I study the way that beliefs about the purpose of technology, as well as its design by management and developers, impact the day-to-day opportunities and roles of wage workers. I define opportunities widely to include personal development, autonomy, and economic wellbeing. I conceptualize processes of automation, and the technology involved in them as sites of struggle, and there are struggles. Despite the US recent economic success, an impressive rebound from the 2007 recession and a similar if muted struggle through the covid-19 pandemic, inequality and wage stagnation are still significant problems. Thus, the main questions of the overall project are ‘Can we create a more just set of social relations given that contemporary capitalist labor is increasingly based on managerial software?’, and ‘What role can a refreshed, and newly nuanced, understanding of computing, automation, and the ostensible “objectivity” of those technologies bring to our pursuit of that aim?’ I figure computer-centered automation systems as sociotechnical phenomena relevant to multiple registers of concern including: contemporary forms of inequity, prevailing understandings of technology, contemporary social relations of labor and capital, and the relational features and material effects of specific sociotechnical systems whose creation and deployment rely on and promote the existence of epistemic features such as the false binary of bias vs objectivity in the functioning of sociotechnical phenomena. Rather than simply dichotomizing technology and automation processes as either the cause of, or solution to, worker inequality I figure them as potential sources of opportunity for equality and democratic participation if their development is democratized. In our increasingly mechanized and automated world, the time and space for critical participation is shrinking. We have become reliant on moments of democratic participation, and even these are few and far between. By conceptualizing the development of technology and processes of automation as sites of struggle I am also positing them as important moments for democratic participation. Moments when more than just upper management should have a voice as to the purposes and uses of our shared intellectual projects