The tech Industry, and the fields that grew from it, are dead.
The Industry, which, as Yasha Levine details in his book, ‘Surveillance Valley’, was always a tool of oppression, and never ‘good’, in some children’s book sense.
But for a time, during the not so longue duree when the consumer and ‘enterprise’ markets expanded, starting in the 1980s and reaching a peak in the early 2000s, many of us carved careers from the material Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco and others created.
Capitalist elites hate workers and despise worker expertise. I don’t have a scientifc study to prove this (if one exists, let me know) but I do have decades of experience, sitting in rooms with (mostly) men who, it was easy to see, hated that a wage servant possessed technical expertise they needed, but were too lazy, arrogant or stupid to grasp.
During the not so long duree when ‘enterprise IT’ assumed its place as capitalism’s command and control layer, business elites dreamed of a world free of worker expertise but carrying on, like the machine haunted houses in Ray Bradbury’s story ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’, automated and bereft of humanity (yet somehow profitable).
The ‘AI’ scourge, is more than a propaganda campaign, it has mutated (as all things do) into a sort of religion. Unsurprisingly, considering the combination of capitalist mania, resurrected eugenics, and hatred for workers that spins, like a molten core, at its center, the scourge is relentless, deforming everything it touches.
Today, it is nearly impossible to propose a technical solution without having to endure the utterances of ‘decision makers’ who don’t know what they’re talking about, insisting that somehow, ‘AI’ will make it better. This isn’t merely enthusiasm, or delusion, it’s the expression of a sinister hope (nurtured by the tech industry in its late stage decrepitude): ‘soon, we won’t need you troublesome peasants.’
A vain endeavour. Like all desperately quixoutic pursuits, this only leads to madness as a stubborn reality refuses to play along. The feedback loop between goals, requirements, engineering and design is breaking, thought is discarded as one supposed answer, ‘AI’ is held aloft, a golden idol.
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In the final sequence of the 1982 released film, Koyaanisqatsi, the explosion of an Atlas Centaur rocket, launched in 1962, is shown in vivid color.
After a fireball blossoms, then dissipates, the camera’s eye (footage from military observation) focuses on the descent, back towards the ground, of an engine fragment. At times, fuel remnants ignite as if the engine is struggling to resume its task, sending a spacecraft into orbit. The metaphor, though beautifully presented, is a bit on the nose: you believed you were flying high, but nature is indifferent, your fall is inevitable.
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So it is with the US tech industry which, for years (but not as long as it seems) has been roaring skyward. In its quest to destroy labor, it is, supreme irony, destroying itself.
It is dead. All that remains are engine fragments, spouting flame from fuel remains, as they crash to earth.
