Thomas Friedman: dumbass fraud. Cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq. Tech isn't going to deliver humanity from itself; humanity's problems transcend tech. And don't get me started on how tech is/was going to "revolutionize" education. When students are just "data points," there is no humanity. And AI is just a giant plagiarism machine.
I am old enough to remember Marshal McCluhan characterizing the internets potential for establishing “a global village” and have lived long enough to see it become a digital Lord Of the Flies.
You're absolutely correct about the need for unions in the heart of the beast, but those unions need to be able to mobilize the workers for the only thing that the investment class truly fears: strikes and demands for concrete material benefits. If the unions are weak or waver, they will be crushed. I speak from experience.
I believe every job in every workplace should have a union. However, I worry that the time to unionized tech was 5 years ago or earlier. The great off-shoring is in full swing, and I fear any place that forms a union will just be shutdown and replaced with off-shore labor anyway. (I know, they are going to do it whether you unionize or not, so try anyway). Manufacturing fought hard, brave battles to form unions that protected their workers, and now they're by and large been replaced by cheaper un-unionized workers overseas, and those former workers are simply impoverished. I don't know if I have a point here, other than I am looking for some hope in dark times and I don't feel like I see any.
Chiming in just in case there are tech workers reading this who want to organize their workplace but don’t know who to contact— if that describes you, this is your best bet: https://code-cwa.org/organize
“Hey, whoa! Where did the internet age’s beautiful dream go off the rails?”
April 12, 1994. The first time commercial interests said “Fuck you - we’ll do as we please. There’s no law against it.” and there were no consequences for them.
This is a really interesting data point that I was unaware of but I remember people still talking about the internet in idealistic terms in the late 90s and well into the 2000s. Blogging, for example, was talked about in this really utopian like random people could be just as important as big media companies and politicians by having blogs. People were still celebrating how recently Napster had broken the shackles of the corporate music business etc.
It’s really amazing seeing all the different developments over the years, especially for those of us who predate the World Wide Web and used the Internet during its infancy/childhood.
Prior to Canter & Siegel, the Internet operated on “netiquette” a loose set of informal policies enforced through peer pressure and collective action. They showed the need for regulation and restrictions to prevent greedy and unethical people from ruining it for everybody. It was the first time I can recall the beautiful dream of the ‘net tarnished by selfishness and greed.
I wonder how you think about the following. I work at a big tech firm creating AI for disclosure, but am also someone who was previously involved in labor organizing. I’m also not American. Critical masses of tech workers at big tech companies are dependent on their employer for their visa status and working in the US typically provides the kinds of benefits that are monumentally harder to come by in the dominant source countries (India, China). Plus people tend to have established lives and families in the US that they’re not willing to give up to pursue AI regulation/accountability. That’s on top of the fact that these jobs are incredibly well paid and offer extremely good benefits and conditions in absolute terms as well (the kinds of things whose absence typically propels labor). And the average tech worker profile is also not someone who tends sympathetic to labor and unionizing (I helped organize when I was in a PhD program and engineering and computer science students were incredibly anti union and obstinate, now imagine the people self-selecting into big tech from that already challenging pool).
I don’t have a prior here, am just curious to hear thoughts as I’ve spent a non negligible amount of time thinking about this in the context of my own workplace.
Unions may not have a profit motive, but they certainly have a revenue motive, because the more money a company earns the more it can pay its workers. Therefore one should not expect them to stick up for third parties who may be harmed by their industry's products.
I love the term "Techno-Utopianism". That being said, I believe unionizing would cause Technology in the West to fall behind as the Chinese would never consider a responsible ethical approach with AI, robotics and so on.
Had nothing to do with races but if you wanna go that route, that tells me all I need to know about you.
However, I should have separated critique of political structures from prejudiced generalizations about populations.
To be clear: I do not believe that any group of people whether chinese, western, or otherwise—is innately more or less ethical. However I think Governments & state policies are. My comment was based on systems, institutions, or historical developments, not on any assumption about inherent traits of a people.
About paying, there's food for thought. I used to get the L.A. Times. One fee. Now I pay for so many Substacks that I wince at the heartfelt pleas from ones I don't pay for. I am perpetually uncomfortable. ?????
For the rest of this post, re seeing what's so and thinking about what to do, it's all one-sided from the money and power side. I have no argument with the points you make, but there's another side. It's we-the-people. We have this awesome tool in the internet, and no one is using it. No one is organizing us. It's all gadflies, all in silos, not thinking together, where one thing to do is to inspire humanity with how it can join together to become a force.
That's what my Substack is all about, and I can't find another doing that, despite a standing offer of a fast $100 to anyone who sends me to a body of work comparable to mine. Here's a recent summary of a couple of years of the ideas I've tried to float:
Thomas Friedman: dumbass fraud. Cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq. Tech isn't going to deliver humanity from itself; humanity's problems transcend tech. And don't get me started on how tech is/was going to "revolutionize" education. When students are just "data points," there is no humanity. And AI is just a giant plagiarism machine.
I am old enough to remember Marshal McCluhan characterizing the internets potential for establishing “a global village” and have lived long enough to see it become a digital Lord Of the Flies.
