Progression

What does the word ‘progress’ mean to you? What do you think of when you hear that word? Does it conjure up a relentless march of technology, pristine futuristic cities where everything is automated, robots serve your every whim and there is nothing to do but, er, stare at AI generated content on your phone? My problem is that every time I follow that idea to its conclusion I don’t see how it pans out to something I would genuinely like. It’s possibly because the 20th century’s concepts of the future were invented by fascists. Streamlined vehicles, polished skyscrapers, automated machinery and, possibly most importantly, neatly ordered societies.

As I was passing by yet another jury-rigged extension cable the other day - from a flat via a bus stop to an EV - I realised why the fossil fuel industry hates EVs so much and spread so much disinformation about them. It’s not just that they don’t use petrol, as the energy companies (as they rebranded themselves when they thought they needed people to think they weren’t just fossil fuel companies) could just as easily pivot to providing other forms of energy (as their rebrand suggested), it’s the fact that those companies can’t control the delivery of that energy. If you own a petrol or diesel powered car you can’t refine your own fuel, you have to go to a petrol station to get it. If you own an EV, there is nothing to stop you cutting the energy companies out of the loop entirely. Stick a bunch of solar panels on your roof, plug in your car and boom, nature refuelled your car for you. You don’t ever need to go to a petrol station again. I mean if you’re on a long journey you might want to charge at a motorway service station, but by and large you can cut big energy out of the equation entirely. Dwelling on this, I could easily envisage a future London that doesn’t look too dissimilar to the one we have now, except with more solar panels and more cables running from upstairs windows and snaking down lamp posts. Where the reduction in grime does not come from removing all evidence of humanity but from removing the consequences of extractive capital.

As a concept of the future I believe this is the sort of thing that falls under the umbrella of solarpunk, but I would be wary of giving it any science fiction label, partly for fear giving it the sheen of unrealism attributed to fiction, but also to avoid the risk of making it niche. The technology led progress of classical science fiction is solid branding for hard capital. In the current moment this is everywhere in the ever receding horizons of self driving cars, autonomous robots, Martian colonies and computer superintelligence. Instead of selling their products as a pathway to an indistinct utopian future (à la Futurama at the World’s Fair) the top level shills of the 21st century have just decided to take their favourite science fiction tropes and declare them imminent. Like cult leaders unfazed by the non-arrival of their predicted rapture, the tech elite blatantly ignore any number of their self-declared deadlines by simply insisting a new one is imminent. The totality of impact of these apparent technological advances has increased as well. The impending changes are no longer going to just improve aspects of our lives, but solve all our supposed problems, seemingly instantly and in totality. The obvious technology in this regard is of course AI or AGI, which is going to usher in an age of abundance, solve the climate crisis and cure cancer pretty much before anyone has even turned it on. Of course what this actually shows is how far away we are from any of this technology doing anything of the sort. The astonishing lack of understanding of the complexity of the problems they think their technology will solve underlines just how far they are from realistically solving them. As I have said before, many of the things they have managed to do - build rockets, miniaturise computers, make machines that can bullshit convincingly - are very clever things and are notable technical achievements, but they do not in of and as of themselves progress our society in any meaningful sense. We should be very wary of anyone who believes they have a complete answer to humanity’s problems or even a full understanding of them. We live in a very complex world, but we need to be aware that an ability to create complex systems does not equate to an ability to understand them and therefore to an ability to control them. The greatest complexity lies in human society and the fact that every person in that society may have a different idea about what it is for and how it should work. Techno utopians (what Meredith Broussard calls techno chauvinists) have a fundamental issue with that complexity, they see it as messy, requiring standardisation.

I’ve been driving up north a bit recently to help my parents out and I passed through the Tyne tunnel for the first time in many years. Surprisingly it has changed a lot. Firstly it’s now actually two tunnels, so traffic flows nice and quickly, but also the fact that there are no longer toll gates means you barely notice it as a discrete piece of infrastructure that requires a toll to be paid for its use. There are of course large signs at either end of the tunnel reminding you to pay by midnight the following night to avoid being fined. First time I passed through I thought “oh that’s convenient” and promptly forgot about it until a letter arrived on my doorstep a week later with a photo of my car number plate and a £60 fine. This struck me as indicative of so much of how ‘progress’ is defined and measured these days. Anyone involved in the management or administration of the tunnel would see its latest incarnation as a great success and they would have the metrics to prove it too: traffic flow through the tunnel increased, mean time to travel from one side of the Tyne to the other reduced: revenues increased, etc. job done, problem solved. The fact that this method of collection also introduces the chance of nonpayment, especially for casual users like me will also be seen as a benefit as it massively increases revenue for almost no extra cost (or almost certainly a reduced cost compared to staffing tollbooths). However, from a user perspective it is a trade off between spending a few minutes waiting at a tool booth to toss some coins in a hopper or tap your card on a reader and spending several minutes on a website creating an account/resetting your password, setting up a payment method, validating your payment card, etc. or forgetting to do all this and getting fined. The benefits are clearly very much in the favour of the provider rather than the consumer, yet it will be presented as a convenience to the consumer as well because they don’t have to stop pay for the tunnel at the point they use it.

This is very much the standard for models of so called technological progress: visible friction is removed at the point of transaction usually at the expense of additional effort further down the ‘stack’. The intended solution for this delegated feiction is that you become part of an ecosystem that will manage all your payments and subscriptions for you. This is the idea behind the Apple ecosystem and similarly the Google/Android one, and both of these work to a certain extent, you can log into websites of apps using things like keychain that mean you don’t need to remember passwords, you can use their payment systems for both subscriptions and one off payments. All of these things make navigating the modern internet much easier but they require you to be locked in to that ecosystem, to share all of your personal data and online activity with a single provider who gets to choose what you can and can’t interact with. If you’re an Apple customer and Apple ban your favourite app from the AppStore, then you can’t use it. You might think “that doesn’t matter because Apple will only ban things that are not suitable for the general public.” You might assume some form of code of decency or something governing what gets on the AppStore, but the only real criterion is whether it makes money for the right people. Consider what happened to the OG App, an app that was designed to take your Instagram feed and show it to you in the manner that Instagram used to work: your contacts’ posts listed in reverse chronological order. It was wildly popular in the few weeks it existed before Meta asked Apple to take it off the AppStore. It was killed because it got in the way of Meta filling up their users’ feed with adverts and sponsored slop. Conversely X (the app formerly known as twitter) has been allowing its users to generate non-consensual pornography and CSAM via its GrokAI and whilst that is a clear violation of Apple’s terms of service, X is still very much available in the AppStore. These two examples clearly demonstrate that your interests are not being served by the companies that own these ecosystems, you are there only because you have agreed to follow their rules and be bound by their decisions about what is acceptable and what is not. Just as the energy companies want you to continue buying petrol so they can tie you into their ecosystem of petrol stations, the tech giants want to tie you into their apps and payment ecosystems so you have to keep paying them for everything (literally everything in Apple’s case - they take 30% of every single transaction).

