Yesterday was my last day working as a tech journalist1. I could go on and on about the daily grind of press releases, the misery of the post-pandemic office life, the trap of equating your identity with your profession, the frustration of not being able to do your job properly, the light at the end of the burnout tunnel and the foibles of toxic management. But honestly? None of that matters, because the position i was hired for doesn’t exist anymore. Tech journalism is dead.
Tech journalism is dead because tech is dying. I don’t subscribe to the lazy “tech has become boring” narrative. Tech isn’t boring, not when atom-thin transistors are on the horizon, when battery prices are plummeting while their density skyrockets, when natural language processing is basically solved, when software-defined vaccines are saving the world, when holographic displays are becoming a reality… We’re living in the future! No, tech is infuriating, because so much of its potential is wasted to make a quick buck.
Late capitalism has devolved into a quasi-feudal system that is still marginally regulated by the state, but is effectively controlled by a handful of state-like corporations that dictate every aspect of our daily lives, the infamous “Big Tech”. It has become all but impossible to function in society without a near-permanent internet connection, a smartphone with an active SIM, and a payment card from one of the big three processing organizations. (Believe me, i’ve tried.) A tool is meant to be shaped by your hand, but in this instance, we’re the tool that’s being shaped.
We’ve got wildly efficient chips at our fingertips, but we squander their power to render “glassy” anti-user interfaces. We could use machine learning to better understand the world around us, but we’d rather use it to deceive, cheat and kill. We have every technology we need to revitalize our ailing democracies, but we’ve let a few tech bros destroy them with their “social” networks.
It gets worse. Technology used to be about solving old problems with new solutions. Now Big Tech is all about creating new – and bigger – problems. The real tragedy? We mistake novelty for innovation, which makes us buy shiny new toys, even though they don’t solve any problems we actually have. We can’t do some of the things we used to be able to do, we have to pay for stuff that used to be (and should be) free, and we can’t even fix our devices when they inevitably break.
Don’t call it “enshittification” — that misses the point entirely. The system works precisely because the individual parts aren’t shitty at all. You desperately want that folding phone. You actually can’t live without that smartwatch. You absolutely need those noise-cancelling earbuds. You might even drool over that futuristic augmented reality headset. But the more you buy, the more you’ll have to buy from the same company. You might call it “lock-in” or “walled garden”, but we French have a far better expression for that. This is a golden jail.
Tech journalism is dead because journalism is dying. You might have read that the so-called artificial “intelligence” was to blame, but it’s nothing more than the scapegoat du jour. The main reason – the only reason – is the inability of my former peers to tell truth to power. Some of them are as thick as two short planks and genuinely can’t see what’s wrong with the world. Most of them are so overworked and underpaid that they can’t be arsed to fact-check press releases and official statements2. A vanishingly small number of them are too clever for their own good: they know to pick their battles but wrongly think that the fight with Big Tech is already lost.
As always, there are exceptions that prove the rule. A few publications are absolutely killing it, such as 404 Media, Aftermath and Rest of World. The fact that they’re reader-supported3 is no coincidence. Who feeds you is who you answer to, and their readers aren’t paying for thinly veiled ads. The Verge is the perfect example of what happens when talented journalists try to work within our broken system—flashes of brilliance drowning in a sea of commercial sludge. (I’m a happy subscriber.)
Journalism has always been subsidized by ancillary activities such as classifieds, printing and distribution services, events, or even games. But that’s the thing: they were directly related to the production of newspapers4. Banner ads and affiliate links aren’t, especially not for smaller outlets, which live in fear of pissing off the companies they’re supposed to report on. Many of them sold themselves to larger media conglomerates, and they now live in fear… of their parent company’s lawyers.
When you’re playing the numbers game, journalists are a nuisance. What you want are “content writers”: they look like journalists, they talk like journalists, but they’re far more subservient. They don’t care to offer any criticism of Big Tech’s actions or to help their readers understand how technology shapes the world. They’re just here to collect their cut of their master’s ad revenue. In a way, tech journalism has become a money-laundering operation.
This is soul-crushing and doesn’t interest me in the slightest. The niche that i carved out for myself has all but disappeared — the industry has abandoned any pretence of stylistic ambition in favour of SEO-optimized LLM-driven dreck. Good writing is actually a hindrance when your goal is to rank high in search results and maximize ad revenue. I can’t work for a company, hell, an entire industry, that rewards mediocrity and thrives in deceitfulness. After sixteen years, i’m out.
What’s next? I have no idea, but i want to create things that make the world a bit more beautiful. I won’t win a Pulitzer, won’t become a billionaire, won’t be famous, but i’ll be proud of what i do. For the first time in years, i fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and slept the sleep of the brave. Not feeling like a fraud is wonderful. Onward and upward!
- You should never say “never”, but… ↩︎
- It happens to the best of us. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. ↩︎
- And worker-owned/non-profit, which goes a long way into building a sustainable yet enjoyable company. ↩︎
- And still are for mainstream media. My local newspaper, for example, makes money primarily by organizing events and offering printing services. ↩︎