Jam's Blog

Earlier this week, I was sitting in the opening Keynotes of Open Source Summit North America here in Minneapolis, and there's an anger that’s stirring up inside of me. I sat down to a keynote about how AI is changing our world, making cybersecurity important because people can find vulnerabilities quicker to attack. But don’t worry, the top companies in the world have the resources and tech to fix this problem! Then, the 2nd keynote talks about Google’s latest development: a new agentic commerce protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol. AI is the future of buying power, it’s no longer click-to-buy!

Meanwhile, I look on Linkedin and there’s a post of a woman around my age, married, who’s been out of work for over a year post-layoffs. She now has to move back to her parents because she hasn’t been able to find a job since being laid off and they can’t handle their rent on just their husband’s salary. That the husband may lose his job potentially due to the move and it may also lead their toddler to be without insurance.

This juxtaposition is something that is honestly pisses me off about the tech industry right now.

Talking with a non-tech friend earlier this week, I stated this: “My general sense of tech right now..is that tech is now being used for profit instead of a balance of that and progress. Tech is showing the real impacts of late stage capitalism and its extractive nature.” I have no beef with the use of AI as a technology. It’s an evolution of the machine learning tech that’s been here for decades. What I do have an issue with is the extractive nature with which it is being used, on all fronts. From ecological, to economic, to human impact. All of this is being sacrificed for profit, and AI is being used as the easy excuse as to why.

And it has resulted in disastrous results. Layoffs in the thousands have happened and people have been out of work for years or more, constantly applying for jobs. This includes the biggest companies in the tech sector. U.S. unemployment systems are also ill-equipped to support white-collar workers in finding new positions with their sometimes 20+ years of experience in technology. I know this from personal experience in 2024. It was demoralizing, especially as a black person, to set up my resume in the the state-sponsored job search app and find zero jobs. Because these portals are geared towards trade and service-based work. Meanwhile tech companies are overwhelmed with applications for one position. I’ve been on calls with recruiters this year who at this point I can tell are starting to show burn out and very cog-like behavior as they search for the right fit among hundreds of applicants who make it past the AI or keyword screen.

At the same time, companies are force-feeding AI-usage demands to the workers that are left post their latest layoff round. These folk are running up AI tokens to show their productivity, with mixed results on success. All the while wondering if and when they’ll be in the next layoff round. And it’s all because these companies want to extract more productivity using less people because that means more profit and less cost. And there’s no time to really work on improving tooling or process, just as it was before. The keynote earlier mentioned that teams have the resources to improve things like cybersecurity with resources and AI. Will you be able to do that if you’re relying on half your staff, which is now starting to feel singed because they don’t have time to execute tooling while also managing the risk impacts and engineering recalibration that AI brings? All the while worrying that they’ll lose their paycheck, insurance, visas, and livelihoods if they don’t?

And don’t even get me started on how tech is getting worse due to it. Google Search is going full speed ahead into AI-chatbot experiences, meanwhile the current experience isn’t accurate. Google Maps I’ve stopped using because since December it doesn’t accurately route when driving live. This isn’t something I’ve experienced since Yahoo Maps in the early 2000s. And this is Google. That has the resources and time to ensure that the tech they release isn’t bad!

Now what is my point to all this? Honestly, I just want tech to be fucking better than this. Because at one point, it was, and in some ways still is. Though social media is a scourge, we can still use it for influencing people to organize and show power. One of my favorite political creators got an award for bringing attention to Black Media sources through their IG. Though things have gotten more algorithmic, we’re still finding ways to use technology that isn’t geared towards it, but are still useful to our lives. More of my kid’s generation is seeking MP3 players as opposed to streaming apps. There’s even more projects than ever that are trying to bring tech back to a place that respects people and our autonomy. Going back to social media that focused on keeping people safe instead of prioritizing people as a product. This is the stuff I want more of in our modern-day society.

However, capitalism, not AI, has made working towards that, along having a passion for it, infuriating and exhausting. I want to be able to find more opportunities and collective power for the tech worker so that we can move the industry back to people's progress, and not just progress for the sake of profit. But I don’t know of a way to move that needle. I just have hope and want to support the move. As there is so much power that we as a collective community have, but we do not know how to organize where/when we need to. Because at the end of the day the companies do not run technology. People do. And the sooner we get back to that and truly making tech progress for us, the better we’ll be.