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Like so many other well meaning middle class lefties, I get an organic vegetable box. And not just any old veg box, a hyper localised community based north London vegetable bag scheme. The word ‘woke’ could be applied to every aspect of this scheme in a way that would guarantee Michael Gove would hate it on principle. I think I’ve made my point, it is truly righteous and unapologetically so. It is, of course, also managed entirely online. Putting aside the issues with exclusivity that this automatically imposes (and that I’m sure the scheme’s management committee have agonised about endlessly) it is relatively convenient. Apart from collecting my bag weekly and forgetting to book holidays, I don’t have much interaction with it day to day, although recently I have been so busy that I failed to notice that they’d moved to a new platform. When I finally caught up with their details of this move, I’m afraid I became the sort of middle aged moaner I never believed I could be (but secretly always have been). The reason for this outburst of grumpy old man syndrome? They’re changing my direct debit to a recurring card payment. So what? I put my card details in and forget about it right? No. My bank requests re-authentication of card payments every few months, which means a recurring card payment fails and I have to log back on to the website to input my payment details again. Even if my bank didn’t do this, I would have to re-input my card details every time I got a new card (either because it had expired or because it was defrauded due to being stored on an increasing number of websites that do recurring card payments). I never have to do that with direct debit. “So what?” I hear you say, “so you have to re-input your card details, it’s not a big deal. Is this all you’ve got to complain about when people are dying in horrific wars?” Well yes, there are horrific wars going on and I feel bad about that every day, but honestly nothing is going to be gained my me adding to the noise around that, although I may come back to that noise. Also my point isn’t that I have to input my card details every now and then and what a hassle that is, but that I have to do it when the technology already exists, and has existed for longer than internet commerce, to allow me not to have to do that. I keep being told that technology is going to make my life easier, so why do I keep finding examples of it making my life a bit more shitty?

Over the last few years all the great technological leaps forward we have been promised have turned out to be more effort for us. Crypto was supposed free us from the shackles of fiat currency and modern banking, building trust into the transactions, except it turned out you needed to know how to secure a crypto wallet in order for that ‘trust’ to mean anything and even if you mastered the technology, the chances were you’d just end up in a pyramid selling scheme. AI was supposed to write all the documents we couldn’t be bothered to write ourselves, except it turns out to be a bit shit, so we have to edit its output, or learn how to give it ‘the right prompts’ (in other words, pseudo programming with inconsistent outcomes). Hell, it turns out even self-driving cars need someone to drive them.

I think I wrote about this nearer the time, but in the early noughts when it was almost obligatory to have an iPod and spend hours converting your CDs to MP3s so you didn’t have to face the hassle of carrying around a CD Walkman and some CDs, I didn’t. I mean it wasn’t just my contrarian approach to trends, definitely being young and skint played a part, but mainly I didn’t see the point. I didn’t see why I should spend endless hours of my life ‘taping’ albums I already owned so I could listen to them. This struck me then as a failure of the technology that would ultimately be rectified, and it was, eventually. However, as in all things when it came to technology in the early noughts, Apple had set the trend, indeed the template, for how new technology should be adopted. The basic premise is, if you want to be an early adopter (which is a desirable thing to be obviously) you are going to have to work for your tech. I guess this was always an aspect of being an early adopter: you accept (in some cases even embrace) the fact that if you want to be first to use new technology, you’re going to be the one to find the bugs. This is born out of the DIY mindset of the home/college computing and garage startup communities. In those communities, early adopters were fellow geeks trying out beta versions of new tech to help out their friends or out of a sense of community duty, trusting that when their turn came, others would return the favour. Apple particularly has always leveraged coming ‘from’ this community, ever since Apple 1 kits were first assembled by home computing fans in the 1970s and in many ways they’ve been successful in retaining much of that community, for many years painting themselves in opposition to the always more corporate, always more overtly proprietary Microsoft. Along the way, they collected other niche communities, notably around design and creative industries, making sure everyone felt part of the club. There was always a sense that if you wanted to be in the club, you had to make sacrifices. In the bad old days that meant only being able to run the programmes that had been written for a Mac or only using files that were Mac compatible. So at the turn of the millennium there was a small army of devoted followers ready to sacrifice their spare time to be able to listen to their CDs at an inferior sound quality on a futuristic looking Walkman thing. A combination of all sorts of millennial nonsense meant that this small group of geeky types were somehow seen as mainstream cool for the first time. It was like Britpop but with tech. In the process, giving up your free time and labour to help develop/test/confugure your technology went from being something you did to be part of a community to something you did if you wanted the cool tech first. With the iPod, Apple enclosed the developer commons and made sure that we all thought it was a good idea to help them out. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countless giant corporations got massive by exploiting the labour of their workers, at the start of the 21st century, Apple got massive by exploiting the labour of their customers and capital has never looked back. All sorts of technology could be pushed out there without any content or real use case, often not entirely finished, but as long as it had a buzz about it, countless users could be relied on to find a use case for it/populate it/debug it. This is baked into the iOS release cycle, with no one who just wants to use their phone accepting the .0 release of a new version of iOS.

The car industry used to complain that it was only tech that was allowed to get away with this sort of thing, but then along came Elon Musk and cars were suddenly allowed to be sent out on the road needing regular massive software fixes. I mean it can’t be a coincidence that he’s the only space billionaire not to have flown in one of his own rockets. I joke, but obviously the Musk approach of building untested rockets and then blowing them up has entirely un-hilarious environmental consequences.

