So the other day on Mastodon I posted a link to this amazingly depressing video in which the author laments the fact that he lost one of his freelance writing gigs to AI powered tech. I also said that “the tech industry has devolved into a money hungry mob of extortionists, grifters and rent-seekers” and promised a subsequent blog post on the topic. This is that post.

So let’s start this post off on the right foot by making some declarations most of you will likely regard as a sign of premature-dementia on my part, shall we?

  1. We haven’t innovated shit since the iPhone

    When I try to think of so-called innovations and advancements since the iPhone, which to be clear is a portable machine that can handle a wide variety of computing tasks, has all day battery life, always on connectivity and is very accessible by virtue of its touch user interface, I can’t think of any. Oh sure there are lots of things that we’ve created and touted as innovations since then (namely the cloud, crypto, NFTs and AI) but all of that is basically short-sighted bullshit.

    If you are an end user, almost none of that shit has changed your life for the better. Sure the cloud has enabled us seamless and easy access to data we want backed up like photos and that’s nice, but it’s not as if we couldn’t do that before the “cloud” became what it is today, and to be clear: it’s gone far beyond that. Everything else on the list is basically an outright scam.

    Whereas when I think back to that seminal moment when the iPhone launched, it basically changed the face of tech and it permanently altered the relationship end users have with their computers. Prior to the iPhone, most people had an intermittent relationship with computers and the Internet. Afterwards? Most of us are glued to these things. We can use these things in almost any situation to maintain connectivity, reach people, share thoughts, read the news and entertain ourselves whenever we want. The best part is that it fits in our pockets.

    Whereas when I think of Crypto, NFTs and AI (our biggest headlines over the last decade) I’m instantly overwhelmed with a sense of revulsion. This is the crap we’ve created and the crap we’ve attempted to sell to the general populace as the “next big thing”.

    In terms of the cloud, it’s not entirely a scam. People like having their photos saved and retrievable in the event that their most important computing device (aka their smartphone) eats shit and dies. They like being able to just buy a new phone, sign in with their primary account and have most of their stuff magically restored. Beyond functionality like that though, the cloud is basically a huge trap designed to ensnare unwitting prey and as an industry we are all falling into that trap in the worst sort of way.

    Crypto and NFTs are such obvious past scams at this point, I’m not going to spend any additional time on them. As for AI, that’s the new kid on the block and it’s basically ripping through tech like the Black Death ripped through Prague almost 700 years ago. In a certain sense, AI is much like the iPhone was in that its a seminal moment in tech which I believe will divide our perceptions of it into two parts: The before and the after.

    From my perspective the after of AI is beginning to look exceedingly dismal. That’s because its clearly fueled by far more hype than results and its creating such a massive bubble that what comes after will likely be seen as a tech depression of sorts.

    All hail the Grifters!

    Disclaimer: I realize by specifically referring to the iPhone instead of the Smartphone, I’m basically giving Apple credit for all of it and guess what? That’s fine. Prior to the iPhone we had shitty Blackberries with keyboards for ants and crappy Windows Mobile devices with their styluses that only a nerd could love. Google basically just copied Apple.

    So fuck em.

  2. Asshole MBAs crack the whip that propels the Cloud chariot

    So if you’ve ever worked with accounting people, and I have spent a lot of my time over the course of career doing just that, you’ll soon discover that they hate what they refer to as “capital expenses”. And guess what? Every time IT has to purchase a traditional software license, a new server, laptop or desktop that basically counts as a “capital expense” (aka CapEx).

    Thanks to the wide proliferation of assholes with MBAs though, we have basically entered a new era in which “operational expenses” (aka OpEx) has become king. Why is that? Well CapEx expenses aren’t generally as predictable as OpEx expenses. Sure CapEx has the advantage that you actually own stuff but now you gotta deal with a bunch of extra accounting bullshit like depreciation and the like.

    Whereas OpEx is more predictable and with that comes less in the way of surprises. You are no longer on the hook to explain why your CapEx outlay increased by 1000% from one quarter to the next when it comes time to start upgrading your aging fleet of on premise servers and hardware. Plus even if the Cloud providers decide to raise their prices, you at least have an easy out when it comes to explaining that increase…

    “Sorry Amazon / Microsoft / Google increased their prices. Not much we can do about that.”

    Of course prior to the wide proliferation of the cloud, there were other methods of converting CapEx charges to OpEx charges but most of those generally involved leasing equipment or taking on debt to purchase the equipment. In the case of the later, you sometimes still have to deal with depreciation which is a total pain in the ass.

    Now I can already hear the teeth gnashing. The techies who read this blog are mostly shaking their heads and calling bullshit on this accounting malarkey that I’m tossing around here. That’s fine. But this isn’t a new syndrome and I promise you this is a massive reason why so many organizations are interested in the cloud. This is not a new syndrome. Traditionally IT as an organization exists under the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who of course is in charge of finance. That is of course why any of this matters and wields the influence that it does.

    The big theme in this piece is that the actual techies in tech have lost their way. This is because we have allowed the marketeers, MBAs and the Banksters to lead us around by the nose. It’s no coincidence that instead of us selling them on a new piece of tech that can help their business, they are now pushing the new pieces of tech on us. We went from enabling them to do a better job to them telling us how to do our jobs.