The fact is that any fully integrated digital future requires you to conform to the sets of rules dictated to you. Look at the tens of pages of legal agreements you blithely sign up to every time there is an update to a service you use. When you think about it there could be quite a high price for the perception of convenience, but you wouldn’t necessarily know about it until you found yourself on the wrong side of a user license agreement that you signed without reading. These agreements aren’t sets of rules for you to follow as much as broad definitions of the ways in which technology companies may exercise their power over you. The agreements are designed such that the rules may change at any time, but the companies still have a right to bind you to them. This commercial and legal consolidation of Wilhoit’s Law proves as much as anything else the inherent conservatism of big tech in that it creates a legal framework in which one party is almost entirely bound and the other almost entirely protected. Technology companies and their leaders clearly see this as a form of natural order rather than a byproduct of corporate risk management and this is now displayed in their complicity in the various forms of authoritarianism we see blossoming the world over. To authoritarians the relationship of the people to the state is effectively a user license agreement, by living in a country, you no longer agree to abide by its laws, but to be bound by any terms the state chooses to impose on you by any means. This is clearly evident in the USA where the regime’s assumption is that by living in the country, its population have agreed to be subject to the violent whims of its paramilitary forces, but as usual the UK is playing catch up. The effective criminalisation of protests against government foreign policy means that UK citizens are expected to accept government policy without any form of recourse but the ballot box. Of course some people would argue that that is the way ‘civilised’ democracy should work. I used to say that if you don’t vote you can’t complain and I still believe that, but that doesn’t mean that if you do vote you don’t need to complain. Despite what many people seem to think, representative democracy is not the process of you absenting any responsibility for your place in society by putting an x in a box every couple of years. One of the complaints of people who choose not to vote is that none of the candidates fully represent their views, which misses the point of representative democracy. An MP is not a service you buy to take care of politics for you, they are a portal through which you express your political will. Like any portal, they have a number of ‘features’ which will be discontinued if they are not used enough. Individual MPs have surgeries, email inboxes (both parliamentary and constituency) and endless social media accounts through which you can tell them what you want. Broader interactions with the government can be achieved through petitions, email campaigns and protest. Just because the government has all but banned protest doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be forced to respond if millions of people took to the streets to protest a single issue.

Like platform owners, governments want to phase out the ‘features’ that don’t give them the outcomes they want. They see their purpose as nothing to do with delivering good experiences or services, as both government and corporations serve the same goal: growth. This means that users/citizens are always secondary to that goal and is the reason why enshittification is central to both. Authoritarianism is simply the enshittification of politics, where we are convinced that eroding our rights and freedoms in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘progress’ is core to the process of optimising the population for growth. Just as a platform will tell you that spamming you with endless adverts is good for user experience, so a government will tell you that locking you up for protesting against being polluted to death is essential for delivering you a functioning society. In both cases, what is deemed ‘good’ and ‘functional’ has nothing to do with addressing the needs of the user/citizen and so nothing to do with democracy.

Democracy is a system whereby groups of people work out what they want for themselves and their society. It is not a fixed process, but a process of change, a negotiation where the priorities will constantly shift. Certainly for the whole of my lifetime I have been sold the concept of democracy as a fixed function, something that will work best if I simply allow it to run its processes and then make my (limited) choice when prompted by the system. Interference at any other point is to be discouraged and ideally banned altogether. The idea ultimately is that the state should be able to get its citizens to fit into neat categories that can be called upon to act on the state in only the ways the state wants them to act. The neoliberal technocrats of all stripes that run these systems are keen to come up with distinct categories of people who will help them achieve their ends (such as the legendary Mondeo Man) and those of us who fall outside of those categories* may be ignored. Much like the users who fall outside easily monetisable categories, citizens who fall outside electorally significant groups can be ignored, bound to terms of service for a service that doesn’t reflect their needs.

In both cases the response is not to vote with your feet/wallet and disengage, as this has no effect. How can you snub someone who was ignoring you anyway? The only effective action is to reframe the terms of service, engage in ways that work for you. The revival of interest in Luddism has brought about the understanding that it is not an anti technology movement, but about removing the ability of those in power to use technology as a way to control and exploit us. As was so evident in the suppression of the original luddites, the state and capital have always been comfortable in colluding to exert control, and the depth of commercial infiltration of our modern state embeds that collusion at a level almost of instinct. As outsourcing has gutted the knowledge embedded in public services, commercial priorities have encroached ever further into the philosophy of government. The language of public service has changed from serving citizens to delivering service to customers, with almost everything being commodified, pushing the idea that your taxes should be a quid pro quo charge for each service. There are some companies involved in public sector contracts whose founders have expressed the opinion that public services shouldn’t exist. For them the idea of a direct correlation between a discrete service and the tax you are levied for it is ideal, as this would open all services up to competition regulation, privatising them by default. We cannot therefore engage with the public sector in a way that reinforces those concepts. If I am pissed off about Thames water increasing my bills by 40% to service the obscene debts they accrued paying their shareholders dividends, I can hardly vote with my wallet. There is no water supply market, I can’t go to a better supplier. I need to pester the politicians who allow this extortion to continue. I write to them, I petition them, I threaten not to vote for them (regardless of whether I ever have) and of course I vote for someone else.

It should only be marginally different for technology, you cannot (yet) functionally walk away from all ‘big tech’ completely, but you can redifine your relationship to it. This requires more engagement than just signing up, agreeing to the terms of service and then hitting ‘yes’ in response to every pop up. It requires you to think a bit about how you engage, what you’re willing to exchange and what you get in return. I’ve long considered much of my data to be a high price to pay for the convenience of being able to stay in touch with my friends without having to make an effort to actually speak to them. Quitting some social media platforms is potentially a big sacrifice for some people, so maybe start with a bit of fragmentation, make sure your email provider is not the same as your payment provider, don’t use your social media account as your passkey for all other websites and definitely don’t allow any app to track your activity across other apps. This will mean you have to get used to a few different services, you can still use a keychain type service, just not the one your social media provider offers you. This will be marginally more effort, but the main difference you’ll notice is that the ad targeting will be a bit less accurate. Beyond that we have to be more proactive in our interactions with technology and its providers. Being passive consumers has led us to a situation where technology companies have wasted billions on technologies that no one actually wants or needs (crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, generative AI). Of course giving feedback to technology companies requires us to know what we want from our technology. That requires us to break away from the narratives of progress that revolve around efficiency, productivity, more technology being better technology, etc. There won’t necessarily be easy answers that aren’t spoon fed to us by organisations looking to profit from us, looking to co-opt superficially utopian visions of the future to present an inevitability to us. Defining an alternative will be a challenge, but we can always come back to the question “what does the word ‘progress’ mean to you?”

*the point where these categorisations cross is the tech world’s obsession with various ways of quantifying intelligence, which is deeply embedded in eugenics and racism.

Potential

The other day I was driving my daughter to swimming. She was playing Pokemon Go on my phone and duly informed me that she had ‘swiped away’ a message from her mum. I tapped on the messages icon on my car’s display and tapped on my wife’s name. Siri told me I had two messages from my wife and asked if I wanted to hear them. I said yes. It read them out and asked if I wanted to reply. Again I said yes, then when prompted I dictated a message. It read the message back to me and asked if I wanted to send it. Once I agreed, the message was sent. This entire interaction was conducted by my phone whilst my daughter continued to play Pokemon Go on it. Granted my interactions were via CarPlay, but that is simply a secondary portal to my phone, all actions and interactions were managed by my phone whilst my daughter continued to use it for an entirely different purpose.

