Why the current tech backlash feels different

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Why the current tech backlash feels different Answering your Decoder questions about surveillance, AI coverage, and the Nilay rant. Nick Statt: Hello and welcome to Decoder, Nilay’s show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statt, senior producer. And I’m joined by our brand-new supervising producer, Greg Ott. Greg Ott: Good day, everyone. And Hi, Nilay. Nilay is here too. He is the person who hosts the show, and his name is also in the show. So it makes sense. Nilay Patel: It’s true. We don’t consistently say my name in the show enough. We should do it all the time. I should do it. Welcome to Decoder with Nilay Patel. GO: Like Nick was saying, this is Nilay’s show and we are doing a mailbag episode. This is where we go through all the feedback. Because you listen to the end of every episode, we know you do. We do mention that we go through every single email that we get. Nick, you can verify that. We get a ton of email, and we do read through all of it. Is that true? NS: We now get YouTube comments. We get many, many Verge comments. We get Spotify comments and posts on Bluesky, Threads, and elsewhere. So yeah, we get a lot of feedback. I do feel like promising we’ll read all the YouTube comments is an emotional commitment that we’re making, but we do read everything. GO: We do. NS: I do read the Spotify comments. I read every one because those are specifically pretty pointed. GO: Yeah. They’re kind of like uncut gems. Because they’re trying to build this little community, somebody might read this because it only gets like six comments as opposed to 600 for a YouTube video. NS: We last did a mailbag episode in April, and we said we were going to do more of these. So we’re back again. This is September. We’ve had a few months. We’ve had a lot of really big interviews. So yeah, let’s just get into it. GO: We’re going to kick things off with the “software brain” video you put out. This was one of the biggest things that people have commented on. It is far and away the most talked-about episode in the past six months. Hundreds of comments on The Verge website, hundreds of comments on YouTube, single to double-digit comments on Spotify, and lots and lots of emails. We want to start there because a lot of the feedback was positive and people actually rarely email us a ton of negative feedback. We get a lot of, “Attaboy.” Some guy I knew in high school just emailed me — Hi Dean — saying how much he liked our Kathy Hochul episode. So people like the show, but for this one, we got some negative stuff on The Verge that we’re going to get to in a second. One thing we wanted to talk about though is something a reader brought up about the idea of the Nilay rants. And of you effectively pulling out your inner Dennis Miller and really giving us your take on something. For this one, one listener wrote, “Just listened to ‘People do not yearn for automation,’ and all I can say is the people do yearn for more Nilay rants.” So we want to know, what is the origin of this type of rant? And then how much of the show’s DNA do you think is built around this idea of you giving us the rant, and the idea of you giving us your hot take on something really, really well thought out, as opposed to the interviews we usually do? I feel like I should make another riff on the “People do not yearn for automation,” but as Dennis Miller — just full rant. GO: We’re going to have to pull out some really good old references. The power of AI means Dennis Miller can deliver software right now. GO: “Let me tell you something, babe. Sam Altman, the last time he was sitting in a Whataburger…” Right. We could just do it. It’d be great. I’m sure we wouldn’t get sued for that. They’re just essays. I know they’re rants and they’re delivered on YouTube and they’re very pointed in particular ways. But that’s just what I would’ve written as a column 10 years ago before we had podcasts this way. It has been very obvious to everyone that you can’t just write a column and expect to have an impact. You have to stare at the camera and do it. We’re very good at publishing that as a column and then having a transcript and polishing it and delivering it all the other ways. That’s the origin of it: For all the podcasting I do and as little writing as I do anymore, in my heart, I’m still a writer. Taking all of the reporting and all of the ideas that we hear and all the conversations we have and synthesizing them into ideas that you can grapple with is the point. It is really the point of running a magazine. That’s where that comes from. Now, can I do it as often as I want to do it? I obviously can’t. The reason I did “software brain” at that moment is that the excitement around AI is so high. The hype is so high and it’s all connected to how good AI systems are at writing software and manipulating databases. But the reason that I thought, “I got to make the time to do ‘software brain’ right now,” is that I could see the hype cycle around AI failing to contend with the lack of verifiability in every domain except software. That’s getting a little blurry now. Lots of companies are just databases. Software engineering is verifiable, you can run it through the compiler and see if it works. AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. If you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good, it’s done. You can see the labs are talking about how they’ve achieved AGI or they will very soon and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. I’m just not discounting that that’s important. I’m just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder. You can see it in the episode we did with Verge reporter Robert Hart about AI and math. There’s an amount of verifiability in math and you can burn a lot of tokens, we don’t know how many, and solve some unsolved math problems. There’s probably verifiability in various other science