Does Doctorow's Enshittification Thesis Hold Up? Dwayne Monroe Responds

Speaker 1: I'm muted.

Speaker 2: Welcome everybody to another edition of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live. We are live and you can tell because I'm talking through a mute. It's good to be with you today. We will have a this conversation, which I'm really looking forward to. A lot of people have been talking about and shitification and the work of Cory Doctorow and We have a critique of it, which it also seemed like when I put this out, a lot of people were ready for that as well. And another opportunity to have a conversation with Dwayne Monroe, which we always look forward to. So really looking forward to that. Today, in about two hours at 12 p.m. Eastern Time, we will also have Alex Avenia, who hasn't been on in a little while either, back on. And we're going to talk about a lot of things. We'll talk about Venezuela. We'll talk about, you know, Trump and capital plans for the Latin America. But we will also talk about sports washing, which I'm looking forward to discussing with Alex. And so yeah, so please do the things and like, share, subscribe, support the Patreon if you are able. We do have a 50% discount through the end of the year on your first month. or even your first year if you do a monthly or yearly subscription, if you choose the $5 a month tier or above. You can also just join for $1 a month. We're one of the few Patreons that does that, but you don't get a 50% discount on the $1 a month tier. But anyway, much appreciation to everybody who supports and really looking forward to this today. I'm going to introduce our guests, who at this point hopefully needs no introduction. But in case this is the first time people are encountering it, maybe they clicked on this because we're talking about enshitification. So Dwayne Monroe is a technologist with decades of experience in the US and Europe. He intimately knows technologies the media describes as ethereal, how they really work, where they come from, and how they are used in the multinational corporations and governments dominating our lives. He applies what he calls a noir Marxist lens. And he's written for multiple publications. He has a blog. There's a journal which will be in his screen name that I encourage people to check out. And he's working on a book about the anti-worker purposes of AI called Attack Mannequins, which

Dwayne Monroe: hopefully that's going well because i would look forward to uh you know talking to him about that when we get there um all right duane it's good to be with you yeah hello hey hey yeah the book uh you know the thing about non-fiction books um is that um publishers tend to give you a longer rope but then this also tends to lead to uh to you um maybe taking longer than you should and also the conditions uh have altered so dramatically from the time two years ago when i started the book but i will indeed get it finished awesome

Speaker 2: I'll look forward to that for sure. So let's just like context for people. So we had a really good discussion a couple of weeks ago with Omar Zaza, you know, talking about his work on, you know, Palestinian like activism, Zionist repression and their role within the tech industry. And I really encourage people to check it out if they didn't. It was a great discussion. But in it, um he did talk at some point about the concept of inchification which is also something that i mean it was like the 2023 word of the year according to some thing you know and i remember hearing the word but it is really picked up in terms of people talking about this more and you know particularly this work of of corey doctorow who is making the rounds I was saying to you beforehand that I just saw something, an interview with him and Aaron Bastani, which is always a red flag to me if anybody goes and talks to Aaron Bastani.

Dwayne Monroe: As it should be.

Speaker 2: I remember you were in the chat during that conversation and you did say that you did, you know, you don't like the concept or you have some critiques of the concept. And so I reached out and was like, hey, let's have a discussion about that. So that's the background. So where do we want to start? We want to start with what it is, like what, how he defines it or how do you want?

Dwayne Monroe: Yeah. Yeah. And just to give a little some background, but also to kind of shape this conversation and to help the audience understand what the goal is, what my goal is in this conversation. The concept behind inshutification, that is the deterioration over time of products, goods and services, did not start with Doctorow. He used that term, he used the term inshutification, but people have observed this over time. And of course, throughout the history of capitalism, there are times in which a service, a good, a product, an organization in its beginning stages offers something in order to attract users, attract customers. And then once they have a monopoly position or their incentives for continuing at a relative level of quality or relatively higher level of quality, Once those incentives disappear, then it's not surprising that there's a tendency for things to deteriorate because capitalists want to optimize profit, shareholder value, and so forth, and not the quality of a particular good or service. So Doctorow did not invent the concept, but he did coin the term. And I think the term caught on for a couple of reasons. One, because, oh, let me clear my throat. One, because Dr. O is a relentless self-promoter. I don't think people appreciate, you know, he shows up everywhere and people think that he shows up everywhere because he's just such a brilliant guy. And it has more to do with the fact that he looks the part. You know, he's a white dude with, you know, glasses, not dissimilar from mine. And he certainly looks like a techie, though, I don't think he actually ever worked in the industry with boing, boing, and so forth. And I checked out his Wikipedia page. And there's no mention of him being hands on. Although he did have a company. So I might be wrong about that.

Speaker 2: In any looks a little like he looks a little like Drew Carey.