I relate this fairly mundane tale because in many ways it is awesome. Smartphones are incredibly powerful computers that sit in our pockets or our hands and let us have freedom and control of our lives in ways that were barely imaginable when I was my daughter’s age. For me this is exactly the kind of thing technology should be doing: allowing me to drive, stay in touch with my wife and entertain my kid all at the same time. The other reason I relate this is because I’m not sure what difference adding generative AI into the process would make. I guess it could offer suggested content for my message to my wife, but how much time is that likely to save me? I’d still have to select one of the options from the prompts it gave me, saving no time at all vs dictating my message. It certainly couldn’t drive the car for me whilst I text my wife back. Maybe I’m being unfair, or maybe I’m just unimaginative, but this is exactly the sort of area I would think that people who say generative AI is the future would suggest it will make a difference. The problem is it feels to me like in so many areas that difference has already been made.

Take ordering dinner. We’re constantly told that generative AI will make this easier. It will look in our fridge and tell us what we can make for dinner. Or ask us what we want, order the ingredients for us and give us a recipe when the ingredients show up. Or even somehow know what we usually like on a day like this and order it for us. Personally only the first two of those sound vaguely desirable to me and actually some combination of both would be preferable. Although I like going to buy my own ingredients and I’m not sure how much I’d be willing to pay for the recipe service when I can just plonk the contents of my fridge into Google and get recipes for free.

I recently bought a new phone for the first time in five years. The difference between this phone and my last one is notable, but not radical, probably mainly because they both ran the same operating system. Over the five years that I owned my last phone there were probably significant, if incremental improvements in the capabilities of that operating system every year. Elements of what used to be called AI will have been introduced and enhanced in things like the phone’s text prediction, voice recognition and image synthesiser (or camera as it’s more commonly known). Adding generative AI to these things can only make a further incremental improvement to them, equivalent at best to a full version upgrade of iOS*. I’d be interested to understand how much Apple spend on IOS development a year and ditto Google, Samsung, et al on Android. I suspect it is significantly less than is currently being poured into generative AI. To be clear that investment is estimated to be around $400 billion this year. This is justified by saying that generative AI specifically will revolutionise every aspect of our lives, yet we are presented with very few concrete examples of how. If there was an iPhone-like platform on which people could build apps, I could see how an ecosystem could form, but the financial models don’t work because that ‘platform’ (such as it is) doesn’t make any profit. In fact it makes billions of dollars of losses. People will point to Amazon or Uber and say that they lost money for years before they made a profit and that is true, but those companies’ costs decreased with scale, which is not the case with generative AI. OpenAI’s latest model was their most expensive to ‘train’ and costs the company more money per query than the previous model. The infrastructure costs that are being ploughed into AI data centres are not even one off, building the buildings is a fixed cost, but AI data centres run ‘hot’ pretty much all the time, almost literally burning through server hardware constantly. If an AI server lasts three years, it has done really well. All of this capital and infrastructure is being poured into something that is a marginal improvement in UX at best. It’s equivalent to all the biggest companies in America investing all their spare cash into Clippy or Clippy clones. If someone can tell me a functional, chargeable use for generative AI that isn’t either a marginal improvement of UX or an artificially cheap enshittification of a previously human delivered service they’re taking an awfully long time to do so. There was an article in the paper the other day where one of the UN climate directors said that AI was a potential problem, but also that it helped with climate modelling and solutions. The problem is he’s not talking about the same AI. There are specialised machine learning systems trained to model the climate or develop new kinds of medicines or myriad other useful applications, but none of these are the LLMs such as ChatGPT, that are designed as general purpose AI applications and are where the vast majority of the investment is going. In effect generative AI is living off other AI’s glory, almost like it’s some massive con or something. Nothing about generative AI justifies the obscene amounts of money that are currently being poured into it. It is not going to have an iPhone moment because the iPhone already had that. No amount of (extremely vague) input from Jonny Ive is going to change that.

In five years time I’ll probably buy another phone because the technology will have moved on sufficiently by then to warrant an upgrade. Some of those advances will be in what is broadly defined under the umbrella of AI and machine learning, but they will almost certainly have nothing to do with the LLM based generative AI that is where all the money is currently being poured. Honestly if the new features on my phone rely on some vast datacentre somewhere ‘thinking’ about an answer it would probably make me think twice about buying a new phone. I’m still close enough to the EU that I was able to turn off the ‘dumb rainbow’ (Apple Intelligence) in my current phone and I will fight long and hard to keep things that way. This isn’t an anti technology or anti progress stance, it is very much the opposite, I want technological progress that actually improves my life. Enshitification is everywhere in the technology that we are presented wiith, gradually making it harder for us to make technology work for us and easier for technology companies to make us work for them. Generative AI is merely the latest incarnation of this, where there are very few consumer value use cases, but the product has the potential to privatise even more aspects of our lives and then sell them back to us in a shitty format, at a premium. The only problem I foresee for generative AI is that in order to properly enshittify, a technology needs to be appealing and useful in the first place. If it starts off shit there really isn’t anywhere to go. Yet the tech giants continue to pour billions of dollars into building out the infrastructure that only really works for this specific technology (AI data centres are not fit for general purpose computing applications). How does this end well? It doesn’t, but even before the catastrophe unfolds we can start to think about what the alternatives could and should be.

I propose a new approach to technology. No more ‘democratising’, no more ‘disrupting’ and no more ‘paradigm shifts’. Technology should be a thing that improves gradually with the needs of its users. If necessity is going to continue to be the mother of invention, it should be the user’s necessity to do something useful, not the necessity of a massive corporation to make ever more profit (or in the case of the AI companies, attract ever greater investment). We need to find a way to identify technology that is genuinely useful and genuinely consumer focussed. Not as easy as it sounds. Earlier today I was reading a thread about how Corey Doctorow posts long threads on Mastodon. When someone pointed out that if you want to read Doctorow’s long threads as a single ‘article’ you can just add a filter, I thought “that’s a bit of a faff, not sure I can be bothered.” If I can’t be bothered to take steps to make technology work for me, what is the likelihood that someone less engaged is likely to? Maybe we get the technology we deserve and if we can’t be bothered to make a little effort in configuring our technology, then we get configured by it. It’s not like AI actually understands us or does what we want without us learning how to do the prompts ‘right’. The grief of setup and learning a new interface is not removed, it is just presented as an opportunity, rather than a burden. If we understand this, then maybe we can think a bit more about what that setup and interaction results in, what we expect from a technology and if we need it at all. You would think that after crypto, the metaverse and AI, we’d all be wary of technology companies telling us they’ve seen the future and we just don’t get it yet. Let’s hope next time we learn, let’s hope that people start to judge for themselves whether they need a technology or not. Some hope when there’s every chance they’ll have given away their last scrap of agency to generative AI.

