Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants.

The Road to Hell

Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big Data: Having lots of information–far too much to process with commodity software–was supposed to magically transform business.

How do you build technology that can process that much information at scale? Well, obviously, you just need to invest in The Cloud! (If you’re using the Cloud to Butt Plus Chrome extension, this entire blog post may be confusing to you.)

But don’t scrutinize the Cloud too long, you might miss your chance to invest in blockchain.

Blockchainiacs practically invented an entire constructed language of buzzwords. Things like “DeFi”, “Web3”, and so on. To anyone not accustomed to their in-signaling, it’s potent enough cringe to repel even the weirdest of furries.

But the only thing to know about blockchain is its proponents they like it when the line goes up, and every “innovation” in that sector was in service of the line going up.

Blockchain, of course, refers to cryptocurrency. The security of these digital currencies is based on expensive consensus mechanisms (e.g., Proof of Work). The incentives baked into the design of these consensus mechanisms led users to buy lots of GPUs in order to compete to solve numeric puzzles (a.k.a. “mining”).

For a while, many technologists observed that whenever the line actually goes down or a popular cryptocurrency decides to adopt a less wasteful consensus mechanism, the secondhand market gets flooded with used GPUs.

That all changed with the release of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models.

Now GPUs are a hot commodity even when the price of Bitcoin goes down because tech company leaders are either malicious or stupid, and are always trying to appease investors that have more money than sense. It’s not just tech companies either.

“Our vision of [quick-service restaurants] is that an AI-first mentality works every step of the way.”

Joe Park, CEO of Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC)

Of all these hype cycles, I suspect that the “AI” hype has more staying power than the rest, if for no other reason than it provides a hedge against the downside of previous hype cycles.

• Not sure to do with the exabytes of Big Data you’re sitting on? Have LLMs parse it all then convincingly lie to you about what it means.
• Expensive cloud bill? Attract more investor dollars by selling them on trying to build an Artificial General Intelligence out of hallucinating chatbots.
• Got a bunch of GPUs lying around from a failed crypto-mining idea? Use it to flagrantly violate intellectual property law to steal from artists with legal impunity!

This “AI” trend is the Human Centipede of technology.

So you can imagine how I felt when I went to add an image to a blog post draft one day and saw this:

There is no way to opt out of, or disable, this feature.

WordPress is not alone in its overt participation in this consumption of binary excrement.

Tech Industry Idiocy is Ubiquitous

EA’s CEO called generative AI the “very core of our business”, which an astute listener will find reminiscent of the time they claimed NFTs and blockchain were the future of the games industry at an earnings call.

Nevermind the fact that they’re actually in the business of publishing video games!

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 released a feature (enabled by default of course) to help advertisers collect data on you.

Per 404 Media, Snapchat reserves the right to use AI-generated images of your face in ads (also on by default).

At this point, even Rip Van fucking Winkle can spot the pattern.

Investors (read: fools with more money than sense) are dead set on a generative AI future, blockchain bullshit in everything, etc. Furthermore, there are a lot of gullible idiots that drank the Kool-Aid and feel like they’re part of the build-up to the next World Wide Web, so there’s no shortage of willing new CS grads to throw at these problems to keep the money flowing.

So we’re clearly well past the point that ridiculing the people involved will have any significant deterrence. The enshittification has spread too far to quarantine, and there are too many True Believers in the mix. Throw in a little bit of Roko’s Basilisk (read: Pascal’s wager for arrogant so-called “rationalists” who think they’re too smart to be Christian) and you’ve got a full-blown cargo cult on your hands.

What can we do about it? Beats me.

Sanity Check

I’m going to set aside the (extremely cathartic) attempts at shame and ridicule as a solution. Fun as they are, they fail to penetrate filter bubbles and reach the people they need to.

What’s your Bullshit Tech Score?

One way we could push back against this steady march towards a future where everything is enshittified, and the devices you paid for (with your hard-earned money) don’t respect your consent at all, is to turn the first of the buzz words we examined (Big Data) against these companies.