Dwayne Monroe: He does indeed, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he does remind one of a somewhat thinner, I suppose, Drew Carey. But he looks the part and he, you know, relentlessly self-promotes and he has a good entree into various platforms, you know, such as, what is that? thing that Carlos, a majority report that Carlos, of course, eviscerated recently on the show, places like that, or Bastani's, Novara Media, many mainstream sources. And in the case of Intuitification, he has a story that is very attractive to the average person, because everyone recognizes that the services that we use, the goods we use, the software and so forth, is getting increasingly worse. And he's written a book, and that always helps to promote an idea as well and to get you on to shows. So it has become popular because it does capture something that we're all noticing. It's very catchy, intratification. It kind of tells you right there, the word right there tells you. It's a good marketing hook. And it does indeed capture, as I said, something that is occurring. However, the problem, and that gets me back to what I was saying in the beginning, the problem with his idea is not Doctorow himself. I mean, I don't know Doctorow. I don't care one way or another. What concerns me is the way that people who have commitments that are similar to our commitments, or maybe identical, are responding to this idea. In other words, they're accepting it just as people have accepted, when we talked about Jacobin in the past, have accepted the idea of AI, and then just take their critique from whatever the industry is saying. They're taking what Doctoru is saying about so-called instantification and they're accepting it as an explanation for how the tech industry is moving right now. So I think what we could do to kind of help the audience really understand what Doctorow was saying is I created two graphics, one that is basically a direct quote from Doctorow from a recent appearance that he did, well, it was like seven months ago at the CloudFest 25 event. And if you take a look at the one that's labeled visual for viewers and click on that link, and share that with the audience, then you'll see what Dr. Rowe has said, and then we can shape the conversation from there. And is that working? Oh, there we go.

Speaker 2: Is that the right one?

Dwayne Monroe: That is the right one. And then there's one after that that's kind of a nice visual simplification of this. So Dr. Rowe is saying in his, his argument is as follows. that there have been three stages of instantification. The first stage, tech companies, such as Google, were once good. And I'm not simplifying his language. I mean, he's like, they're good to users, good to end users, and use their market power, use the market power that this created to dominate the various sectors. So, you know, Google had... a very robust search engine. It was very effective. It was very useful. And then, of course, because of that, we all began to use Google search, which is true. And in stage two, Dr. Rowe tells us, tech companies abuse their users to attract advertisers by, for example, in the case of Google, manipulating the search results to highlight results based on an advertiser's ability to pay for priority treatment. We saw this a number of years ago before the AI push, when, you know, you would do a search on Google. Let's say I was searching for, I don't know, lasers. You know, I want to learn about how lasers function, what lasers are. And then I would get an ad for a laser pointer company at the very top of the list. And I wasn't looking for laser pointers. I was trying to understand the scientific principle behind lasers, for example. So Dr. O is arguing that during the second stage, Google used the fact that we're all going to Google, just to use Google as an example. Of course, it's not limited to Google, but Google is a great example because it's easy to grasp what the stages are. We're all going to Google, and then Google says, ah, aha, we have you all. And so now we can say to our advertisers, hey, pay us because we have the eyeballs, and then we can manipulate those eyeballs. So that's stage two. Stage three, according to Doctorow, the tech companies become even more megalomaniacal and say, you know, we're going to screw or call back as he puts it, value from both the end users in which this whole chain started and the advertisers to maximize shareholder returns. So service quality declines, but the market dominance prevents alternatives or recourse. So even if you're a company, even if you're a corporation and you have some clout, some money, google has you captured in the way that amazon has you captured if you want to sell your product and so they're saying not only can we screw over our customers but we can also screw over our supposed business partners those who are using our platform now much of this is true not all of it but much of this is true and then let's go to that second graphic just to simplify things a bit because i think that uh yeah one second there we go yeah so stage one the industry was good it did good things and had good products stage two it's abusive and in stage three it isn't shitified so We can begin to critique this by asking questions about Dr. Rowe's described first stage in which companies were doing good things. And here, many of us become confused on this topic because we have a nostalgic attachment to the tech that we used in the past when we were younger or when, say, you started first using an iPhone or what have you. And in those earlier stages of the industry, in its consumerist phase, because it's always existed in its military and intelligence services phase, in that earlier stage of the consumerist phase, when, of course, they were indeed trying to attract customers, We are confusing the fact that, oh, this was quite useful and we're able to do things with Dr. Rowe's idea that the industry was doing good. But of course, it wasn't doing good. It was doing things to attract customers. But also, later we'll get into another problem with Doctor Who's first stage, because it presumes that the internet, for example, in this earlier phase of its history, and the tech companies in the earlier phase of their history, were providing goods and services that were of use to everyone. And of course, who's typically left out of this idea, which are minorities, women. And so the environment was always hostile. And the industry is a capitalist industry. So its actions were never, you know, regardless of what companies said, it was never, oh, well, you know, we really want to do something great for our customers. So this is the first thing that confuses us when we respond to the instantification idea, because it feels true that, you know what, my iPhone worked better or it was less annoying to me. 10 years ago than it is now. So rather than asking, well, what was it 10 years ago and what is it now and what are the stages from a materialist and indeed a Marxist perspective, if we want to go there, that explains how we got from A to where we are today. And Doctorow's explanation is insufficient. And in fact, it is a neoliberal explanation, because when there was this golden moment of capitalist competition, companies produced marvelous things. And then in the second stage in which he says they're abusing, and he used the term, abusing their customers by taking advantage of their market dominance, well, this is precisely what companies always do. It's very strange. It's a very strange way of presenting it, as if in this isolated case, these good people saw that they could make more money and were corrupted. And all of this is right there in Dr. Rowe's schema, as it were. But when many of us interact with it, we respond to the term insurification. It rings a bell in our head. because of our declining or the declining quality of our experiences, and we stop critiquing. Just as in our earlier conversations, we were saying that because the term AI has the advantage, the propaganda behind AI has the advantage of decades of pop sci-fi and so forth, that when we hear AI, we immediately assume you know, Will Smith and I robot or something, and we don't, you know, we're not thinking about, no one's telling us about how things are really functioning. So Doctorow misses in the beginning the fact that the industry was never good, even though we had products that were more useful to us, and they were more useful because, of course, the companies were indeed trying to attract customers. He misses in the second stage that, well, of course, companies try to find ways of extracting more growth and more profit from the customers they have. And in the third stage, well, of course, companies that have leverage over other organizations are going to decline quality in order to extract greater profit. This is just capitalism. It's just how it functions. I mean, railroads were much... were once much greater than they are today in the United States and in other parts of the world. And so that's Doctorow. And as I said in the document that I shared with you, he's not a Marxist. I don't think he's even a leftist. He's really a libertarian. So it doesn't matter to me that Doctorow misses this. What matters to me is that there are people who should know better, people who are leftists, podcasters and so forth, people interviewing him who are simply accepting this. They are accepting this argument without adding any complexity to it or with any challenge, you know, to the idea, to the foundational ideas, which again reminds me, should remind all of us of the way that the AI topic is being treated in supposed left spaces, which is uncritically with without without reflection.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because it's like, you know, as you're talking about it, I think about the early internet. And sure, I have a certain kind of nostalgia for it. But it's not necessarily that it was like, oh, we had these great, you know, these great products. I mean, I don't know. You know, that's part of my, a lot of my nostalgia is for pre-internet.

