2026-06-15 12:00:00
Let’s review.
Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and markets are becoming increasingly skittish over America’s big, all-encompassing bet on LLMs. And according to reports from NOTUS and Reuters, major “AI” providers are already having discussions with the United States government, in which they’re laying the groundwork for “too big to fail”-style bailouts.
This is all fine, of course. Totally fine, and great.
I’ve noted before that the so-called “AI” industry is not built on a sound financial foundation. 1 But in the last few weeks, it feels like new, even worse stress fractures have been racing across that foundation. And it’s been hard not to wonder what will happen next.
What will happen next?
I must admit I feel cursed by this stupid question. Why do we even ask it? I mean, look: my endocrine system is evolutionarily hardwired to worry about unseen threats. Something buried deep in my subconscious still thinks alpha predators lurk around every street corner, waiting to snack on my kidneys. “Something terrible is about to happen,” my hindbrain insists. “Look at the evidence before you. Anticipate. Prepare for the unseen danger,” it whines. “Shut up,” I hiss back, “I am basically a fancy typist with bad eyesight, there are no cheetahs lurking in the tall grass, I do not need this much cortisol.”
But professionally? Working in tech, we’re expected to care about this question. We’re supposed to have educated opinions about the future, to have some idea of what will happen next, all so that we can better plan for it. To design and build something that’ll last.
And I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve been asked that question — “what’s going to happen next?” — it has changed its shape. When I first started talking about responsive design, I’d get asked to weigh in on the future of mobile, or what the then-explosive levels of device diversity might look like in a few years’ time. A few years after that, I started getting questions about automated website builders, and how they might change design.
I can’t see the future, but I can state a blindingly obvious thing. None of these are questions about technology. These are all questions about work: what it might look like in the future and, most importantly, whether or not the person asking will even have a place in that future. That’s the real question behind the question, and it’s always tinged with worry or fear. And now, with hundreds of thousands of tech workers having lost their jobs since ChatGPT was released, there are a lot more of us asking the question. All of us would very, very, very much like to know what happens next.
I have no answers here. But two things come to mind.
Here’s the first one.
What will happen next?
When I’m asked about where “AI” might be going, I don’t think about the terrifyingly large bubble that’s (possibly? probably? definitely?) about to pop; I don’t think of the careers, lives, and futures that will be upended by that “market correction”; I don’t think about the potential after a crash for these big, lumbering, literally-world-devouring centralized platforms to be replaced by smaller local models. 2 Instead, when I hear that question these days — what will happen next? — I think about William Gibson and plastics.
“And these guys were very common,” [Gibson] went on, taking down a small plastic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately earmuffed helmet with an antenna on top. “These spacemen were dime-store toys at a time — which I can actually remember! — when cheap plastics were still weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or something. You’d ask, ‘What is it made of?’ ” He looked wistful, then thoughtful. “I’ve decided that one of the most significant things I ever saw in my life was the arrival of completely ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. I was certainly aware of them as the onset of something new. They cost practically nothing. But no one had any idea what a disaster we were all witnessing. Now the oceans are full of it.” He handed the spaceman to me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palm — an antique bit of misread future.
I’ve seen Gibson use this line in a few interviews. And when he does, he’s occasionally mentioned how he can browse through old photographs, and see all the toys he was raised on: crafted little objects made of cloth, wood, tin, even paper. But after a certain point, it’s like a switch gets flipped — and then he’s leafing through picture after picture of nothing but synthetic, injection-molded playthings.
I’ve been haunted by this story since the first time I read it. And it’s useful for me when I think about where we are now, and where we might go from here.
Just to be clear: I don’t think LLMs will be with us for long, at least not in their current form. But I do think that we’re living through a period of generational damage, one that will take years to repair, if not decades. For the last few years we have been watching a failed technology being deployed at scale: a technology built upon theft; upon inaccessible code; upon a flagrant disregard for work and for workers; upon ruinous environmental harms. After more than three years, “AI” has produced very little financial benefit outside of the largest companies hawking it. And in that time, after years of near-constant “AI” layoffs, I have heard and read so many accounts of people wondering if there’s still a place for them in the industry. 3 I personally have several friends who have already left the industry.
When I say the phrase “generational damage,” I mean it.
So, no: I don’t know precisely what will happen next. But I’ve come to realize the outcomes matter a lot less than the harms we’re watching unfold right now. Whether the bubble pops or doesn’t, I feel confident we’ll look back at the first few years of “artificial intelligence” much as Gibson does a toy astronaut: as a herald we ignored, as an antique bit of misread future.
