Below the API

Author: John MacGaffey, December 29, 2021 URL: https://www.johnmacgaffey.com/below-the-api/ One-line: A short post on Peter Reinhardt’s 2015 idea that jobs are splitting into those “above the API” (telling computers what to do) and “below the API” (being told by them), and a call to treat that shift as a chance to “reprogram society.”

A brief post (~500 words); the summary below covers all of it.

Key claims

• The manager has become an app. Gig workers often report to software rather than a person. Fifteen years earlier a cab driver needed a dispatcher; now code pairs driver and rider and picks the route.
• The framing is Peter Reinhardt’s (2015). Jobs fall into two categories: you tell computers what to do, or they tell you. An API is the layer that lets two applications talk; when a human sits on the other side of it instead of software, “the fabric of our society starts to change on a foundational level.”
• Autonomy plus “real-world APIs” raises open questions about what happens to communities as more work is managed by instructions given to computers.
• Two responses: resist the change (some caution is fair, given the unknowns of AI), or treat it as “a generational opportunity to rethink how work gets done, how resources get distributed, and what kind of world we want to live in.”

Notable quotes

“Jobs increasingly fall into one of two categories: Either you tell computers what to do for a living or they tell you what to do.”

“In other words, we have a chance to reprogram society — hopefully for the better.”

Connections

• Gig Economy — the main example.
• The Great Decoupling (Prue) — a 2025 version of the same split, extended from work to health, attention and class.