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I have a great fear for the near future. We are going to see virtually all mainstream software, including for essential services, use AI hallucinated vibe coding.
All because the bourgeoisie simply want to save a buck, and simply hate the working class that much
At some point things will become so bad that the monopolies will fail.
It's not possible that consumers will keep insisting on failing from the same con from the same parties all the way into non-working software. (And they are getting pretty close to non-working already.)
Unfortunately I don't believe that's how it'll work.
Monopolies hold total control of essential services and goods in the marketplace, and we're already seeing in the US what happens when those monopolies see threats of competition. The state becomes the slave of the monopolies, and all competition is taken out. If not through crushing businesses (such as policies hostile to smaller businesses), then through closing the market to competitors (such as the TikTok ban, or the tarrifs).
Im sorry but I do feel schadenfreude for all the conversations I had 2-3 years ago with programmers who smugly kept telling me that AI and enshittification wouldn't come for them because you can't bullshit their job. So many computer people weren't interested in talking about politics because they "knew" their little corner of expertise was unassailable and so they put their fingers in their ears and acted smugly above needing to unionize and build community structures in the programming industry.
It turns out, as I had been desperately trying to get across to techbro very linear thinker types, that management doesn't care if AI actually works or if their firing of you sabotages the company, they are still going to do it if they buy the narrative and they already bought the narrative a long time ago.
Organize and unionize or the programming industry will continue to enshittify and programmers will be treated worse and worse even though their skills aren't any less vital and AI code sucks so bad it costs companies more money to fix the problems AI creates than to just hire human programmers to do it right.... None of this has to do with rationality and the idea that capitalism has a tendency to point towards rationality is simply not backed up by evidence.
Could not agree with you more. Best time for our industry to get serious about unionization was probably after the .com bubble burst. We could have leveraged the degree to which our skills were needed in that era and headed off a lot of today’s problems if we had strong unions in place, but sadly it’s still probably one of the lowest density sectors for organized labor. Now would be a good time to start pulling heads out of asses. I think many of our brothers and sisters in tech are starting to wake up to reality now that we’re in our 5th-6th straight year of widespread layoffs for “reasons.”
It can start with honest and direct 1on1 convos in order to thwart groupthink nonsense, and build on things from there. A simple organizing committee is a great first step.
I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software. He pointed out all the way back then how much power programmers had and now have lost culturally to relinquishing the narrative to AI so heavily around software and programming. He was trying to say "THINK about what your industry is doing, organize, use your power while you have it.". Well, it is mostly too late now, still necessary to do but programming will never be seen as a highly skilled and respected profession again the same way it used to because of how thoroughly programmers did not organize to resist the fundamental capitalist narratives being imposed upon them that have now been set in stone culturally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_QzdKci6OY
The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with every day in the normal course of events are perfectly designed to do this so that if you have the interest, you have the capacity and you have the means. I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in this room begin to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that's true, but I was told there's a sort of undercurrent of unease of where is all this going? There's this huge expanding phenomenon, programming and so forth, and yet an uneasiness about well, where is it all headed? What is it going to do?
Please forgive me. I'm going to be very directly blunt for a horrible second. But it could be viewed that the technical way in which you look at programming at the moment is almost like guns for hire. In other words, you're the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. Tell us what to do, Daddy, and we'll do it. And what I'm proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available and which could then have the result that a living structure ructure in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities is an attainable thing which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years. That is an incredible vision of the future. I realize that you probably think I'm nuts because this is not what I'm supposed to be talking about to you and you may say, "Well, gosh, great idea, but we're not interested." But I do think you are capable of that and I don't think anybody else is going to do this job. I've enjoyed uh talking to you very much. Thank you. Wow.
If programmers and computer culture had actually organized and treated leftist ideas without an air of superior condescension as if understanding computers and factorio made the need to unionize obsolete... we would be in an entirely different world right now. People believed in the power of computers and programming in a way that gave computer culture the possibility to positively transform the world, but that trust has been irrevocably broken and computers will never have that same transformative potential again because people will never trust the profession of programmers the same way again.
The public trusts engineers to build bridges because even though the public doesn't understand how to build a huge bridge they know at some level engineers would throw a collective massive fit if people started demanding they build bridges in a dangerous way. On the other hand that trust is PERMANENTLY gone in how people look at software engineers and honestly the industry deserves it for being so obsessed about only focusing on the details and never thinking about the broader impact of the architecture being created.
Software engineering has culminated in optimizing software for Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and it is stain on the entire industry of programming and software engineering.