A couple months ago, Venkatesh Rao (of ribbonfarm) unveiled season 1 of Breaking Smart, a series of closely-linked essays about the relation of software and society.

Embedded below was my first tweetstorm response to the series, focusing on the theme of work.

1/”I can replace you with a small script” is an increasingly real and realizable possibility, no empty threat.

— hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

2/Next hemorrhage will be worse, culling now-defunct middle-class office jobs and tedious low-wage positions w/ algos & robots, respectively

— hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

3/Traditional labor politics a dead end. Only viable threats are the high-skilled workers, who are restricted by the nuclear option. — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

4/Most admins could bring down multiple companies should they so choose. Any action at all is too consequential; Snowden is a case-in-point. — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

5/Even in the face of wage theft, high-skilled tech workers put up nary a fight; cartel capitalism FTW (cf. the Techtopus) — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

6/Wage theft is just good business. Nucor exec: ‘We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.’ (Good to Great) — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

7/There is a social/psychological complex in America around the need to work, and to be perceived to work, full-time. — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

8/Destroying the automatic respectability of a 40hr/week bullshit job is an essential first step. There is no virtue here. — hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

9/Cull dead labor *and* dead capital. Scorched minds notwithstanding, this will generate a true cognitive (and capital) surplus.

— hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

10/This implies a new concept of civics. UBI partisans are beginning to ask the right questions. Our alternative is more sacrifice zones.

— hewhocutsdown (@hewhocutsdown) August 18, 2015

Mark Ames on the Techtopus. Chris Hedges on sacrifice zones. Scorched Mind: A mind forced into life scripts so far outside its ken that it halts in honorable refusal. (paraphrase of Venkatesh Rao)

In related news, Nick Srnicek and Alex William’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work comes out next month.