*however, given the nature of generative AI, that it is impossible to predict an absolute outcome from it, the chances are that adding it will in some cases make the outcome worse or less reliable.

Polish

“Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?”

I’m fully aware of how utterly cool this isn’t, but the other day I wanted to listen to a song from my childhood that felt apposite for the moment. What I didn’t realise was how self-referentially appropriate it would be. The song was “Here Comes That Sinking Feeling” from the 1985 album “Be Yourself Tonight” by Eurythmics. I hadn’t heard it for a long time and in my memory it was a snarling growling piece of music, like something hocked up from the back of the throat and spat out in one go. So imagine my surprise when the guitar kicked in and I was greeted by a slightly limp, quite gentle pop album track. Annie Lennox started singing “Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?” I knew exactly what she meant, I was listening to it right there and then. I understand that our memories can distort or enhance things, music production has moved on a lot in the last 40 years and my expectations of the sound of a track have probably changed accordingly. But it still felt off to me, until I checked the album details: “Be Yourself Tonight (2018 Remaster)”. That last little addition to the title said it all: this wasn’t the track I wanted to hear, but a simulacrum of it reproduced (presumably) from the original masters, probably in order to make the album more ‘suitable’ to digital media, streaming and downloads.

When I first encountered this kind of digital disappointment, I assumed it was a teething issue. As a pretentious teenage boy in the 90s, Martin Scoursese’s Taxi Driver was obviously one of my touchstone movies. I'd watched it many times on tired VHS tapes that I was pretty sure were not giving me the full glory of the original 1976 cinematic release. Consequently I was excited to see that they were going to release a digital remaster of the film and duly bought a copy on release (I’m not sure it had been able to buy on VHS for a while). I think I watched it once only and I may not have watched the film at all since, so instant and complete was my disappointment. Gone was the glamorously grimy 70s New York and instead something that looked like a tidy film set (which is weird because I’m pretty sure it was actually filmed in New York). Everything was clean and clear (even the grime) and it felt like all the mystery and reality had been airbrushed out along with the glare of the streetlights. Like I say I thought that was just a mistake, teething issue, digital technology was still new and it was understandable if people went a bit too far with it, accidentally smoothing out the rough edges that made a world unique. Even as more disappointing examples presented themselves, I would excuse it. It’s early days for digitisation I would keep telling myself.

The passage of time proved me wrong. Time and again a digital rendering or remaster of a previously analogue film or piece of music was flatter, duller and in some cases just plain bad. I tried to listen to the 21st anniversary edition of “HUP” by The Wonder Stuff once and couldn’t get past the first track (“30 Years in the Bathroom”) the intro had been redone, presumably because they couldn’t get clearance for the samples that probably no one even thought to clear the first time round, because hey, it was the 90s and who cared if you used 2 seconds of audio from some film. I could excuse that, no one wants to get sued, but then the music started and there was a whole guitar line seemingly missing from the mix. It might still be there, buried, but in the original it was front and centre, a staccato attack driving the song, making it slightly confrontational in a jaunty way. Without it the whole thing is a kind of limpid apologetic indie jangle that lollops along with no real purpose. I didn’t get much further before turning it off and going in search of a copy of the original recording on YouTube.

I realise all of this can very easily be dismissed as the purist rantings of a grumpy (nearly) old man, who thinks everything was better in the 90s when no one had mobile phones and we all had to talk to each other, blah blah, but it’s not just that. Firstly, I love technology and I hate talking to people, the internet and modern communications technology in general have made life easier for people like me. Whilst I’ve previously written on the need for personal communications to assist in empathy and understanding, I am not saying you should never send a text or a WhatsApp message. That stuff is super useful. But also this is actually important, and it isn’t just about being a geek or a purist. The main driver for all of those remasters or special editions is to make them fit a new reality, a digital one. It might be presented as a special anniversary edition, but the main driver for that edition is that the original doesn’t translate well to a digital format and so a new version needs to be created if the owner of the work (the record label or film studio, not the musician, writer or director) is to realise a return from that product on digital (streaming) platforms. This is presented to us as a win win, because we can get all of the things we love in one place at any time of the day or night. Except of course we can’t. I can’t get the original master of “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine, the one that nearly bankrupted Creation Records, on Apple Music. I can get a digital remaster that took even longer to complete. It is not the same thing, it is good, but it is not the same thing. And I don’t have a choice in that. If I want the convenience, I have to listen to the remaster, I can’t choose to find out how the original sounds pushed straight to 32bit digital compression. I suspect it sounds dreadful but I’m not allowed to find out. Obviously this gives the lie to the idea that modern digital audio is ‘lossless’, because if it was there’d be no need to remaster original recordings, you could just push them directly to ‘lossless’ digital audio formats. Maybe this is now possible and you just don’t see it because all of the most valuable films and albums have already been converted to a digital friendly version at the time of earlier lossy digital formats. The damage has already been done, why waste money undoing it?

So some old music doesn’t sound as good to old people, so what? The problem is that this is a model that is universalised as we push everything into the digital realm. A digital representation of any thing is just that, a representation, it is not the thing itself. It is like taking a colour photocopy of the Mona Lisa and hanging that in the Louvre. It’s the same picture right? What’s the problem? Maybe nothing. But what if we’re photocopying emotions? I was in a meeting the other day when a potential vendor told me they could offer enhanced sentiment analysis of their AI chatbot’s interactions. I didn’t laugh out loud because that would be unfair. I’m sure in the majority of cases their sentiment analysis would be in the right ballpark, but if you’re outside that majority, the chances are the AI isn’t going to get you. If you’re neurodivergent for example, the sentiment analysis is almost certainly going to miss categorise your mood, as, by definition, you’re outside the mean.

As a person of a certain age, the YouTube algorithm has decided to endlessly serve me irritating adverts that tell me I’m using ChatGPT all wrong. These are of course incorrect, I’m using ChatGPT the right way: not at all. Nevertheless I’m told that I just use it for search (I don’t because I’m only interested in finding websites that actually exist) and that young people are using it to build businesses and make millions by using it the ‘right’ way (there is no evidence to support this). The problem with these adverts* is that they somewhat undermine the claims about generative AI, namely that it understands what you want. The USP of generative AI is supposed to be that you just tell it what you need in your own words and it will be able to produce exactly what you want. Yet when anyone complains about the fact that this rarely happens first time, regular users of these tools will scoff at them and tell them that they’re not doing it right. They will then launch into an explanation about some convoluted process that gets them great results from ChatGPT. This will always involve doing effectively the same thing multiple times and will usually include suggestions for optimising your prompts. In other words it doesn’t understand you, or do what you want, it has an arcane system of trial, error and manipulation that may eventually get you what you want**. This doesn’t sound like the computer doing my bidding, it sounds almost completely the opposite to me. Once again we are expected to gloss over the changes to our lives in order to receive the ‘benefit’ of the digitisation and commercial exploitation of aspects of our culture. With generative AI the idea is that this is as much all consuming as possible - all culture, all art, all writing, - but it isn’t actually and that’s the problem. It’s a lot of all those things, but not everything, and by not being everything, it can only ever be the digital remaster. The most palatable, most average version with all the rough edges, all real life interest, all character smoothed out.

