More Analogies

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies Bibliography · Glossary These posts started as a series titled “Big Tech is Like…”. An earlier post in this series included eight of those; here are a few more. Big Tech is Like a Company Town E.P. Thompson’s account of the transition from putting-out to factory production made a point that factories were initially not more efficient at producing cloth: they were more effective at eliminating worker autonomy [Thompson1963]. Before industrialization, workers controlled their own time and pace, could share work across household members, and could resist disadvantageous terms through slow work, variable quality, and informal coordination. The factory closed off these responses: workers arrived at fixed times, worked at a supervised…