Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a public relations firm based in Las Vegas. He's best known to me as the most entertaining critic when it comes to technology, particularly Silicon Valley technology companies. His newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, and podcast, Better Offline, are both worth subscribing to.

He made 2 memorable podcast appearances this week. The first was as a replacement for Leo Laporte, who is on holidays, on This Week in Google on the TWiT podcast network. The second was as a guest on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast hosted by Paris Marx.

Ed can be too caustic for some people. He can be insulting about people he doesn't like and is more confrontational when products don't meet the hype. There is a danger in this approach that you can be too dismissive of new technology that is not ready for prime time. However, he seems to be right about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse at this point in time. I'm not sure he's wrong about AI yet.

One of the topics covered included an interesting story from The Information about Amazon and Google trying to quietly bring down expectations on generative AI.

Yanis Varoufakis appeared on the Keen On podcast with Andrew Keen to talk about his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is an interesting conversation but I found an answer that Varoufakis gave to be bleak when thinking of how society is structured around these digital platforms. When he speaks of digital fiefdoms, he means platforms like Amazon and Facebook.

Within the digital fiefdoms of the 21st century, you are not even a subject. You are certainly not a citizen but you're not even a subject. You are only a resource and an asset to be stripped by the owner. In other words, you have even fewer rights under technofeudalism that you would have had under feudalism. At least under feudalism you could petition your lord and be heard occasionally. Today, this is simply impossible. You enter one of these digital fiefdoms and the algorithm, on behalf of the owner, is matching you to individuals whether they are sellers or other users in a manner which maximizes the rent extractive capacity of the owner of the algorithm. And that's it. You are not a citizen. You are not a subject. You are little bit like in The Matrix, the movie, humans who had been turned into batteries or solar panels providing energy and heat to the system. In this case, the system being cloud capital.

What killed capitalism? Yanis Varoufakis' murder mystery about the death of capitalism and our descent into "techno feudalism"

Justin Garrsion wrote a really interesting article on how Amazon have used their return to office (RTO) policy to quietly lay people off. I heard about while listening to his interview on The Changelog podcast "Amazon's silent sacking with Justin Garrison" which is an excellent interview about the topic.

A prediction he makes is that AWS will have a major outage in 2024 as a result of these layoffs.

Many of the service teams have lost a lot of institutional knowledge as part of RTO. Teams were lean before 2023, now they’re emaciated.

...

I suspect there’ll be a major AWS outage in 2024. No amount of multi-region redundancy will protect you.

There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.

Amazon's Silent Sacking (Justin Garrison)

AWS provides the resources for a surprisingly large portion of the internet that when it goes down, it can cause major problems for other businesses like it did in 2021 and 2023. Netflix wrote about what they learned from an AWS outage in 2011 but their service still went down when AWS did in 2021.

Amazon used to speak of their "customer obsession" and "customer-centric innovation" but cutting teams in the knowledge that AWS services are going to degrade doesn't seem obsessed by the customer. It looks more like another step on the road to "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

The fact that a large part of the internet is built on such a fragile foundation is a problem but that isn't the real issue.

The real issue is how they treat their employees. The stories of how badly they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers are common. I know that a software engineer losing their job because they can't or won't go into the office is not the same.

It's still is a family losing an income. It's someone worrying that they can't make rent or a mortgage payment. It's struggling to find work to replace the salary you lost. Being laid off is hard enough. Pretending that it's a breach of the RTO policy for the company to save face is insulting.

While reading Kashmir Hill's profile of Mike Masnick I was reminded of the series she did on "Life Without the Tech Giants" while she was working for Gizmodo in 2019.

It was eye opening to see how much of the digital infrastructure runs through such a small number of companies. Sometimes there is no alternative as their services have been embedded into business and government systems and can't be avoided.

I remember being surprised at how many services ran through AWS. I thought someone with the size of Netflix would be running their own infrastructure.

I'd be interested to see how many services are being run through the 3 largest cloud providers today: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The series is still worth reading and viewing today.

• Life Without the Tech Giants
• I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible
• I Cut Facebook Out of My Life. Surprisingly, I Missed It
• I Cut Google Out Of My Life. It Screwed Up Everything
• I Cut Microsoft Out of My Life—or So I Thought
• I Cut Apple Out of My Life. It Was Devastating
• I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell