For sale: strong opinions; never published
I had an opinion. A neat and tidy one; drafted to convey concern; an argument for worry, “this thing is bad!” with a fist shaking against the sky, all ready to publish.
I laid down an argument, feeding anxiety and nourishing my own fear. “I’m usually not this eloquent,” thinking to myself, “this is coming together.”
But, looking at that “together” after the fact, it wasn’t a picture I enjoyed. Like a photo that you know is well-constructed and composed, but all it does is deliver wrong emotions and the wrong time. There is a limit to craft and it has to do with the human element: me.
What do I feel? How do I want you to feel? What do I believe? What do I want to believe?
I sat down and really let my own argument sink in. It was convincing in and of itself, but unconvincing as a part of a larger whole: you, me, the community we belong to, and the society we live it.
I found it unconvincing, not because it was particularly worse or less well-argued than whatever else I’ve published in the past but because it didn’t really matter that much. Not truly.
I’ve already covered most of my basic worries about the tech industry and the “AI” bubble in the past. If you’re amenable to the idea that tech is out in the weeds and that the “AI” bubble is mostly hot air, you’ve probably already aware of whatever issue or concern I might decided to raise each week.
The details and mechanics of how exactly they’re broken are best left to the academics and researchers discovering the faults. There are aspects that I’d be better at explaining than many others, especially how generative models interact with management, media, and writing – I am, for better or for worse, a lapsed academic – but those issues are less pertinent at the moment than the financial bubble, sabotage of the education system, and “AI” as an authoritarian political project, all of which others are doing a better job of covering than I ever can.
Minute details of how the current bubble is playing out (or might play out) feel unimportant compared to the main concerns.
Pointing at a dung-heap and saying “this is a dung-heap” only serves to validate said pile of shit.
I spotted a post on social media the other day – I can’t recall whether it was on BlueSky or Mastodon, let alone who wrote it – that said something along the lines of “columnists should have a yearly quota after which they should be forced to stop, nobody can have 52 well-formed opinions a year without snapping”. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist.
I feel like this is a trap that bloggers and newsletter writers can also fall into. It’s easy to pick a thing to be angry or worried about each week and use that to give you enough momentum to push out a piece of writing.
Do it often enough and your desperation to fill and fulfil leads you to inconsistency and self-contradiction.
This is the business model of commentary. Anger for sale; little of it useful; only worthwhile if you have a big audience.
Analysis is different. As is education. But both tasks of delivering understanding and helping people hone their skills need to have a purpose, a pain to solve – an edge to cut against – and there’s genuinely little left that I personally can analyse or educate about the mess that tech is in today. I can teach you software development skills you won’t get to use and web development practices you won’t get past your manager. I can help you understand exactly how incompetent your executives are and just how much of a micromanaging busybody your line manager is. None of which is going to be of much help in the current job market. Web dev is in a rut speeding away from my core expertise – it’s LLMs and React all the way.
The political side is also well outside my wheelhouse.
We all know what it’s like out there – it isn’t pleasant – and you have plenty of reminders of it already.
Instead, I leave you this note. It’s mostly harmless. It’s definitely not strongly held.
But sometimes strong opinions don’t need to be published because we’re living with the reality that prompted the opinion every day.