Dwayne Monroe: Well, sure, of course. Of course.

Speaker 2: You know, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, and also, like, I mean, I think about Google. The other thing I think about is, like, they gave us all free emails in this weird time frame in which you used to have to pay for an email address back in the day.

Dwayne Monroe: And why would they do that? Why would they do that? I mean, you know, I mean, we're just, I mean, in Dr. Rose's idea, it's just because, you know, Sergey Brin, for example, was just a great guy. Yeah. I've just loved sharing knowledge and so forth. It's interesting because not only is this ahistorical, but he focuses on some companies and not others because no one thought this about Microsoft ever. I've been in working in technology for 25 years or so and there was no point in my in the history of my time to this day because i'm still working um in which you know people said oh you know microsoft is you know just such a generous company they just have our best interests at heart everyone always understood you know that gates was uh a shark um you know who was trying to in fact the what was the phrase uh embrace and extend that you know microsoft would say oh yes we also love whatever this technology would be and then they would extend themselves into it and then try to dominate you know that that the market that that technology um represented or that uh the people in a particular market dependent upon so dr rose very very um targeted in the organizations that he then that he praises as having been at one time so good. And I think one of this is one reason for this is because, you know, if you talk about other firms such as Oracle, such as Microsoft, who never had this halo from the very beginning, um i mean google never deserved it but but it did happen when people took seriously the phrase the motto you know don't be evil and people are like oh my god you know this corporation doesn't want to be evil like people you know if satan was sitting across from you in a martini bar and saying hey you know what i don't want to be evil oh my god come on the horns the beautiful red suit jesus christ oh it's quite a pun anyway like, be more savvy, be savvier. And, um, but but doctor leaves, he leaves these other organizations out. And he tends to talk about Google a lot. Because I think because Google have that halo, and so people are disappointed, and maybe Apple and a few others, as well. But as I say, to return to the main point, it's not doctor that I'm concerned about, it's us. I want our analysis to be sharper. I want us to take what he's presenting. which has become quite popular and recognize it as neoliberal, libertarian in many ways. And and actually his advocacy, which we'll get to in a bit, what he's advocating for as a solution is simply, you know, a return to a neoliberal glory day that never existed. And even if it did exist, you know, there would be no returning to it. And I should also mention that Doctorow has expressed on a number of occasions, his fondness for Yanis Varoufakis' techno-feudalism thesis, which is equally goofy and equally unmoored from an understanding of both technology at the material level, but also the history of tech capitalism. And Doctor has said that he believes that what we're seeing right now is not capitalism. And this is very convenient, because now you can separate out these actions from the normal functioning of capitalism. I'm a bit surprised that Varoufakis is doing that because he's supposed to be a Marxist, although he described himself as a lapsed Marxist, which I suppose that means, dude, that you're just not a Marxist. But anyway, yeah, there is definite valence between Varoufakis' ahistorical argument for techno-feudalism and Doctorow's argument that once upon a time there was goodness and then it was corrupted and we can return to that goodness again.

Speaker 2: We'll have to do a Verifocus discussion at some point in the future as well.

Dwayne Monroe: Yeah, I wrote something. I have an essay in the can that I actually wrote years ago, but never published. But I should sharpen it, update it, because in the time that's passed from when I wrote my first draft to now, he has now two books on techno-funeralism. So it's become a lucrative topic for him. And he used to appear on a few podcasts or a radio show that I listen to and the radio host said, you know, I can't have him on anymore because he just talks bizarre. But anyway, yes. We'll talk about that some other time.

Speaker 2: absolutely yeah i mean one of the things that i was you know with watching that discussion between bastani and him and one of the things that he does is he talks about tech workers at google and like how how well treated they were by google and he does recognize that that's because you know they had a certain skill set and like Google needed them and they needed to extract as much labor as possible and so they had to convince them that you know what they were doing was important and for the social good and all of this and then give them all these additional you know benefits and things like this right but he then but then he talks about like when the new people come in and say you have to make search shittier because we need people to search two or three times for the same thing so that we can increase the number of searches which of course again like you said like this is just capitalism like at some point you run out of a way to expand your business because you've maximized the number of users that you have and if you make your search more and more functional, that actually reduces the amount of time that people are going to use it for because they can get to their answers of things quicker. They have a lesser kind of need for spending time know if i have to search the same thing up three times or go through three different pages of google results to find what i need then obviously i've you know increased my clicks and i can you know that along the way exactly along the way of course uh you are as you say you're being

Dwayne Monroe: what's being pushed to you is more advertising. And this is like what some supermarkets, some markets do in which, oh my God, I think Ikea was like a master of this. You know, well, I just want a lamp, but I have to walk through the whole damn store to get the lamp because the hope of course is, well, along the way, oh, you know what? I also need something for the kitchen. Oh, I also need this. That is how they optimize, you know, the shopping experience to, you know, to increase the probability that you'll you'll buy many other things. And so you, you went there intending to spend 20 bucks in and you know, if you have it, you end up spending a couple 100 bucks, right?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the joke of like, yeah, you can't get out of Target without spending $100. Yeah, right.

