The line and the stream. — Ethan Marcotte

I come from one of the poorest corners of a small, rural state. When I go back to visit, I book a night or two in this big hotel in my neck of the woods. The trips are heartwarming, and this last one was no exception: I got a chance to share a couple meals with old friends and family, surrounded by the hills and forests I still think of as home. This year has felt long and dark, and their faces and voices brightened it.

This hotel, though. Let me tell you about it.

It’s new, first of all. Even if you’re driving through the area for the first time, you’ll be able to spot “new construction” as something that sticks out. What’s more, this huge hotel’s been dropped on top of a mountain that’s too tiny for it. This isn’t one of the hot tourist destinations, either; this mountain’s home to a humble little ski resort, one that’s always been overshadowed by more popular tourist destinations, all of them a short drive away. Now, I need to stress here that I’m no skier — I did a single season on my high school cross-country skiing team that we will not be discussing — but I do know this resort’s historically drawn most of its customers from nearby towns: they’re not pulling in the wealthy out-of-staters. And to look at this new, massive, shiny hotel, that’s who you’d think they’re attracting.

How’d it get here? Well, we need to back up a decade or two to answer that. Because as it happens, some investor types decided to defraud the federal government.

They didn’t lead with that, of course. Through a visa program for affluent foreign investors, they had access to a tremendous amount of capital, which they then used to acquire local tourist spots and dramatically overdevelop them. As they did, they promised that all this investment would bring an influx of new businesses, which would mean more people moving to a state starved for both residents and revenue.

As you might have guessed, the money disappeared when these investors got arrested. One visible aftershock was the halted construction projects. In one town up north, there’s a crater the size of a literal city block, because all the new construction these investors promised — a slew of shops and offices, a new hotel — disappeared when they did. The investors are gone; the hole isn’t.

It also left some massive, sprawling properties in communities that never had enough foot traffic to properly support them. And here we are, back at this gigantic hotel. When we walk in, we see that the gift shop right off the lobby has been hastily boarded up. One wing of the hotel’s been blocked off to guests. At the check-in desk, the clerk has three registration forms lined up in front of her, one for each of the guests she knows will be checking in that evening. All because some rich, powerful men promised my chronically impoverished corner of the state that the things it had always and desperately needed — investment, jobs, and people — were, at long, long last, finally about to arrive.

“Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.” I’ve heard some variation on that line many, many times since 2022; I heard it a few more times after defining “artificial intelligence” as a failed technology. Maybe you’ve heard it too.

Now, regardless of how you or I might feel about “AI,” I think we can both acknowledge just how impressively ahistorical that statement is. In the last two decades, I’ve seen so many things we knew were our future: Internet Explorer, Flash, Web 2.0, jQuery, mobile websites, NFTs ¹, and more. We were told each and every single one of them was immutable, fixed, and unchanging; each and every single one of them, in turn, faded. Some of them even disappeared altogether. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that predicted futures have a pretty short lifespan.

And that’s the moment in which I’m writing: that vision of an “AI” future feels like it’s shaking. In fact, it might be close to shattering. There’s a growing body of reporting on the rampant speculation at the heart of the current boom, with some journalists gaming out what a market crash might look like. Investors are nervous; leaders of “AI” companies are even starting to sound warning bells, presumably to position themselves for government bailouts whenever the bubble finally bursts. In the face of all this instability, stating that “AI isn’t going anywhere” feels even more detached from reality: it’s divorced from how quickly trends shift in tech, and it’s ignoring the growing cracks in the industry’s foundation.

At the same time, I think that unwavering belief is what’s instructive about it.

I mean, look. I’ve been thinking about my future quite a bit. The last decade’s made my sense of the coming decades feel fractured, and the last year has only accelerated that feeling. Friends are aging; family members have passed on; so many things I was taught to rely upon — jobs, industries, institutions, milestones, even seasons — feel like they’re being upended in front of me. When you’re told to expect a certain broad arc to your life, it’s more than a little terrifying when that map’s redrawn as you’re looking at it.

That’s why I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes something to you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that this something will be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?

Now. By calling them magical, I’m not attempting to diminish or disparage these kinds of statements. Far from it: when we make these statements, we’re opening up a kind of possibility space. “What if the future looked like this?” By making space to ask questions, we’re making the future feel less fixed, and far less daunting. It gives us an anchor point in what comes next, one we can move toward with intention. On an individual level, incantations like these can be a helpful goal-setting exercise; performed at scale, they can be transformative.

And not necessarily in a good way. Take the “AI” industry: backed by their belief in their (again, failed) technology and a ghastly amount of capital, they’ve embedded their technology in products, organizations, and governments alike. They’ve begun physical buildouts of vast data centers that take a tremendous toll on disenfranchised communities, and are demanding older, even more dangerous forms of energy to support their expansion. They’ve created new classes of invisible workers to power their operations, all while selling automation technology that makes work even more precarious for everyone else. This is all to say that they’ve moved very, very, very quickly to realize their vision for the future in the last three years. Hell, it’s hard to imagine a future without these platforms, and the powerful people who sell them.

But to paraphrase something Mandy Brown once said, there’s not going to be one future — there will be many. In fact, there’s another future being built right now.

Last fall, the workers at the New York Times Tech Guild walked off the job for a week and subsequently won their first union contract, one that improved pay, won them “just cause” protections, and more. For the last several months, workers at Microsoft have waged an effective and relentless pressure campaign against their employer, in order to force the tech giant to stop selling technology that facilitates the genocide in Gaza. Last week, the workers at Kickstarter United ended their record-breaking strike, having walked off the job for forty-two days to secure improved pay equity, a contractually guaranteed four-day work week, and job protections from “AI”. This week, the workers at Starbucks United, who began a strike just last week, established a blockade at one of the corporation’s distribution centers — all to bring management back to the table after months of stalled negotiations.

These are just four examples from the last year; there are many, many more. We’re surrounded by a tremendous amount of organizing right now, with workers banding together to build protections at work, to win improved pay and benefits, to advocate for human rights, to build power together. That organizing’s happening at a scale I find tremendously inspiring, and at a pace — last year; this year; last week; this week — that’s steadily increasing. This is a new future, one being built by quiet conversations with coworkers, by petitions circulated at work, by bargaining sessions, by chants and songs and protests and strikes.

That’s not to say this future is any more assured than the other one: this worker-led future needs significantly more people, including you and your coworkers. But that aside, I’m struck by the contrast between the two. One vision for the future mentions technology and technology alone, neatly eliding right over who might be impacted or harmed if that future should come to pass; the other future is centered around humans, their needs, and their hopes for something better.

Me, I’ve decided which future I want to live in. When I wrote my last book, I said the future of the tech industry is an organized, worker-led labor movement. That’s the quiet hope I’m casting into the months and years and decades that are stretching before me.

Maybe you agree with that future. If you do, well — let’s you and I start moving toward it.

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