They Want To Ruin Your Life

It's Time To Accept That Big Tech Hates You

Credit: Magnus Hoij

Note from Matt: Got two more posts planned for this week: One free, one premium. I was a little slow publishing content this month, for reasons that are too long and too personal to share, but nonetheless, I do apologize.

This post is a relatively short one — just 2,500 words or so — and it’s about the people and the companies that are directly working to make your life harder, unhappier, and shittier. If you like what you see, or if you think what I write about is important, consider supporting What We Lost with a subscription.

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Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, is an appalling human being, and last week he illustrated why in an appearance on (where else?) the All-In podcast, where a collection of the worst people in the world interview an array of guests from the tech industry who match them, pound for pound, in sheer awfulness.

His comments left a lot to unpack, but we’ll start with perhaps the most egregiously appalling one, where he said (I’m paraphrasing) that working in tech essentially requires that you surrender any notion of work-life balance.

“If you’re going to be in tech, and you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some trade-offs,” he said.

Longer working patterns are necessary, he said, when you consider the 996 culture in China’s tech sector, where employees work from 9AM to 9PM, six days a week. Incidentally, Calacanis, who hosts the All-In podcast, previously said that 996 was “the same exact work ethic that built America!”

Not content to say that America should replicate an exploitative work culture that is deemed illegal in China (itself hardly a gleaming bastion of labour rights), and that has led to the deaths of multiple tech workers, Schmidt ended with a sly dig against those working in the public sector.

I need to be extremely blunt here. Schmidt believes that people who work in tech shouldn’t have time to spend with their families, and should work shifts that, far too often, prove fatal.

I’m not just talking about extreme, isolated cases — like the German intern for Bank of America who died from a severe epileptic seizure potentially brought on after he worked a 72-hour shift. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people dying each year — and millions more suffering life-altering health events like strokes and heart attacks.

According to the World Health Organization, long working hours led to the deaths of 745,000 people in 2016, and are responsible for one-third of “the total estimated work-related burden of disease.” Of the nearly three-quarter-of-a-million overwork-related deaths that year, 398,000 were attributed to strokes, and 347,000 were caused by heart disease.

But that’s okay though, because if we’re going to beat China in AI — whatever that means — we have to hustle.

Forget having a girlfriend, or a wife, or a boyfriend, or a husband, or a baby. Don’t worry if you already have one — working long hours is “among the best predictors of work-family conflict,” so you’ll probably get dumped or divorced after a few months or years of working these patterns.

Forget seeing your parents after work for dinner, or even having dinner at your house. You can’t have any hobbies, or friends, or really a life outside of the office and the bed in which you crash after a gruelling day of doing… something.

Your life is Google now. That’s it. You are a footsoldier in the great war of “number must go up.”

And if you die, well… That’s the price I’m willing to pay in order to build a word-guessing machine that makes stuff up all the time, contributes to the mental ill-health of its users, and doesn’t actually make any money.

Oh, and if you survive, we’re still going to outsource your job to the cheapest labor market we can find, even though we’re still wildly profitable.

Also, what does Eric mean when he says that “if we’re going to win” we need to work insane, potentially life-ending hours? What does winning mean?

Schmidt said that work-life balance is “why people work for the government,” a statement that, under the surface, bubbles with contempt.

If you’ve ever met a teacher — my mum was one before she retired! — you’ll know that the idea of lengthy summer holidays and relaxed evenings after work ends at 3PM are just that, an idea, and one that bears no resemblance to reality.

Do you think that people working as social workers, or researchers, or that administer essential government services (like retirement or disability benefits) are doing so because of “work-life balance,” or because they see themselves as part of a society and they’re willing to work in tough conditions for meager pay because they want to help that society?

This is what happens when you become so rich, you literally don’t have to talk to anyone that isn’t also fabulously wealthy, or that doesn’t work for you. You become alienated from the basic reality of the world beyond the 0.01%.

Schmidt is an outlier among the outliers, who doesn’t understand — and doesn’t need to understand — how anything works, or the value of the contributions of people doing jobs that don’t directly make him money, and even those who are contributing to his fabulous personal wealth, he doesn’t care about.

Evil. Pure evil.

Let It Burn

And it gets worse. Last October, Schmidt said that the very modest climate goals — which won’t reverse the heating of the planet, or the ecological destruction that inevitably results, but rather minimize the damage — aren’t achievable, and therefore we should just give up and focus on developing AI, because AI might actually solve climate change.

