Two years ago, I wrote about why I continue to work in the tech industry while it ruins everything. At the time, the blockchain and the metaverse were the square pegs failing to pass through things-regular-people-want shaped holes. I held my nose because there was still plenty to love about the Internet if you believed we'd eventually come to our senses. These fads were annoying and ugly and destructive enough that we'd have to. In the meantime, I chose to be the skeptical voice in design critiques and product meetings – doing my part to nudge people in the right direction.
The manufactured hype died down, sort of. The blockchain is mostly limited to state-sanctioned money laundering these days. Meta has more-or-less abandoned the metaverse. They've since pivoted to losing money on augmented reality products that make it easier to be creepy in public. Other companies like Apple won't be releasing new designs for their headsets any time soon. Nobody actually wants this stuff. These technologies still exist, sure, but my industry's collective psychosis has mostly subsided.
I thought that weathering the grift would be worth it. My bosses would wake up from their bad trip and it'd be fun to make things on the computer for a living again. I’d return to agonizing over small, pointless design details without feeling morally compromised. The new Internet would be as it was before – a positive place for weirdos to come together and write fanfic. Roll credits.
Just kidding. The tech industry has found another opportunity to worm its way into our brains and it's more dangerous than NFTs ever were. Generative AI is the new set of jingling keys driving investors wild. This time I'm not as hopeful that we'll come to our senses.
Today's AI evangelists pelt us with the same language used by yesterday's metaverse and blockchain evangelists – mostly because they are the same guys. Like, literally the same guys. AI is inevitable according to movie monster billionaires like Marc Andreessen and we can either learn to embrace it or we can fall behind. It doesn't matter that they were wrong about NFTs and the metaverse. Now they're right. Their money is limitless, they're allied with our authoratative government, and they're going to make this stick no matter how much it'll cost to get there. Get back in your cave, caveman, and make way for the prompt engineers of tomorrow.
Let's get this out of the way – generative AI is making the world measurably worse.
There's no shortage of good reporting on how destructive this technology is. It's ruining our libraries. It's wrecking our environment. It's used to create disingenuous campaign ads. It's a consistent source of election misinformation. It's destroying students' ability to think critically and express themselves. It's used by bigots to spread hate. It's used by misogynists and stalkers to harass women. It's built on theft. It's putting one of humanity's most valuable institutions at risk. It's deeply unprofitable and its failure will send us into another recession. It's driving vulnerable people insane. It's driving its own investors insane. It's puppeting our dead and horrifying their families. It's making workers unproductive and miserable. Its output is the aesthetic of fascism and empire. It's a privacy nightmare. It's made it impossible to trust anything on the Internet. And it looks like shit.
If you read all of that and choose to use this stuff, then I'm not sure what to tell you. You are wrong and I am right. Sorry.
You're probably burnt out on guys complaining about capitalism on the Internet, but here goes.
The tech industry is reflective of a bigger problem. There are too many financial incentives for releasing dangerous inventions with limited practical value that make our lives shittier. A very small number of very powerful men are making a very large number of decisions. Those decisions are in service of making a very large amount of money in a very short amount of time. AI products are helping those powerful men evade accountability for their behavior. Flooding the Internet with misinformation is the whole point. They win when we're angry and confused.
The Internet is everywhere. The tech industry controls the Internet. Any industry with this much reach would command this much attention from the world's worst people. If it wasn't tech, billionaires would find another industry to devour. But it is tech – the industry I chose to pursue a career in 20 years ago – and our leaders fully support the morally reprehensible things happening in this country. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai happily attended Trump's inauguration because they have more in common with him than they do with the people who work for them. Elon Musk used compromised AI tools to gut our federal government until he was pushed out for being too annoying. Marc Benioff pleaded for National Guard troops to be deployed in San Francisco and has offered Salesforce's services to ICE. Tim Cook groveled like a baby. Leaders in other industries are bending the knee too, but we're really bending that thing.
It used to be easy to ethically work in tech by avoiding problematic companies. "Yeah, this sucks, but at least I don't work for Palantir," I'd say. But now not-so-evil companies like mine are joining the AI race, even if 95% of AI products are failing to see returns. It doesn't matter that AI is explicitly boosted by the most heinous administration in memory. We've embraced it. Ubiquitous software like Figma and Github have pivoted hard to AI at the expense of their core products, making it nearly impossible to work in tech without engaging with tools designed to subjugate us.
We're in the final hours of my city's mayoral race as I write this. On one side, (editor's note: mayor-elect) Zohran Mamdani has run a campaign centered on his sincere love for New York City and the people who make it vibrant. His success has been a rare source of hope during one of darkest political times of our lives. On the other hand, his opponent lazily began his campaign by releasing an error-laden housing plan generated by ChatGPT. Andrew Cuomo has buried social media in libelous AI-generated ads designed to make you hateful and afraid. I mean, look at how embarrassing and dishonest this Halloween ad is. AI-generated imagery has been so central to his campaign that it's impossible to separate its aesthetic from his cynicism. If you want a world where political campaigns look like Cuomo's, again, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It would be nice to have one day where I didn't have to think about this.
I dissent, but dissent has become riskier as the job market withers. Amazon – the company that generated $33 billion in revenue this quarter from hosting nearly a third of the entire fucking Internet – followed its strong Q3 earnings call by laying off 14,000 workers. Microsoft has laid off as many as 15,000 workers this year – something that has weighed on Satya Nadella despite his $96.5 million annual pay. As I publish this, over 112,000 tech workers have been impacted by layoffs in 2025. That's in addition to the 152,000 laid off in 2024 and 264,000 laid off in 2023 – an unfathomable number of people out of work. In a job market with this many tech workers looking for work, dissenting gives scumbags like this guy an excuse to replace you.
Everyone's been rediscovering the Luddites for obvious reasons. Our bosses have always looked for inventive ways to tyrannize us and today's AI tools are yesterday's textile machines. This isn't new. But the stakes feel higher than ever as the tech industry's influence has clawed into every facet of our personal and professional lives. Now beds stop working when AWS goes down because tech companies are cramming AI into everything – whether it's on the computer or not. It's impossible to log off. For those of us pleading with the industry to slow down and consider it's impact, it's hard not to feel like we're losing.
So why do I stick around? I grew up making things on the computer. My earliest design work was a Winamp skin created with a bootleg copy of Paint Shop Pro. My first piece of published writing was a Super Mario RPG walkthrough hosted on a Geocities website. I'd pay anything to see those projects today because 30 years later, I still love to make things on the computer.
And I'm not alone, thankfully. People who make things on the computer are still easy to find if you can navigate the slop that the tech industry has blanketed the Internet with. Most of my hobbies are supported by niche open source projects and Discord communities. This week I spent time researching how to 3D print a trackball from an open-source design company called Ploopy. Imagine saying "trackball from Ploopy" without the Internet. You can't. Projects like this only exist thanks to an Internet full of people who made something on the computer and gave it away online – not to make money, but because it's fun.
Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Facebook's newsfeed – one of the tech industry's early innovations in making us all rude and argumentative on the Internet. There's since been a stream of products that ruin our attention spans, exploit our labor, surveil us, and litter our planet in e-waste. Twenty years is a long time to wait for the tech industry to behave more responsibly. AI development makes it hard to imagine it'll be over soon.
But I love the computer and I hope I'm doing my small part to make it better, even if the stress is going to make my heart explode one day. And besides, the bubble will have burst by the time I write another one of these in two years. That'll be fine, right?
See you then.