choice, awareness, ritual
Jul. 24th, 2024 06:26 pmWhy I Left Google: "Or: How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it."
I've had this open in a tab for, well, looks like three days per the post's datestamp, trying to figure out what if anything I have to say about it. It's good, and interesting; jmac might have a future in this wordsmithing business. And I clearly want to say something, and not just point and say "yes, this", though there's some of that as well.
I left / am leaving software in part for similar if less dramatic reasons. "Because 'tech' is three garbage fires in a trenchcoat" is my usual pithy summary. Maybe it always has been, maybe I've just been unlucky in employers. When you open with "defrauding the Virginia state police" it's maybe a sign. Three years ago it was "crypto" and NFTs, now it's AI. Everything gets a little worse every six months. And for two decades my job was to make it easier for people to make things worse.
Maybe it's the pivot point of ritual in jmac's post that gets me, the sharp demarcation between knowing-but-not-knowing and knowing-and-not-denying. Most of the time I keep on doing whatever it is because I don't think about doing anything different. Or when I do, the costs of not-doing overwhelm me. Sometimes choices get made for me, like last April. Sometimes I make them and don't realise I've done so. Both of those feel dishonest to me, I think. They're abdicating the responsibility for directing my life.
Or maybe, for instance, getting laid off was just a wakeup call, similar to jmac's experience. Only for me it was less This is morally repugnant and more This is not what I want to be doing. Sure, the moral repugnance makes a better story, not least because it's true, but it's not the main motivator. I left 'tech' because tech writing is a thing I do well and do not enjoy. I can keep doing things I do well and don't enjoy for a really long time, it turns out. It's just no way to live.
There's a ritual in a few weeks that I've been invited to. Same as last year: couple dozen folks camping by a river in the mountains of western Washington. I'm looking forward to it.
I've had this open in a tab for, well, looks like three days per the post's datestamp, trying to figure out what if anything I have to say about it. It's good, and interesting; jmac might have a future in this wordsmithing business. And I clearly want to say something, and not just point and say "yes, this", though there's some of that as well.
I left / am leaving software in part for similar if less dramatic reasons. "Because 'tech' is three garbage fires in a trenchcoat" is my usual pithy summary. Maybe it always has been, maybe I've just been unlucky in employers. When you open with "defrauding the Virginia state police" it's maybe a sign. Three years ago it was "crypto" and NFTs, now it's AI. Everything gets a little worse every six months. And for two decades my job was to make it easier for people to make things worse.
Maybe it's the pivot point of ritual in jmac's post that gets me, the sharp demarcation between knowing-but-not-knowing and knowing-and-not-denying. Most of the time I keep on doing whatever it is because I don't think about doing anything different. Or when I do, the costs of not-doing overwhelm me. Sometimes choices get made for me, like last April. Sometimes I make them and don't realise I've done so. Both of those feel dishonest to me, I think. They're abdicating the responsibility for directing my life.
Or maybe, for instance, getting laid off was just a wakeup call, similar to jmac's experience. Only for me it was less This is morally repugnant and more This is not what I want to be doing. Sure, the moral repugnance makes a better story, not least because it's true, but it's not the main motivator. I left 'tech' because tech writing is a thing I do well and do not enjoy. I can keep doing things I do well and don't enjoy for a really long time, it turns out. It's just no way to live.
There's a ritual in a few weeks that I've been invited to. Same as last year: couple dozen folks camping by a river in the mountains of western Washington. I'm looking forward to it.