This world allows people to plough billions of dollars into something like ChatGPT and then claim that it is useful technology because people are using it. Weirdly ChatGPT has almost no actual use cases, but we’re told it’s the future and we should both be in awe of it and fear its apparent intelligence. Of course in the tech world that Apple built, OpenAI can rely on a veritable army of people willing to devote their spare time (or even their employer’s time if they can justify it) trying to find a use case simply because some rich bloke in California said there must be lots of them. Whenever I point out that ChatGPT is basically useless, someone responds by sending me some virtually unreadable copy that was generated by the LLM as an apparent rebuttal of my argument. To me this proves me right; to them it proves them right. Regardless, if someone cares about their output they are not going to just get ChatGPT to generate it and then send it out there unedited, they are going to have to trawl through it, fact checking and adding in a coherent narrative. Of course for the average tech evangelist this is all thoroughly acceptable, we have to make sacrifices for the technology to reach its full potential. So we carry on, increasingly doing the work that the technology is supposed to do for us in order to make it work. It is almost irrelevant whether AI becomes malevolent AGI and enslaves us all because we are already being trained to serve the machine.

This mentality doesn’t just work wonderfully for glorifying the provision of free labour and free ideas to the machines of capital, it is also really helpful for creating an impression that the machine is not at fault. In the 20th century we got used to the idea of corporate responsibility, which is a mechanism whereby a company becomes a form of being - a kind of meta person - and can therefore be blamed for any damage ‘it’ causes whether to people, property, the environment or the economy. Of course because it is not actually a person, a company cannot go to prison or be held truly accountable for its actions. Sure, companies can be fined and in very exceptional circumstances broken up, but largely they are just treated like giant children, who don’t really know better and occasionally need a slap on the wrist, whilst the board and executive that run the company (actual grown ups who allegedly do know better) get to make all the decisions that allow the company to inflict all the harms it does with impunity, because they are just acting ‘in the interest of the company’ (that interest being to make money for those same people). With the user developed product, this derogation of responsibility can be mediated through the product, especially if it is ‘AI’. In this instance the creators of the product can legitimately say they had not expected it to do a particular thing because they may genuinely not have. Much of the perception of ‘intelligence’ with current ‘AI’ comes from the fact that the level of complexity within the programme means that its programmers don’t know what it will do in many circumstances: a bit like assuming a coin is intelligent because you can’t predict whether it will land on heads or tails. But this unpredictability and the fact that it gets defined as intelligence is allowing companies to embed corporate (un)accountability in their products. Every time someone gets a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to do something stupid (so literally every day) the response is that they didn’t use the right prompts or that the model will be ‘trained’ to get the right answer by more people inputting these kinds of things, making the outcome either the fault of the user or the ‘naïveté’ of the algorithm. Of course in the world that Apple built, we are are happy to take on the responsibility for the harms caused by the algorithm as well as feeding it data and cleaning up its mess all on our own time.

It is hard to see how this leads to better technology, or even vaguely useful technology. If the aim is to create enough novelty around wasting people’s time whilst making sure you’re indemnified against the product causing harm, you will never even bother to try and create technology that even vaguely reaches for the lofty goals claimed by almost all tech firms. In this context, it’s hard to see any of the headline technology of the last 30 years as anything that solves a pre-existing problem, more as a novel way of doing an existing task or even just a novelty in search of a purpose. There is technology that has made positive changes in that time, but with a very few exceptions, it isn’t anything created by the most profitable or highest value companies in the history of the planet. Yet we still allow ourselves to be sold the idea of incomplete, untested, purposeless technology as a marker of progress and its subsequent ubiquity as a sign that it was needed.

As with everything it has ever done, Apple is not the inventor of this kind of reassignment of corporate responsibility to the user, famously when the plastics industry first foisted their not-actually-disposable-at-all packaging on humanity and the planet, they funded the first anti-littering campaigns, placing the responsibility for the non-biodegradable litter that they had created squarely in the hands of the consumer. Famously it worked too. My 6 year old child knows that littering is wrong but can see no problem with getting endless amounts of plastic tat from shops and vending machines (she will sometimes accept my feeble attempts to save the planet as a reason why she can’t have it though - baby steps). The problem with all new technology is that it takes this relationship as the basis for all products and services, and indeed promotes it as desirable. So we end up believing that everything is either our fault or the fault of other ‘consumers’. Due to the ubiquity of technology in our daily interactions, this mindset has permeated throughout society. We blame Brexit on the people who were convinced that years of austerity and neglect would be undone by ‘taking back control’. We blamed the 2008 financial crisis on subprime mortgage holders and tax payers (at least that’s who we made pay for it). ‘We’ blame the atrocities of 7th October 2023 on the Palestinians. ‘We’ blame the ensuing genocidal actions on the Israelis (some, even more incorrectly blame it on Jews). In all cases we blame the ‘users’ rather than the products, the citizens not the country, the people not the system. This is simply the replication over and over of the reactionary lie that people's circumstances are purely a result of their own actions and nothing to do with the systems that cynical elites bind them in and force their complicity with.

Whilst this remains the case, we’ll continue to spend our time fretting about whether we put the recycling in the right bin or what actual practical value we might possibly extract from ChatGPT whilst the world burns at an ever more alarming rate. We march onwards like the members of some weird death cult, grinning at the destruction we’re not being paid to wreak. Unless we stop and ask what all this stuff is actually for and whether it does actually benefit us un any way, or whether it’s just more work for us to do to enrich corporations at the expense of our health and future.

So I’m not going to apologise for questioning the payment service my veg bag supplier uses, I’m not going to apologise for questioning the orthodoxy of progress attached to anything new, especially if it is a new thing that simply reinforces old structures of power, exploitation, consumption and destruction (as most seem to be). It’s probably going to be a bit annoying for everyone around me, but only if they don’t like thinking about things.