Dwayne Monroe: I just wanted tweezers, or like, you know, whatever. mouthwash.

Speaker 2: Man, so should we look at the proposed solution?

Dwayne Monroe: Yes, yeah. So then go to that section. of the document because i think that um this gives us an idea this gives us a way of actually really uh digging into the weakness the thinness of the argument yeah so we can we can understand not only the limits but the characteristic of dr rose argument by looking at his proposed solution um such as resurrecting competition so we can start with that Because the idea is that, well, competition is good. And during the glory days when there was all this fantastic competition, these companies produced good products. And this is one of these things. And here, once again, we have to be dialectical, right? Because there's a bit of truth in this. It's not as if competition doesn't exist at all. I mean, these companies, at least in the past, in the past, there certainly was a greater degree of competition say between samsung and of competition say between samsung and of competition say between samsung and apple you know that apple you know that apple you know that the rivalry between them did produce uh the rivalry between them did produce uh the rivalry between them did produce uh different um bits of equipment although think we all could say that um the end result was not something that was fantastic for you know for people who use either platform but this is his first proposed solution resurrect competition um and then we can return to you know this uh this marvelous time in the past when companies were um you know producing these marvelous products and doing good things because they were competing now how does one do that how does one you know resurrect competition? Well, according to Doctorow, you enforce regulation. And here we get into the weakness of what I of the liberal argument. And Doctorow is mostly libertarian, but he is friendly to some forms of regulation when it comes to the tech industry. So he's kind of in a quasi-state when it comes to that.

Speaker 2: In the conversation with Bastani, he went to Adam Smith and then said that the people at the Adam Smith Institute would think that Adam Smith was a Marxist, that they hadn't read him. So there's an interesting, very classical liberal capitalist kind of...

Dwayne Monroe: Precisely. And so enforced regulation. And here, again, we must be actual materialists because there's things... that people propose that people say that we should do and then but we have to ask ourselves in an age speaking specifically the united states in which you have no congress i mean let's just be clear there barely is a congress and i know the democrats have been winning some elections and people are getting very excited about that because they're terrified um and and tired um but we must be like adults about this and say that um you absolutely do not have a legislative body in the United States in 2025, and you're unlikely to have one for the foreseeable future, that will enforce any regulation. And even in the period before the current unraveling that we are witnessing and experiencing, even before that period, there was a regulatory capture. So corporations found a way to work around even the existence of a stronger legislative, a more organized legislative body. by simply buying off um through lobbying buying off um lawmakers and saying well yes we have you know these clean air rules or you know clean water rules or whatever but maybe you know maybe i my corporation should be able to to work around those rules because i gave you you know a million for your campaign Regulatory capture has been a problem for decades. So even if you had the legislation of, say, the 1960s, there still would be this problem. And in Doctorow's schema, there's no way to address this. It's just, here, let's just do this. This third proposed solution is ensuring interoperability between platforms. And that's a bit techie, but what it basically means is that you can migrate from one platform to the other Because the protocols that they use, say for communication and for data storage and so forth, there's a common protocol, there's common methods, but companies can compete, the idea is, on other higher level services built on top of those foundational protocols. protocols and foundational methods like databases should work the same way you know whether it's you know microsoft or oracle but they can offer other services on top of that that's the idea or things that at the consumer level that you know you use email email systems should be able to talk to each other it shouldn't be well to send email to microsoft to a microsoft exchange server you need to have a special widget that you have to buy uh companies would love that but in the past decades past, earlier in the internet age, interoperability was something that was enforced. I have no objection to that, but I do not see how that would solve anything. It's a technical matter. It would be nice, but if you're able to move around within the constrained space of techno-capitalism, if you're moving from Microsoft 365 to Google G Suite, for example, Well, you're just going from one prison to another, essentially. So it's nice that you can interoperate, but you're not escaping the cage or the prison itself. And then his final proposal is tech worker power. And as I mentioned in the document that I shared with you, we have to really seriously interrogate what that means, because today most tech workers, particularly those who are in the belly of the bees in Silicon Valley, are either libertarian apolitical or outright fascist and there are of course there are exceptions like the no tech for apartheid and the no azure for apartheid groups these are workers who um have achieved class consciousness and uh have moral commitments you know beyond careerism but um But they are exceptions to the rule because most people in this industry have been propagandized for decades into believing that they are a special breed. This is particularly true in California, but that idea moves out in concentric circles across the industry in which people believe that they're special geniuses because they work in this field. Or they're just normal people who don't have all sorts of outlandish ideologies, but they just want to, like most workers, they just want to keep their head down and earn a decent salary and take care of their responsibilities. And so tech worker power is meaningless unless before you focus on that sector, you focus on worker power. And this is something, of course, that Dr. O, not having our commitments, would not mention. And as I said, that's fine. I don't expect that from him, but I expect that from us. And so when people with our commitments are accepting this idea and not interrogating it, This is what I'm challenging, really. I'm really more challenging us than I am challenging him.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, appreciate it. I mean, you know, one of the things... And I know there's a lot of tech workers who listen to this podcast and who are in study groups with me and who have great commitments. And a lot of times they just talk about how freaking difficult it is to try to organize within their sectors for a variety of reasons. I mean, some of it is the kind of like entrepreneurial indoctrination that they're given the same thing about, you know actually what doctoral was talking about in terms of companies convincing them that they need them to have this kind of commitment where they're going to work 60 or 80 hours a week right and like being it but like if you're indoctrinated with those kinds of you know and you start to attach that to you know similar to like people talk about protestant work ethic right if you actually drink that kool-aid and you think that In order for me to be a good worker or a good person, I have to always be willing to go above and beyond because what I am doing is somehow for the greater good, which by the way, nonprofits do this shit better than anybody. So solidarity to all of... you know my fellow ex-nonprofit workers because we were all given some version of oh well you need to go above and beyond right that's right because we all we all wash windows or we all pick up trash these are things that you know i'm going through a little bit of therapy right now but anyway um