    These are the things they want to accomplish. These things aren’t helping our actual end users. These things aren’t improving the quality of anybody’s life. Oh yeah sure, Microsoft and Amazon likely employ far smarter and talented people than some mom and pop shop can to maintain their infrastructure so in theory it should be more performant and stable. The problem that arises from this is that the level of scale that these cloud services have taken on creates problems that are far more complex than the problems you would be dealing with on a more localized level.

    The primary benefit of cloud services from the perspective of tech is simple: Customers get locked in. There isn’t much compatibility to be found between most of the competing services and that’s very much by design. There is no win from the cloud providers perspective in making it easy for you to transition off of their service onto a competitors service. So they don’t. Hence, you keep paying them each month whether you like it or not.

    All hail the Rent-Seekers!

  3. Yesterday’s miracle tech is old news, so pay up bitch

    So yeah you just upgraded to the latest hot tech and you are feeling good, right? Well guess what? In the next few months they are going introduce a new version or an entirely sort-of “new” thing that is at least somewhat incompatible with the previous stuff you built your solution with. The best part? That old thing is going to be taken offline very aggressively. If you don’t update / rewrite, your solution dies.

    This complaint is part of a bigger issue and it was absolutely a problem before the cloud. But it’s becoming a bigger problem with each passing day and the reason is simple: Those old services don’t have enough profit margin associated with them or one of the competitors has successfully emulated it, thereby removing at least some of the burden associated with switching cloud providers when they inevitably do something that pisses you off.

    So part of keeping you on the hook is training you to accept a lack of forward compatibility. In doing that they basically call all of the shots and condition you into accepting whatever we push as the new reality in which you operate. This fits in very well with techies obsession with refactoring and changing things endlessly. The corporate goons are exploiting this tendency of ours and using it to bludgeon their customers into submission.

    This really drives to the most important point of the piece: Big Tech is completely concerned with addressing their own problems (which usually involve how to get more of our money despite a lack of innovation) rather than the problems of their customers. The only time they really care about solving your problems is when they are trying to pitch you on making use of their services to solve it. After that, you are locked in and they get free rein to basically do whatever they want.

    This is why they are introducing new incompatible-ish techs every few years. Not because they are better but because they can use their influence to effectively keep their customers racing on the hamster wheel of shiny tech towards vague promises of future increases in productivity. Most of us have bought into this too. Damn shame that.

    The other part of this is that these cloud services have short to medium term outages all the time, but unless its exceptionally widespread or lasts for a very long time (say for more than a few hours), nobody ever reports on this outside tech blogs only techies read. People are just used to it and frankly so are the techies. The market is used to it too. In fact this is such a norm that the status pages of the cloud providers rarely acknowledge any of their smaller outages because why even bother taking the reputational hit for something that virtually nobody will remember even a week later?

    Meanwhile despite a lackluster performance, a virtual guarantee of ever-increasing peripheral costs and a total lack of long term stability in terms of service interfaces and availability, we continue to pay up. Is it because this is the best possible tech decision? Of course not. It’s because unless we buy into the fad and join the herd of lemmings currently racing towards the AI powered cloud cliff, we will be labeled as luddites and cast aside as the antiques that we have seemingly become.

    I call bullshit. None of this is magic. It’s all packets, routers, servers (fuck serverless), web APIs, data stores, assembly code and bits being flipped in processor registers and RAM. This isn’t a miracle. The only miracle is that so many people, even those who have actually been educated in the field of computer science, are buying into these lies hook, line and sinker. Eat your heart out Keyser Söze.

    All hail the Extortionists!

So where does all of that leave us? Not in a very good place I’m afraid. Every subsequent “innovation” exists only to try to inflate the tech bubble to previously unheard of levels. The core issue is that tech is seen as a growth sector and they are desperate to maintain that status. If they can’t maintain that status, their stock valuations will drop like a rock. And if that happens, the entire face of tech changes overnight.

Frankly, I think that kind of change would be for the better. The reality is that tech has permeated nearly every part of the planet at this point, short of a few native tribes living in whatever small smidgen of the rain forest we haven’t managed to slash and burn into oblivion as of yet. So they can’t increase profits by reaching more people, thus they are effectively trying to do it by selling us more more shit like AI.

Over the years I’ve been a huge proponent of the old adage, “vote with your wallet”. The time has come for everybody to start employing this tactic against big tech. Vote with your wallet by not buying into their latest scheme whether it be AI or whatever tom-foolery they come up with next after this one collapses. Don’t do it. The hype is overblown and the underlying tech simply isn’t capable of meeting the expectations they are setting. They are almost always lying to you.

Sam Altman can semi-ambiguously tweet all he wants about the “singularity” he wants us to believe that OpenAI is creating but the few of us who haven’t gotten high on the industry’s infinite supply of kool-aid know the truth: LLMs have already peaked and they will never be able to reason, think, analyze and go much beyond where they are now. Nvidia is content to parrot these lies because they are the ones selling the hardware that fuels the insanity. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple are clearly on board with this strategy.

Their ability to remain as valuable as they currently are depends entirely on whether or not they can keep us believing that the next world-changing innovation is right around the corner. The second we stop believing and cease paying for them for their fairy tales is the same second that this problem will begin to resolve itself.

The insanity has to end and it has to start with us. Let’s choose a better more sane world, eh?