a mere hackney

I was recently encouraged to partake in the annual "hackathon" that the Google club at my school puts on. That's right, the Google club. If you're unfamiliar with the idea of a hackathon then fuck you die. In this industry it is very common for companies to gather 100s of stinky undergraduates eager for a job or a morsel of tech capital in a room for a 24 hour binge. These unshowered friendless incels then hobble together in "teams" and do something called "speaking to each other" so they can supposedly generate some shareholder value. They stay up late, wake up early, and write the worst code imaginable over an extra-narrow slice of Papa Johns cheese pizza on a paper plate. But not a real paper plate, one of those wax ones with the blue rim. And they give you some coke in a plastic little cup. Less than one can though. Oh and the company stickers and free merchandise for advertisement to your friends. Anyway, these virgin gouls have no time to think, no time to make real decisions, no time to coordinate their labor power, and don't even have a voice in what they create. They sprint as quickly as possible to the finish line set by their manager hackathon director.

It is a misconception that the "hackathon" is named after the verb "to hack" as in "to cut roughly" (through security) or even "to endure" (although the test of the hackathon is mental/emotional endurance). Instead, the hackathon is named after the meaning "to wretch" or better yet the "hackney" horse; truly, the hackathon is a miserable collective 100 man-days of toil and work horsing. In a hackathon, the apparent or contingent competition is among participants, but the latent antagonism (as always) is between capital and labor. No matter who wins the hackathon, capital always wins. And whoever "wins" the hackathon is the one most willing to put their health on the line and do unpaid work overnight on the weekends and lock-in and make really important crucial sacrifices of free-time and energy and life and family and do really quite honest and admirable work in silence without asking for acknowledgement or praise or "thank you"s thank you very much; that is, the most employable. All of this and more for free (thanks) to the event's "sponsor"

Oh yea, did I mention that hackathons have sponsors? Companies will routinely throw money at this cesspools, in exchange for being given the right to define the hackathon "theme" or target problem, and also being given all the submissions to be "judged" (read: used) under free licensing agreements. Sometimes competing companies like Google and Microsoft will even co-sponsor events to manage common pool (human) resources and guarantee long-term cheap labor. The judges at these things are unpaid, but act as a go-betweens for the sponsor, so they can take the best possible code for themselves and recruit the most slavish workers. But so often hackathons don't even pretend to promise employment or even interviews to the winners, so there is never "labor debt" incurred by the sponsors. Instead, an internal bug/infrastructure problem that used to cost a company a week of highly trained salaried work by a team of 5 can now be jointly solved by 20+ untrained and unpaid (and unwashed) teams. They call them teams because they're paid in food like horses by the way. And in no way are these equine participants organized enough to demand dignity; the events are all virtual, voluntary, anonymous (you never meet your competitors), and temporary (one weekend long only). The prize money is often just enough to get the most desperate bottom-of-the-barrel lowest-common-denominator coder to compete, but the chances of splitting $500 5 ways after 20 hours of work are less than 1 in 50 usually. So the expected value hourly rate is something like a measly 10 cents. But you'll do the free work for the resume or you'll work a worse job, loser.

Hackathons used to be actually real community events, just like LAN parties. In the past people did get together to hack computers and take down servers and make highly illegal frequency jammers and steal passwords from banks. But now the banks run the hackathons, and the ones getting hacked are the ones writing the code. The practice was besieged and co-opted by tech recruiters in the way all other social production is commodified, but maybe more-so in the way the lumpen are recruited to join the military, rather than the way that weed was legalized.