The Extorted Existence

If you don't wake up every day in fear of losing your stability overnight, then you are not the part of America that I am. I live in constant fear, as many of us do, of rotting in the street like a dog while our fellow man and woman turn their backs — won't even look us in the eye. It is through this threat of homelessness the ruling class imposes their will. Work — or starve. Pay for water. Buy our food. Rent from our homes. Let your employer insure you. Die when you're not useful. This is the America that I, and most of us, are a part of. If you don't recognize this America, then you are the enemy.

Existence under capitalism is an existence that substitutes extortion for dignity. One of choice absent freedom. We live an extorted existence. It is unbefitting of our humanity, it's unbefitting of our value, and it's a direct assault on our dignity. There is no right more sacred than a man's dignity. The right of all men to live a dignified existence is the root basis of every other right.

We have a complicated relationship with work. To survive in this world we built, one must be sufficiently expert at doing the specific things the people who control all the resources like you to do. The very basic distribution of what they like you to do and do not have much need for you to do defines the entire structure of society. There are those who never work, those who work fruitfully, and those who do the work that they ruled made you disposable. But those who never work never share in the fear. They are not like us.

I walked into a one on one conversation with my boss, around 6 or 9 months after I had been informed that if there were not empirical, documentable improvements in my performance, that my relationship with the company would end. This inspired a dedication to excellence born out of spite in my heart. "How dare they suggest firing me! After all I have done for them? After the automations that I built that are still earning them $47 million a year, per our own internal reckoning." It lit a fire in me. I was so furious, the only thing I could think was: "I'm going to come back so furiously that they will fire the guy who even suggested firing me."

6 or 9 months after that notice, I had succeeded in a powerful rebrand and radiated productivity. I came back stronger, more visible, more innovative, more proactive, and built software that I was never asked to build — simply to further enable myself and my peers with custom efficiency tooling.

It didn't go without note. My manager's managers knew my name for a good reason now. My manager's manager's manager had only praise for my presentation skills. My manager's manager's manager's manager had heard of my innovation tools — and wanted to explore and potentially fund it. Teams across the country were inviting me to change from my team to theirs.

The value I delivered was substantial, in spite of my moments of functional distress and sporadic mental shutdowns.

In an odd twist of circumstance, perhaps my most lasting and impactful contribution to the company was not within the scope of my role at all. Instead, it came from fixing an inconvenience I faced working within their ecosystem. The company had invented a proprietary distributed data query language system and engine. It used its own programming paradigm separate from that of a procedural paradigm — strictly speaking, in the academic sense it was not imperative, but I will not more precisely name what paradigm the language does use. For 11 years, thousands of engineers wrote code in this language with no guardrails, no tooling, no built-in support; flying blind. I rejected that experience. I could not write in this language without proper tools. So I built them. And that seems to have been the thing that I have built that has lasted.

The company and I did a mutual, month-long handoff — I formally gave over control of the project, and spent that month making sure it could be cared for to the best of my ability. Whatever knowledge I could offer or preparation toward its longterm success was more important to me than my tenure at the company. I was leaving. That was certain. My final goal at the company — not my primary work assignment — was to bring the tool to the best condition it could be in. A simple tool that made developing a mite less troublesome. To have produced a useful tool for others is a satisfying feeling. One I chase today, one that inspires me to produce a tool for the good of humanity, not for the company. I am truly proud of this project. Anyone could have done it, but didn't. I did. I made it happen. And now it exists outside of me. Still in use. Still funded. I want that impact for the world, for our security, not for the benefit of the fraction of humanity that binds us to their wicked will.

This tool I built was estimated from company-wide survey data of the developers who used it to save a substantial number of "dev hours", or hours a developer actually spends writing code. Per this survey, my tool saved the average engineer 3 hours for any given week in which their primary work was writing in this internal query language. My tool improved the efficiency one could program in this language and improved the overall quality of the developer experience. If you take that by the number of developers who use the tool — about 1,000 people per week when I left — extrapolate that over to a year per developer, and multiply it by the lowest base salary that any developer can have at the company (the absolute minimum estimate), my tool saved my company $11.2 million a year.

