Read the previous parts:
Part I: Precarization, Inequality and Artificial Intelligence in the IT Sector (2014-2026)Part II: Thunder in Paradise
The last decade gave birth to the first large-scale examples of organized resistance. --- While for many years the IT labor market seemed dynamic enough to allow workers to choose their working conditions, in recent years corporations have gradually managed to impose conditions similar to those in other sectors. Perhaps most telling is the large "return to the office" after the Covid-19 layoffs, which were gradually imposed after 2023. As can be seen from the salary data, IT specialists in the US do not live differently from other office workers.
Unionization
This provoked attempts to unionize among employees of various companies. Krak dragged the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) into Google in 2021. Google employees in the US and Canada formed a union uniting both contract software engineers and contractors. The AWU became a platform against unfair layoffs and exploitation of lower-paid staff within the corporation. Around 2022-2024, the game production sector became a pioneer in the resistance due to the practice of crunch (systematic, unpaid overtime work before a game's release). Today, in the US, the unionization rate is less than 2-3% of the total industry workforce, but the trend is towards steady growth in lower-paid roles such as QA, support, and content moderators.
Even in Eastern Europe, where they have to reinvent the wheel, IT professionals have figured out that they can unionize. After a wave of layoffs at CD Projekt Red, the creator of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, employees quickly organized and created an official union under the national union OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza. The union quickly grew to include employees from other major Polish studios such as Techland and 11 bit studios. In Romania (the third largest IT market in the region), there is Sindicatul IT Timisoara, established back in 2009. SITT members have Collective Labor Agreements (CLAs) that make layoffs without huge financial compensation (often between 6 and 12 salaries) practically impossible.
In Bulgaria... the wheel is still being invented.
Sabotage and exposure
Over the past decade, perhaps as political tensions in the West have escalated, some programmers have realized that the code they write has geopolitical and social implications. And they've started refusing to write it.
In 2018, over 4,000 Google employees signed a petition and dozens of top engineers resigned in protest of the company's contract with the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage and automatically select targets. The protest was so strong that Google was forced to withdraw from the contract and sign an internal AI ethics charter. Project Maven itself continued to be developed and used by the Pentagon, and earlier this year we saw the effect of similar projects - in the killing of schoolgirls in Iran.
Around 2024, the tension against another similar project, this time for the Israeli government, reached the point of sit-ins at Google's offices. But within a few years, the political situation in the country and the world had moved towards open fascism, and the corporation no longer needed to write charters. Google simply fired about fifty of its most active participants, banned "political discussions in the office," and limited internal communication among its employees. With the economic pressure on the class comes pressure on its morale.
Not everyone gives in to pressure. And now the illegal leak of information about automated killings in the US and Israeli armies continues. Data is even leaking from Chinese companies working for China's Ministry of Public Security. Even the most influential networks like TikTok are becoming targets of internal sabotage when they try to censor their content.
And more...
In addition to the above two trends, other phenomena are also observed, for example:
License Rebellion - There is a massive rewriting of software licenses. So-called "anti-capitalist software licenses" are being created, or specific clauses that explicitly prohibit the use of the respective code for training commercial AI models (for example, a ban on parsing by OpenAI or Microsoft). This is a legal resistance that aims to cut off the "raw material" (free human code) that large language models feed on.
Digital Self-Esteem - Experienced engineers are intentionally leaving the corporate sector to create micro-cooperatives or independent decentralized networks (often based on Web3 or local infrastructure). They are building "digital homesteading" - software that is not intended to be sold on the exchange, but for direct use by the community. This is an attempt to build a parallel digital economy, completely separate from Big Tech.
Dumb obedience - Engineers write code that strictly meets management's requirements, but is written in the most inflexible way possible. They show no creativity or initiative for optimization. If the manager asks for "rapid AI implementation," the programmers do it literally, knowing that it will break the database security in three months. Since they followed the instructions to the letter, they cannot be disciplined.
The future of resistance
We can only speculate how the class struggle will develop from here on. Without a doubt, one part of the cognitariat will manage to retain its privileged economic positions, at least in the short term, albeit at the cost of increasing personal efforts and sacrifices. Another has already flowed into the direction of the well-known precariat. Without a doubt, all this helps to shape class consciousness and abandon the illusion of meritocracy, at least among some representatives of the cognitariat.
The ways of collectivization and sabotage are countless, here we will only list a few that are related to new technologies, but remain within the framework of capitalist economic relations:
Creating spaghetti code that machines can't handle well.
Monitoring bosses through AI agents, just like they monitor their employees.
Occupying computing resources and using them for other people's tasks.
Intentionally polluting data so that it becomes difficult to use.
The only obstacle to building alternatives to today's power structures (indeed, AI services are part of them) is the control that the authorities exercise over resources. In a revolutionary situation, this control would increasingly slip away from them and the cognitariat would acquire ever broader possibilities. But for now, the most radicalized part of it faces, above all, the question of self-organization.
https://www.anarchy.bg
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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