Augmenting autonomy: ‘New Collar’ labor and the future of tech work

This essay maps IBM’s attempts to construct a typology of high-tech ‘New Collar’ work and leverage policymaking outcomes to underwrite IBM corporate ventures capable of materializing this work. Through a discursive analysis of IBM corporate texts, webpages, and the 2017 New Collar Jobs Act, I argue for New Collar work to be understood through the lens of autonomy, as IBM recasts notions of ‘autonomous’ technology onto humans by downplaying dystopic associations of technological autonomy and transferring notions of autonomy to human workers. In doing so, I account for IBM’s use of ‘augmentation’ to situate human intelligence as the cognitive force uplifted by work performed with artificial intelligence. By pairing human augmentation with posthumanist conceptions of ‘distributed cognition’, IBM centers human intelligence through a redistributed cognition that reverses posthumanism’s decentering of human supremacy. Following from this, I unpack ‘New Collar’ as a reinvention of ‘white’ and ‘blue’ collar dichotomies and New Collar work as the grounds for tech workers to reinvent themselves. In this way, by minimizing the necessity of 4-year college degrees as pathways to economic and professional mobility, IBM constructs ‘New Collar’ with embedded notions of enlarged self-determination for applied worker intellect, vocational training, and employability. Under the aegis of creating, training, and employing New Collar workers, IBM pursues policy outcomes to underwrite corporate ventures related to New Collar work and bolster its institutional autonomy amidst marketplaces of cognitive capitalism. By outlining how tax relief provisions of the New Collar Jobs Act correlate with neoliberal ideologies of legislators and IBM investments in public–private vocational models and cybersecurity platforms, I account for IBM’s elongated ‘economy of learning’ that enables the company to more thoroughly capture, underwrite, and commodify New Collar cognition from training to market outputs.