I dunno if it's worth expanding on but one thing I think is worth keeping in mind is that a lot of the people in tech who abide or even like NFTs/AI/etc. aren't true believers or scammers, they're complacent and unempowered. Feasibility or ethics don't really matter to them because they're not engaged enough to care.
Even when you make it into a popular tech company or startup it's still extremely difficult to affect change—most places are still running top-down product direction (they try to say otherwise to appear better) and using things like anonymous all hands Q/A or company surveys to defang criticism, and most people fall back to self interest and stability in the face of such powerlessness. AI is inevitable because tech is, in their direct experience, not something that can be changed or stopped.
This is not to excuse them; rather, I think blueprints for action against the spread of tech that threatens us need to include parts that look less like dismantling ideology or rhetorical clashes and more like local empowerment of labor. A workforce that can actually wield it's power will be a much better audience and ally.
Obviously it's not a dichotomy, but IMO sharing union news and talking about it with your friends will have a higher ROI than resharing an essay on why AI is exploitative or can never work.
Or your preferred anonymous question bin that gets used for the company all hands. There are very few outcomes possible and all of them suck:
- Your question is ignored.
- You get a non-answer, either live or deferred if they didn't prep one.
- You get tone policed for being too toxic.
- The CEO mentions out loud they wish they knew who asked so they could give a more specific answer.
- The submission form is not Slido and actually saved the IP that submitted the question and you have an uncomfortable 1:1 next week.
The whole point is that anonymity both protects you and disempowers you in the workplace. You can't hold the CEO to account as a 4chan anon.
Have a spicy question to ask? Share it with coworkers you trust. Ask them to share it with others they trust. Get folks with enough clout to risk spending it to ask their managers or up. Spartacus was powerful because everyone was Spartacus, not because no one knew who he was. Everyone should be asking that question at the same time in several channels.
