Marxian Alienation and Web Development

Burnout is where your work isn’t yours. It’s when you give yourself, but what you give is not allowed to be you. Your energy, your passion, your value co-opted, corrupted, and erased.

Burnout is what Marx called alienation. It’s when a worker becomes estranged from their work.

If you are a good developer, and a good person, asked to do shit work, you will burn out.

it’s one of the more persistent and prevalent features of capitalism. It’s simply not possible to reconcile your desire to do good, for your users, with the organization’s monomaniacal desire to siphon money to shareholders, no matter the costs or consequences.

If you struggle with burnout, you are not alone. It’s the ones who don’t struggle with it, who need no more than a big paycheck and a pat on the back, who bother me.

But there’s enough of us that we can ignore them.

By finding each other, and working together, we can not only make a better web, but a better world. One we can be proud to have worked on.