Dwayne Monroe: Well, recall when Musk took over Twitter and before he changed it to X, there was the case of an executive at Twitter, as it was known originally, who took a picture of herself or someone took a picture of her sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of the office, Twitter's office in downtown San Francisco. And she captioned it, her post on Twitter at the time, this is a few years ago, she captioned it, this is what it takes to build new things and this level of dedication. And someone in the thread mentioned, you know, oh, because she wasn't seeing her children, she wasn't seeing her spouse, she wasn't doing anything. Else she was just like, you know, doing all this coding or leading a coding team, you know, as they were responding to, you know, various demands and the things that popped into his head. Now, of course, she was fired, you know, at some point because, you know, I mean, they don't really care. But that's an example. That's an example of what happens to a person. And this individual, I believe, was in their 40s, you know, so you would hope that they would know better. But but not clearly not. This is an example of where this ideology leads, which is, you know, I'm going to, as you say, you know, work these crazy hours. Although somehow the person who's telling me to work these crazy hours is on Twitch, you know, playing, you know, playing Diablo for hours, allegedly at an elite level. meanwhile, I'm in a sleeping bag rather than in my in my home, you know, kissing my kids and my puppy and my husband, right. So and I recall, I recall earlier in my career, when this ideology began to take home, because I worked for a consultancy. And, you know, we were doing many things that were, I will say, technically quite interesting. And, you know, we're working for these very large corporations, and we're doing these interesting things, and you're getting to work with some fairly exotic and powerful, in computational terms, technologies. And I'm in my 20s, and I'm beginning to make actual money for the first time. And so it's easy to be seduced. It's easy to be seduced into this ideology, because it does seem as if you're doing something that's quite exciting And then I think at some point in my life, I think it was in my mid-30s when I said, well, you know, I'm not stopping an asteroid from hitting the Earth.

Speaker 2: That's the thing. I mean, this is the thing, Dwayne, is like, you know, the second part of what I wanted to say associated with this is like, okay, you have this view, right, but really – more than anything, like, the closest analog is working within, like, the military-industrial complex, really, right? Like, you know, I mean, especially when we see... I mean, the... The examples you used were illustrative in terms of who actually does have some level of moral clarity or class consciousness within the sphere. It's people who understand that their companies are literally complicit in apartheid and genocide at quite a staggering level. know and so that's the thing is it's not and this is my part of what just to clarify for people who don't know why i'm critical of someone like aaron pastani right it is because of this it is because he has this very social democratic you know marxist view which is comports perfectly with like the critiques you have of jacobin and other things right um that is really about improving the quality of life for people you know he would say workers right but within the imperial core and with no consideration or responsibility at all that's right um for the colonized and imperialized and people of the global south right um and so you know, this kind of analysis of tech worker power, which I'm for tech workers being organized, right? Absolutely. But organized around what, right?

Dwayne Monroe: Right. You know, because, I mean, in the 1990s, we were propagandized out of the idea of forming unions. Because, you know, as I mentioned when I was talking to Dr. Ball, you know, you're not Joe Punch Clock. You're a slick professional. You know, you're doing cool things with It's like technology. No one understands what the hell you're talking about. At Thanksgiving dinner, when your grandmother says, baby, what do you do for a living? And you tell her, she's like, what? Which happened to me quite a bit. I was like, what are you doing? Anyway, because of that, as I said, it was easy to bamboozle us. because, you know, we are, we're working with, with, you know, with interesting things and we were making, you know, decent salaries and we were working with organizations that are glamorized. Like if you say, oh, I'm doing a project for Verizon or I'm doing, you know, I'm doing a project for, for Nike, you know, and, and all of this, you know, you're doing all these things, you know, and you're meeting people who we're told are very important, of course. And, And you're seeing the fruits of your labor are showing up in the things that these corporations are doing that do have an impact on people's lives, but for profit. And so we were propagandized away from collective action because that was associated, even though MDs had associations, but we were propagandized away from forming these kinds of associations. reason it was done of course is because it would be very dangerous for capital if tech workers were organized as as a collective force because if um to give you an example um years ago i was working for um a corporation a large chemical company in philadelphia based out of philadelphia um roman house actually and at that organ well and they were purchased by morton salt and i have no idea what they're called today but anyway a new CIO, Chief Information Officer, came in and let go of all of the engineers and architects who were responsible for a platform called AS400, which is an IBM technology that the scientists who created the polymers and various things that the corporation developed, they depended upon these very powerful computing system to do their modeling. So it was completely tied to the profit model of the organization. Well, you know, chief executives can often be quite stupid. And so the new CIO said, you know what, you guys are very expensive. I'm going to let all of you go. And so she did. And following that, what happened was things began to, you know, go wrong. And scientists were complaining because systems were no longer functioning correctly. And this began to have an impact on the bottom line. Now, I tell that story not because people would have to sabotage, but because it shows the criticality of the tech worker to the organization. And in every organization, public and private, technology workers play a critical role because these systems are fragile and they require constant attention and constant maintenance, regardless of what AI propagandists will tell you. And so because they're brittle and because they do require skilled intervention on a routine basis to function behind the scenes, that's a form of power. But that's a form of power just as industrial workers have forms of power, all workers have forms of power. What would happen if your trash wasn't picked up, for example? I mean, everyone who's experienced, I grew up in Philly, I knew what happened when there was a strike of the of the sanitation workers, people in New York, my God, and any large city or any municipality, workers have power. So we were convinced that we didn't have that power. Now, in the case of so-called blue collar workers, they're convinced that they're not important. In the case of tech workers, we were convinced that we were elites and were more associated with owners than we were with so-called blue collar workers. And it worked. And the epicenter of that ideology is, of course, in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 2: Right on. So somebody said, Sebastian, thank you for the super chat, by the way. They asked you, would your thinking about AI change if the GPU farms were worker owned in the nation states where rare earth manual, rare earth minerals are extracted?