Second thing. And it’s about the question itself.
What will happen next?
I’ve been thinking about this question, like, structurally. Isn’t the phrasing a bit…passive? No judgment intended at all here, mind. I’m just struck by the fact that it’s posed from a place of observation. The person asking the question is an onlooker, a spectator; they’re trying to anticipate how events in front of us might be unfolding, and guess where the river might flow next. And when we ask ourselves what might come next — for “AI,” for the industry, for the future of our work within both — I bet we could start asking another question.
Maybe it’s this one:
What do you want to happen next?
Halfway through my unions book, I sat down with Jacky about some of the organizing conversations he’d participated in.
We were talking about some brainstorming sessions he’d been in at both companies, in which he and his coworkers were dreaming up ideas for what they might include in [their union contract] — ideas people had thrown around for what their contracts could look like. Things like, “What if our parental leave policy lasted five years?” And: “Could our contract have mandated that 20 percent of every sprint was spent on tech debt?”
Alciné hastened to note that none of these proposals ever appeared at a bargaining table; they were just ideas that came up in brainstorming sessions. But that’s what I think is so valuable about the collective bargaining process, and the discussions around them: that these discussions are meant to be generative.
This was the common thread that ran through every single one of the interviews I conducted for the book. Amid layoffs, intimidation, the sheer difficulty of organizing, every person I spoke with touched on just how the process opened up new possibilities for them. A new future — and it was a future they wanted to fight for.
Amid all this talk about the inevitability of “AI”, I think it’s okay for us to ask what kind of future we want, and then move toward it together. And it’s already happening across the industry. ProPublica’s guild conducted a strike earlier this year, in part to win contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from “AI” adoption. UK workers at DeepMind, Google’s AI Research Lab, voted to unionize, in part to block usage of their employer’s models in military contracts. Thousands of tech workers in the University of California system voted to unionize, and gained the right to bargain over the use of “AI” tools in the workplace. DAIR has released a hub filled with resources for people looking to push back against “AI” and automation at work.
I think we can figure out our future together, right now. And as Mandy reminds us, it all starts with conversation. We have to talk with our friends, colleagues, and coworkers. We have to talk about our concerns, and what we wish were different. We have to map out how we’ll collectively instrument change in our workplaces, and in our industries.
I want to fix this industry. I want you to have a place in it. I want us to have a place in it. Maybe you do, too.
So, really: what do you want to happen next? I’ve got some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours.
As an aside: how is it that this McSweeney’s article went harder on the circular financing underpinning “AI” than, like, any other business publication in the last few years? Yes I’ll hold ↩︎
Well, I don’t just think about these things. ↩︎
Ky’s essay and Eric’s essay are just two examples I could name; I’ve read and heard dozens of other accounts just as moving. (And heartbreaking.) ↩︎
This has been “All tomorrow’s parties.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2026-04-21 12:00:00
I’m giving a talk at next week’s Boston WordPress meetup! If you’re around on Monday night — that’s 27 April 2026, for you Julian calendar sickos — I hope you’ll be able to join us. I’ll be giving a short talk on design systems: how they’ve changed the way digital teams work, and how we might need to rethink them. It’s a fun talk, and I’m excited to be there.
I’ve been rehearsing the talk this week, and was struck by…well, how weird it felt to rehearse a talk. That’s when I realized that next week’s meetup will be the first in-person talk I’ve given since 2019. Twenty-nineteen! Seven entire years! An eternity ago. Public speaking used to be, like, a whole entire thing I used to do. And now it’s just…not. I’ve given plenty of remote talks since then, mind you. (And they’re still plenty of work!) But as much fun as a virtual event is, I’ve missed getting a chance to meet attendees, hear what they’re working on, and what they’re excited about.
A lot of this is due to a changing world. The amount of travel I did fell off sharply back in 2020, and my house acquired some new health concerns back in 2021 that’ve made it harder to attend public events amid an ongoing pandemic. And the industry hasn’t escaped unscathed, either: many of the conferences I used to speak at simply don’t exist anymore.
This is all to say that amid all that change — and my nerves — I’m so glad to see that local, community-focused events are still going strong. And I’m honored to be in the room at the next Boston WordPress meetup. I’ll be masked up, sure, and probably a little more rusty than I used to be. But if you’re able to come, I hope you’ll say hi. It’d be great to meet you.