You're absolutely correct about the need for unions in the heart of the beast, but those unions need to be able to mobilize the workers for the only thing that the investment class truly fears: strikes and demands for concrete material benefits. If the unions are weak or waver, they will be crushed. I speak from experience.
I believe every job in every workplace should have a union. However, I worry that the time to unionized tech was 5 years ago or earlier. The great off-shoring is in full swing, and I fear any place that forms a union will just be shutdown and replaced with off-shore labor anyway. (I know, they are going to do it whether you unionize or not, so try anyway). Manufacturing fought hard, brave battles to form unions that protected their workers, and now they're by and large been replaced by cheaper un-unionized workers overseas, and those former workers are simply impoverished. I don't know if I have a point here, other than I am looking for some hope in dark times and I don't feel like I see any.
It would have been much easier to unionize tech 20 years ago but that horse has left the barn.
Excellent essay.
Chiming in just in case there are tech workers reading this who want to organize their workplace but don’t know who to contact— if that describes you, this is your best bet: https://code-cwa.org/organize
The most eye opening piece was about that clause in the BBB where AI can’t be regulated for the next 10 years….WTF!!!!
Only one man can solve this. But I forget his name...
“Maybe this time it will be different.”Probably not tho.
Workers of the world, unite!
“Hey, whoa! Where did the internet age’s beautiful dream go off the rails?”
April 12, 1994. The first time commercial interests said “Fuck you - we’ll do as we please. There’s no law against it.” and there were no consequences for them.
The writing was on the wall at that point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel
This is a really interesting data point that I was unaware of but I remember people still talking about the internet in idealistic terms in the late 90s and well into the 2000s. Blogging, for example, was talked about in this really utopian like random people could be just as important as big media companies and politicians by having blogs. People were still celebrating how recently Napster had broken the shackles of the corporate music business etc.
It’s really amazing seeing all the different developments over the years, especially for those of us who predate the World Wide Web and used the Internet during its infancy/childhood.
Prior to Canter & Siegel, the Internet operated on “netiquette” a loose set of informal policies enforced through peer pressure and collective action. They showed the need for regulation and restrictions to prevent greedy and unethical people from ruining it for everybody. It was the first time I can recall the beautiful dream of the ‘net tarnished by selfishness and greed.
I’m sure everything will be fine now that Drumpf has tapped Palantir to create a database on all of us (as if it doesn’t already exist).
I wonder how you think about the following. I work at a big tech firm creating AI for disclosure, but am also someone who was previously involved in labor organizing. I’m also not American. Critical masses of tech workers at big tech companies are dependent on their employer for their visa status and working in the US typically provides the kinds of benefits that are monumentally harder to come by in the dominant source countries (India, China). Plus people tend to have established lives and families in the US that they’re not willing to give up to pursue AI regulation/accountability. That’s on top of the fact that these jobs are incredibly well paid and offer extremely good benefits and conditions in absolute terms as well (the kinds of things whose absence typically propels labor). And the average tech worker profile is also not someone who tends sympathetic to labor and unionizing (I helped organize when I was in a PhD program and engineering and computer science students were incredibly anti union and obstinate, now imagine the people self-selecting into big tech from that already challenging pool).
I don’t have a prior here, am just curious to hear thoughts as I’ve spent a non negligible amount of time thinking about this in the context of my own workplace.
Unions may not have a profit motive, but they certainly have a revenue motive, because the more money a company earns the more it can pay its workers. Therefore one should not expect them to stick up for third parties who may be harmed by their industry's products.
I love the term "Techno-Utopianism". That being said, I believe unionizing would cause Technology in the West to fall behind as the Chinese would never consider a responsible ethical approach with AI, robotics and so on.
This is the ethical framework that sanctions everything because if we don't do it the other guys will.
Hilarious and racist that anyone would still think the Chinese are somehow innately less ethnical than the West
Had nothing to do with races but if you wanna go that route, that tells me all I need to know about you.
However, I should have separated critique of political structures from prejudiced generalizations about populations.
To be clear: I do not believe that any group of people whether chinese, western, or otherwise—is innately more or less ethical. However I think Governments & state policies are. My comment was based on systems, institutions, or historical developments, not on any assumption about inherent traits of a people.
Hope that gives more context to it.
I'm glad you learned so much about me
About paying, there's food for thought. I used to get the L.A. Times. One fee. Now I pay for so many Substacks that I wince at the heartfelt pleas from ones I don't pay for. I am perpetually uncomfortable. ?????
For the rest of this post, re seeing what's so and thinking about what to do, it's all one-sided from the money and power side. I have no argument with the points you make, but there's another side. It's we-the-people. We have this awesome tool in the internet, and no one is using it. No one is organizing us. It's all gadflies, all in silos, not thinking together, where one thing to do is to inspire humanity with how it can join together to become a force.
That's what my Substack is all about, and I can't find another doing that, despite a standing offer of a fast $100 to anyone who sends me to a body of work comparable to mine. Here's a recent summary of a couple of years of the ideas I've tried to float:
An epidemic of courage
For doing what saves humanity
https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/an-epidemic-of-courage