domains, so it’s really interesting. Is there verifiability in generating novel drugs? No, you got to inject a bunch of people with novel drugs. What are we going to do? GO: That’s why they got so many rats in cages somewhere, it has to be done. Right. There’s just some other thing that’s going to happen in the next 10 domains that is going to be really, really challenging. That’s where I wanted to put the marker down and say, “I have been swimming in this water for a long time with these people and the power of software is not to be denied, it has remade our world. But if that’s the only framework or you think that is a universal framework, you’re going to run into these walls.” There are lots more of those we can do, but I want them to hit, I only want to write hit singles. Importantly, they’re all born of the reporting. That’s always been the dynamic on The Verge. Certainly the dynamic on Decoder is the data can get to your head. The episodes where I just talk sometimes outperform the episodes with CEOs. That’s not good. That’s a bad incentive loop for me because I want everything to come out of the fact that I’ve talked to all of the people and you can go check my work. You can go see what those conversations are like and you can see that they are genuine and honest in all the things they should be. That’s where I feel like I not only have the depth and the foundation to write something like “software brain,” but I can send it to those people and say, “This is how I feel about it.” They come on the show and they talk to me about Google Zero or “software brain” and all that stuff, and that conversation gets much bigger than me just ranting. NS: My reaction to that, Nilay, is that you feel like your thesis for “software brain” has borne out over the last few months. We did get feedback from people who disagreed with some of the premises. It wasn’t that they’re saying people aren’t unhappy with AI, but they think that we’re wrong about why they’re unhappy with AI. One reader, Josh Vanderberg, wrote in to say that he thinks it’s not that people hate AI as a technology, but rather that they don’t like their current economic situation and they’re projecting that onto AI. He’s pretty sure that we’ll eventually embrace natural language as the superior way of doing things on a computer. He added, “All modern computer interfaces suck hard. We’re forced to map our fluid non-deterministic creative selves into hierarchical menu systems. No matter how intuitive and discoverable, we constantly fail to find the tools that we need.” He uses Canva’s CEO as an example of somebody that deeply understands the problem and they realize that AI can provide the user interface we’ve all been yearning for. He goes on to say, “People definitely yearn to just tell Photoshop what they want done in words and forget everything they ever learned about that horrible user interface.” We had a few other similar comments like, “People do not yearn for automation, they yearn for cheap stuff. And when AI gives them cheap stuff, they’ll be happy.” A third person wrote, “’Software brain’ misses three things regular people actually care about: control, agency, and meaning. We like doing things. The doing is where the meaning comes from.” I’m curious just from those particular comments and also the other feedback you got from “software brain,” and how you respond to those criticisms? Let’s take them in turn. This is a very thoughtful comment, Josh. I don’t disagree that all modern computer interfaces suck hard. I’ve used Liquid Glass. I agree with you. I refuse to upgrade this computer to macOS Tahoe. I’m just not doing it. There’s some confusing thing happening in user interfaces, probably related to how much all of our devices have turned into shopping malls or SaaS products or whatever it is. There’s something broken there and I agree that that’s bad. I disagree that natural language is a perfect substitute for everything or can become a universal interface. I say this as somebody who is writing a Decoder book based on all the interviews on the show. I’ve used Wispr Flow to get as much out of my head onto the page as I can. That is incredibly powerful and you can see why people like it. I also have to edit every single word it generates because it insists on formatting my thoughts in ways that I find completely bananas. All these systems say, “You think in bullets.” I say, “I am not thinking in bullets right now. I’m just pausing between sentences.” There’s something there where you can take the natural language input and what we as people are reasonably good at doing is taking everything else with it, the context of our body language, the tone of our voice, and creating other meaning out of it. Computers are really bad at that. Maybe they’re going to get better at it, but they’re currently very, very bad at it. I’m using my Wispr Flow example. It’s just one that you can see how bad it is at that. It’s not just you’re being creative to a computer or talking to a computer that’s going to do what you say and you don’t have to push all the buttons, it’s lossy. It’s lossy in a very important way that using a mouse to click on a button is not lossy at all. It is very, very directed and it will do exactly the thing that you want it to do. Ordering from Grubhub with your finger on a phone screen is 100 percent accurate — unless you’re drunk, which I’ve been. But talking to an agent to have it to go do something is lossy. It is error-prone in very specific ways. These things are going to exist together. That, to me, is the balance that we’re going to have to strike, that all of the hype around AI assumes that what I want is another person instead of a specific thing to happen. You can talk to lots of designers or professionals who use these tools and they will all complain about these tools. We use this app called Riverside to produce the show several times a week. Every single person on this team can issue a PhD thesis in all of the problems with