This has been “Retour.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2026-03-04 12:00:00
Amid everything happening right now, I read with great interest about the technologies used in planning our latest horrid war. According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s Claude was used in “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios.” This was all happening in the midst of a lot of sturm and drang between Anthropic and the federal government, during which OpenAI inked a new deal with the United States military.
A few hours before reading all of this, I’d learned of the airstrike on a girls’ school in southern Iran, a bombing that killed nearly two hundred people. Many of those killed were students attending classes.
I don’t have the words to describe how I feel about this.
But I will say one thing.
I am on the record as saying “artificial intelligence” is a failed technology, and I stand by that assessment. These platforms do not work as advertised; features that use them are loathed by the public; they exact terrible mortgages against our future; and they likely wouldn’t even exist were it not for the staggering amounts of capital being poured into them.
It’s that last point I want to focus on for a moment. To put it mildly, the “AI” industry is not built on a sound foundation. Investors are spooked by the staggering amount of debt underpinning the industry’s obscene growth, especially since none of the flagship names care about profitability. And in their desperate search for capital to shore up their ballooning valuations, these companies have turned toward governments, and the nigh-infinite supply of tax dollars they possess. The largest “AI” providers are positively sprinting to enter into procurement agreements with governments — and, more specifically, with the parts of government responsible for violence and war.
Time and again, these organizations have contorted their corporate values to support that sprint. Sarah Shoker, a former lead of OpenAI’s geopolitics team, has written more eloquently than I could about the incoherent policies at these companies around “acceptable” military usage. She notes that OpenAI quietly deleted its outright ban on military usage back in 2024; she also notes that, according to some reporting by Bloomberg, OpenAI has recently agreed to contribute its models for a drone trial.
As it turns out, that “growth at any cost” mindset does have an incredibly high cost. Because what all this corporate flexibility means is that — in addition to all their other many failings — these “AI” platforms are machines of war and death. Anyone infuriated by the military-industrial complex should stop supporting them.
And I don’t just mean monetarily. It’s not lost on me that these commercial “AI” platforms improve by learning. Well, “learning” is too anthropomorphic a verb: these large language models analyze user input, and may be trained on the data we feed them. And as I’ve read about the opening days of this pointless, stupid, awful, horrifying war, I couldn’t help but think that the everyday use of these machines is quite literally enhancing them.
None of this is new, of course. Microsoft’s “AI” products were used by Israel’s military to surveil Palestinians; the 2018 Google Walkouts were driven in part by employees protesting Google’s machine learning contributions to drone strikes; during the height of the Vietnam War, tech workers were mobilizing against the industry’s embrace of defense contracts. But today, we cannot meaningfully separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their application in death and war. Imagine asking Northrop Grumman to summarize an email for you, or refactoring code with help from Boeing and Raytheon.
These tools, and the companies that manufacture them, have tremendous costs — to our labor, to our environment, to our futures. And as we’ve been seeing, those costs also include actual human lives.
This has been “Propellant.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2026-01-19 12:00:00
We’d gotten a good three inches of snow overnight. Four? Not sure. Either way, the thing in the main was I’d gotten a late start on shoveling. I’d slept terribly last night, and still had my head submerged in a large mug of coffee when She began lacing her boots. By the time I trudged outside some thirty minutes later, She and one of our upstairs neighbors had already cleared the sidewalks. They’d started shoveling out the little driveway behind our building, so I set to alongside them.
I was delighted to learn that it was light work. Literally. Last night we’d watched big fluffy snowflakes trace easy, unhurried paths through the air, and the overnight temperature never got cold enough for anything to ice over. And when you’re responsible for clearing not one but two city sidewalks — living on a street corner! never again, I swear — you’ll take the wintertime wins where you can.
I was finishing up the shoveling when I saw an older woman was talking to me, a wide smile on her face, a lovely black dog sitting next to her.
I’d been listening to an audiobook, so I popped out one of my headphones. “Sorry, could you say that again?”
“Doesn’t look like it was too much of a workout,” she said.
“Oh! No, I’m so glad it didn’t freeze over. This stuff’s pretty fluffy, and easy to clear.” I gestured at her dog, now stretched out lazily next to her. “How was it walking around?”
How was it walking around? I assumed that question would be the beginning of the end of it: she’d tell me it wasn’t too bad, I’d say that’s great to hear, and she and her dog would continue down the street. A quick little one-two patter between neighbors who’ve never met, and wouldn’t ever see each other again.
