{"id":191926,"date":"2021-06-04T16:54:59","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T16:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/06\/atlassian-big-tech-software-cyber-taylorism-future-of-work\/"},"modified":"2021-06-04T17:01:54","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T17:01:54","slug":"atlassians-vision-for-the-future-of-work-is-a-cyber-taylorist-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/06\/04\/atlassians-vision-for-the-future-of-work-is-a-cyber-taylorist-nightmare\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlassian\u2019s Vision for the Future of Work Is a Cyber-Taylorist Nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Australian tech company Atlassian \u2014 best known for its flagship product, Jira Software \u2014 presents itself as a humble innovator that wants to improve the world with technology. But its productivity-boosting tools are designed to maximize the exploitation of workers.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Software company Atlassian claims that its business will help to launch a wholesale \u201cdisruption\u201d of work. (Igor Golovniov \/ SOPA Images \/ LightRocket via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

On May 1, 2021, Frank Furedi \u2014 a former Trotskyist turned right-wing libertarian \u2014 penned a column for the Australian<\/em> fuming against \u201cwoke capitalists.\u201d He reserved particular ire for Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, a man he said “personifies the businessman turned culture warrior<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t the only press<\/a> that Cannon-Brookes and his business partner Scott Farquhar received that week. The media is fascinated<\/a> by the mystique of Australia\u2019s larrikin software billionaires. While Atlassian may be domiciled in the UK and listed in the United States, its public image, built around a kind of twenty-first-century Australian pseudo-egalitarianism, is homegrown.<\/p>\n

Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar claim they began the business because they \u201cdidn\u2019t want to wear a suit to work<\/a>\u201d and only wanted to make the starting salary for a grad in the industry. This informal blokishness is part of the company\u2019s ethos. Atlassian\u2019s values, proudly displayed on their website, stress that one of the tech giant\u2019s key aims is to be an \u201copen company, no bullshit.\u201d The firm\u2019s aversion to polished self-presentation is an integral part of its brand.<\/p>\n

Even Atlassian\u2019s products keep a low profile \u2014 so low, in fact, that many people don\u2019t really know what the company does. This has been a running theme in commentary on Atlassian. In December 2015, the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> asked \u201cAtlassian … What do they do again?<\/a>\u201d Three years later, they published another puff piece<\/a> entitled, “Atlassian: The $30 Billion Tech Giant Nobody Understands.\u201d<\/p>\n

We cannot, however, allow ourselves to be fooled by Atlassian\u2019s public image. Understanding Atlassian is key to grasping changes in contemporary workplaces and the politics of tech billionaires, \u201cwoke\u201d and otherwise.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Mystifying Power<\/h2>\n \n

So, what does Atlassian do? The simple answer is that they make project management software for developers. This includes products like Confluence, a corporate wiki built for sharing documentation; and Bitbucket, for collaboratively tracking and managing changes to code. But Atlassian\u2019s flagship product is Jira, which it describes<\/a> as a \u201cpowerful work management tool for all kinds of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rather boring nature of Atlassian\u2019s products contrasts sharply with the company\u2019s world-changing ambitions. Atlassian claims that its business will help to launch a wholesale \u201cdisruption\u201d of work. In their own words, they don\u2019t just sell products but \u201cpractices\u201d that help \u201cteams to find new ways to work<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atlassian\u2019s marketing material offers a vision of a world in which workplace decision-making has been decentralized and hierarchies toppled. \u201cTeams\u201d \u2014 the essential unit in Atlassian\u2019s world \u2014 are free to realize their collective genius collaboratively and remotely. Never mind the power differences within them.<\/p>\n

Underlying this is a techno-utopian worldview. To develop this vision, Atlassian even employ a designated \u201cWork Futurist,\u201d Dom Price. Price likes to reference the work of Klaus Schwab<\/a>, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, whose Fourth Industrial Revolution argues that new digital technologies are creating a paradigm shift in the way we live and work.<\/p>\n

Price uses this periodization to set out a vision of workplaces that are \u201cnetworks,\u201d not \u201cladders,\u201d in which robots have taken up \u201crepetitive, mundane\u201d tasks. This, Price argues, will leave workers with more time to \u201cdo interesting work\u201d and get involved in strategic planning.<\/p>\n

If you take a closer look at a workplace \u201cdisrupted\u201d by Atlassian tools, it seems more like a cyber-Taylorist dystopia than a world freed from drudgery by machines. For example, the McCorvey Sheet Metal Works<\/a> used Trello \u2014 a subsidiary of Atlassian purchased in 2017 \u2014 to replace their paper-based system for production processes on the shop floor.<\/p>\n

