Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

This is an article about the AI bubble and Microsoft.

A quote that I think is relevant:

“The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.”

  • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.orgEnglish
    81·
    23 hours ago

    I’d not say this is a story about Microsoft. Far more time is spent on journalism than MS.

    To start, Zitron is simply better at this sort of analysis than I am. Which isn’t something I like to admit (I want to be the best at everything!), but he has more dots to connect than I do. He basically stitches together about six columns and blog posts I’ve written over the years and effectively synthesizes them into one coherent narrative.

    Management has become completely unhinged from production, unaware of what the fuck we actually do and uninterested in wasting time improving anything other than their own image. Fuck the product, I got mine.

    In a way, it’s oddly … soothing? Like, I’m not crazy but perhaps a bit too aware of where late-stage capitalism was going a bit earlier than most. Such awareness doesn’t exactly buy beer.

    • sculd@beehaw.orgOP
      3·
      21 hours ago

      While this is a global phenomenon, I feel like the problem is much more serious in the US than other places.

      The amount of corporate propaganda, the unwillingness to criticise business leaders seem much more serious in the US. Maybe that is because of my internet consumption, but I feel like Europe and even Asia are much more willing to call out corporate bullshit.