Technology Plan B
Figure 1: "In contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster." – Stephen Jay Gould
I was saddened by the tragic story of a young couple lost in a double suicide after being fired by a US company because of "AI". The greatest respects to their families.
If only they knew how important and valuable they were.
Shazia and Bhanu are part of a horrible tide of suicides amongst Indian students and professionals who are put under extreme social pressure.
In 2020 I taught a cohort of eighty South Indian students. They were delightful, and mostly very capable, but also terrified of failure and would do anything to succeed including openly cheating and offering bribes. That encounter caused me to re-evaluate my morality coming from a place of privilege - the privilege of growing up in more or less a real meritocracy - give or take the obscene British class system we still cling to. I saw that these kids were victims of a new colonialism, their lives ruined by the disease of US-style capitalism which says "unless you get ahead at any cost you are nothing!"
The British so-called 'university' I taught at sold the illusion of meritocratic reputation for large sums of money to overseas students. I got the impression they came from relatively wealthy families who'd bet the farm on a son or daughter, and were told they'd be beaten or disgraced if they came home without a degree. In other words the institution had less morals than the students it hypocritically demanded not "cheat". I did what little I could to help them succeed and save their dignity and morality.
What is different about this new form of 'fake' US capitalism is that it has no work ethic. Real capitalism had roots in Calvinist or Protestant work ethic. Ask an industrialist from 40 years ago and they'd be proud to tell you how they started early and stayed late to build an honest business from the ground up. If they had wealth it was something they could morally justify. Indeed many great capitalists did not become millionaires, but died with everything still invested in growing endeavours. It was their achievements (railways, companies, buildings) that they were proud of.
By contrast the aspiring modern "capitalist" is a cheat. That's not a moral judgement, it's just a statement of fact about changing social norms. Neither Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg finished their computer science degrees. Why do that when a shortcut to wealth presents itself? Billionaires make money by speculation and manipulation. For the Silicon Valley bro getting rich because you did some work or gained some knowledge is second rate. That's just geeky. Nobody gets ahead that way! It's about grift, deception, shortcuts, and bets. They imagine themselves 'clever' but are operating under completely different social assumptions than the genuine innovator of the previous century. However, the children of developing countries are still sold Capitalism 1.0 and they don't know the rules changed.
Spiritually, they are disconnected from their own work ethic and living a lifestyle of supplication. They have not been taught to value themselves simply for who and what they are. One becomes a doctor to heal people and live a good life. Not to get rich. But US values have poisoned that basic ethos, and that's what we need to restore.
Surplus people
Across the world millions of tech workers are being dumped by the corporations they helped to build, 150,000 in the US in 2026 alone. Oracle shed 30,000 staff. Microsoft have dumped wave after wave of workers, with as many as 9,000 in each batch. Another 16,000 are gone at Amazon.
None of us learned the lesson of the bourgeois specialists under Stalin. Redundancies reveal a deeper problem which is not about "efficient gains" ("AI" is quite ineffective), but about control. Stalin understood that once the workers have built the machinery of state, it's best to get rid of them. There is no greater threat than people who built, understand and operate the machine. They may turn. That was the point of DOGE in the United States as we heard when interviewing for the episode We The Builders. It's a similar thing with combat veterans. The ideal war, for governments, is one that doesn't involve soldiers returning and being a burden with their injuries, traumas and opinions about the war.
For industrialists, once the workers have built the machine that builds new machines, they're no use. Every week the numbers mount. This wave of mass unemployment, a new great depression, is not well covered in the media because war, politics and posturing displace the mundane and slow twilight of western industrialism. Job losses are blamed on "AI".
See it another way
These are not losses. They are greatest gains for humankind in the battle against technofascism. Here is a golden opportunity for the Software Freedom movement, and for new organisations that can add positive value to humanity. We stand to make the biggest advance in history for the cause of humane computing and digital freedom if only we can get a simple, crucial message out there;
"You are not alone. You are needed. You are valued. There is vital work to be done. Join the tech resistance."
In this moment of such wild contingency everyone who can type and knows the difference between a comma and a semicolon is a potential hero.
Figure 2: Shazia and Bhanu. Valued, needed. (image: Times Now)
"AI" is a gamble
In all likelihood "AI" is not going to cut it, despite the bubble of relentless propaganda many of us are in. No doubt more trillions will be sunk into doomed projects out of sheer stubbornness.
"AI" is a giant gamble. It is an existential gamble on which the entire world economy is being bet, for the amusement of less than 100 people. Those people making the bet have no plan-B. For them it is glory or scorched earth. For religious reasons many of them are hoping for the latter.
But there is a lot going on in the world they didn't think about. After a good 40 year beneficent run tech is transforming from consumer facing services to a highly centralised authoritarian social control apparatus and using "AI" as its cover story. It is shedding human workers because they may get in the way of the technofascist planned Armageddon. Unfortunately for the technofascists there is no rapture, singularity or ascendancy coming to save them. No thousand-year Reich around the corner. This is just capital eating itself. "AI" is an unsustainable ponzi scheme in which the last billionaires are fighting the ultimate battles amongst themselves.
The truth is that auto-generated code quality is terrible. The cybersecurity implications are beyond unacceptable. The success rate of businesses adopting "AI" are less than five percent. The entire project is unsustainable due to energy needs and model collapse. Push-back due to social upheaval, environmental costs, and metal illness is powerful and growing.