He actually said that. Here’s the direct quote:

“We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it — and the way to do it is with the ways that we’re talking about now — and yes, the needs in this area will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it and having the problem if you see my plan.”

Google, I note, saw its emissions jump by 48% between 2019 and 2024, largely because of its growing data center footprint, which contains billions of dollars of energy-hungry GPUs and TPUs.

Although Schmidt is no longer the CEO of Google, and hasn’t been since 2011, he (according to Bloomberg) owns 1% of the company — and thus, stands to benefit from the AI bubble that isn’t just propped up by countless billions of wasted dollars, but also the tonnes of carbon pumped into the atmosphere every day by the data centers powering generative AI.

Schmidt obviously doesn’t care about climate change — and I’d argue that it’s because he doesn’t have to care.

He isn’t living in Bangladesh, where rising sea levels promise to submerge swaths of the country where tens of millions of people live, and have already ruined vast swaths of previously-fertile land.

He doesn’t live in India, where rising summer temperatures promise to make several major cities uninhabitable, and are already killing people.

He isn’t a single mother living paycheck-to-paycheck, and where a rise in food prices caused by a crop failure could push her into destitution.

Eric Schmidt has a net worth — again, according to Bloomberg — of $43.5bn. Climate change doesn’t exist for him. He can absorb any increases in food prices. He isn’t likely to become a climate refugee, crossing dangerous borders (and often without paperwork) to escape rising tides or temperatures.

Eric Schmidt can ruin people’s lives — and ruin the world — because it doesn’t impact him. The consequences of his decisions, or those of the tech industry at large, are so distant, they might as well not exist.

And yes, while it’s true that Schmidt is no longer the CEO or the chairman of Google, his name and words still carry some weight, as demonstrated by the fact that we’re talking about them right now.

And just like how a conman, Sam Altman, convinced the tech industry to spend billions of dollars on a technology that doesn’t produce reliable results, let alone has demonstrated any consistent mass-market benefits, I can imagine other idiot tech leaders hearing Schmidt’s words and deciding to hire a former sweatshop foreman as their new Chief People Officer.

They Are Not Your Friends

As an industry, tech spends far too much time and effort venerating the words of the immoral and the stupid. That, however, is the subject for the next newsletter, and I want to keep things (relatively) brief because I want to make one point, and I want to make it clearly.

These people — not just Schmidt, but countless others — want to ruin your life. They arguably are content to end it, if doing so provides a financial benefit. These are not good people, and they absolutely detest you. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve done things that are directly responsible for making your life shittier and harder, and they will continue to do so until they’re stopped.

You want examples. I’m going to give you some examples.

• Mark Zuckerberg laying off tens of thousands of workers during a time when Meta is actively wasting tens of billions on AI capex, and when the tech jobs market is perhaps the worst in recent memory, and then describing those workers as “low performers” — thus making it needlessly harder for them to find employment.

  • To be clear: I do not believe that those laid off were low performers. I believe that Meta wanted to trim headcount without spooking the market — in part because Facebook and Instagram are actively decaying apps, and because doing massive job cuts amidst an AI spending spree is likely to raise some eyebrows.

• Meta’s role in facilitating the Rohyinga genocide, in part by pushing Facebook into a country that has spent its entire post-independence history engulfed in civil war, sectarian conflict, or authoritarian rule through cozy deals with local mobile carriers, and then employing just two local content moderators to manage the posts of a country with more than 55 million people.

• Microsoft has also done tonnes of layoffs in 2025 — although it didn’t use the same low-performer epithet — at a time when its market cap is amongst its highest in history, and when — even considering the profligate capex spending — it remains a highly-profitable company.

• Elon Musk selling cars that are literal death traps, accelerating the rise of fascism in the United States, and heading an organization that suspended “lifesaving” HIV/AIDS relief programs in the developing world.

• I will also never forgive Elon for what he did to Twitter — and what he did to public discourse and societal cohesion as a consequence — nor will I forgive him for trying to overthrow British democracy.

• Brian Chesky launched a product that has actively contributed to the housing affordability crisis, especially in tourist cities.

• Every scumbag involved in creating AI tools that are designed to help faceless investment firms like Blackstone take affordable family homes off the market, or to help landlords collude on pricing.

• Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, as well as everyone else involved in perpetuating the farce of generative AI, which exacts not just a financial and environmental cost, but also an opportunity cost. What could we do with the billions of dollars being spent every single quarter on AI data centers?

  • And that’s without even mentioning the fact that generative AI is an industry that couldn’t exist without wholesale theft of creative works, while simultaneously seeking to destroy the creative industries that produced those works.

• The CEO of every AI company, neocloud, and hyperscaler, who are recklessly deploying water-thirsty facilities wherever they can, often contaminating the water they (and local residents) use in the first place.

  • Incidentally, the growth of AI data centers has meant that the UK’s Environment Agency is no longer able to predict water shortages in England, in a country where it does nothing but fucking rain.

• The CEO of every AI company that offers products that can amplify existing mental health conditions, particularly psychosis, leading genuinely unwell people into doing terrible, violent things.

• Every CEO of an AI company for trying to lower our collective standards to a point where we’ll accept soulless, machine-generated slop — whether that be writing, code, video, or art.

  • These people do not understand beauty, or the creative process, or the importance of art. Everything to them is an “outcome” — a product that, if not created by a person, can be created by a machine.

• Every single person involved in the rise of the gig economy, which eroded the labor protections and conditions that our grandparents fought for in the post-war era, thus accelerating a decline that took root in the Thatcher and Reagan eras, and continued ever since.

• The CEOs and CFOs of every single tech company that engages in aggressive tax avoidance, depriving the state of the ability to help the poorest in society, and accelerating the precipitous decline in living standards that we’ve seen over the past couple of decades — particularly those in the UK that were caused first and foremost by government austerity measures.

These people are not your friends. They do not like you. At best, they’re indifferent to you, and at worst, they’ll actively work to ruin your life if it somehow benefits them.

As demonstrated by Schmidt’s comments, a “good outcome” isn’t when people are fed, and housed, and clothed, and can live with dignity. It’s when they, or their investors, make more money, or when they “win” at AI — whatever the fuck that means.

What Matters, Matters

I mentioned how Jason Calacanis spoke about how the 996 working culture was “the same exact work ethic that built America,” and thus good. He also said:

The harsh truth is America is in a war with people who want *it* more than Americans do.

We can choose to become a retirement community like Europe, with negative growth, or we can step up & compete.

What’s at stake isn’t just money, it’s democracy vs. communism.

Let’s ignore that those European “retirement communities” are democracies, and given that all of them use some form of proportional representation, are arguably more democratic than the US (or, indeed, the UK, which is one of only two countries in Europe that still use the first-past-the-post system, with the other being Belarus).

Would that really be so bad?

Would a world in which there’s no OpenAI, or Anthropic, or fucking Theranos be so bad if it also meant that people have paid time off, universal healthcare, state-subsidized daycare for infants, safe and high-quality schools, and a social safety net that — even when as threadbare and torn as that in the UK — exists to stop the weakest amongst us from falling into utter destitution.

Would that be so bad, Jason? Eric? I’m talking to you.

When you talk to Americans — particularly those in Silicon Valley — about the virtues of the European system, it usually boils down to questions of where Europe’s big companies are, and why the Bay Area is the incubator of the tech industry. The unspoken implication is that policies within Europe are directly responsible for preventing the emergence of massive, capital-hungry businesses like OpenAI.

That may be true! To which, my response is always: “... and?”

Do we want a tech industry, if that tech industry actively seeks to make people live shittier lives by poisoning their water or their media, or by raising the cost of housing, or by lobbying to change labor laws to allow for the kinds of conditions that — I repeat myself — killed nearly 750,000 people in 2016?

Do we want to build a tech industry that benefits from the collective inputs of society — the schools and roads and universities that taxpayers fund — while also not actually contributing anything towards them?

Do we want a tech industry that venerates actual anti-human sociopaths like Eric Schmidt, or shameless hucksters like Sam Altman?

No thanks. I’ll keep my universal healthcare and my retirement community state, if it’s all the same to you.

Now, where did I put my Werthers Original?

Footnotes:

• As always, if you liked this, consider signing up for a premium subscription. You get 2-3 extra posts a month, and you also help keep this newsletter running.

• As always, you can reach out to me via email (me@matthewhughes.co.uk) or Bluesky.

• Next newsletter will be another free one, and I’m aiming to get it out tomorrow. It’s about the language used by tech CEOs to mask their awful behaviors and motivations, and how to fight back.