Dwayne Monroe: No, because we have better uses for computation than large language models. And to be clear, if there was, let's say, a research program to increase the usefulness of computers to people. by making them more responsive or, I won't use the term intelligent, but something akin to like the Star Trek idea of computation in which the computers have certain capabilities that make them very useful to people. Well, that's something that I would wholly support, but so-called AI, that's amorphous, it doesn't mean anything. You'd have to say like, what actual use case are we referring to? And right now when people say AI, what they mean are chatbots. at scale, large-scale chatbots. And no, there's no justification for consuming resources for that. Now, a retooled or reimagined computational infrastructure? Absolutely. I mean, I think that would be something that would be worth pursuing, but it would require a level of upheaval that I think that few of us are prepared for at this point. appreciated that um so let's there's a couple of other pieces that you wanted to talk about one i wanted to talk yeah yeah because um we can return to dr rose idea that the internet was at some time good that these tech companies were at some time good and as i mentioned um In the document that I shared with you, there is a thinker who I follow, a site at Harry, and with a group of colleagues, they created a program or a project called Your Sleep is Showing, in which what they were doing, and I think this was in the wake of Gamergate, but what they were focusing on were the ways in which misogyny and misogynoir were rampant across the internet and the fact that none of the platforms, the Twitters and the Facebooks and so forth, you know, care to toss about that. And in fact, might even have encouraged it, you know, in their user bases through the use of their algorithmic manipulation. And so that brings us back to Dr. Rowe's idea that, well, you know, in the past it was great and all users benefited. Well, all your users did not benefit. Because there were millions of users in these categories who were completely ignored and attacked, routinely attacked. And of course, these attacks have gotten more severe as we're facing a fascist onslaught. So that's another way in which, you know, Dr. Rose, his presentation is ahistorical. And of course, I wouldn't, I would be surprised if he was even aware of these things, because, I mean, he's, to be blunt, he's a white dude who, you know, was benefiting from this world in its earlier stages, you know, when he was hosting Boing Boing and doing all these things. I mean, he was one of the winners of this world. And so, of course, Who was he associating with? What was he doing? He was having a good time. And so this wouldn't have been on his radar.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, his critiques are not that... dissimilar in certain respects from what i see on like morning news you know when they're like the you know when when it's like oh you know i mean like for instance there's all of the kind of hand-wringing going on in the corporate media these days about the impact of smartphones on children right which like Absolutely. Like, it is a very real problem, right? So it's like, okay, recognition of a problem, right? But then the proposed solutions again for this are like either like these, you know, family groups that are, you know, doing a collective like withdrawal from smartphones for their kids or... again like you said like regulation right which is like well who what body is going to pass you know this regulation uh maybe maybe in some states you know you could have or school boards or something like that you could have some of these things but you know yeah but but that would be like bastions

Dwayne Monroe: or rather islands floating in a fetid sea. And the example I wanted to give to people is that when Dr. Rowe or anyone says, oh, we need to return to the good old days and regulate, to return to those days, the example I like to share with people is, so if I were to use the following sentence, we need to get back to the good old days of regulation. the hydrocarbon industry and empower oil workers to extract more oil well you would immediately recognize that what i was saying was was insane um but we don't see that when people talk about the tech industry because um we don't recognize it for what it is what it has always been what yasha levine um in his book surveillance valley you know teaches us which is that It was born as a military project. It was born as a partner for the intelligence services. So everything we're seeing now is simply a result of it returning to that. And I think that or that aspect of it being emphasized because another reason that we haven't gotten to and that Doctora doesn't cover I believe that one of the reasons that the tech industry is also becoming worse is not only the deterioration of late-stage capitalism, but because It is going full bore on its allegiance or its service to not merely the military industrial complex, but the surveillance state. As I said, this relationship was always there, but starting in the 1980s, the consumer aspect developed, but there's no more growth there. And this AI push, which is costing so much money and consuming so many resources, so much time, so much talent, has put the industry in a bind in which they've spent so much and they're not seeing a return on their investment. And so now they're turning to They're turning to the intelligence services. They're turning to the defense industries. Microsoft, for example, I think wants to become Lockheed because Lockheed can produce products. I mean, the products kill, but some of the products don't do the things that they promise they do. The F-35, for example, is infamous for... not being a well-constructed fighter jet. And we don't care if it's good or bad. Well, it's probably better if it doesn't work. But the model of feeding at the trough, at the common trough, without having to produce anything, this is what the tech industry is doing, which means that the commercial sector becomes less and less important to it. So why even bother after a while? Microsoft's 365 products has deteriorated considerably because of this fixation on AI. And other products, no doubt, are also deteriorating because of the desire for growth, greater profitability. And as I said, this growing allegiance. Well, that's the wrong term. Allegiance was always there. This growing knitting.