Riverside because it’s the tool we use and it sucks in very specific ways. It is also still the tool we use every single week to make this show. If anybody uses Photoshop or Pro Tools… the books that can be written about people’s feelings about Pro Tools could fill a library, but they’re the tools because they get the job done in specific ways. Making that lossy or making that non-deterministic is actually going to make people less effective. It will democratize access for a lot of people, I think, and that is a huge opportunity. I don’t think that opportunity outweighs the cost of making things more chaotic in specific ways. The cheap stuff piece: yeah, I think people like cheap stuff. There’s a reason TVs are permanent surveillance devices and everyone has them in their home because they cost $500 and they’re just watching you all the time. But I actually think the industry is coming around to my point of view that the products aren’t good enough. I know this because our friend Alex Heath just interviewed Sam Altman and he asked him why people don’t like AI. Altman’s response was that he thinks that the way to win hearts and minds is to deliver value. We actually have a clip, you can run it. Sam Altman: Generally speaking, I think the right way to get people to like something is to deliver them value… Probably if a lot of people use [agents] — which they will over time — and understand that it’s not actually fusing and destroying huge amounts of water or whatever, then they’ll be more excited. I watched that, and I think Alex did a good job talking to Altman. My view of that is it’s a concession that Sam Altman knows ChatGPT is not delivering enough value to consumers. These free versions are not communicating enough what they could do or they’re not doing enough or they’re hallucinating too much and that’s why consumers dislike them. I continue to believe that talking about how everything can be turned into a database that can then be automated by agents is not going to win anyone any hearts and minds. Maybe that’s the technology that creates products people love, but the technology itself is fundamentally uninspiring. It’s the products, it’s the experiences you have that change minds, and “software brain” is inherently alienating, in my opinion. The last one, “’Software brain’ misses three things people care about: control, agency, and meaning.” Yes, I agree with that. I would connect that actually to buttons in cars. We’ve gone through this horrible period where all of the controls in cars became virtualized onto a screen. There’s been furious pushback against it and all the buttons are back. I think people want deterministic actions, even from computer-like things. This is maybe the single best market-driven evidence that you can’t just virtualize everything. You actually have to give real experiences to people that do the things that are printed on the label of the button exactly when you push the button. That is control and agency. I don’t know about “meaning” in changing an HVAC in a car, but it’s definitely control and agency. Meaning I think comes from having to struggle through doing the work yourself, not just letting AI do it for you. So I agree with all these comments in different ways. I just think the industry has gotten completely lost in the sauce on what you can do if you turn everyone into a database, which is what I call “software brain,” and they’ve missed the human connection. A really good example — I’ll give you a little preview of an upcoming episode — we had the CEO of Cloudflare on, and he just laid off a bunch of people at his company because he says AI can do a bunch of those jobs. His whole thing is he can identify rising talent in the company by having the AI look at all the things they’re doing. Then he thinks that’s good because he can make a phone call and say, “Hey, you’re a young superstar.” Maybe that is a good thing. In order to accomplish that goal, every single thing that happens to that company needs to happen in a database for an AI to review and then communicate to him. That’s the preview. We had a whole conversation about that because I think that is one of the more fascinating ideas in all of business right now. GO: Boy, I hope that doesn’t roll out to The Verge. I’ll have to get one of those mouse movers or something. You’re going to have to start figuring out what I’m doing all day. We are maybe insistently human. If we could automate Riverside, I think that would be good. GO: Yeah, good luck. They did roll out the option to build an AI twin of you. The features we’ve been asking for — not better microphone connections, not better uploading. No, we need to duplicate the people we’re speaking to. Yeah. Can we turn off the auto level control? No. But AI twins are here. GO: There’s actually a request for an essay-style thing, a video essay that is a riff on the “software brain,” titled “People Do Not Yearn for Surveillance,” back to the whole watching-what-you’re-doing-at-work type of thing. Is that something that’s in your head right now, especially with all the Flock cameras everywhere, all the controversy around that? Maybe with a “software brain” format or framing or just a bigger picture thing? Is this in your mind right now? It is a little surprising to me. I’ll candidly admit, I wasn’t expecting it to be as bipartisan as it is. Some of that is just that it’s an election year and people are angry about cameras, so all the politicians are trying to channel that anger, maybe the same way they’re trying to channel anger about data centers. But we’ve seen there’s action in red states to ban surveillance as well, and there’s action in more Republican communities to take down the cameras, which I think is fascinating. It’s not just limited to brands like Flock, it’s the idea of these cameras watching. The piece of the puzzle, the reason that it caught me by surprise, is that for better or worse, my formative political experiences were 9/11 and the war in