Implementing Trello involved breaking down tasks into a set of digital \u201cTo Do,\u201d \u201cDoing,\u201d and \u201cDone\u201d lists. This cataloguing system is inspired by Kanban, the scheduling system developed by engineers at Toyota in the 1970s. Trello allows McCorvey Sheet Metal Works to \u201cvisually track jobs in the pipeline … and see when jobs were taking longer than expected, and who needed help in getting their job to completion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The upshot is that Atlassian has given McCorvey\u2019s management an even greater insight into the production process. Whether this is a utopia or a dystopia depends on where in the production process you stand.<\/p>\n

Managers are the target audience for Altassian\u2019s vision of the future of work. If there were any doubt, an interactive marketing infographic called You Waste a Lot of Time at Work<\/a> makes their intentions clear. We are told that 91 percent of people daydream during meetings, and that for every workday, two hours are spent recovering from distractions. One graphic from Atlassian\u2019s infographic reveals that \u201c60 percent or less of work time is actually spent productively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atlassian concludes with a call to \u201cStop the trend!\u201d And their pitch seems to be working. Over the last financial quarter, the company grew its client base by over two hundred thousand<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Changing the World for the Worse<\/h2>\n \n

If changing the way we work wasn\u2019t a grand enough goal, Atlassian has also taken up political and social issues, both domestic and international. Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes have led the charge, regularly intervening in day-to-day questions. These range from backing plans for elite Australian private schools to go co-educational<\/a> to attending the UN Climate Action Summit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cannon-Brookes is particularly outspoken on environmental issues, arguing that it is now necessary for \u201cbusiness leaders to provide leadership<\/a> in areas of the community,\u201d or risk losing their workforce.<\/p>\n

There is a connection between Atlassian\u2019s forays into the world of politics and its technocratic vision of the world. When you sell billions of dollars\u2019 worth of management software, it is easy to think that tech innovation can solve all the world\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

In an interview on his \u201cpoliticization,\u201d Cannon-Brookes told the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> that he saw \u201ctwo problems with politics.\u201d The first was that \u201cpeople start with a given position … they can\u2019t apply logic to it, they can\u2019t sit there and go: \u2018What is the best solution here? Let\u2019s go with that,\u2019 because there are interest groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

His second issue is with the \u201cgovernment\u2019s inability to experiment\u201d because \u201cyou get voted out, or the other guys are like, \u2018Oh look at those idiots, that was never going to work.\u2019\u201d He compares this approach unfavorably to that of startups. In budding companies, according to Cannon-Brookes, there are \u201clots of experiments going on constantly that work or don\u2019t work and then flame out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the government should operate more like a tech startup, presumably one that uses Atlassian software and management practices. All that is needed are solutions \u2014 but the messy world of politics gets in the way.<\/p>\n

Regulation and restructuring do not have much of a place in Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar\u2019s vision of how tech companies ought to be run. When Facebook blocked<\/a> Australian users in response to a media code introduced by the federal government, Farquhar backed Facebook down the line. \u201cPoor government regulation,\u201d he argued<\/a>, was hampering the tech industry and its \u201cwider benefit to society.\u201d Atlassian then issued a set of principles it wants governments to adhere to when setting regulation for tech companies \u2014 so much for experimentation and teamwork.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

Hollow Visions<\/h2>\n \n

In response to Atlassian\u2019s dire warnings<\/a> that Australia won\u2019t keep up with other nations in the tech race, the New South Wales government built Tech Central, a \u201ctechnology and innovation precinct<\/a>\u201d in Sydney. Atlassian will take center stage, with a new 180-meter-tall headquarters<\/a>. It is a monument to the notion that \u201ctechnology can turbo-charge Australia\u2019s recovery\u201d and \u201ccreate jobs, ideas, and innovation.”<\/p>\n

As the writer and academic Gavin Mueller has argued, \u201ctechnology developed by capitalism furthers its goals … compels us to work more, limits our autonomy, and outmaneuvers and divides us when we organize to fight back.\u201d This is particularly true of technology that is developed to manage work processes, including Atlassian\u2019s software, despite their attempts to sell it as a \u201cdisruptive\u201d form of liberation.<\/p>\n

Until we develop the digital platforms needed to organize strikes and genuinely disrupt work, socialists may have to rediscover the Luddite approach that has, as Mueller has argued, always lain hidden at the heart of the workers\u2019 movement.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 1, 2021, Frank Furedi \u2014 a former Trotskyist turned right-wing libertarian \u2014 penned a column for the Australian fuming against \u201cwoke capitalists.\u201d He reserved particular ire for Atlassian cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, a man he said \u201cpersonifies the businessman turned culture warrior.\u201d This wasn\u2019t the only press that Cannon-Brookes and his business [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191926"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4865"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191927,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191926\/revisions\/191927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}