Oh, my. This has needed to be said just so for a very long time. Was just speaking some of this history to my son the other day. Most folks don't know, can't see it as they did then, because they're told an entirely different story every day. "The story works because the structure makes it true." McLuhan's "a chicken is an egg's idea of making more eggs."
"Culture is infrastructure. Narrative is strategy." How this is conceived and used makes all the difference. Compare the Tzotzil people you mention in another article to Americans/Canadians. "A system optimized for extraction requires fragmentation." A fundamental truth, and one reflected in the the current system's reliance on (and creation of) biological monocultures, as well as the social effects.
The egg doesn't theorize. It optimizes. Two hundred million years before the first union hall.
The IWW fascinates me endlessly - precisely because they saw the structure clearly, then tried to build counter-structure using the same optimization logic. One Big Union to match One Big Capital. The mechanism ate both.
Your son gets the real history. That's what matters.
Belatedly occurred to me that the current fragmentation is being optimized most notably by asset tokenization. When any asset can be a fractionalized token on the blockchain, optimization moves at the speed of information. Currently, the legal relationship of an asset token to the actual asset is a bit uncertain, though the two types of ownership are considered distinct. If (unfortunately, when's more likely) the blockchain is recognized as the official/legal registry of real world assets, this distinction will disappear.
Sharp catch. Right now there's friction—token ownership sits separate from legal deeds, courts haven't decided which wins. That gap slows things.
If the blockchain becomes the actual registry? Token = ownership, no distinction. Every asset splits into infinite tradeable fragments, optimizable at information speed. Zero lag.
The IWW tried consolidating labor power, failed because fragmentation paid better for owners. Tokenization flips it: consolidates capital's extraction infrastructure while fragmenting what anyone else owns. You get 0.0001% of everything; algos control the system trading it all.
This framing of the IWW as systems architecture rather than just labor history is really sharp. The part about how fragmentation is the control mechanism hits hard, especially seeing how the same playbook gets used with platform labor today. What's fascinating is that the system didn't just crush the Wobblies through violence, it made solidarity itself unaffordable which is a way more durable defense. Everytime I see Amazon or Uber structure things so workers compete with eachother instead of coordinating, it's the same damn machine.
Exactly. The violence was theater. The real kill shot was making coordination cost more than workers could afford.
Platform labor runs the same playbook at algorithmic speed. Individual task assignment. Geographic dispersion. Just-in-time scheduling. Every efficiency gain makes solidarity more expensive. You can't strike against an algorithm that treats you as interchangeable.
The IWW got it: you can't reform a system that makes coordination unaffordable. You either build outside the efficiency trap, or you get ground up.
That's why I keep coming back to them. Not because they won. Because they diagnosed the mechanism correctly even as it was killing them.
This piece looks at the Industrial Workers of the World not as a moral legend, but as a systems experiment—one that briefly neutralized fragmentation, the core control mechanism of industrial capitalism. What matters here isn’t whether the IWW was “right,” but what the system learned from the moment solidarity actually worked.
Oh, my. This has needed to be said just so for a very long time. Was just speaking some of this history to my son the other day. Most folks don't know, can't see it as they did then, because they're told an entirely different story every day. "The story works because the structure makes it true." McLuhan's "a chicken is an egg's idea of making more eggs."
"Culture is infrastructure. Narrative is strategy." How this is conceived and used makes all the difference. Compare the Tzotzil people you mention in another article to Americans/Canadians. "A system optimized for extraction requires fragmentation." A fundamental truth, and one reflected in the the current system's reliance on (and creation of) biological monocultures, as well as the social effects.
Thanks for this.
Not McLuhan. The egg.
The egg doesn't theorize. It optimizes. Two hundred million years before the first union hall.
The IWW fascinates me endlessly - precisely because they saw the structure clearly, then tried to build counter-structure using the same optimization logic. One Big Union to match One Big Capital. The mechanism ate both.
Your son gets the real history. That's what matters.
Belatedly occurred to me that the current fragmentation is being optimized most notably by asset tokenization. When any asset can be a fractionalized token on the blockchain, optimization moves at the speed of information. Currently, the legal relationship of an asset token to the actual asset is a bit uncertain, though the two types of ownership are considered distinct. If (unfortunately, when's more likely) the blockchain is recognized as the official/legal registry of real world assets, this distinction will disappear.
Sharp catch. Right now there's friction—token ownership sits separate from legal deeds, courts haven't decided which wins. That gap slows things.
If the blockchain becomes the actual registry? Token = ownership, no distinction. Every asset splits into infinite tradeable fragments, optimizable at information speed. Zero lag.
The IWW tried consolidating labor power, failed because fragmentation paid better for owners. Tokenization flips it: consolidates capital's extraction infrastructure while fragmenting what anyone else owns. You get 0.0001% of everything; algos control the system trading it all.
This framing of the IWW as systems architecture rather than just labor history is really sharp. The part about how fragmentation is the control mechanism hits hard, especially seeing how the same playbook gets used with platform labor today. What's fascinating is that the system didn't just crush the Wobblies through violence, it made solidarity itself unaffordable which is a way more durable defense. Everytime I see Amazon or Uber structure things so workers compete with eachother instead of coordinating, it's the same damn machine.
Exactly. The violence was theater. The real kill shot was making coordination cost more than workers could afford.
Platform labor runs the same playbook at algorithmic speed. Individual task assignment. Geographic dispersion. Just-in-time scheduling. Every efficiency gain makes solidarity more expensive. You can't strike against an algorithm that treats you as interchangeable.
The IWW got it: you can't reform a system that makes coordination unaffordable. You either build outside the efficiency trap, or you get ground up.
That's why I keep coming back to them. Not because they won. Because they diagnosed the mechanism correctly even as it was killing them.
"You can't strike against an algorithm that treats you as interchangeable." Bingo.
This piece looks at the Industrial Workers of the World not as a moral legend, but as a systems experiment—one that briefly neutralized fragmentation, the core control mechanism of industrial capitalism. What matters here isn’t whether the IWW was “right,” but what the system learned from the moment solidarity actually worked.