A few years ago, I started this very blog, devoted, as the subtitle reads, to  “AI industry analysis without hype and techbro-ism.” Writing, when seriously pursued (whether money is exchanged or not) is a demanding activity, requiring time and often, a reduced number of social interactions, things that are becoming ever scarcer in our decaying world of enforced busy-ness and endlessly distracting ‘discourse.’

Considering the difficulty, why bother writing? And why bother writing about the tech industry generally, and its so-called ‘AI’ incarnation specifically? Until very (very) recently, the unchallenged cultural consensus was that Silicon Valley is populated by a wondrous horde of luminous creatures, the brilliant young who, armed only with wafer thin laptops, dreams, and that sorcerer’s wand, code, were building a vibrant future of robot taxis, chatbot friends and virtual worlds filled with business meetings attended by cartoon dinosaur avatars.

Who could resist this vision, this nirvana of convenience? Well, as it happens, yours truly.

It was while watching a left-leaning (and at the time, supposedly Marxist) YouTube show that I realized there was an acute need for a pitiless, materialist critique of the tech industry. One of the show’s co-hosts opined that it would not be long before robot trucks replaced actual truckers, changing the political economy of logistics in the US. This is not remotely close to happening (as one of that program’s guests, a trucker, pointed out) and so, I wondered why this idea was asserted with the same confidence of a Tesla press release about full self-driving…happening, any day now.

The reason is a lack of understanding of how actually existing computational systems work. This isn’t a sin; the world is complex and we all can’t be experts in everything (though there’s a large army of men who assume they can, for example,  perform surgery, fly fighter jets and wrestle bears – the scientific term for such men is idiot).  As it happens, my decades of experience with computation, combined with an unequivocally Marxist (therefore, materialist) understanding of capitalism seemed to make me qualified to fill this niche from a unique perspective – not from the distance of academics but feeling the cold chill of data centers.

And so, I started this blog, a sisyphean effort, of unknown utility but necessary, if only to help me achieve some measure of clarity.

But, how to write about the tech industry? What ‘voice’, to lean on a cliche, should be used? In the beginning, I wrote like a war correspondent (or at least, what I supposed to be the attitude of a war correspondent) : urgent, sparse, accessibly technical. The enemy was clearly identified, the stark facts countering mythology plainly stated. There was no time for leisurely applied words. In an earlier age, when fedoras and smoking on planes were common, this might have been called a ‘muscular’ style (which evokes the image of a body builder, busily typing on a keyboard after leg day at the gym). I imagined myself in a smart, yet disheveled suit, sitting on-set with Dick Cavett in a forever 1969 Manhattan, a Norman Mailer of tech critique, though without the nasty obsession with performative manliness.

Something pulls at me, another ‘voice’ which has moved me, by degrees, away from reports from the front to an even sharper-edged approach, one informed by a combination of disdain for the target – an intrusive and destructive industry – and deep concern for its victims: all of us, nearly everywhere. This writing personna is closer to my day to day self – not a perfect mirror, but more recognizable.

This person at the keyboard, this version of Dwayne who tries to convey to you, esteemed reader, the true danger posed by the tech industry and the various illusions it promotes, is a man who refuses to be fooled or, at least, to walk into delusion willingly, without struggle.

Now, as I write, my thoughts turn to an essay about detective fiction Raymond Chandler penned for The Atlantic magazine in 1950 titled, ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ About writing, as a craft, Chandler wrote:

“The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about.”

Honesty. This is the goal; an honest accounting of the situation we’re in and what we’re up against – capitalist political economy, supply chains, resources extraction and data centers as a form of sociotechnical power – a rejection of the Californian Ideology; no, not just a rejection, but a hard boiled reaction to it, a Noir response.

To close this, which is a work in progress, let’s return to Chandler’s essay about detective fiction, “The Simple Art of Murder” –

“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of  detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be  killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what  we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.”

The world itself may be lovely but the world the tech industry has built and which it seeks to entrench is ‘not very fragrant’ indeed; in fact, it is a nightmare. Resistance requires passion but also, as Chandler wrote of his fictional hero, Phillip Marlowe, a tough mind and cool spirit of detachment. No, I will not celebrate AI and each gyration of an industry whose goal is to act as the means through which labor’s power is suppressed.

Enough wide eyed belief; time for productive cynicism.