Comment by curiousaboutml

What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).

What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?

It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.

The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.

We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.

And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.

Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.

Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.

Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.

And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.

During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.

The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.

I've had enough.

Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.

I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in software. We want software to finds its way back to empowering the general public, not serve as a resource extraction machine for the rich and powerful.

1. Stop forcing us to write user hostile software. We do not want to lock down software to extract more rent from our users.

2. Stop forcing us to force addictive algorithms. We do not want to force anti-social hate mongering adware junk on people.

3. Stop forcing workers to commute unnecessarily. Not twice a week or once a week or 11.33% of the week. Just no. Let individuals/teams decide how they want to work. If their performance is bad, you already have performance management tools for fixing that.

4. Stop all forms of unnecessary micro-management. The specifics for this depend on your company/role.

5. Stop forcing us to peddle slop. We do not want to shove AI generated bullshit in the face of our users.

6. Stop firing our human customer service staff colleagues to replace them with AI agents. It's one thing to let AI front some of the repetitive work. But AI can't replace a dedicated human who cares about helping the customer.

7. Stop forcing us to deal with slop ourselves. If the software is shit, we need time to fix it. Your deadlines can't go beyond the limits of complexities of real life.

8. Stop forcing "growth". Some of us our happy with our current role/jobs. Not all of us want to write ridiculous long essays praising ourselves for mediocre accomplishments. For many people a job is a job.

I think the specifics of these demands is not important, they shouldn't be universal. Different people have different needs.

The main reason for this strike is to send a message that they can't keep controlling us forever. And that if we don't cooperate with them, their house of cards will fall tomorrow. And that software must remain a way to empower people, not to satisfy greedy billionaires.

So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026.

Your fellow working class techie.