In my recent article “Computers Are Technically Work,” I critique Gary Levi’s call for craft values as a path out of the current technology boom-and-bust cycle. The US computational classes are either not actually craft labor or they are too imbricated in capitalist ideology to be trusted. To wit, Levi’s proposal is a bust. Because he has no real answer to that criticism, Levi replied with a miasma of misdirection.

Readers paying very close attention to my article might have noticed that I answered the question I opened with (“What stops the tech industry from organizing?”). My answer is the minds produced by the tech industry. And Levi’s utterly confused letter confirms, to me, the need for that article. That every point I made can stand and yet my overall argument is false, by his lights, speaks to an unthinking insistence that claims about computer work should only be made from an epistemically privileged position, one bathed in the light of a thousand monitors. A lot of Levi’s specific confusion seems to come from an inability to clearly differentiate viewpoints and provide stable summaries, so I do not really need to engage in theoretical debate or summon sources to defend myself here. Levi’s arguments collapse under their own weight; I will now attempt to stand them up.

First, Levi conflates my casual use of the word “value” with my precise use of “non-productive.” He accuses me of moralizing about values, when some very serious people are out here organizing. I do no such thing. I do not even make the claim that tech work is non-productive. Those views are not mine, but Levi’s: “[A] lot of tech work isn’t in direct production at all.” On this go-around, however, Levi: “[The talk] 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.” Which is it?

Instead of solving that riddle, however, Levi tries to put the hat of “capitalist rationality” on my head by using my example of tech infrastructure failures against me. How foolish of me, as imagined by Levi, to imagine capitalism a perfectly rational system! And indeed, it would have been. In actuality, I was using that example to point out that tech work is productive labor, because many industries of exploitation cannot continue without it. But Levi and I now agree on that point, so I can proceed.

Levi is also correct that I did not incorporate his conference into my analysis, for the simple fact that he did not either. His explication of a pun and a half-hearted footnote hardly necessitated a response. It certainly would have felt uncharitable to attribute to Levi things said by other people in other places at other times, but somehow it is unfair of me to point out that he failed to include all those categories of worker he now scrambles to account for. By not including them in his article, however, his call for craft values falls apart. It does not account for the range of tech labor, so spatially and socially distributed as to include both someone who hunts bugs and GitHub issues all day in their home office and someone who watches suicide content for eight hours a day in a data center.

Finally, because I used an academic voice in my article, Levi tries to skewer me by saying I am in the pitiable state of needing Real Talk with Workers (“I invite him to speak to those organizing such workers!”). But I am a former tech worker. I have performed mundane data work to train language models; I teach classes on network architecture; I have organized hard-headed and -hearted computer scientists. My unsympathetic view of tech-worker organizing does not itself arise from abstracted academics, even though that is the form I gave it in my previous article. This view is one I have acquired through a decade of work and organizing.

I have grown weary of watching the social capital generated by the cyberlibertarian machines of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Palmer Luckey be laundered by leftists into the apparent expertise needed to shush their comrades. (I’m seeing this conference advertised on Harvard critical tech listservs and has hosted speakers funded by Microsoft Research.) So: there are many websites I do not read and many conferences I do not attend and, for my sanity, I plan to continue that practice. Why I would accept an invitation to be lectured by someone who so resolutely refuses to respect the meaning of words—their own or others—is beyond me.

-Sam Dee