https://the-enemy-within.org/systems-of-power/ Recent content in Systems of Power on The Enemy Within Hugo en-us Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/from_craftsman_to_supervisor/ Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/from_craftsman_to_supervisor/ Developers who delegate their coding to AI agents describe losing their felt connection to what they produce, and the grief is real. But the resignation wrapped around it, the idea that this was inevitable because the tools simply work, does not survive contact with the data. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/we_learned_nothing_from_dijkstra/ Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/we_learned_nothing_from_dijkstra/ In 1975, Edsger Dijkstra diagnosed a fifty-year-old delusion: that programming’s difficulty is a translation problem, solvable by better tools, rather than a reasoning problem. AI is the latest tool wearing that old promise, and it cannot close the gap it was never built to close. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_grid/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_grid/ In May 2026, the actual regulator responsible for keeping the lights on issued one of its rarest possible warnings: AI data centers are now a threat to the reliability of the entire power grid. Utilities are delaying coal plant retirements to keep up. The federal government is forcing others to stay open by emergency order. Meanwhile, the same companies straining the shared grid are quietly buying up the cleanest, most reliable power for themselves. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_bubble/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:30:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_bubble/ OpenAI is on pace to lose $14 billion this year and does not expect to break even until after 2030. Anthropic, on a leaner budget, expects its first operating profit within months. Serious, credentialed voices, not just internet skeptics, are warning that the industry funding both of them is priced like it cannot fail. If it does, the people holding the loss will mostly be people who never chose to make the bet. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_spotify/ Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_spotify/ Suno and Udio trained their models on years of scraped music, most of it from independent artists, then settled only with the major labels who could afford to sue. The independents are still in court, Suno just launched a grant program that requires never criticizing it again, and a North Carolina man is about to be sentenced for turning the same cheap AI generation into a $10 million fraud. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/automating_consumption_of_software_engineering/ Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/automating_consumption_of_software_engineering/ AI did not invent software engineering. It inherited it, from generations of engineers who spent decades discovering what worked and why. Removing the people who renew that inheritance does not just risk buggy code. It risks a profession that keeps producing software while losing the ability to produce engineers. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_price/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_price/ A DDR4 memory kit that cost about $60 a year ago costs up to $350 now, and Micron is not apologizing for it: the company announced it is leaving the consumer market entirely to sell to AI data centers instead. From Louisiana to Virginia, electricity ratepayers are footing a piece of the AI buildout too, whether or not they have ever opened ChatGPT. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_environment/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_environment/ Elon Musk built one of the largest supercomputers on Earth in a Memphis neighborhood that already breathed some of the dirtiest air in the country, and got the Justice Department to defend it in court. It is not the only fight over water and power the AI boom has started: a Meta data center is linked to brown tap water in rural Georgia, and an Arizona contractor got caught trucking city water to a site the city had already voted against. Memphis is the sharpest version of the pattern, not the only one. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_attention/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_attention/ The same extraction machine that scraped books, video, and code runs on a simpler resource: attention. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all built it, and their own internal research proves they knew exactly what it was doing. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/engineering_by_proxy/ Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/engineering_by_proxy/ Harness-based development produces every visible sign of engineering rigor (green tests, merged pull requests, upfront specs) without the substance rigor is supposed to guarantee: correct software, and humans still capable of noticing when it isn’t. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_software_development/ Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_software_development/ The same extraction machine that scraped books and art is now scraping code, and the programmers who wrote it are being conscripted to serve the AI that replaced them — reviewing its output at inhuman speed, right up until an Amazon outage proved what happens when even that role gets automated away. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_slop_prevalence_youtube/ Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_slop_prevalence_youtube/ A month-by-month look at the fastest-growing channels on YouTube shows AI slop isn’t just present at scale — it’s the platform’s fastest-growing category, and the examples show exactly how it crowds out the people who actually make things. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_youtube/ Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism_youtube/ A DMCA lawsuit against Apple shows how AI firms scraped the platform to build the very tools now competing with the creators who made it worth watching. https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism/ Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500 https://the-enemy-within.org/technology/ai_colonialism/ The AI boom is not a technological revolution but a regime of extraction — taking language, art, labor, electricity, water, and legitimacy from the many and converting them into power for the few.