I love this video of Cory Doctorow explaining how the dreams of tech workers have changed over the past 15 years.

https://youtu.be/XwvqecNDHF0

This topic also appeared in his speech that he gave to Defcon earlier this year.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse

If tech workers needed an example of the power they possess at this point in time, they need look no further than what happened at OpenAI when Sam Altman was fired by the board. He would not be the CEO today if the workers had not threatened to leave.

It's a small example and it will be interesting to see how Altman and OpenAI will react to try and break that solidarity in the future.

This is the talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the DEF CON Conference earlier this year. The whole talk is a lot of fun. A room full of hackers is a receptive audience for his message. It's well worth watching or listening to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

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