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I'm annoyed by a lot of the changes happening to the fediverse lately. Unlike what seems to be the majority over there, I don't really see a massive influx of new users as a Good Thing™. That said, there are some things which are fascinating to watch. The recent tech layoffs and reaction to chatbots is definitely one of those things.
I am not a tech worker (although I would like to be). I never went to college. I would not have made it through college, not because of any lack in intelligence or innate talent, but more due to what I like to call my severely low bullshit tolerance. Being made to live in a dorm rather than finding cheaper housing off campus? That would have made me quit. And I know it's a thing because my kids have complained about it. Mandatory courses that have no relation to my major? Another deal breaker. But mostly I just don't believe in the concepts of intellectual property or paying for knowledge. That's the biggest line of bullshit that has ever existed. My feeling is and always has been that the entire sum of human knowledge should be freely available to anyone who has the desire to learn it. With no further qualifiers. This is only tangentially related to the subject of the post, but an introduction to my life's circumstances.
My first job after entering the workforce was in the printing industry. I found the machinery fascinating. About a year later I moved from that rather large shop to a smaller mom and pop operation and was working on a press that was built 14 years before I was born. The extent of the electionics on that press was a really huge rheostat that controlled the main drive. Literally everything else was mechanically driven. Watching the gears, cams, and other mechanisms working in clockwork harmony was fascinating. Mastering an understanding of the whole was satisfying. Operating the machinery with proficiency was a literal craft.
I left that shop when it became clear that it was failing for a variety of reasons, moving to another small shop. This other shop had the "advantage" of really up to date equipment. The Heidelberg press that I operated replaced all of that beautiful clockwork with servos and microcontrollers. It was, in a word, too easy. And management saw no reason whatsoever to view those who they employed to run such equipment as anything but unskilled workers. They treated us accordingly, and I left.
For the next few years I worked as a photographer, both freelance and for a portrait studio. This was the culmination, I believed, of a lifelong hobby and fascination with cameras and optical equipment. I got into this business right at what was the end of the film era, although at the time it really didn't seem that way. The quality of the digital images being produced at that time was laughable compared with even 35mm film, and I was using anything from 6x6cm up to 4x5 inch negatives and slides. Alas, the rest of the world saw things quite differently than I did, and over the next five years I watched as the focus continually shifted from carefully crafted shots that were painstakingly set up using as much art and craft as could be employed to an industry dominated by folks who just shot as many frames as possible and popped out a disc to hand to the customer at the end. I wouldn't even try to argue my points today in the face of smartphone cameras that can take clear images and even video in the literal dark. The art is gone, the craft is dead, and it holds no interest for me anymore. I haven't touched any of my beloved cameras in a few years now. It's just depressing.
In fact, in 2023 my current employment isn't even trying to hide the fact that it's a dead end job with no prospects.
Am I an old man yelling at the clouds? Yes. Do today's tech workers complaining about chatgpt and GitHub Copilot putting them out of work also sound like old men yelling at the clouds? Why yes, they do.
Those of you who have been priviledged to work in a field that you loved and be well compensated for it these past several decades should realize just how lucky you were to have been born at the time that you were. I have a feeling that you're only seeing the beginning of a process that so many of the rest of us have seen over the past few centuries. That process is capitalism inevitably turning the tables on you and viewing you and your contribution as unskilled labor to be exploited. I'm sorry for your loss, I really am. Some of you have even been aware of the plight of the rest of us over the years and have been somewhat politically active about wanting a better economic system. But I don't think your hearts were in it enough. Maybe they will be now? Time will tell.
The rest of you, who have unintentionally been completely blind to just how priviledged you have been these past few decades, who cry about racism and gender equality while still subconciously feeling disgust towards the working class and the uneducated, well I'm sorry for you too but I have some harsh things to tell you. When you complain that companies are eliminating jobs and requiring those remaining to do an unsupportable amount of work, we've been on that. For decades now. When you rail about what ML platforms are doing to the visual arts, writing and even computer programming, well, we've complaining about that sort of thing too. None of this is new. It only seems new if you've been living in a bubble.
But I'm not giving up hope. We could still get together at some point and throw out the horrible economic system that is driving this trend of making all work equally unskilled and valueless. We could instead create an economic system that benefits everybody, feeds and houses everybody without qualification, gives us all access to medical care and leaves human beings free to pursue the things that bring joy to their lives. We are effectively already in a post-scarcity state, but are living in almost feudal conditions. It's time to get serious about using our enormous powers of creation and technology for the common good and freeing the human race from wage slavery. Do you see it yet? If not now, when?
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