and places it into some sort of sociological-cultural history over the idea of “craft” as an “ideological project.”

But what Dee responds to is uninterested in this question of “devaluing” or “valuing” in any moral sense–the aim is to understand this labor within a broader context of social production. What Dee neglects is that these distinctions are elaborated in the context of an eminently practical question–what sorts of work actions and organizing escalations are most effective in different circumstances, and what sorts of workers are most vulnerable to the vagaries of market flux, as all tech workers have been experiencing over the last few years of miserable labor market conditions.

He then engages in essentially a false argument, restating things that the talk does not dispute as though they are in opposition to it, writing:

Levi tries to imagine the programmer as akin to an academic, in producing long-term necessary but short-term inapplicable ‘R&D.’ This is, if you think about the process of programming for even a moment, false. What Levi talks down as ‘mundane tasks’ are essential components of programmers’ labor.

Yes, the mundane tasks are indeed essential components of programmers’ labor. That is precisely what the talk argues! It simply argues that those mundane tasks are also, in a sense, research and development, in that they produce things that are new, rather than repeating a process to reproduce something that already exists–with regards to software, the latter task is already automated, accomplished by copying a binary. In fact, root-causing and fixing a bug (one of Dee’s examples) is often some of the most difficult and creative labor in which programmers engage. It is also, if one speaks to programmers about their experiences with corporate prioritization, “tech debt,” and “backlogs,” very frequently classified as long-term necessary but short-term inapplicable. If there is any “devaluing” here, that is something Dee brings to the table, not a part of the already-present potluck.

Dee then continues to argue, from the standpoint of capitalist rationality, that

As anyone who has ever written a script knows, fixing bugs—let alone exploits or vulns—is essential for producing a stable product. If a bug of a significant enough size is not patched, there is no product and, therefore, no production. Take a country, make it dependent on this kind of technical labor for several decades, and you have an industry that is capable of crippling entire sectors of the economy including flights, hospitals, and financial transactions for uninterrupted days at a time, as the CrowdStrike software update last summer proved.

Well and good, but we live in an era where all the evils Dee has described have occurred–precisely because the capitalists are irrational and do not seek to produce stable products. Rather, they seek to produce profit. As it transpires, there are people, other than the consumers whose lives are disrupted or even threatened by these issues, who do care about making things stable and bug free. Those people are the workers, and they in fact do come into conflict with management over this. Which, in turn, brings us to the observation that this conflict can be one among the many issues used to drive organizing, and in some ways a particularly useful one, as it poses the question of workers control of production. But it is exactly this observation which Sam Dee opens his article by inveighing against! If there is sense to be found, it escapes me.

We then turn to Dee’s second complaint–that the attribution of any degree of care to work or conflict over “quality in production” may hold true for engineers and software developers, but not the vast quantities of other tech workers, involved particularly, by his account, in QA or data production–and further that “Levi’s division” (in realty, Marx’s) obscures those workers altogether. I invite him to speak to those organizing such workers!

At Circuit Breakers, we do. Had Dee visited the website, he would have seen prominently the statement that “We consider all workers in the tech sector, from software engineers, to sales, to ride-share drivers, as ‘tech workers.’” The first advertised talk was from data workers, and the third discussed global value chains including Amazon warehouse organizing. It transpires that these workers, as much as any others (in or out of tech) also care to some degree about the product of their work, worry if they moderate poorly or if their moderation fails to catch truly offensive or horrifying images, or if shoddy or rushed QA work causes bugs to slip through. Call center workers complain that they are not given enough time and resources to genuinely help those who reach out for support. If these issues are less central to their organizing, it is only because there are so many more basic issues they currently find more pressing.

The fact that this is true is very important–if workers in all fields did not find themselves, as human beings, with investment into the product of their labor, and sometimes even pride, then the prospects of a socialist society would be much diminished. The idea that workers care and bosses do not has been a compelling factor in organizing campaigns ranging from coffee-shops to rail lines, and without it any call for workers control of production would be meaningless, or even counterproductive.

Finally, I would note that Dee concludes in a rather frustrating manner. He calls for workers to “perform more inquiry into their workplaces and the sites of labor they are connected to.” But when confronted with a document produced as part of a conference engaged in that inquiry on a large scale, he has chosen to reject it! Instead, he writes “I normally love learning about an industry from the perspective of workers within it. Personal observation is one way to short circuit capitalist ideology. But the US computational classes are a special case.” Sam, come to Circuit Breakers this year. It will be October 18-19 in NYC.^[5] There will be tech workers of all sorts engaging in mutual inquiry, from engineers to data workers to warehouse workers. But please, take the chip off your shoulder first. We are not all as insular as you imagine, and there’s plenty to discuss and learn and figure out together–for those that are willing to listen.

In Solidarity,

-Gary Levi

P.S. Josha Lew McDermott has also written a response to the article on “Who are the Workers.” It is rather confused and silly, and I do not believe a further response would be enlightening.

1. Sam Dee, “Computers are Technically Work,” Cosmonaut Magazine, May 7, 2025, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/05/computers-are-technically-work/.

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2. Gary Levi, “Circuit Breakers: Profit, Bubbles, Crisis, and Chokepoints in the Tech Economy,” Cosmonaut Magazine, January 15, 2025, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/01/circuit-breakers-profit-bubbles-crisis-and-chokepoints-in-the-tech-economy/.

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3. https://techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-breakers/2024.

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4. Gary Levi, “Who Are The Workers, and Why Does It Matter,” Cosmonaut Magazine, March 15, 2024, https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/03/who-are-the-workers-and-why-does-it-matter/.

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5. https://techworkerscoalition.org/circuit-breakers/.

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