People are rediscovering vinyl and with good reason in my opinion. It isn’t perfect, but nothing is and nor should it be. A lack of perfection is what makes vinyl records interesting, and it isn’t just music, but all sorts of media are being rediscovered in their non-digital form. As people like Brian Merchant have pointed out, the tech elite think that removing all friction from life should be the goal of technology, when in reality it is the friction that is what makes life interesting. Friction is not the same as conflict. Friction is what happens when you have a conversation with someone that you disagree with, conflict is what happens when all friction has been smoothed out by technology and you are presented with a simplified version of their opinions that you can easily dismiss as wrong. The ultimate end of all this is a life where you are free from challenges and everything is ‘easy’ as long as you are happy to be given what is available from the machine rather than what you actually want. The goal of all advertising, marketing and now the ‘training’ of AI (ie the AI training you, not the other way round) is to convince you that everything you want can be defined by the machine, that to want anything outside the bounds of the digitised, simplified list of limited options available from the machine is abnormal. The worrying trends towards labelling and othering people outside of a very clearly defined norm that is evident in the tech aligned rightwing governments is another aspect of this. Difference, whether cultural, political, racial or neurological is inconvenient to the technology and abhorrent to the ideology. Fortunately for the ideologues, the technology precludes the diversity they abhor, and it continually trains its users to only think about the options available from the machine and consider all other options as weird, uncool or subversive. Generative AI goes one step further in that it decides what you want for you, because actually you tell it what you need and it decides what you want or like. For example if you are a student and you tell ChatGPT that you need an essay on the Third Reich, ultimately if you don’t check what it writes for you, it decides whether you think nazis are great or not. Outsourcing our lives to computers means they decide what we get, based on the limited options defined by their owners, and this is the problem with AI, it’s not thinking or giving you its own opinion, it is giving you one of a vast set of answers its owners allowed it to give. There is no scenario where you outsource any part of your life to big tech and you get exactly what you want in return, unless you want exactly the same thing as Big Brother.

My wife noted the other day that wherever you are in the world Gen Z look the same. I mean I suspect there are exceptions to this, and I imagine there have been international homogeneities for many years but I’m pretty sure that they were smaller and less all encompassing when I was in my twenties. To an old [argue whether I’m Gen X or Millennial here] like me, this is a strong indicator that the digital remaster of culture that I saw as a rather disappointing anomaly is actually just culture now. That’s all they’ve got. Even if someone thinks up something cool and new and different, it’s a meme before lunchtime. It has been normalised and digitally remastered before it can have an identity that might run counter to prevailing cultural or political norms. But none of this would necessarily concern young people today, as there is a space for them to air their grievances, to be ‘heard’, then tagged as a demographic variant for the sales algorithm and a possible subversive element for the surveillance state, noting the the former might do the early stage analysis for the latter. It will be progressively harder to resist the homogeneity of the digital simulacrum of culture as more and more people grow up with its assumption of all culture or all of society, as an absolute with no alternative. It is important for all of us who know an other reality to speak it, to let people know that there was, is and will be another way of being human and being with other humans. There will be no singularity, not in the sci-fi way of intelligent machines taking over consciousness from humans, but there may be a shitty digital remaster version, where the owners of the machines use them to degrade our intelligence to a point where we think the way they want, look the way they want, experience desire the way they want. The singularity happens in reverse, the machines don’t get more clever than us they make us as dumb as them, happy to hoover up any old slop they sling our way. This is the real future AI promises and it shows how little the titans of technology value human art, human culture, human creativity, humanity itself. They think we should accept the lowest common denominator digital remaster of our lives. How does that sound to you?

“Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?“

*apart from the fact that they are obviously a scam
**much like any other computer programme

Post industrial

When the World Wide Web was still relatively shiny and new I was a bit disappointed with it. Not in the way that I’m disappointed with it now - where I’m disappointed with the fact that it has become less world wide and a web in a very different sense - but disappointed in the way that it wasn’t as easy to build as everyone seemed to suggest. If anyone could build a website in their bedroom, why did the emerging behemoths of the dotcom bubble need so many people? In my naïveté I thought that the Web would bring a different kind of business. I believed the hype about upstart kids in their garages building a new world and missed the bit where the money men in suits turned up and offered those kids shed loads of cash to become a lucrative new part of the same old world. I watched as people said “we’ve got this amazing technology, let’s make it do all the things we already do” (shopping, watching TV, talking to our friends, disseminating the lies of right wing demagogues) and slowly the promise of new forms of existence or society drained from the technology. And whilst I learned the truth about the amount of effort involved in creating and maintaining an online platform, I’m not sure that the sense that because it’s done by computers it should be easier ever went away. Since the 90s (actually since the 50s) we have constantly been told that technology is coming for our jobs. That technology will make everything easier and run smoother, it will take care of us and it will take care of itself. That’s the never ending story.

When a colleague asked on Slack about the best robot vacuum cleaner the other day, I jokingly replied that I have a regular vacuum cleaner and pay a human to operate it. They responded that they would quite like to pay for a cleaner, but their partner is strongly opposed to paying a person to clean up after them. I made a joke about how the partner will feel once the machines become self-aware and left it at that, conscious of the limited value of being a dick on Slack. But here’s the thing, I would be willing to bet real money that whatever robot vacuum cleaner they end up buying will have been made by someone who is paid a fraction of what a domestic cleaner in the UK gets paid (assuming they’re not a victim of modern slavery) and has the attendant quality of life. But hey, they’re on the other side of the world, so I guess we don’t need to worry about them.

I have relatives, New Labour types, who refuse to get a cleaner because they see it as bourgeois or something. I guess there is a sense in which as soon as you pay for the labour of another, you are an owner of capital and therefore you set yourself on the wrong side of the worker/owner divide. This feels like a particularly dumb interpretation of Marxist theory to me. Every transaction you ever make involves labour, the only difference is the level of abstraction away from the original work. If you buy an apple, labour was involved in growing, harvesting, transporting and selling it to you. If you invest in commodities, you’re aiming to make money out of putting yourself between the person who grew or mined something and the person who wants to buy it. If you invest in derivatives, you’re betting on what people will pay the people who have inserted themselves between the people who grew or mined a thing and the people who want to buy it. At the root of it, there is always a person doing work and you are either paying for or profiting from their labour. The idea that because you don’t pay a cleaner directly, you don’t pay someone to clean your house is laughable. Regardless of what we tell ourselves, the distaste we feel around paying a person to do a job directly for us is around the fact that it forces us to consider the person at the other side of the transaction. I paid my cleaner throughout the covid lockdowns when she was not allowed to come and do her job partly because she is a person I know and could empathise with. Equally when I have to have conversations about the cleaning, asking her to do a specific thing or do something differently, that conversation is inherently awkward because I am asking a person to do something and I am acutely aware that it may be taken as a criticism. But I think that is important, I should feel the complexity of human relationships when I am enacting a decision that affects my relationship with another human. If you can instruct someone to do something without any thought to how that makes them feel or what the potential consequences are for them, then you are a sociopath.

