Twiddling, AI, and Venture Capital
Enabling Arbeit to Macht Frei
Keep an eye on 404Media and Pluralistic.net. Quite serendipitously, I just noticed a kind of convergence of stories from the two.
Yesterday, 404 ran a story on Y Combinator (a venture capital firm) backing a startup called Optifye.ai, that bills itself as an “AI performance monitoring system for factory workers.”
On their Y Combinator profile, Baid and Mohta [the founders] outline who gets what out of installing micromanaging AI surveillance on assembly lines. Owners gets “accurate real-time factory, line, and worker productivity metrics,” production heads get “line-wise and worker-wise metrics,” shopfloor supervisors get to “identify who/what is causing inefficiency in the line and fix the problem on the go.” For the workers? They get the tantalizing benefit of being “held accountable for good or bad performance.”
Then today, Cory Doctorow shared the text of a recent talk he gave elaborating on his concept of enshittification. Here he explains “twiddling” and some of its possible applications:
What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.
Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.
Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.
Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.
And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.
The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.
Optifye.ai is a good candidate for twiddling at the most fine-grained level in real-time. When Oracle or SAP or Salesforce or Peoplesoft or whoever snaps them up, it’ll just get integrated into the usual workforce management stuff and applied to everything.
And if you think this is unrelated to what Trump and Musk are doing to the federal government, you are wrong in at least two ways: (1) they are reducing the ability of the government to do anything at all to protect us from this, even if we actually have the relevant laws, by reducing the enforcement apparatus to a shadow of its former skeleton, and (2) surely they will try to use this kind of thing to monitor government employees, as well.
Perhaps we will start seeing op-eds in the Washington Post arguing for “optifycation” as eliminating friction in free markets and making us all free-er. Because, after all, arbeit macht frei.
Recommended reading
I love Cory Doctorow’s commitment to keeping his daily links and observations 100% free — not just fee-free, but ad-free and tracking-free. He’s got the wherewithal to do it, and the will to do it, and he makes money other ways, so he should do it. And yet, that he does is a testament to his character. More than that, he is smart and observant. Worth keeping in your regular round of checking things.
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