Tech Used to Fight the Good Fight | Shimmy Says Ep. 33

Hey everyone, it's Shimmy, and welcome to another Shimmy. Says, you know, this is a kind of different Shimmy says, 'cause I'm not in the studio back at our offices, I'm actually on scene here at CubeCon in Atlanta where this is the, uh, the third or fourth day we've been here. I hope you've caught some of our coverage, but I wanted to come at you today on the Shimmy.

Says, really has nothing to do necessarily with CubeCon, but it, it does have to do with community. You know, there's something to be said for the, for the Kumbaya, if you will, that open source brings where people feel like they're bonding together across companies, across competitors, across disciplines, to do something good, to make tech better for all of us. And that used to be a major message in, in tech, right?

It used to be tech used to fight the good fight, right? It wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't, you know, myth or legend, but, you know, being in tech meant something. It meant you didn't kowtow to the government.

You didn't just become another pig feeding at the trou of, of profits and money and power. And somewhere along the line, I guess we seem to have lost that. I read a, uh, an op-ed in the New York Times today by a fellow named Aaron Zamost.

Aaron at one time was at YouTube, and he's worked at other tech places before. And you know, what he had to say really kind of hit me like a bucket of ice water, right? And as much as I tried not to think he was right, as much as I tried to find the alternative to what he was saying, you know, I came to the conclusion he's right.

Somewhere along here, we, we've lost, we lost the plot. We lost the track of, of what what tech is about. And I mean, big tech as well as small tech, right?

When you look at the companies that kinda rule the tech world today, apple and Meta and, and Google and, and OpenAI and Nvidia, you know, who, who I'm talking about. The eight or nine companies that, you know, trade trillions of dollars between themselves, are they doing it for humanity? Are they looking to uplift ev all of us?

Do they care about the downtrod and the, the, the overlooked? No, they care about themselves and in caring about themselves, they sold their souls to a corrupt political machine. I don't know any other way of saying it.

That's what Aaron said, and after reading it and thinking on it, I gotta agree with them. But the truth of the matter is tech has been turned from a, a, uh, an instrument of good from an instrument of progress to a weapon for nationalistic goals. And, and it's not just necessarily about this administration or about the us it we're seeing this worldwide.

China obviously has been doing it a long time. The EU has, it feels like they need to handle their own sovereignty. They can't, they can't count on other countries respecting their privacy and, and sovereignty.

So I think we're at a pivotal moment here in the tech industry. Do we want to, you know, turn in our avenger capes or what have you and, and get a, a, you know, become card carrying members of the party and with all that that entails, um, but to me, that's not the tech that we want to be, right? I, I want to be the tech industry where the two guys in a garage can still change the world, and I don't think we can.

And we're not at that place anymore, right? The only place you see that kind of camaraderie, the only place you see that kind of feeling is at these Kup car, these Linux foundations. And, and they're not the only one, but the other foundations around the open source movement.

Otherwise, it, it just seems like we're trading billions and trillions of dollars among a small group of people for their own enrichment, and we're just pawns in that game until they decide they don't need us anymore and we're replaced with AI and then we won't be here. Um, so, you know, that's what's at stake here. So what I'm asking, and I'm sorry I'm moving this because I don't have a teleprompter like I do in my, in my studio, in the office, but what are we gonna do to reclaim the good fight?

Well, for starters, we gotta stop paying ransoms to make problems disappear. It seems the tech industries decided it's better to pay hush money. It's better to pay someone who threatens you or sues you because you did the right thing, but it wasn't the right thing for what they were thinking.

So we write 25 million, a hundred million dollars checks to suit, to settle lawsuits that were meritless to begin with. Instead of fighting the good fight. We gotta throw off being a vassal, a futile vassal to the king, right?

Tech was never meant to be Dukes and, and, and Earls. We were meant to be the rebels. We were, you know, we got the code.

We, it was a different, it's a different, it's a different character. We're gonna rediscover our reason for existence, even our reason for existence is to push the human envelope and make it happen. So what do we have to do to make this happen?

We've gotta return to the garage, right? We've gotta return to the garage and enable a system where little people, the little guys with big ideas, can still make it happen in this world. You don't need $500 billion to start a company and, and find a place in the market.

Um, we've gotta, you know, you wanna call it idealism? You wanna call me idealistic? That's fine.

But we gotta rebuild that culture of idealism where we believe what we're doing. We do it because it's the right thing to do, and it's good for everybody. That rising tide lifts all boats, whether you are a woman or a, a person of color or any other minority that hasn't partaken in the, in the whole thing.

So that's important. Second last, we're, we're, we're at the cusp here of this, I don't know whether it's the fourth or fifth industrial revolution, ai, quantum robotics, all of these things are right, right in our grasp. And they, there's so much promise there, but they, they could also be a weapon against humanity.

So we've gotta champion humanity in the age of ai. The more we use ai, the more we have to remember we're human humans. And here's the last thing we gotta get out of this thing where tech leaders are robber barons.

I kinda like the Ironman tech leader from the Avengers where he thought he was fighting crime and doing the right thing. Then I like the tech leader who, you know, wants to rule the world man in a manic, manic kind of fit. And, and, you know, uses politicians without moral compasses to help them achieve that.

So we need real leaders. Again, not, not tech, not barens. Now what does it mean though?

I'll end it with this. We need the courage to stand for something in, in tech. We need the courage to do the right thing, even when it's expensive.

And we need the courage to invent the future we all want again. Um, that was, that's who we used to be. It starts with us.

It starts now. I'm here at Cube Con. I'll be back next week in the studio for Shimmy Says.

But until then, this shimmy we're out.