Web 2.0 was an exercise in removing direct contact from all exchanges of goods or services. Amazon meant you never had to talk to a shopkeeper again, Uber meant you never had to talk to a taxi driver again and social media meant that you never have to talk to your friends again. All the studies indicate that this is a problem in terms of loneliness and isolation for individuals, but it is also a problem in terms of how we relate to others. If we don’t have any of those complex interactions with the people who we depend upon to provide our goods and services, we can easily abstract them away from the concept of being people and so stop thinking of them as such. The great Michael Franti once said that “words can reduce a person to an object, something more easy to hate, an inanimate entity.” If people are just ‘boomers’ or millennials’ or whatever, they have no human needs or wants, they don’t feel pain or suffering, they are merely an irritation. Except, of course, they are actually humans with needs and wants and they definitely feel pain and they definitely suffer, often as a direct or indirect result of our actions.

The future we are apparently constantly striving for has always been sold to us as an automated utopia, where humans live a fulfilled life of plenty and machines attend to our every need. This is not a new concept. In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes predicted that increases in productivity would result in a working week of no more than 15 hours, with people mainly filling their time with creative leisure activities. His prediction about productivity increases were broadly correct, but we’re all working longer hours rather than shorter because Keynes didn’t account for capitalism’s ability to syphon off all that extra productivity as profit for shareholders. Given this, how does anyone see the promise of AI automating all the work* play out? Assuming it is likely to ever happen, what becomes of all the workers when the work has been taken away? The owners of the AI are not going to suddenly give shit away for free, they need to make money. And the rest of us will have no income so how are we going to pay for the robots? I mean I guess we could introduce a universal basic income funded by a tax on the robot companies, but given their reluctance to pay tax now and their massive amounts of capital to influence all policy decisions, I think the AI companies would be extremely unlikely to let that happen. Maybe we won’t need money anymore, because everyone has everything they need, except how will that have happened when the AI companies will have differentiated themselves by their ability to generate massive returns for their shareholders*. That need for wealth as a differentiator, as a measure of success, is not going to magically wash out of the system due to abundance, indeed it is the main barrier to such abundance. The pattern of capitalist acquisition, of which the AI data grab is only the latest incarnation, shows that nothing suddenly becomes abundant and then gets given away for free. Corporations would rather artificially create scarcity than allow their product to be devalued. So there is no real scenario where the existing corporations of the world solve any of humanity’s entrenched problems. In the mean time technology will either put more people out of work, provide the context for people to be paid less to do their work (“the machine is doing all the clever stuff, you’re really just doing unskilled Labour”) and/or further separate consumers from the labour that produced their goods or services. So called AI does all these and its promoters use the vision of utopian plenty that will (clearly never) be brought about by the AI age as the rationale for all the harm it causes without any clear indication how or when all these harms magically switch to benefits. Of course the people funding these technologies don’t see any downsides because they only see the end product. The writers, artists, academics and others whose work was stolen to ‘train’ these models see only downsides as their livelihoods are taken away in the name of a progress that, for them at least (and for most of us), will probably never arrive. This is the logical endpoint of the abstraction of labour, where it has been abstracted away to a point where it is no longer paid for at all. So using generative AI is a political act. In using it, you are saying “I do not want the producers of this work to be paid.” We are not told it is a political act, we are told technology is neutral, but this ignores the fact that almost all technology exists for a reason: to increase productivity. Companies invest in technology on the assumption that the technology will generate revenue and ideally profit. Technology as deployed in almost every modern context is inherently anti human labour.

In the past few years, technical documents that defined relations between a machine making decisions and another machine acting on those decisions as master/slave have moved away from this terminology as it is deeply problematic. However, changing the terminology doesn’t change the fact that since its earliest days, technology was seen as a replacement for the unpaid labour of slaves that it was no longer acceptable to own. The ‘Industrial Revolution’ was not about the arrival of technology, but about the application of technology to create the kinds of profits on the kind of scale that up till that point had only been possible through the use of free labour (ie slaves). The fact that it allowed the factory owners to undercut the prices of artisan cloth makers was not an unfortunate side effect, it was the entire point. So the first mass application of technology was entirely a political act: it was designed to create a underclass of workers who were dependent on the factory to eke out a meagre existence. It resulted in a considerable drop in quality of life for the working class, and set the standard for the structure of the modern world. Technology allowed factory owners to force their workers wages as close to zero as possible (ie as close to slavery as was socially acceptable). Once the popular Luddite rebellion was put down by the army, the factory owners and their new friends in government could paint the working class that they had impoverished as authors of their own misfortune, poor because they were not clever enough to earn more money. Thus also the central tenet of modern right wing ideology was born: that rich people are rich because they are smarter/more hardworking than poor people and therefore the poor don’t deserve a better life unless they can ‘work smarter’, ‘work harder’ or both. Both are inaccurate. There is no need to spend much time on the idea that rich people inherently work harder than poor people, modern social media show it to be so inherently untrue as to be laughable. The concept of working ‘smarter’ is also a misnomer, it actually means working more ruthlessly, being more willing to exploit the work of others for your own profit. Of course machines make all this easier, the factory owner can claim it is the machines that dictate the workers’ conditions, whilst the factory owners exploit the machines. Of course the machine is actually an intermediary that enables exploitation of grater numbers of people, whilst also removing the need to interact with them directly, taking the sociopathy out of exploitation. As more of our lives have been captured for monetisation - up to the point now where catching up with our family or friends has become a commodity - the boundary of the ‘factory’ has expanded to allow the machines to dictate the way we should speak to our friends, the way we should eat, the way we should sleep and how many steps we should walk. We can kid ourselves that some of these things are good for us and therefore evidence that the platforms care about us, but really it is about making sure we are well maintained as efficient modules of production. In terms of how platforms (the 21st century factories) view us, we are just our numbers, because those numbers have value. We should not (although we do every day) allow the production of those numbers dictate the way we interact with and relate to each other. The factory always needs to define complex systems in simple terms. Subjecting our society to the factory has modified our social relations into those that suit the factory, the complexity of human relationships is broken down into a limited set of discrete actions that can be mediated by the machines and the parts that generate the most income are rewarded.

