Are Silicon Valley’s software engineers the worker-poet ideals?
This is the manifest destiny of the American tech engineer
Joseph Stalin famously called Soviet writers “engineers of the human soul,” but today it seems engineers are the engineers of the human soul, with the lofty aim of perfecting the mortal body and mind.
The fanatic premium Silicon Valley places on efficiency, measurement, and engineered solutions has rightly drawn comparisons to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management, which sought to optimize the labor of assembly line workers during the boom years of the Industrial Revolution.
As Nicholas Carr put it in The Atlantic, “Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California — the Googleplex — is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.”
But as Google developer Vivek Haldar points out, “In Taylor’s worldview, workers are unskilled, replaceable cogs. Programmers are anything but…Programmers are more like writers, or even artists. This difference is at odds with Taylorism’s thesis of workers having roughly similar productivity, and hence being replaceable.”
And to some extent he’s right: Taylorism, pure and simple, is not the religion of Silicon Valley. It’s Taylor’s disciple Alexei Gastev who is the real patron saint.
Known as Lenin’s revolutionary “worker-poet,” Gastev became the father of Soviet Taylorism as founding director of the Soviet Central Institute of Labor. Like Taylor, he obsessively studied the biomechanics of assembly workers, devising elaborate diagrams that depict the optimal way to swing a hammer, to stand behind a workbench, to tighten a screw. But his approach to biomechanics extended far beyond the assembly line: “Gastev readily concedes that he is attempting to go further than Taylor: the latter meant only to solve the problem of production, while Gastev, in adopting Taylor’s strategies, seeks to solve the problem of culture,” Julia Vaingurt writes.
Tech culture, with its fitbits, ball chairs, and compulsive abbreviations, has introduced new language and new bodily ideals — new modes of selfhood, as Rob Horning argues. In this sense, it is very much a product of what Gastev, who even took pains to cut out overly florid Russian words from popular usage to “save time,” had in mind.
“Gastev’s ideal worker of the 1920s was neither pure soldier nor pure robot,” the late Russian historian Richard Stites wrote. The worker was “neither the oxen brute of Taylor’s dreams, nor the lifeless robot of [the Czech writer Karl] Capek’s nightmare. He is rather an active, sentient, and creative part of the productive process who behaves like a seasoned, conscious, and well-trained warrior.” Palantir’s “ninjas” and “forward deployed software engineers” might relate to that description, which offers a much more flattering description of today’s ideal workers that Google employees like Haldar might welcome. Gastev’s strain of Taylorism was a kind of aesthetic militarism, Stites writes, one that aimed “to ‘free’ the Russian population from its enslaving lassitude and to transform it into a spontaneously functioning army of producers who saluted and served under the machine rather than the colonel.”
He wrote poetry that captured the energy of the factory floor (where he sometimes recited his work), alternating between triumph, world harmony, and apocalypse. “Brain-machines — get ready for shipments. / Cinema-eyes — prepare the installation. / Electro-nerves — get to work,” one of his poems reads. But while Gastev’s verse alternated between dark and light, his mission did not: “Gastev’s quest for ‘new people’ in fact resembled a vision of the ‘superman’ who would master nature, death, and time by a new work culture,” Stites writes, pointing out that Gastev coined the term “social engineering.” He admired Western industry and sought to foster more egalitarian working conditions in the new Soviet Union. “Gastev himself, by all accounts, was not a cold-hearted machine-like fanatic but a warm and engaging person. He did not fear the power of the machine. He feared backwardness, passivity, and sloth.”
Gastev’s ideal worker sounds a lot like Buckminster Fuller’s “Comprehensive Designer,” whose arrival Fuller thought would herald an era of technological and industrial advances. This Designer was “neither engineer nor artist, but always both simultaneously, he would achieve psychological integration even while working with the products of technocracy,” as Stanford communications professor Fred Turner argues. Like Gastev, who thought of the human body as a “workstation,” Fuller sought to blend man and machine. “Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer is, from a functional point of view at least, an information processor,” Turner writes.
Today, Silicon Valley has brought us closer than ever before to a synthesis of Gastev’s and Fuller’s dreams. “We can’t wait to see AI free us of mindless, menial work and empower us to unfold our true creative powers,” Google executive Eric Schmidt writes in a recent Fortune op-ed. In some ways, his company, which is investing in AI, longevity, and immortality is “an instantiation of Fuller’s ideals,” as Fuller’s biographer Jonathon Keats told Wired. Google has made evolution a social process, as Gastev and Fuller both anticipated, bringing us closer to the advent of machine-man.
Gastev was purged from the Soviet regime in 1938, but his ideas have had more staying power. In fact, Schmidt sounds a lot like Gastev in that Fortune op-ed, assuring readers that the advent of AI means that “the right course is not to panic — it’s to get to work.”