Speaker 2: of the industry with um with intelligence and uh and and defense yeah no absolutely uh it as you're talking about that it reminded me you know thinking of imperial 80s of robocop with ed 209 right like the the robot that doesn't they know won't work uh but that's okay because they're gonna sell They're going to sell it anyway. They've got contracts for it, and they don't care.

Dwayne Monroe: And if it kills citizens who are just walking around minding their business, well, that's just the cost of business.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, so, I mean, in conclusion, is there anything else that you wanted to kind of add to close with?

Dwayne Monroe: I wanted for people to focus not on Doctorow, but on the approach that we've taken to his work, which is not to say, oh, Doctorow's a bad guy, I don't care. What the focus on is, as you see these appearance and when you encounter the term in shitification, as it is used in various podcasts and shows and so forth, And particularly when left-leaning people or people who claim to have left allegiances are talking about it and engaging with it, I want you to challenge them. I encourage you to challenge them to go deeper and to ask some harder questions rather than accepting it because it's an attractive idea. But like all attractive ideas, you should interrogate it even harder because if it's appealing to something in you, That might be perfectly fine and natural, but you need to ask yourself, well, why? As a friend of mine said, when we were walking down the street and someone was handing out cards for like a, what was it? A striptease show or something. And he's looking at the card and had the typical picture of the sexy lady. And he's like, but do I actually find this attractive? So he's like actually interrogating his own reaction to the imagery. And that's what I want us to do because it is appealing in shitification, but that's all the more reason to actually look behind the curtain.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Some good stuff in the chat today. Thank you, Dwayne, for taking the time for this today. The DEF CON talk, this is Bastani's, definitely tries to legitimize policy responses and existing institutions and essentially depend on existing institutions feels very liberal despite him identifying as a leftist.

Dwayne Monroe: Precisely. And that's the tell. That's the tell.

Speaker 2: Holding a torch for old dial-up. The good old days. That 14.4 modem that I had out on Antioch Road. I wonder how much of corporates work for EFF guides, doctorals, selective critiques of.

Dwayne Monroe: I, that is a very good point because in, in the I was noticing when I was watching him in the what was it? The cloud fest 2025 event, which is sponsored by Hewlett Packard, you know? And so he's couching his words in a certain way. Yes. I, I think that you know, a little bit of common sense tells us that obviously influence matters.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anytime somebody is just everywhere, right. Or like ideas just become everywhere or even like, I mean, like I said, the word became like a word of the year. So it's like there's something for sure that's being accepted at a level that should make us very skeptical.

Dwayne Monroe: Once it shows up in a New Yorker long piece or the New York Times, then you know that you're dealing with some deep bullshit.

Speaker 2: Listen, I had a Commodore 64. Or actually, my father did. But yeah, those were my earliest, my first gaming experiences.

Dwayne Monroe: I love that. I love that machine. And listen, this nostalgia.

Speaker 2: Dr. J versus Larry Bird.

Dwayne Monroe: Oh my god, I had that. And these are all good memories. And I certainly don't begrudge anybody. I mean, I was building computers. um you know from kits uh back in the day and um and i i feel sad for younger people who um have been deprived of that because one of the reasons why i have the attitudes that i do is because you know being hands-on from the small scale when i was doing kits to the to the massive scale of data centers right but all along material you know being a materialist There is nothing wrong with looking back on these moments with fondness. But the key is not to allow nostalgia to form your political commitments and your analyses.

Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I mean, what are we talking about? Like being nostalgic about 1998? I know.

Dwayne Monroe: It's like, my God, it was like...

Speaker 2: Well, those Clinton years. It was like, what? Right.

Dwayne Monroe: Exactly. I mean, it was a horrible time. I mean, you know, I mean, yeah. But, you know, if one was younger and, you know, you were having, we were carving out, we were carving out, you know, our niches at that time. And everyone, people tried, people find ways to have fun. And this is what we're recalling, you know, is the fun that we were having. And absolutely, you know, cherish those memories. But, yeah, don't be fooled.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I don't even know if it's still around, but there used to be a podcast that was called The Nostalgia Trap, which I think... Oh, I remember that.

Dwayne Monroe: I don't know if it's still around, but yes, I do recall.

Speaker 2: I don't think I ever really listened to it, but just the idea of it, I liked. I was like, yeah, because it is. It's a trap. Exactly.

