Thread by @mer__edith

📢NEW ARTICLE!!!

In which I connect Charles Babbage & his 19th c. blueprints for digital computation to industrial labor control & the creation of a regime of denigrated, disciplined "free" labor.

All of which has its roots in plantation slavery. 1/

logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skie…

Labor division, worker surveillance & record keeping are techniques that emerged on plantations as ways to extract as much labor from enslaved workers as possible. Well before they were deployed in industrial factories. 2/

Babbage was both the early co-designer of digital computing & an influential theorist of labor discipline. Both Babbage's "engines" & his labor theories repackage, expand on, and encode plantation techniques, particularly labor division and worker surveillance. 3/

With this in mind, we can understand Babbage's work in total as striving to maintain British empire–itself reliant on the industrial mass-production–in the face of the 1833 abolition of West Indian slavery & sustained worker uprising in Britain. 4/

How to get workers to shut up & produce was the question. Applying plantation techniques of labor discipline & control, modified a white British workforce, can be seen as Babbage's answer. An answer he provided in the form of his computational designs and in his labor theories.

This is not a thin connection. His "engines" were shaped to directly encode templates for labor division, and were themselves tools for worker automation & surveillance, whose architectures assumed they would be applied in contexts of a divided, rationalized workplace. 6/

This work is a start and I hope it helps collectively marinate on the limits of computational logics, recognize the central role of antiblackness in computing history, and confront why, ~200 yrs later, plantation logics continue to scale via centralized computational systems. 7/

This work also owes a great debt! Thank you first to @UpFromTheCracks. I would not have written this for anyone else and it was a truly collaborative effort. Khadijah is *brilliant* and for real my favorite, most trusted editor. Thank you <3

I also want to thank @sarahbmyers, @veenadubal, @ambaonadventure, #RashidaRichardson for their incredibly helpful comments, interventions, and support. And @nantarsya for their insight on a much earlier version.

AND thank you to @wewatchwatchers, #NicholasFiori, @DainaRameyBerry, @sunhahong, @danmcquillan, @natashaiskander, @timnitGebru, @ruha9, @alexhanna, @s_premchander, #StefanOuma, @CC_Rosenthal, #ThomasCHolt, & many others whose work taught me & grounded me and helped me continue♥️

Subscribe to Logic(s) for this, and all the good stuff. Extremely grateful it exists.

logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skie…