My theory is tech companies promise to deliver impossible things in order to cultivate an air of mystical capability that’s invoked to mask real-world awfulness.—Cory Doctorow
He's using Amazon's recently abandoned drone project, and the hundreds of layoffs that followed as a metaphor for the whole tech industry.
When he notes that, "Amazon’s automation claims — about drones, warehouse robots, and self-driving delivery vehicles — masks their ghastly labor abuses," he's not just talking about Amazon, he's talking about how Uber's grift is enabled by its self-driving programs, Facebook's privacy invading architecture is enabled by the promise of meaningful AI driven content moderation, and Elon Musk (Long list), etc.
It's more than just obscuring the negative effects of the their operations, it's also about obscuring the frequently fraudulent origins and practices of these businesses.
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