As people know, I'm a huge Cory Doctorow fan. He has 18 titles for sale as a Humble Book Bundle to raise funds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). You can get all 18 for €16.75 so it's a great chance to get some good books for a good price to support a good cause. The offer will end around the 23rd of March so there's a little over 12 days to get them.

Cory Doctorow delivered the Marshall McLuhan lecture in Berlin on January 30th, 2024. It was recorded and posted on YouTube. There are also contributions from Frederike Kaltheuner and Helen Starr.

transmediale McLuhan Lecture 2024 with Cory Doctorow and Frederike Kaltheuner.

"You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype" by Lee Vincel is an essay I return to often. It was the first place I heard of the term "criti-hype".

Criti-hype breaks down as critics of a certain technology warning of the worst case scenario of its adoption end up advertising its features rather than looking at the real world problems happening today. As Lee Vincel puts it:

It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

It's important to keep criti-hype in mind when extraordinary claims are being made by technology companies about how their new invention will disrupt an industry. Uber spoke of making transit cheaper and more efficient by allowing people to act as taxi drivers on their commute home or in their spare time. A few years later,

Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

No, Uber's (still) not profitable (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)

AI has been the new technology in the hype machine for the past year. As Lee Vincel writes:

More recently, “AI” is the area of technology that has likely experienced the greatest amount of criti-hype. As Yarden Katz and others have argued, “AI” is really best thought of as a rebranding exercise: around 2017–2018, corporations using “AI” to describe things that had previously been known by other faddish terms, like “Big Data.”

...

First, criti-hype helps create a lousy information environment and lends credibility to industry bullshit. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch write about the role of narratives in creating speculative bubbles around new technologies. When academics engage in criti-hype, they lend more authority to these narratives.

Here is one example of how credibility-lending can work: McKinsey says 60 percent of occupations would have 1/3 of their activities automated by “AI.” Let’s be real. McKinsey says this because it sells consulting services to firms and wants executives in those firms to believe they will be soon be dealing with a radically transformed environment. In other words, McKinsey wants to scare the shit out of us.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

That is not to say that there is no utility from AI and large language models. I've tested out some AI assistants and there are some useful aspects to them. Sometimes they speed up my work process but I've found they have slowed me down more often.

That is also not to say there is no risk to employment from AI. As Cory Doctorow said:

I also think that out bosses have proved over and over again, indeed since the Industrial Revolution, they're happy to replace skilled labourers who make good things with machines that make substandard things.

IBM Predicts AI Job Disruption (Cory Doctorow on This Week in Tech)

The nature of the technology is hype and change. The next thing is the next "big" thing. Get in early so you don't get left behind. Look at the guys who got in early on the previous "big" thing. In times like these, I try to remember the Gartner hype cycle and wonder where we are on the chart before I get too excited about the next thing.

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.

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.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece that appeared on John Scalzi's blog that had some great quotes on writing.

I wrote because that’s how I go from being life’s passenger to taking a small bit of control over my destiny. Writing isn’t just a way for me to escape to a better world, it’s a way to help conjure that world into existence.

Science fiction, after all, is a literature that says we’re not prisoners of history. It’s a way to say, “Things can be different. What we do matters. The future is up for grabs.”

Bill McKibben called The Lost Cause “The first great YIMBY novel,” adding “forget the Silicon Valley bros–these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.”

Kim Stanley Robinson said, “Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope.  May it go like this.”

For me, these two quotes are the perfect summary of why writing – especially writing sf – feels so satisfying in anxious times. None of us can stop the bus on our own, but if we can break free of the frozen terror of helplessness and understand that the bonds that hold us in our seats are forged of our own constrained imagination. we can grab the wheel and swerve.

The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

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

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow. I do like Mike Masnick and the work he does on Techdirt. I don't always agree with them but they can make compelling arguments. I appreciate hearing an alternative viewpoint that is smart rather than just contrarian for the sake of it.

Cory appeared on the Techdirt podcast this week to talk about his most recent book "Red Team Blues". A lot of the conversation covers ground that has been dealt with in other interviews.

What stuck out from this conversation comes towards the end of the episode. Doctorow talks about the using the infrastructure that unions and organised labour had built in the preceding decades to participate in protests. He speaks of his experience as those structures were degraded and eventually dismantled.

Once those structures are gone then everything gets so much harder. There isn't a solid foundation to build on. It takes time to build something solid. Digital tools have helped to regain some of the ground lost over the past 40 years.

Mike Masnick has an undergraduate degree labour relations. He suggests that the internal corruption of the unions meant that they needed to be burnt to the ground before they could be rebuilt.

I'd agree with Doctorow's retort the the labour movement should be improved instead of jettisoned.

Once that ground has been taken or that institution destroyed, it is so difficult to get back to where you once were. The opportunity cost can be extremely high.

I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow and I came across this section of his interview with the Changelog podcast.

I've started other projects and blogs in the past and have been crippled by perfectionism. Even this blog already has almost 30 draft entries that I can't bring myself to publish.

I don't know what this is going to be but I'm going to start with the intention that Cory wrote about in The Memex Method that

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

If I write to explain what I found interesting about the topic to someone else then hopefully it'll be easier for me to remember in the future.

This is going to be an experiment. I'm going to blog about things I find important, fun, interesting, cool, whatever. There are going to be mistakes and missteps. I know I'm going to look back in embarrassment at some point in the future but I've lost a lot by not recording these things digitally in the past.

As Cory writes,

Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

The Memex Method - Cory Doctorow

Hopefully there's going to be good times and fun too. Thats's the plan. Let's see how it goes. Like the title says: Welcome to my blooper reel.