I’m proposing we could gather data about companies’ actual practices and build score-cards and leaderboards based on the following metrics:

1. Does the company strategy involve generative AI?
2. Does the company strategy involve selling NFTs?
3. Does the company strategy involve stitching other unnecessary blockchain bullshit where it doesn’t belong?
4. Does the company make questionable claims about quantum computers?
5. Does the company choose default settings that hurt the user in the interest of increasing revenue (i.e., assuming consent without explicitly receiving it)?
6. Does the company own any software patents?
   • This includes purely “defensive” patents, in industries where their competitors abuse intellectual property law to stifle competition.

     While these circumstances are understandable, we should be objective in our measurements.

7. Is the company completely bankrupt on innovation tokens?
8. Does the company suffer from premature optimization (e.g., choosing MongoDB because they fear a relational database isn’t web-scale, rather than because it’s the right tool for the job)?
9. Have any of the company’s leaders been credibly accused of sexual misconduct or violence?
   • Sorry not sorry, Blizzard!
10. Does the company routinely have crunch time (i.e., more than one week per quarter where employees are expected to work more than 40 hours)?
11. Does the company enforce draconian return-to-office policies?
12. Has the company threatened a security researcher with lawsuits in the past 10 years?
13. Does the company roll its own cryptography without having at least one cryptographer on the payroll?

A passing score is “No” to each of the above questions.

This proposal is basically the opposite of SSO Tax. Rather than shaming the losers (which there will assuredly be many), the goal would be to highlight companies that are reasonably sane to work for.

I’m aware that there are already companies like Forrester that try to do this, but with a much wider scope than the avoidance of bullshit.

Furthermore, they’re incentivized to not piss off wealthy businessmen, so that they can keep their research business alive, whereas I don’t particularly care if tech CEOs get mad at being called a hypocritical hype-huffer.

I mean, what are they gonna do? Downvote me on Hacker News? I don’t work for them anyway.

In Over Our Heads

There may be other solutions available that will improve things somewhat. I’m not immune to failures of imagination.

Some solutions are incredibly contentious, though, and I don’t really want the headache.

For example: I’m sure that, if this blog post ever gets posted on a message board, someone in the peanut gallery will bring up unions as a mechanism, and others will fiercely shoot that idea down.

It’s possible that we, as an industry, are completely in over our heads. There’s too much bullshit, and too many perverse incentives creating ever-increasing amounts of bullshit, that escape is simply impossible.

Perhaps we’ve already crossed the excrement horizon.

Maybe Kurzweil was right about a Singularity after all?

Closing Thoughts

The main thing I wanted to convey today was, “No, you’re not alone, things are getting stupider,” to anyone who wondered if there was a spark of sanity left in the tech sector.

It’s not just the smarmy tech CEOs that are the problem. The rot has spread all the way to the foundations of many organizations. Hacker News, Lobsters, etc. are full of clueless AI maximalists that cannot see the harms they are inflicting.

It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [their] not understanding it.

Original quote by Upton Sinclair.

Though I am at a loss for how to tackle this problem as a community, acknowledging it exists is still important to me.

On WordPress and Generative AI

Years ago, I wrote on Medium, but got tired of the constant pressure to monetize my blog, so I decided to pay for a WordPress.com account. I write for myself, after all, and don’t expect any compensation for it.

Many of you will notice the “adblocker not detected” popup. That sums up how I feel about the adtech industry.

It’s disheartening that WordPress is pushing Generative AI bullshit to paying customers with no way to opt out of the feature. (Nevermind that it should be off-by-default and opted into.)

For now, I just refuse to use the feature and hope a lower adoption rate causes a project manager somewhere in Automattic to sweat. They’re somewhat notorious for being led by stubborn assholes who don’t listen to critics (even on security matters).

I’ll also continue to credit the artists that made the furry art I include in my blog posts, because supporting artists is the exact opposite of supporting generative AI.

If you’re looking for a furry artist to commission, first read this, and then maybe consider the artists whose work I’ve featured over the years.

New Avenues of Bullshit

If I may be so bold as to make a predication: In the distant future, I expect to see more Quantum Computing related bullshit.

Though currently constrained to the realm of grifters, NIST’s recent standardization of post-quantum cryptography is likely to ignite a lot of questionable technology companies.

Whether any of this quantum bullshit catches on at the same scale as tech industry hype remains to be seen.

If any does, I promise to handle each instance with the same derision as the bullshit I discovered in DFECON’s Quantum Village.