From the Editor’s Desk: Conspiracy Theory ⭐️

Humans are hardwired to see conspiracy. I wish I could find the original article, but I vividly recall reading 20 years ago or more that this all dates back to prehistoric times when some early humans would see a tiger or other predator hiding in the tall grass while some would not; those who did survived, and those who did not were killed, assuming there really was a tiger. And that latter detail didn’t matter, because those who thought they saw something dangerous were the ones who bred and multiplied.

This is why some believe today in Sasquatch, UFOs, or the Loch Ness Monster, that JFK couldn’t possibly have been killed by a single gunman, that the moon landings were fake, the earth is flat, vaccines don’t save lives, or the U.S. government for some reason caused or allowed the 9/11 attacks. Pick your favorite conspiracy theory, and point fingers and laugh if you’re so inclined. But the truth this, we’re the evolutionary result of history, and that history makes it very difficult not to see patterns everywhere and to ascribe purpose to what is almost always just chance. This quality is among several things–like faith and hope–that make humans unique, I think.

But here’s what I know: Like most people, I have to work to suppress these feelings sometimes. I like to think of myself as logical and analytical, of choosing evidence and facts over feelings. But I see patterns everywhere, too, and I see purpose in events or things that are just happenstance. I am not unique in that regard at all. And like everything else in life, all I can do is try. I fret when I see friends and other loved ones falling for the stupidity of conspiracy theories, but I also get it.

You may have seen the 1980s sci-fi action movie They Live, starring former professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. It’s most well-known for the iconic line, “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum,” which was later reused in the Duke Nukem videogame series. That’s hilarious and, God help me, even iconic. But I best recall being taken by the sunglasses that Piper’s character finds in the movie that let him see which humans were really aliens and alerted him to the subliminal messages the aliens were using to ensure mankind was docile and compliant.

There are elements of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in They Live, of course, but to me this is really about conspiracy theories and how they can be true, just as that tiger lurking in the tall grass was sometimes really there. And if you think about the history of mankind, you can see that many conspiracy theories, including the invented one in They Live, are rooted in the distrust that the common folk have in the ruling class. This was true in feudal Europe, it was true in the Vietnam/Watergate era of the early 1970s, and it’s true today. In fact, the Internet and now AI have only amplified this problem. Which is interesting because the only thing worse than blindly distrusting everything our leaders do would be to blindly trust them.

I’m writing about this now because I’m seeing an escalation of issues in our industry, this thing that has always been defined by science, computer science, and thus by numbers–literally 1s and 0s–and facts. Personal technology in the form of computers anyone could buy became a market in the late 1970s and early 1990s, but it became an economic force in the 1990s, driven largely by Microsoft, and it’s now an all encompassing economic superpower in the form of Big Tech companies, many of which are richer and more powerful than most of the countries on earth. We all understand that power corrupts, but if the enshittification of this industry in recent years proves anything, it’s that being evil at scale has never been easier or more prevalent. The very notion that any business would actively undermine its own customers is ludicrous on the face of things, but for Big Tech, doing that is a strategy. It’s rather incredible.

Nothing I wrote there could be misconstrued as conspiracy theory. Sure, there will always be the overly simplistic fools eager to do the bidding of their Big Tech overlords, like sheep lining up to slaughter because surely their masters only want what’s best for them. But you don’t have to be a particularly clear or critical thinker to see the issues of Big Tech. Enshittification is everywhere, from the software you use but do not own, to the unending subscription services, the ever-escalating monthly costs, and the consumer-adverse behaviors. Some people don’t like the term enshittification out of misplaced prudism, but it’s perfect, and even those people see enshittification everywhere because, and this is important, it’s real. This isn’t someone maybe seeing a tiger in the grass. There is a tiger. And it is out to kill us all.

I am clear-eyed about enshittification, and it is my nature to be direct and plain-spoken, and so this term speaks to be in its perfection. A new term that is immediately understood like this isn’t just rare, it’s a miracle. As I writer, I can only praise its inventor. It’s impressive.

And as a writer, I have tried to bring my direct and plain-spoken nature to my writing in the hope that this can be used to explain complex concepts in ways that most will understand. This is sometimes misconstrued. In the same way that my Bostonian, inner Masshole ways can be seen as too direct by the more passive aggressive folk who tend to live west of where I grew up, some will read what I write and wonder what the anger is all about. They see a complaint and find fault with the complainer, as if I were perhaps making this thing up, inventing some outrage, perhaps to drive page views or something. But that’s not what this is about. I complain when there are things to complain about. I praise those things that are deserving of praise. That there is more of the former than the latter should say something about our industry, not about me.

With all that in mind, I have to betray one more personality trait that factors into this conversation: I am not good at math or money, and I have never been. My wife handles our finances, and not just with my blessing. She is good at this stuff. She is responsible. She should be responsible for it. Not me.

Years ago, I was at dinner with Gary Brent, the guy who got me started in my writing career and one of the smartest, most technical people I’ve ever met. Gary was a genius, literally, and yet he was also bad at math. We had finished dinner and were presented with the check, so he pulled out a calculator to figure out the tip. (This was over 30 years ago, long before pre-smartphone cellphones were common.) I asked why he needed that, as a 15 percent tip, common in that era, was easy: You just figure out 10 percent of the bill, math anyone could handle, figure out half of that number, and add the two. Easy.

He stared at me for a moment and told me that I was excellent at math, contrary to how I had presented myself. No, I said, I’m terrible at math, this is just a workaround because I could never multiply a bill by 15 percent to arrive at the number. But that’s what being good at math is, he told me. That’s not a workaround, it’s a faster way to get at the same number. It’s smart.