Instead, the woman introduced me to her gorgeous collie, and how the poor thing had a number of mobility issues. Some joint and ligament issues had led to a series of surgeries, and while the pup had healed well, it made walking a bit of a challenge. “But she’s doing so great today,” she said. “We did hydrotherapy, and I think that made such a difference.”
And then more stories came. I learned she’s been in our town since the eighties — first as a renter, then when she and her husband moved into the house she still lives in. We chatted about how much change she’s seen in our little city; I shared how much change I’ve seen in the decade we’ve been here. I learned her sweet old collie had a brother, who passed away a year ago. I learned she lost her husband a few years back. Her children had moved out ages ago; it was just her and her dog.
Then she said, “I’ve got friends in Minneapolis.”
I paused. “I do, too. A few.”
For the first time, we fell silent. Just for a moment. I thought about my friends in their city; I thought about what the warmer months will bring to mine. I thought about the observer training I did last week.
And then she said, “One of my friends is worried about leaving the house right now. But their neighbors have offered to shop for them.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “I’m so happy to hear that, right now.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was, too.”
Toward the end of our chat, she told me her name; she asked me for mine, and I gave it. I wished her well as we waved goodbye, and her dog got to its feet. They walked down the street, letting the collie set the pace; I went inside to get some salt for our sidewalks. The trees all along our street were blanketed in snow, as though their branches were long, tentative fingers clutching delicate clouds, holding them aloft for us all to see.
A note of thanks to Fatimah Asghar — both for the poem I stumbled across today, and for the line I borrowed from it for this post’s title.
This has been “I find them on the street & shadow.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-12-31 12:00:00
I’m trying to write some kind of post to close out 2025, and the words just won’t come. I should’ve started this post weeks ago. But every time I thought about sitting down to write, my brain kept glancing off the idea. Something about it felt entirely too big, too difficult. And now that I’ve finally, finally started typing, it still feels daunting: I am sitting in my living room, a slowly-cooling mug of coffee in my hands, as I stare at one of the sloppiest blog drafts I’ve started in a while.
I mean, how do you write about a year that’s felt so hard? On a personal level, I lost a very good job I loved; a couple months later, I buried a parent. And amid all of that, the national and global horrors raged. I have no idea how to make one of those things legible within a few hundred words, much less all of them.
Maybe that’s why I’m sitting here, cold coffee in hand, thinking about flowers and dead men.
I spent a good chunk of my final year of college studying elegiac poetry: poems of loss and mourning written for the dead. 1 My thesis advisor and I spent hours talking about their structure, and how frequently flowers were used — frequently and differently used, I should say. As metaphors, flowers are versatile: they can represent metamorphosis and transformation, or act as a not-so-subtle callback to “the flower of youth”; they can even just, well, be beautiful things, letting the author drape a dead friend in splendor.
They can also be a boundary. In “Lycidas,” John Milton memorializes a dead friend by, at least in part, naming an array of flowers — primrose, jasmine, violets, hyacinth, and many, many more — before casting each of them, in turn, around his friend’s tomb.
…
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
Personally, I don’t think “Lycidas” is an especially good poem. But Milton’s sorrow for his dead friend is really evident throughout: there’s maybe more open emotion from Milton here than I’ve seen anywhere else in his writing. And maybe because of that raw, clear grief, the poem has passages that have haunted me in the best way possible — and this little litany of flowers is one of them. I love the idea that casting wreaths of flowers around a dead friend could be read as a protective measure from death. When you draw a boundary around something horrible, you can give it a shape; you can contain it.
I suppose that’s my path through this not-so-little post. This year was, in a word, relentless, sprawling, and tragic. And at the same time, some really beautiful flowers managed to grow; let’s you and I drape them around 2025’s shoulders.
The year began with planning a memorial service and mourning a lost job, but it also began with something I’m tremendously proud of: a redesign of my latest book, You Deserve a Tech Union, and its subsequent rerelease as a self-published title. I’ll be honest: I sometimes wish the arc for this book had been a little different since its release, but man am I delighted it’s still in the world, finding its way to people doing good work. And if you’ve read the book, or shared it with friends and coworkers, you’re part of the book’s quiet, ongoing success. So thank you, friend. Really.
I was hoping I’d get a few more years at 18F, but going back into independent practice has gone much better than I could’ve hoped. I’ve gotten a chance to work on meaningful, interesting projects with some tremendous clients, including the City of Boston. At the same time, I’m relearning how to talk about the work I do: I updated my portfolio for the first time in years, and wrote about how I approached the process. I’m also starting some new work in January that should keep me busy for the next few months, and I’m feeling incredibly grateful for that. (But hey: if you’d like to talk about working together, do get in touch!)
