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.

I was scrolling through my RSS feeds on Friday when I came across the news of Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI. After the success of OpenAi's Dev Day the previous week, I was surprised by this. After reading the blog post announcing the decision I still didn't understand why exactly he had been fired.

According to the OpenAI board

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

OpenAI announces leadership transition

This raised way more questions than it answered. I spent over an hour trying to find out what was going on but then I remembered a quote from Brian Stelter gave in an interview about breaking news.

We oftentimes have the most interest in a news story when there's the least amount of information. You know, something's breaking news and we really know absolutely nothing about it but that's when everybody wants to know everything and by the time we know all the facts, everybody's moved on.

Brian Stelter on the Offline podcast

It's important to for me to remember that I don't need to keep up with events like this. It will work itself out eventually and I can deal with it then. There's no point responding to speculation about things that haven't happened yet. It's usually wasted energy.