Dwayne Monroe: uh mastered the ikea shortcuts and i still fall for it yeah you got to find those those little portals right from like one that's right my wife and i as well like oh no we we know how to get to that lamp that i mentioned earlier and then there you go you still end up with like the plastic doohickey or molnier what was it there was one that was actually named for thor's hammer it was like a chair like molnier

Speaker 2: uh doctor o what's up uh m2 may uh doctor o seems to fit so much with the liberal cynical critique you see in hollywood films that suggest capitalism's failure is a metaphysical immorality ingrained in the privileged yes you you could have cast him if he had acting chops and these days it probably doesn't matter because netflix probably just throw some money at him you could cast him as like you know the nerd or something in a movie and he would certainly fit the role

Dwayne Monroe: visually anyway. And I don't remember, I don't know if there was a falling out between him and his Boing Boing colleagues from back in the day, but I seem to recall that there was one over his grandstanding. I could be wrong about that, though. That could be a false memory. yeah i don't know um this all the internet once being good makes me think of people talking about jack's twitter and going back to that yes and this gets us back to what uh i was mentioning um sydad harry and others and your slip is showing they were the ones who were telling people no twitter was always horrible and and not just horrible in the way that people talk about like oh everyone's arguing or they're rude which is what you would get from like some weak-minded academics and journalists who just want to steal your your material um and not all journalists hashtag but um um but yeah that the people who were being attacked on twitter and other social media platforms have always known that you know that these places were not safe for them yeah oh for sure um so i think this was a follow-up from them to me so you get a movie like working girl or other people's money

Speaker 2: that if you rewire the capitalist or if you get someone from moral stock, the system will grow to achieve its egalitarian promise.

Dwayne Monroe: That's precisely right. Yeah, it's a vision of political economy that's based upon being nice. And what could be more liberal than that? I mean, when I've gotten into conversations about... My pushback to liberals who argue with me or try to debate me about Marxism is... how do we deal with Exxon? Tell me what your approach to Exxon is. And they will say, well, regulation. I said, okay. The conversation is over because you've had decades to do this. And if you think that this can be achieved without, I'll just say, kinetic action, I have some bad news for you. Indeed.

Speaker 2: Off topic, but I want an episode with Duane that talks about the book, The Soul of a New Machine, to explore how exploitation and overwork is romanticized.

Dwayne Monroe: And I bought that book when it was first released. And yes, indeed, that is a topic worth exploring, that book. And also The Californian Ideology, the paper The Californian Ideology, which was written 30, 40 years ago and is truer today than when it was released.

Speaker 2: Thank you again for a super chat. Appreciate folks. Jabari G asks, says, great convo. What is your opinion on Syed Mustafa Ali's decolonizing computing analysis? Have you encountered that?

Dwayne Monroe: I've heard of it. I haven't had a chance to dig into it, so it wouldn't be fair for me to offer any opinion, although I will indeed pursue it now.

Speaker 2: yeah i'm interested too i have not either but thank you for the super chat sorry that we can't provide a better answer to the question in the future um i definitely definitely will will read we're sorry the interview is uh is winding down already we will uh we'll have dwayne back again soon there's always lots of things that we could talk about too many unfortunately um tech was especially propagandized to be a political precisely important too right like and that's the thing like i partly when i was talking about like the military industrial complex too it's like there's a synergy there you know in that like you're just doing things in their case like for national interest right which which actually also falls into um

Dwayne Monroe: know some sectors of tech now because of how interwoven it is with the mill and probably always did right but yes um yeah so yeah i i had i i had a friend and the operative word is had who um he joined uh um lockheed right and when i asked him so you know why like you had other uh engineering phd a very skilled guy Could have done many, many different things. None of them clean, but not as dirty as Lockheed, right? And when I asked him why, he said, well, you know, I'm just doing a job. And when I asked him what he was working on, he said, well, you know, my team is helping to increase the precision of guided missiles, right?

Speaker 2: I have a friend just very similar story. He was like, one of my best friends growing up as a kid. Yeah. And, you know, got, you know, pursuing engineering at a high level and got into aeronautical engineering, right? And like, you know he's a rocket like it's a rocket scientist right that's like what it is right and um you know and and same thing you know works for I think he actually works for the government but maybe it's a military contractor I'm not sure and that's what you I mean if and there are other things to do um obviously that are less that are non-lethal or less lethal

Dwayne Monroe: or non-lethal, I mean, I'll be less lethal, just non-lethal would be ideal. But to choose an organization like that to work for, well, that says something about either having blinders on or not caring. And in the tech industry, what you have is basically a collection of people who have been propagandize into believing that they're all working on the Manhattan Project. And never mind the deaths or the radiation. What we're doing is very important. It's changing the world.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Yep, and great point. You were saying this too, but it's not about the individual, right? There's going to be more of this. Exactly, exactly.

Dwayne Monroe: This is why he hustles so hard. He certainly knows that.

Speaker 2: Right, yeah. Always enjoy Duane's interviews as a frequent Mac watcher and someone who also works in data science.

Dwayne Monroe: Great, thank you.

Speaker 2: All right. I think that kind of winds things down. Dwayne, thank you so much.

Dwayne Monroe: Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2: Come back in 50 minutes at 12 p.m. if you're watching this live, at least. And if you're not, then just go find it. But we're going to have Alexander Avenia back on and we'll talk about. know current events we'll talk about somebody in the chat also brought up you know don't bomb maduro and yes we agree don't bomb maduro um and so we'll be talking about venezuela and um you know latin america we'll talk about this new u.s national security policy um which is like you know but um and then we'll talk about sports washing we're going to talk about fifa giving trump a peace prize oh my god Yeah. So anyway, Dwayne, this was excellent. Hope to see folks back in the chat in a little less than an hour. And yeah, we'll be sure to have another edition with you soon.

Dwayne Monroe: Okay, man.

Speaker 2: All right. Bye, everybody.