Conjure Utopia

Workers these days are quitting the Tech industry in droves. They are quitting their programmer or sysadmin job, or maybe just the startup world and its craziness. Some are quitting because of market conditions. Others because they are exhausted. Many more feel disillusioned by the empty promises of the Tech oligarchs, blasting their propaganda on Twitter and LinkedIn. Each one of us has different motivations and each story is different, so I wanted to add mine to the pile.

Change is always a result of an infinity of factors. I’m now free to do meaningful work in my daily life, but what brought me here and what allowed me to get here starts from afar. Many threads are woven together in each life, most of which we have no control over. I will try to share a few that I think are meaningful.

Let’s start from the very beginning. My first memory of being in front of a computer was when I was five years old: it was an AMIGA 500, and I was probably playing The Settlers, which my father bought for himself. My destiny at that point was sealed, or so I thought for a long time. I was going to be the nerdy computer guy. I was living in the countryside, 15km away from town, and while I had classmates and friends there, most of my time was spent indoors, in front of the screen.

Fast-forward twenty years: I live in Milan, I’ve just received my Master's degree in Computer Science, and I’m ready to join the workforce. In the past years, studying computer stuff has been an obvious choice, done on autopilot. No other future was conceivable and I had no reason to think about an alternative: I liked computers, and all my friends were in it. During my Bachelor years, I struggled with my studies, but in the end, I got my Master's Degree with the best score achievable in Italy, where I’m from.

Before graduating, I had already a job lined up as a Scala programmer in a local boutique consultancy company, working mostly with big corporations. Big Data was the trendy thing back then and machine learning was becoming ubiquitous, even though deep learning was still a niche technique outside of FAANG and academia.

My first client was one of the biggest banks in the country: a hellish circus of inefficiency, coked-out managers, feudal power dynamics, and pre-GDPR surveillance marketing. My job was to cross real-time credit card transaction data with bank data, score some machine learning models, and send ads for predatory loans to families about to have a baby, couples about to get married, and so on and so forth. People who are poor enough to need a loan to live their life, but stable enough to pay it back with a lot of sacrifices. An SMS or a bank app notification should have been delivered after a few seconds of doing an expensive transaction, in the moment of their, supposed, psychological vulnerability.

This job taught me tech can be evil, the people developing it can be clueless, and that big corporate companies are much more inefficient than the narrative would tell you. They are not machines designed to extract value from your labor, but grotesque organisms, grown over the decades, wasting people’s lives on meaningless activities. For a top manager, the daily life of thousands of people costs just a signature on the budget for the next semester. If they deliver what they promised, it is secondary, as long as the manager can justify the expense to their superior. You have to perform to get the money and sometimes this performance means working on the weekend, late at night, meeting with internal managers after dinner. In the end, your software might not even go to production because the plans up above have changed. They give you a bonus to shut the fuck up and in the meanwhile your life passes by.

After one year or so, I moved to Berlin, where I’m still living. Doubled the salary, and halved the workload. I wanted to leave Italy and having a tech background made it very easy: I had a job before moving, complete with a relocation package. Here life was completely different: much more relaxed, more autonomy in the workplace, no cocaine-snorting managers slamming the door open at 9 AM shouting to the workers to rile them up. Worst case you get a ketamine-addicted manager showing up on Monday with sunglasses coming back straight from the club.

Everything was going smoothly, until one Saturday morning, on Christopher Street Day, I started feeling a terrible pain in my chest. I’m on the floor shouting for half an hour, while my guts feel like they are being torn apart. I thought it was some weird muscular spasms, but after going to the hospital, I found out it was gallbladder stones. Nothing too terrible: my grandma had them at my same age, it’s genetic they say. The problem is that while investigating the issue with a laparoscopy, a doctor pokes my pancreas repeatedly, giving me pancreatitis. I almost died, but the abundant oxycodone, the care of my then-girlfriend, and past experiences with psychedelics surrounding the topic of death made the whole endeavor not so terrible.

I spend one month in the hospital, and a few more getting back to normal life. I realize my health is not the same anymore and to this day I still suffer from chronic issues. This whole experience forced me to slow down, accept my limits, and reframe my plans for the future. It was very liberating: I was forced to quit the rat race, and I had to give up ideas of moving again to a city bigger than Berlin, with more opportunities. I started to appreciate the freedom that comes from restrictions.

In the meanwhile, I moved to another startup working on self-driving cars: I became a team leader, and I helped the CTO put in place a holocratic structure. It was the same period in which I started to become politically active: I helped to start a chapter of Tech Workers Coalition in Berlin, and then one year after I did the same in Italy. Tech Workers Coalition pushes me to reflect on my role as a worker, on the nature of the tech industry, and on paths to alter how technology is made by bringing conflict inside tech companies.