While I’m on the subject of meaningful work, I found no shortage of it volunteering over at Unbreaking. Back in June I wrote about why I joined the project, and why its work matters. Since then, there’s been a tremendous number of meaty design problems to think through, all while collaborating with some of the brightest, most hard-working people I’ve ever met. I know we won’t web design our way out of fascism. But I can’t tell you how good it feels to bring a few of my skills to support activism that matters.
Additionally, I’ve done some writing this year I’ve been incredibly proud of. A few of my favorite posts:
I remain dismayed by what’s currently happening in tech, and at the same time I’m incredibly inspired by the people fighting for a better vision of it; I want to write more about both of those things. On that front, I should note I’ve decided I want to write another book — a much longer one, if possible. But I’ll share more on that when I can.
That’s a lot of work-shaped stuff, I realize; there was plenty of good that happened that involved doing very little. As always, I got a tremendous amount of joy tinkering with this little website: adding better social media preview cards, or a linkblog. But I spent a considerable amount of time with my wife, with our two little cats, and with our dear friends. I went for long walks and runs in my city, and played plenty of video games. I read several books I’m still thinking about.
And whenever possible, I said hello to my favorite river.
I’ve always loved this time of year. But the hope and optimism I feel for what’s coming is tempered by the knowledge that there’s going to be a considerable amount of work next year, and more than a little hardship. Many didn’t make it out of this year; not everybody will make it out of the next one. But right here, in this moment, you and I are looking ahead together. So here’s to you and I, friend, and to pastures new.
I’m glad you’re here. Thank you, as always, for reading.
If your Cool Guy Detector suddenly exploded in a puff of white smoke, I sincerely apologize. ↩︎
This has been “Our frail thoughts.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
2025-11-21 12:00:00
I come from one of the poorest corners of a small, rural state. When I go back to visit, I book a night or two in this big hotel in my neck of the woods. The trips are heartwarming, and this last one was no exception: I got a chance to share a couple meals with old friends and family, surrounded by the hills and forests I still think of as home. This year has felt long and dark, and their faces and voices brightened it.
This hotel, though. Let me tell you about it.
It’s new, first of all. Even if you’re driving through the area for the first time, you’ll be able to spot “new construction” as something that sticks out. What’s more, this huge hotel’s been dropped on top of a mountain that’s too tiny for it. This isn’t one of the hot tourist destinations, either; this mountain’s home to a humble little ski resort, one that’s always been overshadowed by more popular tourist destinations, all of them a short drive away. Now, I need to stress here that I’m no skier — I did a single season on my high school cross-country skiing team that we will not be discussing — but I do know this resort’s historically drawn most of its customers from nearby towns: they’re not pulling in the wealthy out-of-staters. And to look at this new, massive, shiny hotel, that’s who you’d think they’re attracting.
How’d it get here? Well, we need to back up a decade or two to answer that. Because as it happens, some investor types decided to defraud the federal government.
They didn’t lead with that, of course. Through a visa program for affluent foreign investors, they had access to a tremendous amount of capital, which they then used to acquire local tourist spots and dramatically overdevelop them. As they did, they promised that all this investment would bring an influx of new businesses, which would mean more people moving to a state starved for both residents and revenue.
As you might have guessed, the money disappeared when these investors got arrested. One visible aftershock was the halted construction projects. In one town up north, there’s a crater the size of a literal city block, because all the new construction these investors promised — a slew of shops and offices, a new hotel — disappeared when they did. The investors are gone; the hole isn’t.
It also left some massive, sprawling properties in communities that never had enough foot traffic to properly support them. And here we are, back at this gigantic hotel. When we walk in, we see that the gift shop right off the lobby has been hastily boarded up. One wing of the hotel’s been blocked off to guests. At the check-in desk, the clerk has three registration forms lined up in front of her, one for each of the guests she knows will be checking in that evening. All because some rich, powerful men promised my chronically impoverished corner of the state that the things it had always and desperately needed — investment, jobs, and people — were, at long, long last, finally about to arrive.
“Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.” I’ve heard some variation on that line many, many times since 2022; I heard it a few more times after defining “artificial intelligence” as a failed technology. Maybe you’ve heard it too.
