On Craig Gent’s Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work
In 1801, Nottingham weavers smashed the automated looms that threatened their livelihoods. A century later, in the steel mills and slaughterhouses of America, factory hands were timed with stopwatches, their every movement engineered for maximum efficiency. By the 1970s, office workers were subjected to the cold metrics of the spreadsheet. And by the 2000s, Amazon was telling you when to piss. At each stage, management found new ways to wring labour from the worker’s body while insisting that the process was rational, necessary, and even inescapable.
In Cyberboss, Craig Gent meticulously chronicles the latest iteration of this historical project: algorithmic management, where discipline is automated, exploitation is optimised, and the worker, whether warehouse picker, delivery driver, or precarious freelancer, is left adrift in a labyrinth of invisible commands. If Taylorism once promised scientific efficiency through human oversight, today’s workplaces remove even the pretence of negotiation. The boss no longer watches; it calculates.
Gent’s subject is what he calls the “black-boxing” of management, a process by which workers no longer confront bosses in the flesh but interact with managerial authority through interfaces, notifications, and impersonal data flows. It is a regime where, as one worker tells him, “there’s a phrase at work they keep repeating: ‘Just trust the system.’ It’s quite quasi-religious. To the point where I, like—‘Amen!’—I cross myself when they say it.” The system is an assemblage of computational technologies that record, direct, and discipline the labour process in real time. Rather than replacing workers outright, as some crude automation narratives suggest, Gent argues that algorithmic management reconfigures their position: extracting ever greater intensities of labour while systematically reducing their autonomy, their security, and their ability to organise.
In a previous review, I considered the ways in which algorithmic systems operate not merely as tools of efficiency but as instruments of discipline, how, in the novel Predicted Guilt, predictive technologies don’t just respond to behaviour but actively anticipate, direct, and condition it. Cyberboss takes up a parallel thread, focusing on how algorithmic management functions within the workplace, not merely tracking workers but setting the terms of their activity in advance, transforming every movement into a data point, every moment of labour into an optimisable variable. The difference is one of application, not of substance. In fiction, the algorithmic gaze turns life itself into a script to be followed; in reality, it turns the workplace into a series of non-negotiable instructions.
The Taylorist Spectre
Gent situates algorithmic management within a long tradition of capitalist control, drawing a line from Taylorism to the contemporary workplace, but he insists that the digital turn is not merely an acceleration of past trends. The key difference is that under digital management, not only are workers separated from control over the labour process, but human managers themselves become subservient to the algorithm. The boss is, in a sense, cybernetic: a real-time computational system that perpetually adjusts its commands based on a feedback loop of worker-generated data.
The opacity of algorithmic decision-making, a quality Gent describes as an ‘ontology of unknowability,’ makes it more difficult for workers to challenge their conditions. The imperatives of the algorithmic system are presented as neutral, as mere technical necessities, yet they encode deeply political decisions about productivity targets, shift patterns, and job allocation. “We are not being replaced,” one worker notes, “but we are being played.” Workers find themselves in an arrangement where their performance is constantly monitored, but the logic governing their work remains hidden.
This is not simply a matter of efficiency. Gent argues that algorithmic management is designed to ensure that resistance is difficult, if not impossible. Workers cannot collectively bargain with an app. They cannot reason with a piece of code. The traditional points of leverage, negotiations with a foreman, complaints to human resources, become meaningless when the mechanisms of control exist outside human oversight.
The Political Stakes
Gent is at his strongest when drawing out the implications of these transformations for workplace politics. He critiques the tendency, even among left-wing commentators, to frame algorithmic management as simply a matter of bad technology in need of reform. The real issue is not the opacity of algorithms, nor even their tendency to generate perverse incentives, but the basic fact that they are used to consolidate managerial power against labour.
This is why the most effective forms of worker resistance do not revolve around calls for greater transparency or regulation but rather direct confrontations with the structure of control itself. His discussion of the Writers Guild of America’s campaign against AI-generated content is instructive in this regard. Unlike most unions, which remain mired in negotiations over marginal improvements to algorithmic systems, the WGA recognised that the only viable strategy was outright refusal: rejecting AI-generated scripts not because they were insufficiently regulated, but because they represented an attack on labour’s power.
But this is where Gent’s argument could go further. While he is right to dismiss regulatory fixes as insufficient, he does not fully explore how workers might meaningfully resist. His focus on subversion, tactics that exploit the gaps and contradictions within algorithmic systems, suggests that organised labour will have to look beyond traditional strike action. But what forms will this take? The most interesting moments in Cyberboss come not when Gent diagnoses the problem, but when he gestures towards potential counter-strategies: coordinated slowdowns that confuse the algorithm, acts of digital sabotage that obscure performance metrics, collective obfuscation of tracking data. The history of labour struggles is also a history of creative resistance. If algorithms are the new foremen, workers will find new ways to fight them.
A Necessary Reckoning
Cyberboss is, in the best sense, an angry book. But it is also a meticulous and deeply researched one. Gent situates his argument within a rich tradition of critical political economy, drawing on figures from Harry Braverman to Mark Fisher (to whom the book is dedicated). What emerges is not just an analysis of algorithmic management but a broader critique of the contemporary labour regime: a world in which work is increasingly fragmented, insecure, and surveilled, yet where capital remains as dependent as ever on the extraction of human labour.
It demands not only recognition of the scale of the problem but a reckoning with the question of power. The factory floor once had a foreman. The office once had a supervisor. A worker could demand answers, file a grievance, call a strike. Now, the boss is an equation. The algorithm does not negotiate. It does not listen. It does not make exceptions.
In The Frontier of Control (1920), Carter Goodrich described the moment at which an employer asserts: “Beyond this there shall be no discussion, the rest is my business alone.” Gent shows that the algorithmic workplace moves this frontier even further, locking workers into a regime where even the logic of their exploitation is unknowable. But the old struggles remain. The Luddite weavers smashed their looms not because they hated technology, but because they understood that control of the machine meant control of the work. If today’s battle is against the cybernetic boss, the same lesson holds. The future of resistance will not be fought on the picket line alone. It will be fought in the shadow of the machine.
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