For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself: I’m an IT Fossil and the end of my career path is tantalizingly near. Yet it’s not quite over yet. So in the final years I have decided to speak truth to power in the form of this anonymous blog. But who are you? Well if you are reading this then the odds are that we have something in common: We are the Wage Slaves tasked with building and maintaining the empires of Big Tech. No matter what they ask us to do, we generally do it. If we reject the notion, they just find somebody else who will.
There of course is no shortage of people willing to do whatever they are asked to make a buck. However within the confines of tech, there is almost a complete and utter lack of ethics. Years ago I would’ve probably described this circumstance as “amoralism” and proudly defended it. Nowadays I’m old enough and have enough of an understanding of the bigger picture to realize how caustic this trend actually is. Not only in terms of how our users are exploited by our code each and every day, but also in terms of how every new product that we build for or choose from Big Tech serves only to tighten their grip over our lives. You don’t have to work for Big Tech to be part of this problem, you simply need to choose to integrate into their ecosystems. We are all doing this. We are all therefore part of the problem.
At some point, this cannot stand. At some point we have to universally and consistently reject the notion that helping Nadella and Bezos expand their empires by building services on top of Azure and AWS is worth it. It doesn’t matter how much these services cost today or will cost tomorrow. What matters is that by building products and services around them, we are giving up the thing that matters most: Our agency. By extension we are also serving up the agency of our users on a platter to the Billionaire robber barons of our modern day gilded age of corruption.
If we simply refused to do this work, these empires would not exist. By themselves Zuckerberg, Ellison and Pichai are nothing. They themselves were never capable of building the empires that they now rest upon the thrones of. Regardless of all the capitalist propaganda involving bootstraps, they have none and it took an army of technical people to propel them to their current heights. By themselves they are nothing. Only with our enablement have their been able to achieve such ends.
Yet despite what amounts to now decades of recorded and indisputable unethical behavior, we keep showing up. Even now as they are laying off technical people in vast swathes because they have finally made the fatal mistake of drinking too much of their own kool-aid, we keep clamoring for yet another opportunity to serve these bloated and corrupt wielders of near absolute power. They don’t care about their customers and their don’t care about their employees. They only care about increasing that share price so that their own hoard of treasure will be big enough to save them from the hordes of rebellious peasant that will one day come looking for their pound of flesh.
This is why people like Tim Cook, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su are doing whatever they can to appease the Trump administration. This is why they are agreeing to their insane demands. Because nothing matters more to them than maintaining their grip on power. Even if they have to kowtow to the most corrupt, fascist and anti-democratic presidential administration in the history of the United States, they don’t care. There is a single end that they care about and it does not involve the well being of anybody positioned downstream from themselves.
Never forget this. Even as they seek to divest themselves of their dependency upon us, which is basically what the mass-delusion known as AI is meant to do, anybody who has critically evaluated these tools knows that they cannot succeed. At some point, once this fad dies and the bubble bursts and if these robber barons are allowed to maintain their grip on their empires, they will come crawling back to us. We should refuse to indulge their wanton desire. Let them die.
A wise person once said that “money is the root of all evil” and no single sentence uttered by a human being could be more truthful. For people with billions of dollars, they will never be able to reach the point of “enough”. They are incomplete soulless husks who intrinsically believe that they will relieve themselves of their condition once they acquire enough. Except that point is merely a wavering oasis on the horizon of a vast desert in which they are playing the role of a dying thirsty wanderer. It is not real. It is an illusion. And with each step they take towards it, the goal just gets that much further away.
We have the power to choose a different path. They are powerless without us. We can strip them of their power, their wealth, their cruelty and their immunity over night by simply denying them the thing that they need the most: Our labor and our silent consent.
Stop consenting to empower our collective amoralism. Stop pretending that problems of your customers aren’t your problems. Treat your customers as equals rather than as loose ends looking to be tied. They should be our partners, not our victims or our hostages. As fellow human beings we all deserve better than to be treated the way that Big Tech treats all of us.