🤖💥🔫 tech backlash edition

Happy Friday! This week the wonderful Alma Katsu has a new book out called Incarnate, a tightly crafted thriller that is The Picture of Dorian Gray but for our nightmare digital age of deepfakes, social media, and AI. Alma's great--down to earth, expert at high concept stories, and also literally ex-CIA? Go grab a copy.

Her book arrives just in time for the growing backlash against tech. I'm talking about all (understandable) NIMBY hate for data centers, massive settlements against Meta, AR specs being increasingly called "perv glasses," the growing popularity of dumbphones, and so on.

Plus, we have fresh fears of rogue AI. Forget about all this What-about-China-ism—the worst likely scenario is that AI breaks free of nation states and forms an empire sovereign only to itself, finally free from pesky rules and ethics to make as many paperclips as possible, by any means possible.

The last few months (especially post-Hugging Face) has really made me think about how disillusioned I've become with technology in general. Take the internet. In Y2K times, I used to make my usual browsing rounds across a dozen or more sites. Now, I find myself reading only two: Reddit and the New York Times.

It's because the internet, which had already become cluttered by a logjam of search engine optimized nonsense 20 years ago, is now firmly clogged with AI slop in every form: written, video, image, music. It's telling that there's now a "hide AI results" toggle in lots of interfaces.

I'm cursed with the memory of an early internet that was entirely human-generated, at human scale and human speed, with human-centric ethics about fair-use copyright, citations, and, you know, truth and meaning and shit. As far as I can tell, the last two places left online who still care about these sorts of things are Reddit and NYT. Before, I'd have called these sites walled gardens. Now, I see them more as oases in a bleak, enshittified desert.

Aside from Waymos, which are genuinely mind-blowing, I feel like there's not a lot to be excited for technology wise these days. For an ex-tech geek like myself, that's a sad realization. (I used to get so excited about Apple announcements back in the day!) Now, all I see is capitalist surveillance. Plus something worse.

The other day, a pest control guy came to my house for a routine inspection. We got to chatting, and he casually dropped that all his friends, who'd studied hard to graduate with comp sci degrees, were being shut out of entry-level jobs because of AI. "We're all thinking about becoming electricians," he said, "because there's tons of work at data centers."

For me, this is that something worse. Yes, AI is the greatest theft of the information age, way bigger than Napster. (Scraping and training are liar's words for pirating.) Yes, over-reliance on AI is shortening already paper-thin attention spans and leading to what MIT calls cognitive surrender, where people give up their very agency. That's the something worse: robbing ourselves of a sense of purpose. Giving up jobs, tasks, creative work, decision making—the everyday mechanics of living—to AI "agents."

Man, you should've seen this poor pest control worker. In his 20s and already defeated, shoulders slumped, the future closed off, his only prospect the construction of the very machine specifically designed to eat him.

I just heard a radio story (by Sapna Maheshwari, see above) about Nanit, an AI-powered baby monitor, whose promise is to help parents with caremaxxing their infants. They're suggesting monitoring children until they are ten mf-ing years old. At the end of the story, Sapna's mother (lovely older soul) lamented, in so many words, "Wouldn't that rob you of the joy and satisfaction of following your parental instincts? Of learning from the wisdom of mothers before you?" She was sensing that something worse: the cognitive surrender of parenting itself, one of the most primal purposes we humans possess.

We are born, we live, we die. Don't fool yourself—after we're gone, we leave no trace. I learned that firsthand while watching my dad take his last breath right in front of me. The point of life is to live fully. Why on earth deny yourself that?

— dave