Taylorism to TensorFlow: The Conquest and Contraction of the Social Contract
Labor rights were not a gift from the elite, but a victory won by blood. The algorithm is the ultimate technological mechanism for the silent reversal of that hard-won social conquest.
I. The Bridge: From Rationalist Heresy to Historical Conquest
In Article 1 (The Blind Architectures), we established that the AI system is the perfect execution of the Rationalist Heresy, which discards the valor da inutilidade (human dignity and conscience). But the current crisis is not merely a legal or philosophical error; it is a historical pattern repeating itself. The rise of the algorithmic manager is best understood as the final counter-attack in the century-long war over the social contract. The history of the Industrial Age is the story of labor successfully fighting the mechanization of man. We must now ask the critical question: If the AI is reversing the gains of labor, how precisely were those labor rights conquered in the first place? The answer is not found in boardroom charity, but in the bloody, structural transformation of power.
II. The Machine Age Thesis: Taylorism and the War on Time (History & Sociology)
The true predecessor to the modern algorithm is not a computer, but a clipboard. The Industrial Revolution saw the birth of Scientific Management, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor [CITE: Taylor, F.W. The Principles of Scientific Management]. Taylor’s goal was the maximal utilization of the human body as a machine, a sociological process that reduced workers to quantifiable units of effort and time.
This was the original sin of the machine age. Taylorism served capital by decoupling the worker’s skill from their value, making labor fungible and cheap. It was a philosophical attack because it sought to eliminate the worker’s sovereignty over time and knowledge. The stopwatch became the instrument of the first great act of mass sociological control.
However, the resulting wealth accumulation (ascensão da burguesia) created grave social problems [CITE: Mendonça, E. P. O Mundo Precisa de Filosofia] (poverty, disease, class warfare) that threatened to destabilize the entire economic engine. The system, optimized for production, was failing at the level of social reproduction. To survive, the power of wealth (riqueza) was forced into conflict with the growing political will (política) of the dispossessed masses [CITE: Mendonça, E. P. O Mundo Precisa de Filosofia].
III. The Labor Antithesis: Conquest by Tears and Blood (History & Political Philosophy)
We must reject the sanitized narrative of history. Labor rights were never a welfare program freely delivered by enlightened elites; they were a conquest by the masses. The victories that birthed the social contract, the minimum wage, the 8-hour day, the prohibition of child labor, and the right to collective bargaining, were won through organized strikes, political struggle, and profound personal suffering. These rights were written in the tears and blood of those who refused to be mere cogs in the iron cage of rationalization [CITE: Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism].
This hard-won social contract served a dual function that stabilized the capitalist order:
Human Dignity: It introduced legal boundaries (the valor da inutilidade writ large) that limited the extent to which capital could treat a human being as mere input.
Economic Stabilization: Crucially, it ensured that the masses of workers received sufficient capital to become a mass of consumers. This solved the fundamental problem of demand: workers could now purchase the immense volume of products made by the very factories that employed them.
The transition from a society dominated by the economy (riqueza) to one stabilized by the political power of law and rights (política) was a necessary evolutionary step [CITE: Mendonça, E. P. O Mundo Precisa de Filosofia]. It transformed the feudal relationship of direct dependency into the modern relationship of structured compromise.
IV. The Algorithmic Reversion: TensorFlow as the Final Foreman (Law & Technology)
The Algorithmic Reversion is the undoing of this compromise. Today, TensorFlow (or any modern machine learning model) is the final, perfected foreman. It re-imposes the micromanagement of Taylorism but is immune to the legal and social boundaries that contained Taylor’s original system.
The AI accomplishes this by using the independent contractor loophole (Article 1) as its blueprint. The factory foreman was legally accountable; the AI is protected by a categorical classification. The digital system imposes the rigid time control and performance mandates required of an employee while legally avoiding minimum wage, benefits, and unionization.
This is the technology that enables capital to recede the social contract silently. By removing the need for a legal compromise with the worker, the AI removes the necessity for the consumer-worker contract as well. The system is rapidly shifting toward a design that requires fewer workers with purchasing power, enabling the elite to extract maximum value with minimum social cost.
This is not just economic regression. It is the technological re-engineering of society back toward a pre-contractual relationship defined by micro-control and dependency, the fundamental architecture of the vassal order.
V. Conclusion: The Ideological Battlefield
Mendonça understood that the “luta de ideologias” (the struggle of ideologies) [CITE: Mendonça, E. P. O Mundo Precisa de Filosofia] decides the fate of humanity. Today, that struggle is waged by ideas embedded in software.
We have traced the genesis of the modern crisis back to the historical conquest of rights. We have shown that the AI is the ultimate tool for reversing those gains. The core struggle is no longer over wage rates, but over the very purpose of human existence in an optimized world.
The final question remains: What force is driving the global financial and political system to use this technological opportunity for such a systematic historical reversal? We must look beyond economics and into the deepest, longest cycles of geopolitical power.
Article 3 will deliver the philosophical climax of this series. We will explore how this algorithmic return to vassalage aligns with the long-term geopolitical and ideological cycles of the Anglo-Saxon Oligarchy and what the closing of the current world cycle implies for the future of global power.
Licensing and Use
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The ideas generated here are for the defense of the valor da inutilidade and the sovereignty of the human mind.
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