So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.

Well, I would say at least since the 80s, where the political movements started in the 68 lost steam and we entered a period of political irrelevance for the Left throughout the West. After the fall of the USSR, it got worse because especially in Europe the Left lost the leverage given by the threat of a soviet invasion/support. The G8 protests in Seattle and Genova kinda sealed the deal, showing that the future has been abolished.

It shouldn’t, but it does. Now what?

same author, more accessible stuff: https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/03/18/seven-mantras-for-political-holism/

the assumption is that they are not customers. They are producer on a platform, which is very different. This is more similar to office workers striking alongside riders in a food delivery company rather than a consumer boycott.

That surprises me, marketing and sales being the main user of AI, I thought the back-office automation for sure was going to be by far number 1

Generative AI is a bullshit generator. Bullshit in your marketing=good. Bullshit in your backend=bad.

 > So the number 1 user is sales/marketing but it’s back office admin jobs that are most impacted?

GenAI is primarily adopted to justify mass layoffs and only secondarily to create business value. It’s the mass layoffs that drive AI adoption, not the other way around.

“alignment problem” is what CEOs use as a distraction to take responsibility away from their grift and frame the issue as a technical problem. That’s another word that make you lose any credibility

I’ve met the author IRL. He’s quite famous in his niche

The Free Software movement over the last 30+ years failed at every single one of their political goals. It’s effectively a political zombie which sometimes produces barely usable software for nerds. I know perfectly well what they advocated because at some point I was close to fall for it (more than 15 years ago), but it’s delusional dogmatism. The world moved on and the FOSS movement failed so bad that their enemies are now in control of an Imperial fascist government.

You’re responsible for the technology you create. Unconstrained freedom is more often than not the freedom of the powerful to oppress the weak. Anything else is techbro ideology. FOSS ideology and techno-fascist ideology have the same roots in the freedom of information.

My call to action is unrelated to technological production, because technology doesn’t solve social problems. Unionize workers in Microsoft. If you really want, build software to facilitate the construction and deployment of worker power, and stop playing around with the liberation of software. As long as it’s “Free Software” instead of “Free people” you’re playing on the side of the tech oligarchy.

Contributing to genocide for money is evil. Contributing to genocide for no money is evil and dumb.

Linux is used extensively for military and surveillance purposes. Licenses don’t stop bullets.

there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.

It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.

Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.

Here “replace” doesn’t mean “being able to do the same job”. It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.

The author is a machine learning engineer, so he’s perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

The market doesn’t reward quality.

The vast majority of people I know has no cooking skills, no time to cook or no energy after work. Pretty much all the middle-class and lower-middle-class people in this group order delivery for most of their evening meals. The people who 10 years ago were eating microwaved food, now order out: it costs a bit more, but it’s definitely tastier.

that’s not how information and journalism works, but ok bro, keep believing in “objectivity” lol

Your opinions are all influenced by the outside. The distinction is just between influences you ignore/accept and influences you reject. We are not born with opinions.