The Markup published an interview of Dorothy Gambrell by Gabriel Hongsdusit, the visual designer of site. It covers a number of topics including the importance of publishing to your own site even as your audience move towards platforms and how publishing on the Internet has changed since she started writing Cat and Girl in 1999.

The main topic of the interview is Gambrell's response to finding out her art was used to train Midjourney, an AI image generation model. She wrote a beautiful piece about her journey as an artist that captures the struggle to make work that you find meaningful and the fear of that work being taken and abused.

I've included it below under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The final 6 frames are heartbreaking.

2023 was a brutal year for layoffs in tech and 2024 has not improved the situation. It can be an incredibly difficult time especially if this is the first time you've been laid off. I was laid off from my first job in tech a decade ago and it's only recently that I've come to realize how much it affected me psychologically.

I came across this series from Joey deVilla, who was laid off from his job as a Senior Developer Advocate for Okta earlier this month. This advice is incredibly important to remember.

If you’ve been laid off — and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time — you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Laid off in 2024, part 10: Unearned consequences (Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy)

It is hard to reconcile the number of layoffs with the vast profits that the large tech companies have announced over the past few months. It feels unnecessary but it is important to remember that is also a tactic to reset salary expectations in this job market.

I've done a couple of interviews a year to research what the interview process is and how it has changed over time. It is not a process I have ever enjoyed.

Wishing anyone entering the job market all the best.

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.

Dare Obansanjo (a great follow on Mastodon) shared a LinkedIn post from Diane Hirsh Theriault, a staff software engineer at Google. The atmosphere at Google sounds grim. The fact that Sundar Pichai notified Google employees that there will be more layoffs this year wouldn't have helped.

This post does run into the danger of reading too much into one person's opinion. However, this is not the first instance I've heard of people complaining about the leadership and lack of morale in Google. Praveen Seshadri wrote this in a Medium post after he left Google last year.

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

The maze is in the mouse (Praveen Seshadri/Medium)

That's a real indictment of the culture and management in Google.

A couple of things stood out from the LinkedIn post to me.

1. Leadership, or lack thereof, is a major problem

Theriault starts her post like this:

My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

and it only gets worse from there. There appears to be a lack of direction and a problem with communication. People are being let go seemingly at random which is disrupting functioning teams.

Google has had the benefit of the money machine that is their search for such a long time that they have taken their eye off the ball in terms of new products.

The Google Graveyard is a real problem because whenever Google launches a new service, people are not using it because it could be gone again in a few years. I don't trust Google to maintain their services. That has become their brand to me.

2. There is a fine line between excitement in work and exploitation

There is a pervasive sense of nihilism that has taken hold. "Well, I guess I will just do the job until they fire me." A lot of people have golden handcuffs situations and aren't going to walk away from the salary, but nobody works late anymore. The buildings are half empty at 4:30. I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That's gone. 

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

I work in the IT industry and I enjoy my job. I have done the long evenings and weekend work. I regret some of that now.

There are times when extra hours are required. Sometimes you just need to drive through to hit a deadline.

When I see people being encouraged to stay late by peer pressure when there is not urgency to the work, that is a red flag for the workplace. What I regret from working in environments like these is that all my social relationships were tied to work. Companies that encourage this behaviour will drain every drop of effort they can from their employees.

The problem is that, oftentimes, I enjoyed myself while working. There's a real feeling of accomplishment when completing a project or learning a new language, framework or technology. There was a sense of camaraderie that developed in teams when hitting targets we weren't expected to. Most times, we didn't receive any benefit. Maybe a pat on the back, some drinks and dinner. Then get back to work.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, take stock if this is something you want. Is this a temporary work schedule? Is this expected even during quieter times during the year? Can you keep working this way until retirement? What will it do to your relationships?

If you plan to be in this industry for the long haul, consider what is sustainable for you. Keep adjusting that baseline as you get older. You could say life gets in the way. That's wrong. Life is what's important but work can get in the way of that.

"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.

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"

Sam Kriss wrote a funny review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in The Point. The part that stood out the most was Kriss' opinion of Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.

Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (Sam Kriss/The Point)

Scathing.

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 a discussion between Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Professor Andy Przybylski from the University of Oxford about research Przybylski has done about the effects of social media on children, mental health and video games and the effects of Facebook on well-being.

https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/social-media-mental-health

In short, he didn't find a lot of evidence supporting the claims that social media and video games had a negative impact on people's well-being.

It is a good conversation to listen to and consider in the light of the increased scrutiny that the tech industry is under. The tech industry has escaped scrutiny for too long but there are times when bad regulation is worse than no regulation. There is a danger of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.

I want to see better regulations drafted when considering the best available evidence. A major problem is that the data required to perform this research is locked within servers owned by the companies who aren't really incentivised to allow academics to use it, especially if they feel it could impact them negatively. There is need of a transparent process to give researchers the access they need while also protecting the sensitive data that the companies should be protecting.

I didn't know of Jeff Jarvis until I started listening to This Week in Google. He can be quite strident in his opinions but he provides a valuable perspective when it comes to technology policy and regulation.

I came across an interview he had with Andrew Keen on the Keen On podcast back in May. They go on a tour through Jarvis' history on the internet starting with blogging and moving onto social media.

The story of Jeff walking up from the subway in New York after the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was harrowing.

This is around the time that he started blogging. Listening to his description of the importance of blogging in his life, it became easier to see why he's such a staunch defender of allowing people access to new technology.

There are times when I feel he's too dismissive of potential downsides of a new technology. In his defence, there are many examples of moral panics in the past that have turned out to be overblown.

I lean more towards Andrew Keen's side when it comes to the tech industry. I think that the uncritical coverage of the tech industry has been a major problem but I am more aware of the potential downsides of inaccurate regulations can have. When I hear of a negative news report about the technology industry, I stop and say "What would Jeff say about this?".

A useful anecdote is Jeff talking about seeing some of his old newspaper colleagues and how they are surviving in an industry that is shrinking, if not dying. He recounts how he was told he was crazy to leave his job as a columnist with the San Francisco Examiner. Sometimes taking the risk to move to a more uncertain field like the internet was at the time is the right thing to do.