After the army had crushed the Luddite rebellion and several dozen people had been hanged - murdered by the British state - for nothing more than acts of vandalism, the plight of the cloth workers forced back into the factories could be forgotten, as it happened behind factory walls. People didn’t see the maimed and impoverished children who had made the cloth when they bought it, so they didn’t need to think about the sacrifices made for their cheaper clothes. This was not the first time the consumer’s distance from the producer was used to avoid the ugly truth of production, colonialism allowed commodities such as tea, coffee, sugar and cotton to be produced by people in far away lands forced to work for little pay in appalling conditions, or as actual slaves. But they were far away in other countries whose populations ‘enlightenment’ philosophers had defined as ‘savages’, undeveloped peoples, whose societies needed civilising and therefore benefitted from the hard lessons of colonialism. This is obviously one source of the racism that is still pervasive in modern society - once you have successfully defined a race as ‘uncivilised’ it is much harder to define when they have become ‘civilised’ (and, I would argue, convenient never to do so) - but also an idea that was successfully repatriated to the centres of empire. If lesser people in the colonies can be ‘improved’ by subjecting them to grinding poverty and horrific working conditions, then why not lesser people at home too? All that needed to happen was a way of othering them in the way that the distance of the colonies othered them, the factories and mines allowed for this. They hid them away and created a new definition of the working class, which has been allowed to become their cultural identity to a point where they fear the loss of the industries that have blighted their communities for centuries because they have successfully been convinced that the industry is their cultural identity (and because industrialisation has left them no alternative employment). The othering of the working class is something that they have themselves actively participated in for many years, guided and encouraged by a right wing press that pretends to be of the people, allowing many to be persuaded that education is not for them and that the only route to true success is to exploit their peers. Meanwhile the burgeoning middle class was persuaded to think of goods and commodities as being produced by the factory, magicked out of the machine, not ground out of the lives of those who worked in the factory. Again, offshoring allowed the factory owners to put the distance of the old colonies between producers and consumers (presumably the former colonies had by this time been ‘civilised’ enough for their population to be put to work by the machines as well as by the plantation overseers), further othering them. I mean I guess we may conceive of a Foxconn worker in Shenzhen sleeping in a bunk bed, we may understand that they exist, but their relationship to the phone that I am writing this on seems tenuous at best. They are non people, a tiny fraction, a rounding error on the margin of a giant pariah state far away.

As almost every aspect of our lives is subjected to the factory we are able to abstract away more and more of the ‘workers’ in these factories, the producers of the data products that we consume. Even when those producers are artists or writers, our neighbours, our friends, our family, their struggles, the reality of their lives, their humanity becomes meaningless to us. They are just people we heard about, that the machine sells to us for the right price, whether any of it is passed on to them or not. Even when we think we are caring about these people, or their plight, we should be wary that we are doing it in the way that the factory wants us to. We may be outraged at their suffering and we may want to ‘speak’ about it, and this is fine, but we should be aware that anything we say will be packaged up and delivered to the right consumers: either those who are likely to strongly agree with us or those who strongly disagree, in both cases furthering the opportunity for the factory to produce more data. It is extremely unlikely that our message will reach either the people who we are sympathising with or the people who could have a material impact on alleviating their suffering. So as long as we accept that such engagement serves only to make us feel better at having done something when we have done nothing, that is fine. As long as we are happy for our outrage, our anger, our fear, our compassion to be nothing more than raw materials for the factory, then we can live our lives content. But it’s exhausting isn’t it? I want my emotions and my energy to have purpose, or at least to know they were received and interpreted by a human. I will only know that if a human gives me feedback directly, if I get to know about them and their needs and wants (even at a most superficial level), even if I misinterpret their responses it doesn’t matter. I’m less likely to shout at them, less likely to ignore their suffering, less likely to write them off as just plain wrong if they are there in front of me with all their human complexity, unmitigated by the factory.

In the modern world it is obviously impossible to buy all the things you need or want from a real person (believe me, I’ve tried), but that doesn’t mean we have to give up on people altogether. It doesn’t mean we have to assume that turning to the factory for all aspects of our life is the best option for us, and we should be very wary of any ‘moral’ argument that tries to persuade us that a product is preferable to a real person. I have yet to find a situation where that is true.

*something that has so far showed zero sign of happening

Processing

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.

Poverty

There are many ways to lose money. Being a 21st century parent is basically a license to do so. There is a point at which children realise that almost every TV programme has toys associated with it and, given that your average 6 year old can binge watch a single series of an entire programme in a few days, that carries the potential of multiple new toy demands per month. Such things can be shrugged off/put off till birthdays or Christmas, when the child will have inevitably moved on to another programme (inevitably just days before said occasion, after you’ve already bought the toys for the now passed fad), but sometimes something sticks, or you need a goal with an attached reward. This can be a toy but generally in the lower cost bracket this could be a (video) game.

As with almost everything in tech, games manufacturers are actually even better at squeezing cash out of you than the traditional ‘analogue’ media/toy tie-ins (to which they are also often corollary). The ‘free’ game with in app purchases model is hardly new, but it really has been finessed into an almighty piss-take in the world of kids' gaming. Witness the countless games where the free download contains one out of a possible ten small furry creatures with giant doe eyes or two out of a possible 20 locations. These are pretty obvious though, and funnily enough will either be accepted (and entered into the pantheon of pester) or rejected pretty quickly by my daughter. In many ways the more interesting games are the ones where everything is ostensibly ‘available’ but you either have to wait a genuinely long time (for a child, like 7 hours or 28 hours) for some of the most exciting items/features (even after you’ve earned the in-game currency to pay for them) or they’re priced in the game’s second currency, which can only be accrued at a glacial pace through gameplay. Of course waiting can be avoided or second currency can be instantly accrued through the simple application of the parent’s credit card. My daughter has a zoo building game that applies both of these concepts together: you can only buy certain things with serious amounts of the second currency and even the things you can pay for with the primary currency (such as zoo expansion) take an increasing amount of time to arrive after purchase unless secondary currency is deployed to get instant results. Obviously as a lefty liberal parent I find this repulsive and infuriating in equal measure. How dare these people attempt to make money from a game. Well not that, I don’t mind paying for things, it’s just I expect value for my money, what’s my ROI? If I drop £6 to pay for a game my daughter is going to play for a month or so, that seems bearable, if I have to pay £2.50 just to get her unicorn breeding program accelerated and then another £2.50 to expand the zoo in under a(n actual human) weekend and so on, I want real tangible results. I want to see a real fucking unicorn in my living room at the end of all that expenditure.

Perhaps by thinking about ROI (but excluding my woefully 20th century expectation of actual real world returns) is the right way to go about this. What is the game teaching my child after all, but the reality of the 21st century economy? The sooner she learns that you don’t really get anywhere in life without a serious injection of generational wealth the better. If a zoo game can help her realise the harsh reality behind her privilege then so much the better right? Except of course it isn’t teaching anything harsh, it is gamifying privilege. Kids will either get bored and quit, pester their parents into funding their success or (if they’re really determined) grind out the hours in soul crushing tedium to reach a fraction of the attainable goals. These are the only options allowable in the current version of the game of life. Those who don’t have a benefactor of some form are destined to struggle through or drop out altogether. I’m pleased when my daughter gets bored of these simulacra of modern capitalist orthodoxy and drops out, but this is also a form of privilege. There is nothing in this system that allows you to drop out without a benefactor and that is what needs to change.

When I was a kid and I didn’t like the way the world was structured or I thought it was unfair, I was told by my elders and betters to grow up because that was how the world works. Now I’m very much grown up, I realise that their absolutist view of the world was not only miopically incorrect but also part of the problem I had originally identified. I realise that it is easier to tell a child that there is no alternative to the orthodoxy, but unless you truly believe that (or you are too afraid of change to contemplate it) then you are simply reinforcing the dominance of that orthodoxy. The broken system in which we live is largely sustained by the fact that the assumptions underpinning it (endless growth, trickle-down wealth, the efficiency of private enterprise, an ideal 2% inflation, etc) are treated as immutable constants in the equations of life, liberty and happiness. We look at the propaganda of the past, at the unquestioned belief systems that underpinned the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church for example and comfort ourselves that we could never be so deluded as to commit so unquestioningly to a belief system. Yet here we are in the streets protesting against the few feeble attempts our rulers have been allowed by their paymasters to implement in an attempt to to avert a species wide catastrophe because we are so entirely convinced that the system is good for us, even as it makes us poorer, less healthy and more lonely each and every year.