Both because of my job and because of my politics, I become more and more interested in the topic of organizations: how to create them, how to nurture them, and how to make them meaningful and fulfilling. We all participate in organizations all the time: in school, at work, at home, and in our free time. Nonetheless, we spend very little time thinking about them, and how to make them better. We spend even less time thinking about what all organizations have in common, what they say about us, how they shape our lives, or what we want to get from them.

In the office, I’m the one training new people on our organizational model, but I’m also the one shaping it to make room for resting time for me and my coworkers. Kids and hackers break things to understand how they work and gain insight through this process. That’s what I was doing on my job: by trying to make room for afternoon naps, I was developing a deep understanding of agile processes, digital communication, and leadership. I was also growing more aware of the injustices of modern work: high-paying jobs, especially within the startup world, are not at all commensurate with the effort requested from the worker, the amount of study you have put into learning what you do, or with the value you produce for people or customers.

I also began to understand the limits of software and the narrative of automation: software, people, and organizations need to adapt to each other. Software won’t solve all of our problems. Eventually, it hits a wall and the change must come from somewhere else. This realization, together with my political growth, planted a little seed: maybe I don’t want to do this, to work in a startup developing new, mostly useless software, forever.

COVID hits, the startup pivots, and money starts to run out, so at some point, I decide to quit: I publish an article saying farewell to the startup world and I share it in my network. I wanted to be held accountable for my decision and avoid second thoughts in the future.

I was leaving behind a cushy, relaxed job, a lot of money, and an established career to jump into the unknown. It was still a safe move: in the past years I had saved around half of my monthly salary, so I had all the time in the world to find my way. I was also leaving behind a very surreal situation, that at the time didn’t fully understand, probably because I don’t watch enough Gen X movies. I was in a privileged position, with a great daily routine, with the freedom to spend my free time and my disposable income, and yet my feelings towards work ranged between frustration and dread. The truth was that the job was so meaningless, irrelevant, and performative that I couldn’t rationalize staying, despite the privilege, money, and stability the job was giving me.

After starting to work remotely, I could spend most of my day doing political activities, resting, going out, or whatever else I wanted to do. In the few months before I resigned, I was working maybe two hours a day. Yet, those two hours were terrible. I was forcing myself to accept them because they were enabling a lot of good things for myself and for the people around me.

Such a mechanism worked for a while until it didn’t anymore. Fuck self-driving cars, food delivery robots, SCRUM, k8s, deep-learning, REST services, CNNs: the world is on fire, industrial civilization is collapsing, history is unfolding at accelerating speed, and I’m here fixing data pipelines. That’s not what I’m supposed to do as a human. It’s all wrong and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Even though I spend hours in meaningful and impactful political activities, it’s not enough: I have to do more. The autopilot has to stop, I want more control over my life and my time.

The first few months after quitting I try to start a co-op with some Italian friends. The idea is to support existing co-operatives, improve the way they work, and develop their businesses, processes, and software stack by bringing in ideas that struggle to trickle into the established co-op movement. The collaboration doesn’t work out and I abort the plan before going public. Soon thereafter I joined AI Forensics, at the time called tracking.exposed. It’s an NGO research group investigating the social harm of AI, recommender systems, and, at the time, also food delivery platforms.

The organization is very democratic, with workers deciding a lot on their research and way of working. It also has a flat pay: everybody gets paid the same regardless of seniority, gender, role, or any other factor. There are no managers, no imposed deadlines, and no command structures. I was hired to be a data engineer but after a few weeks, it was clear that this space was the perfect test bed for my newfound interest in organizational development. I set up processes, governance models, collaboration spaces, and the handbook. I see the organization grow, people getting happier, and my activities improving the quality and quantity of work done by others. This is something that, as a programmer, I had never seen. Mostly because the software I was working on was either useless or straight-up evil, but still, it was a new experience for me.

Here I also learn a new pleasure: people being grateful after I tell them what I do for a living. When you work in Tech, this is rarely the case. Reactions can be diverse. They might think: “Oh no, a tech bro”, or maybe “Yey, another tech-bro like myself”, or even “tech=money=husband material”, but they very rarely think or say “Thanks for what you’re doing for all of us”. Very addictive, 10/10, would recommend.

