Overthrow the technocrats!

Way back in the 1990s, I was writing lab software in my spare time, and I was working with a company in California for a while. I was coding exclusively on a Mac, but they mainly did PC stuff, so they bought me a cheap PC just so I could see the software they were developing. I think it was a Dell or something like that, and I set it up at my house. First thing that horrified me was that the computer was covered with stickers. Why? What are you advertising?

Then I tried running the thing, and had to wade through all the crudware that came pre-installed on the computer. Ads popped up. There were all these off-brand applications installed, and they didn’t want me to remove them — just cleaning up all the garbage took me several days before it was functional to run the tech software I had obtained the machine for.

That was 30 years ago. I guess the situation has gotten even worse, if you’re buying the inexpensive mass-market computers. Ed Zitron got one just to see what the average users experience was like. Now we’ve got the internet layered on top of everything.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.

As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”

Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.

This is our world now — the wealthy have control, and they’ve engineered everything to grow and make more money for themselves, and they’ve wrecked everything they’ve touched. I remember the early 2000s when Google was just a barebones text box that you typed things into and it bounced back with a list. It was clean and easy. But not any more!

The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.

The algorithm was never for you, the user. It didn’t make your interactions with the internet easier or better, it made it easier for companies, both legitimate and criminal, to sell you stuff. That has become the primary purpose of computers and the internet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine using a computer for anything beyond convenient shopping…although it is becoming increasingly inconvenient as all the garbage piles up. One of the best examples of a growing obstacle to using the internet is all the “AI” trash being inserted.

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.

These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment – both digital and otherwise – along with it.

Do you need AI? Do we really want some weird capitalist-created interface in front of everything that babbles and confabulates and tells us even more lies? Again, this isn’t something added for our benefit — we have to ask who profits from these layers of new crap tossed unto our computers. I don’t think it’s the users. We really don’t need ChatGPT for anything, and it literally makes everything worse.

Ed Zitron names names.

• Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
• Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
• Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
• Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
• Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.

I’m willing to call these people crooks and corrupters, profiteers and parasites. They are getting rich off of our growing inconveniences. We really need to fight back somehow, and tell these people we don’t want ChatGPT or whatever pointless energy-sucking leech they want to attach to us. Unfortunately they’ve got all the money and power and have monopolized everything.

Bob the Angry Flower