Iraq. That’s when I was in college. And what did we do? We passed the Patriot Act. We militarized the police. We started doing warrantless wiretaps. We ran our way all the way up to the Snowden revelations and then we did nothing about them. Literally none of that stuff caused this amount of panic. That’s just my framework. This is a shock to that system. It’s surprising to me that people care now. I think it’s because the cameras are visible. The understanding that there’s an AI chatbot that you can talk to that can just go generate an answer and the cops now have it for cameras that are tracking you everywhere. And you can literally see the cameras and you can connect it to an experience you’ve had. There’s Flock, who we are trying to get on the show, and their CEO originally tried to do a bunch of MAGA-coded messaging around this stuff. He would call his critics terrorists and that didn’t work. All that is new if you are born of the things that I was born of. All of these are criticisms of the Patriot Act in 2001, and we just did it anyway. I’m curious for the feedback from the audience on what they think shifted that made a bunch of stuff that we were happy to do in the past feel like one of the more potent political issues of our time? GO: I tie this to the Meta glasses right now with the way those cameras are being received. Compare that to how Google Glass rolled out. If you refer back to the Patriot Act days and your formative years of tech, that’s back when cellphone cameras were seen as a joke. “Wait, I’m going to take a photo on my phone?” Right now the only thing I would take a photo with is my phone because it’s the best camera I will ever have with me. I find that to be a really interesting evolution, especially tied to the AI of it all. When it’s like, “No, no, these cameras now can connect to this network and have all this extra information.” It’s not just some file living on your device that you can put somewhere with your discretion. No, it’s out of your hands now. I wonder if part of that’s the anxiety around things like the Flock cameras, the glasses cameras, and all that. I definitely think there’s some amount of anxiety around “I’m being recorded without my consent.” There’s a lot of anxiety around the intent of the people particularly wearing Meta Glasses. There’s a reason they’re called pervert glasses. Some of the biggest influencers in the world have posted videos complaining that they get stalked at the airport and people wearing Meta Glasses film them coming off of planes. This is very bad. It was Olivia Dunne who posted a video about that. She specifically called out Meta Glasses, which is not a great rep for those products to have. There’s something about that. There’s something about how intrusive the phones are and the cameras are and the idea that everything is recorded and meant to be shared, but we’ve been living in that for a long time. Our thesis there is that there’s a button on a phone and you pushed it and you kicked off this line of huge consequences because the camera exists in your pocket, like you’re saying, Greg. I’m just saying there’s something that happened recently where the very notion of the police having a network of cameras that are all connected to each other and they can do an AI-powered search has just flipped over. Now people say, “We’re going to go and cover them up with spray foam or we’re going to tear them down.” Or 404 Media, which is excellent, has done so many videos finding clips of people at town hall meetings yelling about Flock cameras and being shut down by their own elected officials. There’s something there that’s new. We’re obviously going to cover it. I’m not saying it’s so surprising we can’t engage with it. I’m saying from my worldview, the dirt that I was raised in, the thing is the same as it ever was, and that’s why it was surprising to me. We could have had this conversation about the Patriot Act. We could have had this conversation about the existence of the TSA, or any number of things, and we didn’t. We could have had this conversation about the Snowden revelations. Something flipped and to me it’s cause for investigation and also reflection. NS: That’s a good time to switch gears to talk about our most popular episode of the year. That was, of course, our sit-down with Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. This was our fifth year in a row talking to Pichai at Google I/O, and it always generates a lot of feedback. This year we had commenters write in to say, “There seems to be an underlying answer of, well, we have to do all of this even if it’s bad or irresponsible.” And that person also said, “It’s a bit odd talking to him without getting some stronger concessions from Sundar.” Another said, “This interview is great, but I think Sundar got away with not having to answer the root issue of Google Zero, which is in this example, how Conde Nast were seeing a reduced click-through rate because of AI summaries.” The question here for you, Nilay, is: Do you feel like Google is getting away with not being held responsible for what it’s doing to the web with AI? And do you think Sundar Pichai has a sense of Google’s culpability for the swath of destruction that’s being left in the wake of the AI era, and do you think he’s ever going to address or acknowledge this? Or is he still going to disagree with the premise five years from now? That’s a lot of questions. I’m going to just issue the caveat that comes up in every single mailbag episode. Sometimes it feels to me like the audience is mad that I don’t arrest the CEOs on Decoder. GO: [Laughs] We’ll arrest them over Riverside. Yeah, that’s a future we don’t have. Maybe one day. Well, I was in person with Pichai. We could have cuffed him. GO: That’s true. That’s right. Maybe one day I’ll be granted this power. I’ll be deputized by the internet police to arrest the CEOs. But all I can do is ask the questions, and it has been five years of talking to Pichai. I hope he comes