CrankySec

Be interesting

You know that saying from Dale Carnegie, right? To be interesting, be interested. It's very powerful stuff: when you care, people appreciate it. And when people appreciate it, people appreciate you. And that goes a long way.

I was just reading Ed Zitron's latest on DeepSeek, and here's the truth bomb that I want to use as a springboard for my hot take:

This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.

By making this "about China" we ignore the root of the problem — that the American tech industry is no longer interested in making good software that helps people.

I want to take this last bit a little further and paraphrase it as:

America is no longer interested in people.

That's why your data keeps getting stolen and leaked with reckless abandon. That's why everything you own or use is constantly spying on you. That's why data brokers are a thing that we as a society allow to exist. This is why you keep fighting ransomware. And that's why you keep patching the same class of vulnerabilities over and over and over again: as long as the money is flowing, it's all good.

Companies have normalized data theft, atrocious cybersecurity, and complete hostility towards their customers — paying or otherwise — to a point where everyone just shrugs and go "what else is new?" That was the one simple trick societies hate: it's bad, but what can you do, amirite?

You can do plenty, actually. Start making these fuck ups expensive to make. We, as a society, don't tolerate mistakes and/or wanton disregard for quality in a whole bunch of industries. The tech industry con is probably making everyone believe that this is just computer stuff, no biggie. When we all know it is a fucking biggie. Like hospitals being unable to treat people because of ransomware. Ransomware that only exists because we — again, the royal we — have decided (or allowed) that cryptocurrencies are a-ok. I already wrote about this over at the Institute, so I won't rehash it here.

Even the most staunch capitalist out there must acknowledge that this isn't it. There's no competition. There's no innovation. There's only a bunch of dumbasses who call themselves "product managers" whose whole job is to figure out novel ways to fuck you over, lock you in, and leave you with very little recourse. It's no longer about making cool shit that people like, if it was ever that. It's about setting the pieces in a way that you simply have no other choice. The highest achievement for this kind of enterprise today is not to have happy customers: is to get to the point where they can say "What are you going to do? Leave us for the competition? There's no competition."

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Uber, et al. The endgame is the same. Are you going to go to Mastodon? LOL. Are you going to use Pixelfed? As if. Are you going to hail a cab like a caveman? You won't even find one because we destroyed that industry and replaced it with cars that are just as shitty, and prices that are just as bad. Don't want to pay $150 for cable? Pay $150 for YouTube TV, and Netflix, and Hulu, and Max, and Peacock. That's going to be $200 next month because... what are you going to do? Call Comcast?

And it's the same with Fortinet. And Crowdstrike. And AWS. And Azure. And GCP. And Splunk. The people in charge went to the same schools. They hang out in the same country clubs. Your awful experience as a customer is the load bearing pillar of fat profits.

And we've allowed that to happen. And we keep doing that because we keep voting for the same assholes, we keep tweeting, we keep instagramming, we keep using Office 365, we keep using Splunk and Crowdstrike. We keep voting with our wallets, too.

Unless things change radically, this will only get worse. Next thing you know, some big tech robot you pay $2,999 a month to rent will slap you across the face, call you a bitch, sell your most private thoughts, and catch on fire every other day because of some stupid overflow. And you will like it because that's either that, or the other robot that does exactly the same thing for exactly the same price. And you simply cannot not have one, unless you decide to pass on being part of the civilized world. Fuck this bullshit future.