The first “Your Computer Is On Fire” essay, the second part of the “Introductions” section. Written by Mar Hicks.

Bottom line up front

I rate this 3.2.

A handful of insightful parallels to past disasters buried among a long-form version of May 2020’s liberal Twitter. Begins summarizing some of the worst of all of the usual suspects. Ends with a call for regulation, unionization, and protest.

Summary

This one will age like milk. Written in May of 2020. It starts off moping about the pandemic, then Zucc in congress, with a sprinkling of simping for AOC.

Mar is teaching a ‘disasters’ course where students learn how disasters catalyze political change. May of 2020 is a disaster, minorities die of covid, Black lives matter protests are ongoing. Big tech decides what counts as misinformation, how much privacy we get, and Zucc didn’t block Trump on Jan 6.

We’ve seen industry overreach before, and we’ve broken up robber barons, ma bell, IBM, Microsoft. We’re at another crisis not unlike these.

We didn’t start the fire

The fire refers to our complicated relationship with technologies designed to make our lives better but that often create new problems. This has been happening for centuries. Skyscrapers and the internet are like eating shit during the Cholera outbreak in 1854 London. Obvious systematic problems are being ignored.

Zucc’s FaceMash was about ranking female classmates. Facebook has been using non-consenting people’s data for creepy stuff since day 0. Most disasters are like this, usually obvious in hindsight, not unexpected rods from god.

Weizenbaum had similar concerns, he also made a chat-bot, but eventually, it became too powerful so he vowed to never unleash his destructive power on the world. Citation: Weizenbaum. Others went ahead anyway.

Yahoo used to sell Nazi paraphernalia through its auctions site. Google discarded “Don’t be evil”. Facebook’s roots are in sexism.

Computers were first used for war. Black women did the hard work to put a man on the moon. Government funding has gone into computing with very little accountability. There’s a built-in assumption that those who can solve technical problems can also solve societal ones. Mar then takes some pot-shots at Turing not solving general AI.

Tech benefits the powerful the most. IBM profited from the Holocaust and supported apartheid South Africa. Bill was anti-competitive. White upper- and middle-class men are in charge.

It was always burning

Technology has long been built on existing power relationships. Disasters lay bare that those in power don’t know what they’re doing. Regulatory agencies should have prevented Boeing from crashing the 737 Maxes. The regulators did not. Therefore, Mar asserts, regulators will save us from big tech. By the same logic, more government control would prevent the president from tweeting. Facebook has done too much to help authoritarian states and not cow-toed to states wishes enough. I’m trying my hardest Mar, but I’m losing ya.

Corporations are doing things, like installing facial recognition tech, that we wouldn’t allow our governments to do. They’re becoming so powerful, they’re basically governments. Civil rights, workers’ rights, and care for customers have never been profitable. Labor unrest and consumer complaints are screams into the void when governments are asleep at the wheel.

We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it

For decades, tech has tried to convince white-collar workers that they’re management. No need for unions. Mar points to (unionized since 1935) Boeing as proof of how individuals are ignored in non-union workplaces. Walkouts at Google and unionization at Kickstarter have worked. We need the government to be on our team though.

This chapter ends with a call to action, oppose Trump, support workers, vote for regulation, protest, support those protesting, support the postal system, traditional news media, and citizen-funded public health. Reject newer technologies. If you work in tech, share your salary, meet with union organizers. Don’t be a cog. If you work somewhere unethical, do your best to interrupt. Don’t think “If I don’t do it, they’ll just get someone else to do it”. Neoliberal thinking is bad. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.

Thoughts

After a slow start, this got interesting. It requires you don your BIDEN HARRIS 2020 t-shirt. I enjoyed learning about historic disasters and uprisings. I could pass the particular hashtag that was popular among black feminists the weekend Mar wrote this. The unabashedly liberal phrasing, oddly specific 2020 United States Democratic party issues like post offices, and shaky arguments that hinge on liberal presumptions, lay bare Mar’s goal with this essay. This is exclusively a call to action to the most liberal of liberals.

Mar’s relationship with the government frequently gave me whiplash. In the past, it wages wars, trains women, and exploits the women it trained. It should stop subsidizing tech. It needs to put more money into developing its own tech. Yahoo doesn’t enforce local laws, that’s bad. IBM enforces local laws, that’s bad. We need to listen to it more, also it would have silenced the president.

The main point seems to be “Vote for regulation and unionize”, paired with an example of the most heavily regulated and unionized industry skirting regulations and killing workers.