Since Oct 7, 2023, my taste for debunking tech industry hype has faded like morning mist, exposed to strong sunlight. Although the need for analysis and critique has never been more urgent – particularly of the linkages between the software cartel and state violence, counterinsurgency and related matters – my interest in dissecting false claims evaporated as my thoughts turned to algorithmic targeting platforms and armed quadcopter drones.

Microsoft’s recent announcement of a product named Recall for Copilot Plus PCs, which reportedly features built-in ‘AI’ hosted on a ‘Neural Processing Unit’, provides us with an opportunity to take a look at the political economy of the technology industry in the era of decline.

I say ‘decline’, because Recall, despite the hosannas we’re hearing from the tech press – Silicon Valley’s Pravda – does not represent an advance but a rearguard move to accomplish what I see as two goals:

Increase and guarantee Microsoft’s ‘AI’ related revenue stream by using its dominance of the PC operating system market (both consumer and corporate) to force a failing product on customers (Tesla’s so-called full self driving software provides another example)
Increase ‘AI’ related revenue by marketing Recall as a surveillance tool to governments and corporations

On point one: Despite a massive investment in OpenAI, including hosting and operating Azure data centers for the ChatGPT suite of resource destroying text calculators and embedding the large language model in flagship products Azure and Microsoft 365, it’s not clear Microsoft (or any company) has seen a return on its ‘AI’ investment. Quite the contrary. Recall creates a compelled revenue stream as corporations refresh their fleets of laptops. Microsoft has tried to recoup costs via high prices for products such as Github Copilot but this does not seem to be working as hoped; organizations can opt out.

On point two: In a Wall Street Journal interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described Recall’s capabilities as a “photographic memory” that is, recording every image and action on a PC, using an onboard neural processing unit to run this data (supposedly kept on the machine) through a model or models to enable more sophisticated, ‘AI’ enabled searching.

This seems like a lot of engineering effort to make it easier to find a photo you took at the beach a few years ago. Corporations don’t care about making anyone’s life easier so we must look for more adult, power-aware explanations for what we’re seeing here.

Consider the precedent of Windows Vista, released in 2006. Vista, which employed a complex method for enforcing corporate digital rights, was created by Microsoft to attract the attention of the film and music industries as the preferred way to exert command and control over our use of ‘content’. With Vista, Microsoft’s goal was to become the gatekeeper for the digital distribution of entertainment and derive profit from that position. This didn’t work out as planned but the effort is a key indicator of intent. I interpret Recall as being the ‘AI’ variant of the gatekeeper gambit.

We can safely ignore happy talk and promises of privacy to see what is right before us: a system for recording everything you do will be marketed to businesses and governments as a means of mass surveillance. What was once the description of malware has, in the age of ‘AI’ become a product. In its quest for profits, Microsoft is creating a difficult to escape, hardware based, globally distributed monitoring platform. We can be certain that its competitors, such as Apple, are making similar moves.

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When thinking about the tech industry and its endless stream of product announcements, particularly about ‘AI’, a good rule of thumb is to ignore whatever glittering words are used to ask one question: how do they plan to make money? But not just ‘money’ in the abstract, profit. Looking at Recall for Windows 11, a follow the money approach leads directly to what Yasha Levine called ‘Surveillance Valley’.