Now, regardless of how you or I might feel about “AI,” I think we can both acknowledge just how impressively ahistorical that statement is. In the last two decades, I’ve seen so many things we knew were our future: Internet Explorer, Flash, Web 2.0, jQuery, mobile websites, NFTs 1, and more. We were told each and every single one of them was immutable, fixed, and unchanging; each and every single one of them, in turn, faded. Some of them even disappeared altogether. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that predicted futures have a pretty short lifespan.
And that’s the moment in which I’m writing: that vision of an “AI” future feels like it’s shaking. In fact, it might be close to shattering. There’s a growing body of reporting on the rampant speculation at the heart of the current boom, with some journalists gaming out what a market crash might look like. Investors are nervous; leaders of “AI” companies are even starting to sound warning bells, presumably to position themselves for government bailouts whenever the bubble finally bursts. In the face of all this instability, stating that “AI isn’t going anywhere” feels even more detached from reality: it’s divorced from how quickly trends shift in tech, and it’s ignoring the growing cracks in the industry’s foundation.
At the same time, I think that unwavering belief is what’s instructive about it.
I mean, look. I’ve been thinking about my future quite a bit. The last decade’s made my sense of the coming decades feel fractured, and the last year has only accelerated that feeling. Friends are aging; family members have passed on; so many things I was taught to rely upon — jobs, industries, institutions, milestones, even seasons — feel like they’re being upended in front of me. When you’re told to expect a certain broad arc to your life, it’s more than a little terrifying when that map’s redrawn as you’re looking at it.
That’s why I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes something to you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that this something will be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?
Now. By calling them magical, I’m not attempting to diminish or disparage these kinds of statements. Far from it: when we make these statements, we’re opening up a kind of possibility space. “What if the future looked like this?” By making space to ask questions, we’re making the future feel less fixed, and far less daunting. It gives us an anchor point in what comes next, one we can move toward with intention. On an individual level, incantations like these can be a helpful goal-setting exercise; performed at scale, they can be transformative.
And not necessarily in a good way. Take the “AI” industry: backed by their belief in their (again, failed) technology and a ghastly amount of capital, they’ve embedded their technology in products, organizations, and governments alike. They’ve begun physical buildouts of vast data centers that take a tremendous toll on disenfranchised communities, and are demanding older, even more dangerous forms of energy to support their expansion. They’ve created new classes of invisible workers to power their operations, all while selling automation technology that makes work even more precarious for everyone else. This is all to say that they’ve moved very, very, very quickly to realize their vision for the future in the last three years. Hell, it’s hard to imagine a future without these platforms, and the powerful people who sell them.
But to paraphrase something Mandy Brown once said, there’s not going to be one future — there will be many. In fact, there’s another future being built right now.
Last fall, the workers at the New York Times Tech Guild walked off the job for a week and subsequently won their first union contract, one that improved pay, won them “just cause” protections, and more. For the last several months, workers at Microsoft have waged an effective and relentless pressure campaign against their employer, in order to force the tech giant to stop selling technology that facilitates the genocide in Gaza. Last week, the workers at Kickstarter United ended their record-breaking strike, having walked off the job for forty-two days to secure improved pay equity, a contractually guaranteed four-day work week, and job protections from “AI”. This week, the workers at Starbucks United, who began a strike just last week, established a blockade at one of the corporation’s distribution centers — all to bring management back to the table after months of stalled negotiations.
These are just four examples from the last year; there are many, many more. We’re surrounded by a tremendous amount of organizing right now, with workers banding together to build protections at work, to win improved pay and benefits, to advocate for human rights, to build power together. That organizing’s happening at a scale I find tremendously inspiring, and at a pace — last year; this year; last week; this week — that’s steadily increasing. This is a new future, one being built by quiet conversations with coworkers, by petitions circulated at work, by bargaining sessions, by chants and songs and protests and strikes.
That’s not to say this future is any more assured than the other one: this worker-led future needs significantly more people, including you and your coworkers. But that aside, I’m struck by the contrast between the two. One vision for the future mentions technology and technology alone, neatly eliding right over who might be impacted or harmed if that future should come to pass; the other future is centered around humans, their needs, and their hopes for something better.
Me, I’ve decided which future I want to live in. When I wrote my last book, I said the future of the tech industry is an organized, worker-led labor movement. That’s the quiet hope I’m casting into the months and years and decades that are stretching before me.
Maybe you agree with that future. If you do, well — let’s you and I start moving toward it.
lol ↩︎
This has been “The line and the stream.” a post from Ethan’s journal.