The year ends with our hammers up
My favorite stuff of the year, and a very happy holidays to critical thinkers, workers and luddites everywhere.
Greetings and happy holidays all — even if we are wrapping up the year in some dire straits here.
Amazon and Starbucks workers went on strike across the country, protesting sky high injury rates, and demanding basic union recognition and good faith bargaining. Our new tech oligarch-in-chief Elon Musk effectively torpedoed a bipartisan bill to keep the government funded, apparently to ensure the removal of provisions that would have impacted his business interests in China. An AI company rounded out the year by blanketing SF in trollish posters heralding the end of human workers, and the arrival of “the Era of AI Employees.”
Naturally, people are tearing them down.
It’s obviously going to take a lot more than ripping up some posters to effectively challenge the freshly emboldened and empowered Silicon Valley right, the march of incomprehensibly capitalized AI companies, and the many tentacled tech monopolies that seem intent on running roughshod over users, consumers, and workers alike. But the spirit is there and it’s gaining steam; the will to raise those proverbial hammers, like the perennially misunderstood Luddites before us, to the machinery hurtful to commonality.
In other words, the table is set, we’re ending 2024 with our hammers up. Next year is all but certain to be even more unhinged than this one, so I hope you’re all resting up over the holidays. I’ll be off the next week or two to grab some of that R&R, so this space will be quiet for a spell.
In the spirit of that R&R, I’ll leave everyone with some vacation-friendly books, film, TV, and music that I enjoyed last year; stuff that I think can for the most part be enjoyed on any level, but that might *also* deepen our understanding of This Technological And Political Moment. Drop your own faves and suggestions in the comments if you would, I’m always on the lookout for more stuff in this lane.
And before we go, one final thanks to each and every reader, commenter, and supporter of this newsletter—in a year where a lot went to hell, this vibrant, thoughtful, and still growing community (there are 10,000 of us machine breakers now) was a perennial source of strength and hope. I’m incredibly grateful to all of you. I’ll see you in the new year.
The short fiction of Ted Chiang
This was it, my happy place for 2024. In a dark and chaotic year, I found myself taking solace in the deliberately crafted, singularly transporting works of short-form sci-fi legend Ted Chiang. Since last year, Chiang has been penning bullseye critical essays about AI for the New Yorker. Read those, of course, they’re great. But those also essays inspired me to break out and reread my copies of Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalations, his two story collections. And let me tell you; little soothed the soul more, or helped me process, in a semi-contained environment, ideas about AI, automation, ‘progress’ and man’s hubris, more than Chiang’s work. It’s the best.
Everyone who works at an AI company or throws around talk of AI super-intelligence should be made to read the Lifecycle of Software Objects (re: the patience and care it might take to realize, and support, actual digital intelligence) and Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny (re: what lurks behind the drive to automate), and, hell, the Tower of Babylon (re: challenging fundamental assumptions we have about how the world itself works…..) and okay why not all of it while we’re at it. We all should. Just maybe make sure you’re in a good place before you read the Great Silence, that one just about ground me to dust this go round.
Union
A riveting, beautifully shot doc about the union drive at JFK8 in Staten Island, where the Amazon Labor Union won its first major victory. It’s not on the big streaming platforms, in part because no distributor wants to get on Amazon’s bad side, for fear of spoiling relationships with Amazon Studios—a perfect example of the power and reach of Bezos’s empire. Fortunately, you can go direct to the source and watch it online.
“Not Going to Mars”
If literally *one* person asks me to, I’ll write up my favorite heavy metal tunes of the year, but this newsletter is MAYBE not the place for that. Still, metal is machine-breaking music, so I’m going to shout at least one: the savage “Not Going to Mars” from Brooklyn’s Pyrrhon, which is not so subtly a about everyone’s favorite tech titans with spacefaring aspirations. It includes the screamed lines “saw you whistle past the failing crops, the rolling blackouts and supply shocks” and “accounting tricks fail before physics,” and the all-time “you’re not going to Mars / Mars is coming here.” This is dissonant death metal, so it is very much not for everyone, but it whips and is thematically on point for our purposes here, so give it a spin the next time a Cybertruck cuts you off in traffic.
The Final Season of Evil
I guess this would qualify as my guilty pleasure. It was the fourth and final season of Evil, the TV procedural that’s a bit like the X-Files meets the Exorcist meets critical tech blogs. It’s campy, self-aware, often funny, and occasionally legitimately disturbing. It very much does not always hit, but it’s extremely TV in a way that feels kind of rare and old school; monster of the week stuff with a tone that’s deliberately all over the place; it’s low stakes and goofy and just fun. But it manages to sneak in some decent meditations about influencer culture and surveillance capitalism, as well as some solid jokes about our technologies being literal portals to hell. Any show that wraps up a driving plot point of a four-season arc over a miserable Zoom call gets points in my book.
Wild Robot
For my money the year’s best new family film—and look as a card-carrying Movie Dad I watch a good deal of family films—there is also a thematic throughline about how technology can be harnessed to foster community and the greater good, but *only* if it is freed from the destructive corporate programming that otherwise confines it.
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
This book may *not*, at first blush be exactly thematically on point for this newsletter, but man, it blew me away. It was the first suggestion n+1 fed me in its great Bookmatch fundraiser—it’s over now, but everyone should do it next year; a very good way to find some leftfield books to read—and it did not disappoint. Gaitskill’s novel is harrowing, vivid, crushing, and in my opinion formally brilliant. It’s about misogyny, ambition, sexual violence, living with and amid disease, and a lot more. But the reason I mention it here is that there is a beautiful and pivotal scene halfway through, in which our protagonist visits a friend who hosts a sort of impromptu daycare/meeting place for friends and workers, that points the way through the mess, no matter where you are. It’s through solidarity, through making space for fellow imperfect fumbling and injured people, and through community. That’s the way.
If you want an explanation for why AI companies are so incomprehensibly capitalized, as you put it, read Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by economist Yanis Varoufakis. He posits that profit is no longer the goal; instead, it's trapping people on digital platforms and charging them rent, or cloud rent, as he calls it.
In my mind, he explained why Silicon Valley is the way it is and how companies like Uber can be so valuable while being largely unprofitable.
He also goes over America's key place in the global economy, which might change now that Trump has been reelected.
I finally subscribed and I am here for your favorite heavy metal tunes of the year (in addition to everything else).