Tech Is Political
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Bugs can kill
- 3. Bad design can kill
- 4. Algorithmic bias exists
- 5. Tech companies love surveillance, and don't actually care much about privacy
- 6. Tech companies love exploitation
- 7. Crypto, NFTs, Metaverse: the nascent model for the grift
- 8. "Hoverboards" with wheels: the modern grift of "AI"
- 9. See also
1. Introduction
About R.W.
- Teacher in the Computer Science department at JCCC.
- Previously worked in web and software development, still do indie game development.
- Been programming since 2000, grew up in "tech bro" culture online.
- I spend a lot of time reading about design bias and ethics in tech.
- Got to grow up on the "good internet" before it turned into a wasteland of 5 platforms and massive surveillance.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Format
I'm planning on this being pretty free-form; I'm going to have a set of main ideas and links to articles and readings about these items, then in the talk itself we can talk about these things. I'm going to let my ADHD and the discussion in person guide.
2. Bugs can kill
3. Bad design can kill
- Family sues Tesla claiming faulty doors led to daughter’s death in burning Cybertruck (The Independent)
- Killed by a Machine: The Therac-25 (Hackaday)
- Myanmar: Facebook’s systems promoted violence against Rohingya; Meta owes reparations (Amnesty International)
- Report: Tesla Doors That Won't Open Have Led to 15 Crash-Related Deaths (Car and Driver)
- Three Mile Island: How bad UX led to a partial nuclear meltdown (UX Collective)
4. Algorithmic bias exists
5. Tech companies love surveillance, and don't actually care much about privacy
6. Tech companies love exploitation
- Facebook content moderators in Kenya call the work ‘torture.’ Their lawsuit may ripple worldwide (AP News, 2023)
- Facebook may have knowingly inflated its video metrics for over a year (The Verge, 2018)
- Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race (Propublica, 2017)
- I Tracked Down the Hidden Workers Secretly Powering ChatGPT (More Perfect Union, 2026)
- Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI Data Center Explosion | View From Above | (Business Insider)
- How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart (The Guardian)
7. Crypto, NFTs, Metaverse: the nascent model for the grift
This is the future, don't resist.
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs (Folding Ideas)
The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse (Folding Ideas)
8. "Hoverboards" with wheels: the modern grift of "AI"
8.1. Selling the hype
8.2. Is it increasing productivity?
- AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity (Harvard Business Review, 2025)
- AI Hallucination Cases Database
- Airline held liable for its chatbot giving passenger bad advice - what this means for travellers (BBC)
- Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake headlines (CNN)
- Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive (404 Media)
- Death by a thousand slops (Daniel Stenberg)
- Fox News Falls for AI-Generated Footage of Poor People Raging About Food Stamps Being Shut Down, Runs False Story That Has to Be Updated With Huge Correction (Futurism)
- How scammers are using AI to steal college financial aid (AP News)
- Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox (404 Media)
- Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side With Them (404 Media)
- Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
- Workers are scamming their employers using AI-generated fake expense receipts (TechRadar)
8.3. What's the harm?
- After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis (ArsTechnica)
- Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow
- Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked (404 Media)
- ‘You’re not rushing. You’re just ready:’ Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself (CNN)
9. See also
9.1. What I've read/been reading
- Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, by Ashley Shew
- Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams (it's about Facebook)
- Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, by Amanda Montell
- Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, by Tamara Kneese
- Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, by Karen Hao
- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow
- Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, by Ben Tarnoff
- Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado-Perez
- Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Mike Monteiro
- Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, by Yanis Varoufakis
- The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna
- User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play, by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O'Neil
9.2. Things I haven't gotten around to reading yet
- Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, by Christopher Steiner
- Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, by Virginia Eubanks
- Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI, by Madhumita Murgia
- Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up, by Britt Paris
- The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, by Amy Webb
- The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, by Scott Galloway
- The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny, by Laura Bates
- The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein