Dissinovate - Blog

This morning, floating through that state between sleep and consciousness in which you can become aware of your dreams as dreams immediately before waking, I realized that I was dreaming in code again. This has been occurring on and off for the past few weeks; in fact, most times I have become aware of the content of my unconscious mind's meanderings, it has been something abstractly connected with my job. I remember hearing the sound of the call centre in my ears as I drifted in and out of sleep when I was working there, and have heard stories from friends of doing an extra shift between going to sleep and waking - the repetitive beeps of a supermarket checkout punctuating the night. But dreaming about your job is one thing; dreaming inside the logic of your work is quite another. Of course it is unfortunate if one's unconscious mind can find nothing better to do than return to mundane tasks, or if one's senses seem stamped with the lingering impression of a day's work. But in the kind of dream that I have been having the very movement of my mind is transformed: it has become that of my job. It is as if the repetitive thought patterns and the particular logic I employ when going about my work are becoming hardwired; are becoming the default logic that I use to think with. This is somewhat unnerving.

The closest analogy may be that of someone rapidly becoming acquainted with a new language, and reaching the point at which dreams and the rambling thoughts of the semi-conscious mind start to occur in that tongue. Here too it is a new kind of "logic' that the mind is assuming, and again the brain is able to scan its own processes with a pseudo-objectivity and determine the nature of their logic as something particular-something which does not yet possess the whole mind, but inhabits it and takes command of its resources. One never really gains this kind of perspective on thoughts in one's own language; one does not usually develop an awareness of the particularity of one's own thought. But right now I experience it as a clear split: that between the work-logic me, and the spectator-on-that me.

I

I work in it. Specifically I am a web developer, which means that I write potentially all the original code that goes into a website: markup like html and xml, the visual styling, the functional "logic' that happens behind the scenes and in your web browser, and the scripts that keep a site running on a web server. I work for a small e-commerce start-up that specializes in the difficult business of selling second-hand cars online. The company is a late echo of the dot.com bubble, in which one of the ceos originally made the practically inexhaustible funds that keep this unprofitable enterprise afloat. I am the main web developer, working alongside another who also deals with the graphical side. My line manager is the it manager who, apart from programming himself, takes a lead in organizing how our projects come together. Above him are the ceos, a couple of oddball born-again Christians with a serious work ethic. They used to try to put all new staff through the Alpha Course, a charismatically inflected Christian-recruitment project, and to organize monthly "God days' when all staff would get to take the day off work, on condition that they spend it taking tea with a preacher. Unsurprisingly, many employees skipped these-actually preferring to work rather than go through the motions of religious conversion.

One notable characteristic of the "politics' of the job is the split-or antagonism-between the business pole and the technical one. The techies always feel that business are making arbitrary decisions, based on insufficient knowledge of the way things really work; everything could be done so much better if only we, who understand the task in hand, were left to do it by ourselves. Business always feel that the techies are being sticklers, pedants, needlessly or pathologically recalcitrant, while the technical staff feel the recalcitrance is that of the real world and its demands. In some ways this makes it easier for me: since contact with the business side is mostly mediated through a specific "project manager', and I primarily deal with those on my side of the great divide, it is even possible to develop a certain "us against them' attitude.

From our point of view, business and its needs appear as parasitic externalities imposed upon the real functioning of our use-value-producing enterprise. We are strangely tied to a certain normativity; not just that of doing the job right in a technical sense, but also that of thinking in terms of the provision of real services, of user experiences, and of encouraging the free flow of information. This sometimes spills over into outright conflict: when business advocates some tortuous use of language to hype "the product', the techies will try to bend the stick back towards honesty and transparency. "What goes around comes around' seems to be the prevalent attitude in web development in the era after "Web 2.0': provide the services cheap or free, give away the information, be decent and hope that somehow the money will flow in. If business acts with the mind of money capital, encountering the world as a friction or recalcitrance which it longs to overcome, and if a tendency to try to sell snake oil follows from that, in the strange world where technical pride opposes itself to capital as capital's own developed super-ego, use-value rules with a pristine conscience; everything is "sanity checked'-to use the terminology of my boss-and the aggregation of value appears as an accidental aside.

