The heroic age of the tech giants is over

December 23, 2022 8:49 AM

In his recently rebooted newsletter The Amazon Chronicles, Tim Carmody (previously) is exploring how Amazon and the other tech giants have moved from a "heroic" phase focused on growth and championing the liberatory value of their products to maintaining profitability above all else: The ideal for a tech company in 2023 is either docile humans ready to consume what they've been given, or better still, no humans at all.
posted by Cash4Lead (11 comments total)

Steve Jobs was never much of a hero to anyone who worked at Foxconn. These products have always had a huge human cost.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:54 AM on December 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

It seems like the answer is going to be capitalism, doesn’t it? Really, it’s the ultra American form of capitalism that’s unfettered from social responsibility.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:16 AM on December 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Trying to imagine being a guy who ever believed it was about liberatory value.
posted by Reyturner at 9:32 AM on December 23, 2022

Not to be all "RTFA" but the concept of the heroic phase, which does not mean "Amazon used to be good and now it's bad," is discussed extensively in the first essay in the series.
posted by derrinyet at 9:50 AM on December 23, 2022 [12 favorites]

Eh, the author might be conflating a lot of things together. Take this quote:

If you were a warehouse worker, a job with Amazon might be hard, it might be dangerous, but it paid well and came with decent benefits at a time when blue-collar jobs across the world are scarce.[...]

Amazon's often-antagonistic position with its blue-collar workers has metastasized. Its engineers, its retail staff, its research and development division, and its human resources team are all now equally expendable. Amazon isn't just burning through its staff through overwork, but eliminating whole divisions that can't prove they contribute directly to the bottom line altogether. That is new.

So it's totally fine (heroic maybe?) to fire blue-collar people for missing their algorithmically-determined pick rate (2016), to the point where Amazon has hired and fired virtually everyone which is why they're turning to robots (which they started to do in 2012). But it's not ok for white-collar folks to get laid off for reasons unrelated to performance! This just sounds like pretty standard belt-tightening to me. Amazon was spending ten billion dollars a year on Alexa where no one was using it to order anything from Amazon.
posted by meowzilla at 11:37 AM on December 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I honestly don't remember there EVER being a time when Amazon wasn't terrible... I've been hearing horror stories about their software engineering org since 2012, which is baaaasically for as long as I've been listening to tech jobs gossip.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:19 PM on December 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

The comments on HN suggest there's a *wide* difference in the different in Product groups at Amazon. With some (a lot?) being as terrible as discussed going way back. Just some claim that some aren't that terrible, and some people claim some as "good" to work for.

But Amazon being Amazon, they say you'll never know in the constant re-orgs whether your group will be broken up and you'll end up in a shitty one.

Don't know.
posted by aleph at 4:00 PM on December 23, 2022

He’s using “heroic” in a specifically Marxist sense, the phase in which a dominant group struggles against the previously dominant. The “conquering hero.” The example that was most salient to me was the idea that Google’s heroic phase peaked with Gmail and Maps.

Trying to imagine being a guy who ever believed it was about liberatory value.

Like, good for you? He’s talking about a sociological phenomenon.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 5:45 PM on December 23, 2022 [9 favorites]

To play devil's advocate, while Amazon's current labor practices are abhorrent equally abhorrent is the 1950s-esque small town where what you could buy was limited to what was available "locally". Which may or may not have included such nonessentials as birth control, condoms, pornography or booze let alone headshops. There's a happy medium. As far as the "heroic age" of tech giants, there will be another kind of bleeding edge tech scene same as their were railroads as a dominant industry in the past. Maybe we'll all have sentient AI bio-muppets a'la Existenz. Who knows?
posted by peterweyand at 10:30 PM on December 23, 2022

Every tech company has a set of pet teams that the upper management interacts with frequently and is very well cared for, and a much larger set of teams that are less visible and are treated like crap. From inside the blessed teams, the company looks like a very nice place to work.
posted by phooky at 7:06 AM on December 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

You could probably have written this in 2017 when any notion of profitability was hidden in building out capacity or 2020 when deliveries to quarantining homes and IT supply to on-demand business was suddenly boosted. At some point punk upstarts become The Institutions They Seek To Destroy.

The anarchist thought about current ML and AI applications is that there's a regulatory squeeze on surveillance and customer data-gathering just as ML tech demos allow them to dream of becoming the rentiers of places to execute training and ML system generation.

The rents and killer apps haven't come in, yet, so they can hold station while the global economy goes through a phase of rebalance after the shutdowns caused by Coronavirus. (Don't look too carefully at the Alexa team being shut down for not generating revenue or failing to find internal revenue-generating customers, there's got to be revenue-generating businesses right around the corner that use ML in depth, right?)
posted by k3ninho at 10:47 AM on December 24, 2022