OK. But I really am bad at math. And so it is with some bemusement and that I sit here, decades later, having spent so much time and effort every quarter reporting on the financial results from Microsoft and several other Big Tech and industry players. This often requires a lot of math. Some companies provide growth numbers, others don’t, so I need to calculate that. Some companies report earnings in other currencies. There are all kinds of math-related issues, and I confront this again and again in my version of Groundhog Day every single quarter.

Life is funny sometimes. When Microsoft was accused of antitrust violations by the U.S. Department of Justice in the late 1990s and that case eventually turned into an historic trial, judgment, and aftermath, I was forced to figure out antitrust, a legal topic outside of my wheelhouse, so to speak. This changed me. I was confronted by horrible behaviors and legal terms and precedents I had only previously understood in cursory ways. Then the U.S. antitrust case was then followed by an even longer antitrust case in Europe, cementing my understanding of this topic. That enshittification and antitrust go hand-in-hand is probably obvious, but like enshittification, you see antitrust issues everywhere once you understand the topic. And in today’s more heterogeneous technology industry, it’s no longer just Microsoft. All the big players violate antitrust laws around the world every single day.

And now these topics are colliding at a scale I can barely comprehend. I have been educated by experience over decades, have seen the ways in which the world’s biggest companies are terrible in so many ways, and I am steeped in these topics. Antitrust. Enshittification. Financial reporting. And they are all intertwined.

To be clear, I know what that sounds like. I know that what I am saying here is like that person insisting there were multiple shooters in Dealey Plaza or that no human has ever walked on the moon. I think those people are nuts. Some will think I am nuts.

I wrote today about Spotify’s earnings and noted that this company is committing what I feel is financial fraud. This is an issue I’ve observed happening for years over many quarters, but it’s escalating, like so many other bad behaviors in our industry. And I’ve only touched on a few examples. There is a lot more nonsense in there. I don’t understand how this company can get away with this.

Spotify is small fry in the scheme of things: It may be relatively dominant in digital music right now, but its €4.5 billion in revenues pale in comparison to the tens of billions of revenues that Netflix, PC makers, and others make, and the hundreds of billions in revenues that Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are starting to earn every quarter.

This past week, Intel reported its earnings, and Wall Street went crazy, in a good way, claiming that “INTEL IS BACK”–yes, an actual headline–desite the hard reality that the microprocessor giant lost $3.7 billion in the quarter and fell short of analyst expectations by over $6 billion. That’s a 6 billion dollar shortfall, in a single quarter. Success!

Microsoft, like its other Big Tech contemporaries, has been slowly becoming less and less transparent every quarter for the past decade or more, replacing hard numbers—you know, things like Windows licenses and Xbox console units sold–with soft numbers like “engagement” to hide where the money really comes from and which businesses are, in fact, failing. This is illegal, and there have been no changes in the accounting requirements demanded by the U.S. SEC. But that regulatory body has also done nothing to enforce it own rules, and so Microsoft, like others, keeps pushing the envelope and it keeps getting away with it.

But there is no worse example of the utter nonsense that our industry spouts than AI. The only thing that Spotify, Intel, Microsoft, and AI have in common is that each is engaging in financial malfeasance–and to be clear, I write that as a person who just admitted to being bad at both math and money—but what sets AI apart from the rest of this illegal behavior is the scale.

AI spending is nothing more than a circle jerk of the world’s biggest companies and AI upstarts promising to spend money with each other and then rarely ever exchanging any actual money. (There are exceptions: Nvidia and Amazon, for example, are being paid for their GPUs and the infrastructure needed to utilize them.) I would call this a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid is too simple a shape to describe this. AI is nothing more than a multi-tentacled fraud on every level, the biggest ever version of faking it until you make it, except that the payoff will never come and this behavior could literally destroy the world’s economy and flush our collective futures with it.

The details almost don’t matter. But where one could make the case, as the book Made in China does, that Tim Cook has effectively betrayed the United States to China in a bid for short-term profits, Big Tech and AI are betraying mankind for profits that will never exist. Never has so much been spent on so little. Not because AI isn’t “real” or beneficial, but because AI is just technology, and the Big Tech companies involved here are engaging in a power grab through which they hope to solidify their respective dominance for the foreseeable future. Which one might define as “the remaining lifetime of the selfish, evil people running these companies.”

So yes, I have no particular expertise in these financial topics. All I have is decades of experience and a growing unease as I watch these terrible, terrible companies behave ever more badly and at a scale that is unprecedented in human history. And so I point out what I see knowing that I will be perceived by some to be the crazy one, the nut who sees something that’s not there. But I see the tiger for what it is, and it’s real. And that’s true whether you see it too or ignore it.

Microsoft will report its next quarterly earnings this week, alongside most other Big Tech companies. I approach these events with a sense of dread these days, a sense of distrust, because experience tells me that’s the only rational response to this terribleness. Someday, maybe, some regulatory body somewhere on the earth will force these companies to behave legally and responsibly, but I’m not holding my breath. Because the conspiracy theory I now believe to be real is the biggest of all.

I think that these companies, the world’s governments, and Wall Street and other financial markets are all colluding to prop up the global economy, to fool investors and regular people into believing that not only is everything OK, but everything is going gangbusters. Our world is in trouble, and we’re being sold a load of crap to keep us quiet, as docile and compliant as the people depicted in They Live. And they are undermining democracy and our health and security to make it happen.

And I know that sounds nuts. I do. I just wish it weren’t true.