I spent around two years in total working with AI Forensics: after the organization was stable and structured, I moved back to my original data engineering role, while also leading a project investigating misinformation produced by Bing Copilot on the topics of political elections. Plenty of results, and a great publication, but then I realized research wasn’t my thing. I’m a builder and in research, more often than not, you spend a lot of effort to find nothing. Even the possibility of this happening was stressing me out. Failure is always a possibility in any job, but the way it is framed in research, as a likely and sometimes inevitable outcome, was nerve-wracking.

I decided to leave AI Forensics. The experience was nothing like leaving a tech company. There were tears involved from both sides, a lot of heart-breaking goodbye messages, a green Adidas tracksuit with the AI Forensics logo made for me, and a collection of memes printed on laminated paper as parting gifts. I definitely miss working there.

This happened around eight months ago. Now my daily life is completely different: I’m working freelance and chasing every project and activity that looks interesting: some are not really worth the pay, but they are fun, interesting, or satisfying, so I do it anyway. My bank account is not supportive of this strategy, but I occasionally feed it with my savings and it shuts up. Overcoming the fear of not saving money was one of the hardest parts of this journey. I’ve always been very frugal, always saving up. The high-paying cushy jobs in Tech are not going to last forever and the last few years of systematic layoffs, deskilling, and general class war against tech workers are proof that is just going to get worse. I always had the feeling I had to make use of this privilege while it was available, while the job market was still favorable, and while I was still young enough to be able to write code.

The problem is that I was part of a profession that was benefiting from an anomalous amount of privilege, built over decades by the expansion of the market, and this privilege wasn't built on solid grounds. Now such privilege is crumbling, and it’s always going to get worse, at least until the unionization of the tech sector reaches good levels and it will take a while. If future conditions are always going to be worse, you can always rationalize digging in and staying put into whatever position of comfort you might have achieved. Luckily irrationality saved me from this deadlock: yes, I’m doing something financially irresponsible for my future, so what?

I turned my interest in organizations into both a political activity and a consultancy service: I help cooperatives, collectives, NGOs, and associations to work more effectively. I work mostly with small organizations which wouldn’t be able to afford more expensive consultancies intended for bigger corporations and I ask them for less money if they are politically aligned with my values. I bring them no-code software, facilitation training, democratic leadership models, and many other methodologies. The improvements and relief from their organizational burden are incredibly fulfilling for me. I’m born lazy and the two things that annoy me the most in life are working hard and seeing others work hard. There’s no bigger reward than seeing others relax because you freed their time from wasteful chores. If you’re curious, this is my one-pager.

On top of that I’m also helping my partner with her fermentation school. While before it was hard for me to commit to regular support given my full-time employment, now I’m free to reserve time to help her build her community, promote her courses, and give live support during classes. When we have to set up a fermentation class, everything needs to be cleaned: the space, the tools, but especially the jars in which the ferments are going to grow. That’s my job. Endless arrays of clean jars need to be washed again, to be then sterilized right before being filled with raw miso, kimchi, or whatever we are teaching on that day. After class I have to wash all the tools and surfaces again, to leave the class space as clean as we have found it.

It doesn’t happen often, maybe once or twice a month, because preparation for the classes is a lot of work and my girlfriend is also working two other fermentation jobs. Nonetheless, this is a regular reminder I’m not cut for physical jobs: back pain, leg pain, headache. Hitting the gym several times a week doesn’t make it any better. When the collapse matures, and I will have to till a field to survive, I’m going to get very skinny. I hope I will find a way to sell organizational consultancies to plants in exchange for their fruits.

I’m also keeping a foot in the door with research. With Reversing.works, we are investigating data privacy and labor rights violations of major platforms. Big news might be out soon on this topic, but I obviously can’t share anything about ongoing investigations.

To wrap up: part of this freedom comes from accepting the intrinsic irregularity of freelance work, which I’m always been skeptical about, but at the moment is the only form in which I can do professionally what I was forced to do informally. The other part though is relevant for the topic of this article: finding meaning in your profession. It is a very privileged position to be in, and I’m well aware that even in the Tech industry, only a fraction of workers are allowed the stability to make such a choice. I don’t believe quitting the Tech industry is the ultimate solution to the problems created by Big Tech, let alone more general ones. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be active in supporting unionization efforts through the Tech Workers Coalition. Nonetheless, for those who are offered the choice, there’s a lot to be said about how one should spend their privilege, and many stories to be told about those who did and had a positive impact.

Life is too short to work on a SaaS B2B Marketing Insights Data Platform Software. Whatever it is the direction you want to take, whatever it is that you're looking to achieve in your life, whatever your dream is, even if it's about the creation of new technology, it's unlikely to find its space in the Tech industry. If you're thinking about quitting, and you have the means to do it, quit now!