back next year. It’s remarkable that he’s the one who comes and takes the heat. We ask them all, and I can’t make them show up. They have to decide they want to do it, and he decides he wants to do it. I appreciate that he shows up and takes the heat and that he’s willing to do it. Let’s use the Conde Nast example. I asked that question before a bunch of publishers started saying to other media outlets that they were going to stop letting Google index their sites. That’s the last turn. When they are so clear that it’s not worth it for their content to be stolen by AI because they’re getting no search traffic, that they just turn off the Google indexer, the Google crawler entirely. My conversation with Pichai would have been different if I had had that in my back pocket. I’m looking at these reports from various big publishers like USA Today and People Inc. And they’re all the way at, “We’re going to stop letting you index our sites because the traffic isn’t coming.” I don’t know what he would have said. I just think that answer might have been different or that the tenor of that moment might have been different. What I have been taking from Sundar Pichai these past five years, and which I agree with, is the sense that these publishers got addicted to Google and they didn’t do anything about it. The shape of that conversation or his frustration, if you ever sense the flash of frustration that I sometimes sense is, “The web is really big. Google can measure the web. They have Chrome, they have all this data about the web. And the web is getting bigger and some parts of the web are really, really vibrant.” If you listen to Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas, when she was on Decoder, she said, “We are getting more calls from our clients, more requests to make webpages and landing pages than ever before.” So some part of the web is growing and Google has that data. I think Pichai is saying, “These publishers are constantly complaining that I’m taking their business away and they did nothing else about it.” Every time I talk to a publisher, I ask them, “Why didn’t you do anything about it?” I agree with that. There’s some sense that Google bears the responsibility for making the people who built a business on their platforms successful. Every platform eventually kills every business that’s built on it. YouTube will eventually kill YouTubers. Instagram will eventually kill Instagram. If you’re a Decoder listener, you know I think this. I’m always asking creators what they’re going to do about platforms and platforms when they’re going to kill creators. The web is just a platform for Google. Do I think that Google’s getting away with not being held accountable? Sure, a little bit. But the mechanism of accountability is not letting Google index your site. I’m very curious to see if this handful of publishers who have started making noise that they’re going to de-index their sites actually go through with it and actually impose the leverage on Google that I feel like the company has been daring them to impose. Again, I don’t want to preview the Cloudflare conversation too much. There are other mechanisms and there are other ways of doing it and that was part of that conversation as well. But there’s something here where this straightforward “you were sending us traffic for free and we were giving you content for free” exchange is gone. I don’t know that you can provide accountability such that Google doesn’t just have to still compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. They have to. GO: Speaking of publishers and web traffic and all that, do you need to drop in a very nice little disclaimer about our new company and the PMX situation? Oh, this is so complicated. So through a series of what only can be described as divorces and remarriages, Vox Media has split itself in two and The Verge is now part of something called PMX Global, which is a subsidiary of PMC, which is the Penske Media Corporation. PMC is suing Google, I believe, over AI Overviews and traffic. PMX and the thing formerly known as Vox Media are all in ad tech antitrust cases against Google. I’m telling you this because it is a disclosure we should make. You can tell how much I know about them. They’re happening very far away from this newsroom, but it is true that our companies are involved in active litigation with Google about all this stuff. GO: Thank you. Just want to make sure we get that out there because you flagged this the other day for when it’s relevant and it feels like with everything you just said makes that quite relevant. Yeah, it’s in the strike zone, but it has nothing to do with us. GO: Pivoting to something different, we had a listener talk about how our AI skepticism broadly on Decoder is Western-centric and it’s pointing out how a lot of AI adoption in China is actually different and faster and more welcomed in other ways. This is from Alex Wong: “Have you considered Asia and more specifically China where, by outward appearances, AI rollout adoption and image seem to be faster, deeper, broader, and more well received than in the West? Do you find this to be true? If so, what is the difference? And if so, why the difference? And if not, what are we not seeing?” What are your Asian sources seeing and saying? Should you have more Asian sources? Is it time for Decoder and The Verge to expand beyond Silicon Valley? This is a US-based show. Nilay is based out of New York. The production team is scattered, but we have New York offices where people come and shoot stuff. Do you think there’s room for more non-Western perspectives? Can you speak about the differences that are evident between the way China is approaching AI development versus in the United States? And can we really cover such a massive transcontinental gap like that? It’s a lot. I do want to point out, as you said, we’re in New York. I actually think we need more Silicon Valley perspectives. We can be myopic. New York is all about mon