Immortal Pyramids

The Era of Precrime is Upon Us

Last week we talked about the inherent problem with the oversized hierarchies that dominate modern society. The central thesis was that hierarchical power structures concentrate power at the top, enabling those at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid to act with impunity in their own interest without regard for those who the organization was meant to serve and those who work inside them.

While the focus was on the tech giants, this dynamic applies equally to education, healthcare, insurance, financial, and political institutions, including governments. All of which have been exposed as corrupt and oppressive to varying degrees, not just for the consumers, but also those who serve inside the pyramid.

But how, exactly, do hierarchies enable impunity? Bosses don't actually do anything. They just decide what needs to be done. They depend on people below them to actually get anything done. How do they act with impunity if they can't actually do anything by themselves?

“Bureaucracies are utopias of rules. They create structures in which it is possible to imagine a world where everything is predictable, calculable, and known.”
– David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Let's say you work for a company that has very publicly made privacy a key part of its brand. You sign up as the engineering manager to lead an exciting new project to build an app to help people keep track of their lives.

Obviously this has some serious privacy implications. The app has to access to sensitive private information, including where they've been, who they've been talking to, what websites they've been visiting, and so on.

Given the company’s public stance on privacy, you are certain the privacy issue would be carefully handled.

You are surprised when one day your boss asks you to rubber-stamp a proposal for the app to directly access this info without user consent. He explains that asking for permissions would introduce friction and slow down adoption. He needs you to sign on to the proposal before he presents it to his VP for final approval.

This can't be right, it goes against everything you know about what the company stands for. You don't want to upset your boss, but you feel this is too important not to stand by your own, not to mention the company’s values.

After forty five minutes of intense browbeating, he hangs up, clearly frustrated. You are relieved when the VP shuts down the proposal after identifying the privacy concerns.

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
– Michael Foucault

After the meeting, your boss stops talking to you completely. He doesn't respond to your calls or emails. Three days later, you are replaced by someone on your team. They didn’t even bother talking to you first, they just announced it in a meeting you happen to be in.

But why? Didn't the VP prove you were right all along? You soon realize being right and five bucks gets you a nice cup of Starbucks in Corporate America.

At least the company has very strict policies against retaliation, and this seems to fit the bill pretty well. You had that drilled into you at the mandatory management training. You get in touch with HR and explain the situation, complete with full documentation on everything that transpired.

HR officially open an investigation. You are hopeful that things will work out. After all, you did everything right according to the company policy, not to mention upholding a key part of the company’s brand.

Shortly after the HR investigation started, your boss abruptly leaves the team and lands at a different spot in the company. Friends in high places. But not before leaving you a poor performance review, ensuring your future prospects are limited inside the company.

A month later, HR gets back to you and tells you they could not find any evidence of retaliation. But how is this possible, you ask. There were only three days between your argument with your boss and your demotion, during which he refused to speak to you. Any reasonable person would see the connection between these two events.

“The system is perfect. The flaw is in you, John.”
– Director Lamar Burgess, Minority Report

Well, it turns out that your boss would literally have to put in writing that he planned on retaliating against you for saying no to him. It suddenly dawns on you why he always calls and never texts.

By the way, you have three months to find a new job, since you aren’t getting yours back.

If this story sounds like some kind of outlandish joke or dystopian fantasy to you, congratulations, you obviously haven’t worked inside Corporate America long enough to know how it really works.

Of course, this is just one person’s experience, but it is far from unique. Most people who face retaliation are reluctant to talk about it for the same reason women didn’t talk about sexual harassment. It was understood that powerful men abusing their position was just the way things are, and if you speak up, the only thing that’ll happen is the destruction of your own career.

Most people found the idea so unsettling that they prefer rationalize it away as over dramatization or isolated instances, until it happens to them or someone they know.

Now imagine how the boss in this story might wield the power to monitor your every keystroke, every conversation with a coworker, every document you open, read, or write. Of course, this kind of surveillance already exists, even if we prefer not to think about it. But until now, it has been limited by one thing: the sheer volume of data. You have to know what you were looking for before you could find it.

That is, until AI enters the picture.

AI doesn’t just comb through mountains of data. It’s much, much more than that. It interprets. Predicts. Extrapolates. It answers questions about not just what’s in the data, but what might be there, hallucinations and all.

Your intent will be mapped before you act.

Your dissent will be flagged before you speak.

Your resistance will be neutralized before you even know you’re resisting.

“No one ever thinks it’s going to be them. We’re all so plugged into this thing, and we can’t even unplug ourselves.”
— Black Mirror, “Smithereens”

There’s now a line of sight from where we are to the world imagined in Minority Report, where crimes are punished before they’re committed. Only this time, it’s not three psychics in a vat, it’s AI trained on your Slack messages, calendar invites, and performance reviews.

The key point is that AI doesn’t have to be right, we just have to believe it is or at least can’t tell when it’s wrong to act on its predictions.

In The Minority Report, the pre-cogs supposedly predict the future and you could be arrested for crimes that the pre-cogs predict but haven’t happened yet.

It turns out that the pre-cogs themselves do not always agree because the future is not predetermined, but that doesn’t prevent the whole society from acting as though it was. Those in charge of the pre-cogs could then pick and choose whichever future that suits them.

If that sounds like dystopian fiction in the far future, you’re not paying attention. The big tech layoffs that began in 2023 are accelerating and spreading. The same AI surveillance system that forces Amazon warehouse workers to pee in bottles can, and will be turned on engineers and designers next.

As Cory Doctorow made clear in The Enshittification of Tech Jobs, tech workers are only exempt from exploitation until the C-suite realizes they can get away with it.

And now they have.

The urgent question facing us is this: Will AI supercharge the dystopian reality of Corporate America? Or will it empower us, the people who do the actual work, to dismantle the systems that treat us as compliant, replaceable, and invisible?

That choice isn’t written in the code. It’s written by us, the rank and file tech workers.

But the window is closing. Fast.

Once the AI surveillance system is fully in place, it will coldly, efficiently, silently, and ruthlessly enforce the will of those in power. Not just in tech giants, but across every major institutions including healthcare, education, finance, insurance and the military. It has already begun in the Federal Government.

The pyramids of power, no longer human, will be made immortal by AI.

How do we fight back when every move is tracked, and every act of rebellion is predicted? Don’t wait for the foosball tables, free lunch and onsite massages to come back, my fellow tech workers.

They are not coming back.

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