The assassination of honesty by the cowards of Silicon Valley
More times than I can count, but twice in the past two weeks, a colleague has said something like this to me:
I can't say what I really think. At work, there's AI everywhere. I'm lucky I haven't been fired. Happy to talk about this more the next time we meet in person.
And a variant, from before the mass layoffs at my old company:
Thank you for saying something. I hate what's happening, but I'm afraid to say anything. I thought I was alone.
In both cases, I've paraphrased the exact quotes to preserve anonymity. I got the second variant a lot by DM in Slack after company all-hands. There was one memorable occasion when, amidst literally hundreds of questions, mine was the only non-anonymous one. Probably ill-advised! But I'm compulsively honest.
When an expert chooses to withhold their expertise, something is wrong.
I've also seen some very talented engineers voluntarily leave the field forever. This is a striking choice in a world where working in big tech can feel like winning the lottery. Tech work is (was?) a source of upward mobility, and in most of the industry, there's no credentialing requirement.[1] The barrier to entry is comparatively low. To voluntarily exit the industry is a moral choice in a world full of more convenient options.
Let's draw some threads together. We're talking about some of the highest-paid workers[2] on the planet. And we see company-wide meetings involving thousands or tens of thousands of these employees (including other non-engineer tech workers). Lots of money is at stake. In the course of a 90-minute meeting, 99% of the questions are anonymous. If you, the hero CEO of a big tech firm, can't rely on your very expensive workers to give you their honest feedback (and stand by it), then you've made a huge error. A climate of fear is not conducive to the best work. Not even, really, good work.
Famously, the purpose of a system is what it does. Here we have a system generating fear and lies (i.e., the withholding of expertise). It's been doing this for a while, so we must conclude that the purpose of this system is to generate fear and lies. I think this is the case.
As I said, I don't think this is an environment conducive to good work. As an experienced professional in a creative field, I am intrinsically motivated to do good work.[3] And conversely, I grow despondent when I'm pressured to produce low-quality work, or rubber stamp a large volume of low-quality work. I experience joy in exercising my skill to find and implement an elegant, and sometimes novel, solution to a difficult problem; also when I get to collaborate with peers on a problem too large for one mind to solve, which is most of them. This joy motivates me to get better at my job. Bosses should want this, but the evidence in many cases is that they don't.
The climate in the software industry for the past couple of years has been increasingly one that undermines both these sources of joy and fulfillment. I was often actively discouraged from speaking directly to colleagues—it's "more efficient" to ask the in-house LLM. I should encourage contributions to my area of the stack from non-domain experts, even when their agentic extrusions do active harm to correctness and maintainability. I should spend time thinking of things to do with "AI" rather than solving the actual problems right in front of me.
I think we should resist these pressures. I think we should loudly proclaim we have a right to fulfilling work, and that we should have a say in the nature of our work. I think that anyone who claims that the current "trends" are inevitable is engaged in magical thinking at best, more likely is historically and politically illiterate, or is on the side of the oppressors at worst.[4] Asbestos became very common in the 20th century because of its many useful properties; it is toxic and carcinogenic, and many countries have banned its use.[5] The famous power loom of Luddite history was forced on skilled workers by state power at the behest of capitalists; it didn't "just win" because it was better technology, whatever that means. Cars didn't beat horses in any "natural" sense either, unless you consider propaganda and violence natural.[6] It's remarkable that today, the most livable cities are those that either resisted the car or made tremendous effort to limit single-occupant vehicles in favor of other, more humane forms of travel. We should consider what this analogy might mean for the present moment.
Silicon Valley has always had a problem with right-wing ideology. Stanford University was founded by a eugenicist, and modern luminaries are fucking weird. I think you'd find that most of the VC and CEO class stand behind Palantir's manifesto. They are enemies of democracy and there's no sense pretending otherwise. We face a question today: do we capitulate to the epistemic, social, political, environmental, and literal violence of "AI" (and Silicon Valley writ large), or do we resist?
Luckily, the perverts are also cowards. Are we really going to pre-surrender to a bunch of cowards?
As Ta-Nehisi Coates advises in The Message, we should examine, and oppose, these cowards.
The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and unexamined.
I taught myself! I have a degree in urban planning. But for a shining moment about 13 years ago, I had a lot of free time and was curious how Android phones work. Somehow that turned into a career. ↩︎
But my god do we hate thinking of ourselves as workers. ↩︎
Though in the current climate, it certainly helps a lot that the work also pays well. ↩︎
Please read a book. Any book. No not that one. ↩︎
TIL asbestos is still legal in the US! ↩︎
If you do, just be honest and say so. ↩︎