Category: Internet Industry

Internet Industry Russia Ukraine War

Declaration of Withdrawal

By ShinJoung Yeo

For the past few weeks, the mainstream media have been plastered with news about ChatGPT – a chatbot developed by the Silicon Valley company OpenAI which recently received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. Will Microsoft revolutionize its Bing search with ChatGPT? How did Google lose $100 million with its mishap on its new AI chatbot? Will ChatGPT change education? Will ChatGPT affect the future of work? We’re sure that an AI chatbot is worthy of the corporate media’s close probing, but amidst plenty of media coverage on technology, there is a deprivation of critical analysis on the tech industry’s involvement in the current war between Ukraine and Russia resulting in the killing of thousands of people on both sides NOW – not in some version of the future. We insist this requires a series of probing questions and elaboration.

A few months after the war broke out, the US and its allies imposed economic sanctions against Russia.[1] Company after company loudly publicized that they were withdrawing their businesses from Russia; though after a year of the war, hundreds of the US and European companies, including Pfizer, BP, and Renault, are still doing business in Russia according to a recent NY Times report.[2]

By March 2022, the major tech companies were also joining this drive. Apple stopped selling new products and paused its Apple payment services; Amazon suspended shipments of its retail products and new clients for its cloud services in Russia and Belarus. Google’s Russian subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in Russia and suspended ads in Russia on Google’s internet properties including YouTube. Microsoft announced that the company was also suspending new sales in Russia.

Despite their public declarations, it is not clear to what extent the US tech industry has actually pulled their businesses from Russia; however, one still wonders what has driven this unusually prompt rhetoric of withdrawal? According to the tech companies, they were responding to an unlawful invasion and a humanitarian disaster. This line of reasoning is inconsistent with the tech companies’ previous behavior, as they are doing or have done plenty of business in countries with repressive regimes around the globe and have ignored other humanitarian disasters.[3]

The tech companies’ exit from Russia came as a result of governmental edicts. The question then is, what has moved these companies to comply with the US state’s current geopolitical ambitions? What is the basis of the interlock? The complete answers to these questions are multi-faceted because we need to consider the tech giants’ long relationship with the Democratic party; their interests in domestic and governmental markets; their involvements in US foreign policy; and their leaders’ class interests – all of which are intricately intertwined.  Further explication of these questions will occupy multiple posts. However, for this piece, we’re calling attention to one of the apparent reasons for the tech companies’ swift withdrawal announcements from Russia.

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Automation Class Internet Industry Labor Uber Working Class

Low-Wage Workers & the Internet Industry

By Observatory Admin

What are the overall impacts of tech companies on occupational structures, employment patterns, and labor practices? This question is large, complicated, and vital.[1]

To engage it, a meaningful starting-point pertains to low-wage workers. As well-compensated engineers and entrepreneurs have been raised up as the Internet industry’s public face, low-wage workers have become a mere afterthought. The very terms that analysts use to characterize this category of workers suffer from ambiguity and imprecision: “flexible,” “independent,” “temporary,” “contingent,” “freelance,” “casual,” “precarious.”  The International Labor Organization (ILO) states, simply, that such workers fall within a “non-standard form” of employment.[2] Two facts, however, are certain. First, low-waged workers are crucial to the business models that are being advanced by Internet companies.  Second, low-wage workers in the “new economy” are increasingly pursuing “old-economy”-type job struggles and demands.[3]

To press ahead from here, a conception of the labor process is essential.

The Labor Process

Identified and explicated forty years ago by Harry Braverman,[4] and further clarified by historians and political economists, the labor process provides an irreplaceable analytical fulcrum. Both to cheapen costs and to augment control,[5] capital has continually attacked the labor process as it exists, with the aim of altering and even reconstituting everything from the content and sequencing of specific job-tasks, to the technical division of labor within companies and industries, to the location of production processes. Beginning during the 1970s, a new and expanded cycle of innovations around networks and other ICT tools permitted capital to intervene in the labor process across an unprecedented range, which encompassed an increasing number of information-processing jobs.[6] Making explicit, aggregating and codifying what had been workers’ tacit knowledge, and/or generating and collecting new categories of data, corporate suppliers and corporate users of networks worked to standardize more tasks and to quantify more outputs. Managers, as Huws explains, gained new freedom to disaggregate and reorganize work, and to relocate or contract it out in line with their varied corporate strategies.[7]

Prominent recent examples of this much wider trend include Uber and its rival, Lyft, alongside rental platform Airbnb, labor outsourcer TaskRabbit, the Instacart grocery delivery service, and the dry cleaning service Washio. Such companies invade existing industries by deploying network resources to compile, codify, rearrange and contract out existing labor processes. In the process they extract data from, and push costs onto, workers and users alike.

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