Distrustful of trade-union bureaucracy, the Italian operaisti of the 1960s hoped to discover opportunities for working-class autonomy within the production process itself, through the form of the "worker's enquiry'. Examining the business-technical antagonism in web development today, though, yields scant grounds for revolutionary optimism. The solidarity that we develop against business, apart from providing us with respite and shelter from individualized victimization, functions as a "sanity check' for the company itself. The contradiction between technical staff and business is a productive one for capital: the imperative to valorize prevents the techies from wandering off into their esoteric concerns, while the need for realism is reciprocally enforced by the techies as they insist on a broadly "scientific' way of working.

There is little space left in this relation for a wilful "refusal of work': given the individually allocated and project-centred character of the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that is not done now will have to be done later, under greater stress. Apart from that, there is the heavy interpersonal pressure that comes with the role: since a majority of the work is "collaborative' in a loose sense, heel-dragging or absenteeism necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards the technical workers in general. Nor is sabotage a creative option here; not because of the supposed pride of the skilled worker, but due to the nature of the product. On a production line, sabotage may be a rational tactic, halting the relentless flow to provide half-an-hour of collective sociability. When one's work resembles that of the artisan, to sabotage would be to make life harder. Occasionally one hears of freelancers or contractors who write confusing and idiosyncratic "spaghetti code' in order to keep themselves in work. This technique may make sense when a company relies heavily on particular individuals; but in a typical development team, which uses feedback-centred it management methodologies such as "agile' and "extreme' programming, and where "ownership' of a project is always collective, high-quality, clearly readable code has a normative priority that goes beyond whatever feelings one might have about doing one's job well.

Of course, there is a banal level on which I drag myself reluctantly out of bed, knock off as early as I can, push my luck in terms of punctuality. I try to make work time "my time' as much as possible by listening to my iPod, sneaking bits of reading into my working day or having discreet conversations with friends over the net. This sort of thing is the real fodder of worker's enquiry. But the bottom-line recalcitrance here is on the same level as the resistance of the human body to the indefinite extension of the working day. People will always test the permissible limits, but such actions are defined by the framework of what is acceptable in any given job. The apparent insubordination of my lateness would soon collapse if it threatened my livelihood, while the social pressures that come with the job are such that whatever time I "claim back' through slack behaviour is more than compensated when a project deadline approaches and I work unpaid extra hours into the evening, or start work in the middle of the night to fix servers when nobody is using them.

It is only when sickness comes and I am involuntarily rendered incapable of work that I really regain any extra time "for myself'. It is a strange thing to rejoice at the onset of flu with the thought that, in the haze of convalescence, one may finally be able to catch up on things pushed aside by work. Here illness indeed appears as a "weapon', but one that fights its own battle, not wielded by the supposed aggressor. Yet I wonder sometimes whether it should be seen as merely pathological, a contingency imposed on the body from without. Illness can feel almost willed-a holiday that the body demands for itself. Perhaps there is a continuity between "genuine' illness and the "man-flu' that a matronly temping agent once accused me of when I ducked out of work for a week. But if sickness is all we have, it offers little hope for meaningful resistance.

II

If worker's enquiry is about unearthing a secret history of micro-rebellions, exposing the possibilities for struggle in the fine grain of lived experience and expanding one's own consciousness and that of other workers in the process, this is worker's enquiry in the cynical mode. We "struggle'; we are recalcitrant. But as techies against business, our recalcitrance is integral to the movement of capital, and as workers our struggle has no discernible horizon, if one exists at all. Our day-to-day interest as workers is, for the most part, practically aligned with that of this particular capital. If programmers are a vanguard in the enshrinement of use-value, technological libertarianism, collaborative work, moralistic "best-practices' and freedom of information, it is because all these things are posited as necessary in the movement of capital. The systematic normativity with which our working practice is shot through is merely a universalization of capital's own logic.

Just as capital posits its own constraint in the form of the state, in order not to destroy itself through the rapacious self-interest of each individual capital, so-after an early period of ugly coding, due to the fragmentation of the internet into a babel of different platforms, browsers and languages-a consensus formed in the world of web development that "standards' were important. Central to this was an idea of universalism: anything that adheres to these standards should be supported; anything that does not is asking for trouble. Microsoft became a pariah among web professionals due to its continuing contempt for standards and its penchant for developing proprietary annexes on the public space of the net. Developers proudly sported web-standards badges on their personal sites and became vocal advocates of technologies like Mozilla's Firefox which, as well as being "open source', beat Internet Explorer hands down in terms of standards-compliance; in fact, in the moral universe of the developer, standards rank well above open source. The universalizability of working practices has become the particular imperative of informational capital; a duty to the "invisible church' of the internet.

