Blood in the media machine

Why every bad media company seemed to embrace AI this year, and some Blood in the Machine book updates

THIS LUDDITE LETTER IS NOT DEAD

Well, would you look at this — a newsletter, in your inbox, a mere 400 months or so after I promised to start writing this thing. It turns out that, surprise, I overestimated my capacity to blah blah you know the drill; every newsletter writer, blogger, or podcaster utters words about biting off more than they can chew sooner or later — though not, typically, immediately after *the very first post*. Whoops.

In my defense, my life has been a swirling vortex of insanity for the last 2-3 months.

The bloody book came out at the end of September, and ever since, I have been on a nonstop Luddite rehabilitation/bad AI resistance campaign aka book tour. I went to Boston, Miami, New York, Oakland. I got Covid. I staged two Luddite Tribunals, each of which were easy highlights of the year for me. Someone very close to me got very sick. I appeared on half of all known podcasts, including some of my all-time favorites. I turned 40 and considered my own mortality for what I consider just the right amount of time. I wrote a bunch of columns. It’s been a lot.

SOME BLOOD IN THE MACHINE UPDATES

Honestly, the response to BLOOD IN THE MACHINE has been more than I ever could have asked for. After all, the book is, I readily admit, kind of a swing — a hybrid of narrative history, tech analysis, labor reportage, with a little polemical soapboxing thrown in because I couldn’t help myself. It’s also, uh, long.

But it turns out that so, so many folks are on board with what I was trying to do; there were extremely kind and thoughtful reviews and very generous interviews, and hate from just the right people. There was a genuine and good-faith interest from the press in reconsidering what the Luddites were about, why they revolted, and what that might mean today.

The New Yorker turned me into a doodle. Planet Money took me to a rage room. Both the New Yorker and the Financial Times have named BLOOD one of the best books of the year.

I’m so thankful for all of it. Most of all I am thankful to the readers, thinkers, advocates, and Luddites out there who have been joining me in all this metaphorical machine breaking and sharing their thoughts and ideas and putting *real* luddism into practice and staring down AI on the picket lines. It’s given me the opportunity to speak with students, organizers, tech workers, activists, and groups like the California Labor Federation, and at events like the inaugural Critical AI symposium, about lessons we can learn from the Luddites, so it all feels like it’s very, very much worth it.

ANYWAY. Thanks again to anyone who bought the book, requested it at the library, came out to an event, hosted me at a bookstore or a festival, bought me a beer on the road, or brought some tech to a tribunal for the smashing. Endless love to my luddites out there.

BLOOD IN THE SPORTS PAGES

Fittingly, my column in the Times this week is about bosses using technology — in this case, media execs caught deploying generative AI — to try to replace work previously done by skilled human workers. It’s a direct echo of what the Luddites were experiencing, with the 19th century industrialists using automated machinery to try to replace their work.

The operative word in both cases, is “try” — in the 1800s, those early machines mass produced low-quality cloth goods that degraded the reputation *and* livelihoods of the workers making the high quality stuff. In 2023, management at Sports Illustrated, CNET, Gannett, and Gizmodo are doing much same thing, with writing. Instead of cheaper, shoddy cloth that falls apart much faster after less wear, it’s cheaper, shoddy psuedo-writing that falls apart under any degree of scrutiny.

And it reveals the sad truth of how AI is actually being put to use on the ground, in practice.

From the column:

Sports Illustrated is run by not one but two vampiric entities with markedly little interest in the magazine’s erstwhile core mission — you know, the thing that made it so beloved in the first place, doing good sports journalism — and every interest in maximizing profits at every opportunity…

And here’s where the AI comes in.

Not as a tool deployed by forward-looking executives eager to embrace the future, but as a last-ditch effort to extract the final bits of value from the pieces of something that’s already broken. Sports Illustrated has already slashed full-time staff, spun up a content mill with freelancers pumping out content for a fraction of the price, and let editorial standards sink into the gutter. The AI play is an arrow out of the same quiver.

Spoiler alert: It’s a mess, and no good will come of it for anyone except, maybe, the private equity firms using the tech to juice ad rates in the near-term. Workers, readers, journalism — all those parties lose. Anyway, read the whole thing, and while you’re at it, read David Roth’s great piece on the snafu too.

OTHER STUFF YOU SHOULD READ:

“It’s all Bullshit” by JS Tan, in the Baffler. A great, incisive look at the working life of a Googler, and the paradox presented by the fact that many jobs at the tech giants are what the late David Graeber would have called “bullshit jobs” and yet we still need the workers in those jobs to build power…

“Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data,” by Jason Koebler in 404 Media. Turns out that ChatGPT doesn’t just ‘hallucinate’, it can leak its training data, as well as confidential user data, when prodded. A major security risk, especially as OpenAI pushes its enterprise tier products, and thus, more workers onto the platform. Also don’t miss

“Male Tech Conference Founder Is Behind Popular Woman Coding Influencer Account” by Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole, at 404 Media. This saga is *wild* on every level, and picks up where the last story, about the same guy using AI-generated women to round out his speaking roster at a conference he was putting on, leaves off.

“Federal government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act” by Daniel Thibeault, David Cochrane, Darren Major in CBC News. This is huge, as I noted on Twitter: “After the passage of the Online News Act, Canada has reached a deal with Google in which the tech giant will pay ~$100 million a year to media companies for the right to use their stories on its platform.”

The US media industry and state and federal legislators should be sitting up straight right now. And it further bolsters my case (I wrote about this back in July) that California needs to call the tech giants’ bluff, too.

“The real AI threat we must stop” by Paris Marx in Disconnect. A nice roundup of the many ways — that are largely flying under the radar right now, because they are not Skynet-style risks — that institutions and executives are threatening to make people’s lives *worse* with AI, ie, using it to justify stripping people’s welfare benefits and to try to relentlessly ratchet up worker productivity.

“‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza” by Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine. A long and harrowing look at how the IDF uses AI and other tech to help justify its mass bombing campaign in Gaza. This is precisely the kind of thing I was worried about when I wrote about Israel’s worrying embrace of military AI a few weeks ago. The AI is helping grease the wheels, making it easier to pull the trigger on strikes the IDF know will result in hundreds of civilian deaths. Horrifying and tragic.

Okay! Let’s see if I can’t make this more than a twice-yearly newsletter. If you’re into this and want to see more, let me know. It might help motivate me to keep this moving here — I’ll generally plan on following the originally proposed template; sharing the column and some additional thoughts and/or context that didn’t make it in, book, event, and appearance updates, and then links and news to good stuff on the tech, labor, and power fronts.

Until then, a hearty salute — no general but Ludd means the poor any good.