So I’m not sure what response I want most from my child when she runs up against cold hard capital. In many ways a child is the ideal capitalist subject: driven solely by novelty and a desire for continuous accumulation. Refusing them their every desire doesn’t teach them the limits of happiness through acquisition, it merely confirms their place in the capitalist caste system, whilst maintaining (or even enhancing) the desire for greater consumption. It would be great to find a way that she can transcend the urge to endlessly consume, but I can’t exactly cut her off from literally all of society. For now I’m just content that when she discovers there is a fiscal limit to her desires, she says “I wish there wasn’t any money.”

Perfidy

Recently my feed on LinkedIn (such as it is) has been peppered with posts about various of the most ‘popular’ conspiracy theories. This is all thanks to a single colleague who I connected with because, well they seem nice enough in person, and we’d really only ever talked about work at work. I mean it’s LinkedIn, we’re connected because we’re colleagues and I’m not going to disconnect with someone because I don’t agree with them, I’d have to disconnect with solidly 80% of my connections in data science if I was to go down that path. But also it’s LinkedIn, I thought I got to avoid this type of nonsense by not being on Facebook. I’m expecting my LinkedIn feed to be full of cutesy marketing videos, baseless claims about AI tools that are going to solve all the world’s problems by 2025, meaningless motivational nonsense and the occasional interesting post from friends whose job is actually doing something to make the world a better place.

Anyway here I am, confronted with the ‘truth’ in my LinkedIn feed of all places and I have to say I’ve learned a lot from it. For example I wasn’t previously aware that the ‘fascist’ government of Jacinda Ardern (famous for that classic fascist move of relinquishing power of her own volition before her democratic mandate had expired) was responsible for killing tens of thousands of New Zealanders and covering up the fatal impacts of the coronavirus vaccine (along with the current administration, the mainstream media and every other government around the world). Some people would think that this is simply a conspiracy theory, but I’ve seen a link to a website that explains it. I’ve seen a video of someone sat in a car near where a whistleblower is being arrested (apparently unable to walk round the corner and video the actual arrest) talking about it. It turns out that whilst the truth is relatively easy to find, it’s very hard to document in the manner that everything else is documented these days.

Last week, Davos week, I was learning about the German farmers and how their ‘fascist socialist’ government is oppressing them by raising the price of diesel and banning fertiliser at the behest of Klaus Schwab and the WEF. In protest, they’re driving their tractors to Berlin and apparently are willing to drive all the way to Davos if they don’t get what they want, because compared to a hike in fuel duty, the diesel cost of driving a tractor the 850km from Berlin to Davos is nothing. Apparently this too is being ignored by the global mainstream media, because when a nation’s farmers protest it is usually headline news around the world. It turns out this is part of a conspiracy to stop us all eating meat and make food the preserve of global elites. Why else is Bill Gates buying up so much farmland?

I know very few of the verifiable facts in this case. I suspect the German government has increased tax on diesel and hasn’t exempted farmers. Maybe they’re also banning certain types of fertiliser that are causing considerable environmental damage. What I find amazing is that this fits conveniently into a grand conspiracy theory: the Great Reset, which I have to say I don’t really understand. What are these global elites trying to achieve by making us live in 15 minute cities and eat less meat? What’s their end game? Surely it’s easier to lord it over the proles by just giving them shit jobs, selling them junk food, junk tech, junk culture and raking in the profits? Surely there are more subtle ways to get power, say by letting government ministers holiday for free on your island/yacht/space ship. Surely there are easier ways to make money, such as taking advantage of conflict to increase the price of fuel or get governments to pay you ’free money’ to deliver poor quality ‘public’ services. But no, apparently the global elites are more concerned with controlling us, so we are a bit more healthy and a bit less destructive of the environment.

The are two problems here, the first being there is clearly some basis in fact for the claims made in these conspiracy theories. Some policy makers do indeed think that we should eat less meat and use less diesel (although not nearly enough in my opinion), but that is not a conspiracy, merely a response to the recommendations of countless scientists, who have actually looked into this stuff. Obviously the conspiracy theorists will conclude that the scientists are in on it, which leads to the second problem: there are conspiracies, just not the ones popularised in these theories. They can be arrived at by a simple process of looking at facts. As a scientist, what is going to make me more money, doing independent academic research that shows the products of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet are making that same planet uninhabitable, or doing ‘research’ funded by those very wealthy companies that casts doubt on the scientific consensus? As a scientist, what is my motivation for showing the cause and impacts of climate change? Why would I do what Klaus Schwab told me and why would I do it in collaboration with tens of thousands of scientists around the world? On the other hand if I’m an oil baron, hanging out with Klaus Schwab and my billionaire mates at Davos this week, what is my motivation to make people believe that the actions that would stop me accumulating obscene wealth at the expense of humanity’s survival are actually just part of a sinister global conspiracy? What indeed? It seems almost too obvious that those in power would help undermine the message that their wealth accumulation is killing people. Almost, but not. I suspect the reason people ignore the real ‘conspiracies’ is because they are so obvious as to be depressingly mundane.

The German farmers have every right to be angry, they should be protesting, against a system that forces them into debt to have to spend a quarter of a million euros on a tractor that relies on fossil fuels that will only rise in price, that has a support contract that means they have to pay the manufacturer for any repairs and can be sued if they attempt to repair their own tractor themselves. They should be protesting against a system that forces them to buy seeds that are genetically modified to need artificial fertilisers that are literally killing the land they are trying to grow things on. The people who make spectacular amounts of money out of these systems of exploitation must laugh all the way to the bank every time they hear people protesting based on conspiracy theories that add to their profits and obfuscate their impact. They must revel in the reputation washing that comes along with it. Bill Gates is the centre of many of the most preposterous conspiracies and he must love it, because the more he’s accused of putting 5G chips in our bloodstream via the covid vaccine or whatever, the more people look away from the very real harms caused by his extreme techno-solutionist neoliberalism, or even just his private jet use. There is a sinister conspiracy and if you like, you can see it centred around the WEF, after all that organisation believes “the world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations” (ie those who already have wealth and power), which is a fundamentally anti democratic position. The Great Reset was hilariously a policy put forward by the WEF as a way of mitigating the impacts of what they do. They saw it as throwing humanity a bone, a way to make the plebs feel considered as something other than resources, tiny cogs in the wheels of the apocalyptic money machine. So we should be angry at these people, they don’t really consider us as anything other than subjects, they don’t really have our best interests at heart and they do benefit from a system that oppresses, controls, manipulates and kills us. It’s called capitalism. I dream of a day when that conspiracy appears in my LinkedIn timeline.