Some of these aspects are tied to the collective character of company work and do not affect the freelancer; but "being your own boss' tends to amount to imposing upon oneself what can otherwise be left to others. I have done a bit of freelance work, and the very thought of it now causes my soul to wither a little. When freelancing, one can easily end up putting in uncountable hours, fiddling with projects in one's "own' time, with work colonizing life all the more due to the failure to self-enforce the separation between the two that guarantees a fleeting escape from alienated labour. At least when I walk out of the office I enter the world of non-work.

Indeed, the hardened work-life separation of the Monday-Friday, 9-5 worker looms increasingly large in my experience. Sunday brings a growing awareness that the harsh return to work approaches-which sometimes entails forcing the dregs of the weekend into the small hours of Monday morning-while Friday evening opens a gaping chasm of desire and the desperate chase after satisfaction whose ultimate logic is that of boozy self-annihilation. I become a hedonistic caricature of myself, inveighing against others to party harder, longer; blowing much of my free time away in a fractured, hungover condition. This is the state of the old fashioned rock'n'roller: the beyond-work as a state of pure transcendent desire and consumption, the nothingness of abstract desire-the refusal merely to reproduce ourselves as workers coupled to the will to annihilate ourselves as humans. This is what the Stooges' "1970' means.

III

But lying in that splintered early-morning consciousness as the previous night's fleeting attempt at liberation recedes, I often find I am dreaming in code. It can be any of the various kinds I work with. A sequence will pop into my head and rattle around, unfolding itself as it goes, like a snatch of melody repeating itself in my ears. Much of the time, if I was conscious enough to re-examine it, it would probably be nonsense. I have enough difficulty dealing with the stuff when I am awake, and I suspect my unconscious mind fares little better. But sometimes it does have a meaning. One morning recently I was woken by the thought of a bug in some code that I had written, which I had not realized was there. My sleeping mind had been examining a week's work and had stumbled upon an inconsistency. Since I am a thought-worker, and since the identification and solution of such problems is a major aspect of my job, it is not fantastical to say that I had been performing actual labour in my sleep. This is not the magical fecundity of generalized creative power, churning out "value' beyond, and ontologically before, the labour process. It is actual work forcapital, indistinguishable in character from what I do during my working day-but occurring in my sleeping mind. Suddenly the nightmarish idea of some new kind of subsumption-one that involves a transformation of the very structures of consciousness-looms into view. Indeed, I find that standard patterns of thought seem increasingly burned into my mind: the momentary recognition that there is a problem with something prompts a fleeting consideration of the possible locations of faulty code, before I consciously jolt my mind out of code-world and into the recognition that "bugfixing' cannot solve all problems. There is something terrifying here.

Beyond the specific syntax of a computer language I suspect that another logic, far from neutral, may be being brought into play when one thinks in this way: the abstract, instrumental logic of high-tech capitalism, with its discrete processes, operations, resources. A logic tied to particular "ontologies'-to the classes and instances of "object-oriented programming', the entities of markup languages like html-this is the form that increasingly structures my thought. When thought has become an activity that is productive for capital-the work for which one is actually paid-and when that mode of thinking has become a habit of mind, which springs into motion independent of one's willed exertion, we might ask whether the subject of this labour process is still the centred individual, who would set about making his own world if it were not for the alienating, abstractive power of value. When I find myself sleep-working, I observe myself acting in an alienated way, thinking in a manner that is foreign to me, working outside the formal labour process through the spontaneous process of thought. Who is to say that this language will not take its place as native tongue-alienation entirely swallowing that which it alienates?

If the workplace no longer offers a site in which it is possible and meaningful to commit daily acts of insubordination, to develop a sense of a latent "autonomy' posited in the very exteriority of the worker to the process of production, but rather posits a productive antagonism, in which technical workers give capital its "sanity check' and recalcitrance is merely that of the bodiliness through which capital flows; and if labour becomes a mere habit of thought that can occur even in sleep, then it would seem mistaken to place many revolutionary hopes in the nature of this mental work and its products, in the internet or in "immaterial labour'.