I was rewarded with a gift card. To the company store.

It was indisputable that my performance was not only exceeding the criteria of my level, but it was starkly evident that the work I had completed in this improvement period was by the very definition of the scope of the work, not something a junior level engineer could possibly do. This was the work of a midlevel engineer. AI automations, code tooling, and code generation were the projects of a midlevel engineer. I had been tasked with the work of a midlevel engineer for the past five years. Delivered on 17 projects that would qualify me for a promotion under the company's own promotion model. To be considered for a midlevel engineer, one had to have about three successful, end to end designs or architecture solutions written, owned, or implemented. For five years I did that work on the salary of someone who joined the company yesterday.

The positive feedback was unanimous. My teammates recognized the change in ability. My reputation had become that of an innovator, someone who sees a problem and fixes it.

For my efforts on the data query tool, I was invited to present at a tool fair at our company's annual tech conference at company headquarters. Only 100 others were selected to have a booth. I traveled for it. Put work on hold for it. Printed banners for it. Prepared a thoughtful presentation for it. The investment I made was calculated — I knew that this would distinguish me as more valuable to the company than I had been treated before. Saving $11.2 million per year. Creating automated AI knowledge support agents. Introducing the latest workflow tools. Presenting regularly.

I had built up enough corporate credit to make this case to my manager. He agreed with my assessment — the work was midlevel work. I put the facts plainly. Due to the stock issuance per employee last year being 0 units or near 0 units for a broad majority of the company, my salary was slotted to be less than when I joined the company. My boss agreed this was an unacceptable scenario. He said he recognized my efforts, and came across earnestly as taking the task personally to amend it.

I remember my boss saying, "You've really improved. I can see that you are motivated, not just by the money, but an intrinsic motivation to build. You can tell you really care about the product." I told him, "No. It's the money. I care about the product because you pay me to care about the product." My boss responded, after so many words, "What is it that motivates you to succeed at work?" The answer to this question I already knew, but I paused before I said: "The fear of becoming homeless. That's why I work."

The special approval for my equitable salary adjustment was moving its way through the chain of command. I had allies several levels up and across aisles. I did make it clear: earning less than when I joined the company come the next fiscal year is an exit condition for me. The raise comes or I go.

The performance review was a blowout. The score was settled. But three, maybe four levels up the chain, the deal was quashed. "We tried everything we could," they said. One month later they were stunned to learn I had been arranging to leave the company. They asked what they could do to keep me. "Pay me more."

Perhaps they counted on or didn't care if I actually left. For 18 months, they got from me the performance of a lifetime. Dedication. Forget the hobbies. Forget the socialization. Focus. Weekends. Nights. Perform. Do the song and dance that grants you the right to survive. Please your benefactors or risk your stability.

This system is designed to give you an existence under threats. The system captures your life. Layoffs are routine. By design — they remind the employee their job is always at risk. Their safety is always at risk. Homelessness is a paper push away every single day.

As I prepared to leave the company, the team that designed and maintained the language I built my tool for attempted to recruit me. More people continue to use the tool. My company could have made me whole. They could have secured my future. They could have paid me my worth — a fraction of the amount I moved their top line — and I would never fear instability again. They could have finally freed me to succeed. But they cannot let you escape the tesseract. To do so is to break the promise of extortion the ruling class has silently made to each other. Fear makes the mind malleable.

If capitalism is the ideal system, why is the dream to escape it?

They have made slaves of us all. They extort us for the very means of survival. They conscript us to a lifetime of work — they don't attend our medical needs if we don't.

They work us until we die — and put us down if we don't. The extorted existence is life under capitalism. The extorted existence is the life of you and I.