A-Infos (en) Bulgaria, ABL: Crisis in a Technological Paradise, Part III: The Resistance (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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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