It also makes no long-term economic sense. The cost to educate a person to graduate level, including primary, secondary and further education is about a half million per head. Unless a pool of competent engineers is maintained the system fails. With an expected 8 million new unemployed in Britain and no plan for UBI - which is unsustainable anyway - "AI" will cause a demand spiral in a country based on imports and seed the greatest economic disaster to face this country since the second world war.
People who work as programmers and system administrators spend decades in education, training and learning to develop software and run systems. It's more than a skill, it's almost always a passion, a calling, a mindset. One of the key components is "care". But that has been beaten out of every last one of the new breed by the disease of US 'fake' capitalism and "zero work ethic".
Ironically, while they are led to believe that their time is over, and they're being thrown on the scrapheap, their actual worth to humanity is immeasurable and massively under-valued at the moment, because sooner or later we'll need these people to fix the mess we're making. Lot's of good people.
Free Software is the backup plan for civilisation
What we need is a Plan B for post "AI" reconstruction. Fired tech workers are our B-Team. If you've been fired from Tech, you're one of the lucky ones. The remaining jobs are going to get more abusive, morally injurious, confusing, stressful, until nothing but a pack of savage, hungry dogs remain, ripping strips off each other.
Congratulations! You're now one of the most valuable people in the world today, even if you don't know it. For goodness sake, don't crawl back to the capitalists who disrespect you. Don't bother refreshing your CV or learning some "AI skills" (no such things exist). Don't demean yourself looking for another 'lucrative' corporate tech job to waste your life making rubbish that nobody wants or needs.
Come and join the resistance. Be part of the Software Freedom movement.
Sure, the Rebels don't pay as well as the Empire. Hugo Boss don't make our uniforms. But the food and conversation is better than at the Death Star canteen.
There is no money. It's pure work ethic. Finally you can find something to really feel good about yourself again.
An urgent mission awaits you; to take back digital tech from dying lumbering corporations and put control of it back in the hands of the people where it belongs.
You see, the really smart and cool people are the ones who do more with less (you do still aspire to be a 'smart and cool' person and not merely a wealthy one, right?). In a world of exhausted resources that's an evolutionary advantage for natural selection over needy dinosaurs. The victors understand that technological advancement is doing the same with fewer, less powerful computers, not building gigawatt data-centres. They are the Vietcong who humiliated the mighty US army using pointed sticks. In business they're the Davids who fell Goliaths every day.
Figure 3: "You're going to die out. You know that, don't you?"
The task you're assigned is immense; to redesign tech, to distribute and federate production, uphold protocols, maintain free internet governance, secure your national digital sovereignty, defend software freedom, code new operating systems and applications that respect user dignity and freedom, write good documentation… There are teams of coders, many very neuro-diverse and unorthodox that need coaching and managing. We need vigilant, human operational and cyber security to run repositories and defend against infiltrators. We don't need wizards, visionaries or charisma, though that wouldn't be unwelcome. We do need steady, competent slow horses.
Yes, I do love William Smith's Slow Horses, which is thoroughly British and a fresh slant on class war. The heroes are resourceful. They are dutiful, marginalised competents, bossed by flamboyant, contemptible moral degenerates. They're an ostracised B-Team of operators who are poor, smoke, drink, have terrible personal hygiene, but are absolutely rooted in reality. In the words of Chuck Palahniuk, they're the "all singing, all dancing crap of the world". Always the slow horses come to the rescue of their bumbling overlords.
Ironically the slow horses are labled as "failed or disgraced" by the actually failing and disgraceful upper echelons of gentlemen thugs, self-serving dreamers, schemers and traitors, contemptible posh nobs or pathetic lackeys who destroy everything they touch, especially the country they pretend to serve. It's a black comedy and morality tale. Their moral ethic seems Kantian - they do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. When you do the right thing it's a tide that raises all ships. You help even the people you don't like that much, but no need to begrudge that.
A five year old child gets this and we don't need a pseudo-scientific beard-stroking session prove the validity of basic morals. Why are corporate sorts so deaf and blind to ordinary human experience? It's a picture that speaks to every walk of life where the American creed of cynicism has spread today, whether that's the heroism of NHS nurses or the teachers holding our crumbling schools together.
Humanity needs a plan-B. It will not emerge in glass towers. It will not grow because it is funded. It will not happen because of government policy.
It will happen because it is needed and through evolution, nature always finds a way. That is called contingency.
Figure 4: "Find out about Free Software"
As commercial software becomes more enshitified and people figure out that it's hostile and useless, there's going to be a growing demand for simpler, functional software made by real humans, by a verifiable "hand-crafted" process that is trustworthy. Its relative simplicity, robustness and design by people who understand technology as a tool will ensure its triumph. It won't matter how much governments back failing corporations if their catastrophically over-complex and insecure stuff just doesn't work. No amount of pretending is going to fix it.
If you just got fired from tech, take hope. Life is not over, it just began. You're part of the B-team now. Like it or not you're with the resistance. Keep practising your skills. Old skills. Develop yourself. Read the fundamentals; Knuth, Abelson, Sussman, Kernighan and Ritchie. Find out about Free Software. Find the others. Nobody else will tell you how. Understand technology and knowledge as a force for sustaining liberal democratic society. These skills will be needed. Find your place in the Free Open Source Software Movement. Beware of corporate money. Good luck.
Lastly, if you want to talk about your circumstances or feelings on this subject please get in touch with us on the show. If you know someone who recently got the heave-ho from tech, please pass on this article to them.