Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Capitalism’s Shell Game: From Robert Bork to John Deere.
John Deere’s workers are done with their employer’s bullshit.
When the 10,000 workers who keep the world’s largest agribusiness monopoly humming walked off the job last month, it was historic. As one John Deere worker put it, “Everything John Deere did to increase its stock price is now a liability.” Deere’s workforce loyalty had been eroded by decades of reduced pay, reduced benefits and increased hours, all amid skyrocketing profits, stock prices, and executive compensation,.
As the day of the strike vote drew nearer, the company put on a charm offensive, painting its workers as greedy and lazy, unhappy with $60,000 a year.
In 1956, the Nobel prize in physics went to William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their work on silicon transistors. Shockley, a Bell Labs alum, had already gone to work commercializing this invention, moving from New Jersey to Mountain View, California and founding Shockley Semiconductors, the first “silicon” company in Silicon Valley. In an important sense, Shockley invented Silicon Valley.
He was a terrible person.
After the Nobel, Shockley turned brooding and paranoid. He installed wiretaps to spy on his engineers and family members and administered polygraph tests to employees.
He lost interest in semiconductors and threw himself into eugenics and the extermination of “inferior” people. He offered cash bounties to Black women who underwent sterilizing surgeries. He toured the US, debating biologists to prove that the human race needed to be purified through “race science” to preserve and refine the superior genes of the very best white people.
All of this would have posed a significant barrier to inventing the commercial silicon transistor, of course. But even without the racism and paranoia, Shockley was a genuinely terrible manager. He was prone to starting and then halting projects, switching up the corporate priorities based on his whims without regard to the work that his employees had put into work that he was scrapping or de-emphasizing.
Within a year of the company’s founding, eight of its top engineers had had enough. They quit Shockley Semi and founded their own rival, Fairchild Semiconductor. Less than a year after that, Fairchild launched its first silicon transistor, the 2N696, dooming the germanium transistor to the scrap heap of history. Silicon Valley was finally making silicon.
Continue reading "The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley"
