Fire In The Hole

There's a decent amount of Internet schadenfreude being aimed at Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke after a podcast interview in which he noted that while generative automation allows employees to create more, faster, when they don't then check that work, it becomes "slop grenades" (perhaps more commonly known as "workslop") lobbed at other employees.

According to a Business Insider article about the interview, "Lütke said AI is most valuable when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise."

Okay, fair enough, but in the all-hands memo that was reported, he said that "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify."

That's significantly different from "consider your tasks, and where generative automation can make you clearer or more concise, use it." The memo seemed to presuppose that humans simply couldn't match the clarity and conciseness of an LLM. And if people are expected to reflexively turn to generative automation to do work, and are being graded on being seen to do so the "slop grenades" are a feature, not a bug.

In the all-hands memo, it's noted that: "What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by... using it a lot." Well, this is what everyone "using it a lot" looks like.

The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.

From the memo that I saw reported, the message seemed to be "use the tools all the time and let the feedback mechanisms sort it out." There's no call for employees to evaluate their outputs themselves before sending them. Now, I'm going to admit that I don't know if I've seen the memo as it was sent to Shopify employees... screenshots purporting to be the message in question were shared to LinkedIn, and that's what I read.

In any event, it seems to me that Mr. Lütke is running into something that I remember encountering in my professional career... people don't do what someone tells them... they do what they hear. And a hallmark of good communication is narrowing the gap between those two things as much as can be managed. While Mr. Lütke may have intended for Shopify employees to be careful to ensure that their use of generative automation didn't simply create more work for people, when employees read that "In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that much just to re-qualify. [...] That sounds daunting, but given the nature if the tools, this doesn't even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore," their focus is going to be on meeting that benchmark, especially given that the memo also noted that "We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire."

Of course Shopify didn't intend for people to use generative automation willy-nilly and then simply lob the raw outputs over the wall to their colleagues. But Mr. Lütke's memo didn't make an expectation that employees would check those outputs to see if they actually provided value clear to anyone. And that's where the miss occurred. Employees internalized the implicit assumption that all automation was good automation, and left it to feedback from others to inform them if they were on the right track. But the sheer volume of material that an LLM can put out in short timeframes can make evaluating all of it difficult, especially for someone who is receiving work items from a number of people.

Perhaps the real lesson from this is that CEOs are people, too, and they're just as susceptible to believing that their words are accurate carriers of their intent as anyone else. And of finding out the hard way that they're mistaken.

Justification

There is a saying, and I have no idea where it first originated, that says: "There is no wrong way to do the right thing." There are a few different ways, it seems, in which people mean this, but it still tends to sound to me as just a different way of saying: "When the end is lawful, the means are also lawful,"* or, more prosaically, "The ends justifies the means."  My own expression of this is commonly "Right makes right," as in "The correctness of my intentions justifies the actions I take in bringing them about."

While this strikes me as a rather crude statement of consequentialist ethics, the problem, as I encounter it in the real world, is not the consequentialism of it, for all that there may be many valid criticisms of consequentialism. It is, instead, the fact that it's commonly a post hoc rationale, deployed as a shield against criticism of an action.

And this may be the fundamental problem. The understanding that there is no wrong way to do the right thing justifies pretty much anything that can be explained as being in the service of a desirable end. Which, on the one hand, makes a certain amount of sense; it's merely the understanding that it makes sense to do what needs to be done to reach appropriate ends. But on the other hand, it has the same problem that many questions of morality and ethics do... whose standards are things intended to be working toward?

Take, for example, President Trump's push to remove millions of immigrants from the United States. The alleged goal of all of this is to create more jobs for American citizens. Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea that it seems unlikely that this goal will actually be attained (and that there are also political goals in play), if that's all that one is interested in, then how the program actually works on the ground doesn't matter. Any amount of suffering and misery that may be caused will be more than counterbalanced if it leads to a net gain in employment for citizens.

And for people who are unemployed or underemployed, they may feel themselves straited enough that other concerns are luxuries that they simply cannot afford at the moment. And maybe that's the bigger problem; "There is no wrong way to do the right thing" tends to show up when someone i really needs "the right thing" to happen, but isn't going to bear the costs of a "wrong way" of bringing it about.

* "Cum finis set licit, etiam media sunt licita." Hermann Busenbaum, Jesuit Theologian.

Payoff

As I see it, the thing about this most recent promise of a "Trump Dividend" is that it wouldn't be necessary if the economy of the United States was working for people in a way that they want it to. If unemployment was low, if median wages were rising and inflation was being kept in check, people would be happy enough with the Trump Administration that (likely) empty promises of cash payouts (which are best a one-time fix, and come with consequences for both inflation and the federal budget) wouldn't be needed. It's a quick fix for an electoral problem that Republicans are facing, intended to paper over the fact that the longer-term economic problems that people want solved aren't being solved.

And there are a number of reasons for this. One of them being that large scale economic dysfunction isn't simple to correct. Things work they way they do because of the incentives that they're responding to, and those incentives have often been built up over years. Another reason is that people's expectations don't have to be realistic. And just because an expectation is unrealistic doesn't mean that someone won't run for office on a promise of fulfilling it.

But perhaps the most important reason is that having things actually working well, and having people feel that things are working well, while they are different goals, aren't easily distinguishable by the general public, more or less by definition. And this incentivizes politicians to focus on public sentiment, because, in the end, that's actually what they're being judged on.

President Trump's primary political skill lies in convincing people that their perceptions are accurate; at least in the sense that if they feel good about the economy, it's because the economy is actually doing well. Likewise, when people have a sense that levels of immigration or the trade deficit are creating problems for them, the President affirms them in that, and assures them that their perceptions are, in fact, accurate.

This skill is not, however, infallible. Because when people come to the conclusion that the problem resides in the White House, the conviction that they're correct in their perceptions becomes a liability. Like President Biden before him, President Trump has attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince people that when their lived experience doesn't line up with positive economic indicators, it's the indicators (at least when he takes credit for them) that are correct.

Which brings us to the idea of a "Trump Dividend." The President has promised dividends before; like the $2,000 tariff dividend or the DOGE Dividend, which, like this current promise, was set at $5,000. Neither of these have materialized, but perhaps more importantly, the billions of dollars of government savings/revenue that would have paid for them never materialized, either.

I'd like to say that the President underestimated the complexity and time that would be needed to bring about what was promised, but that presupposes that the President really engaged on the topic, and I'm dubious about that. And this latest pledge of a dividend seems to be more of the same.  

One Score and Five

Today is September 11th, 2026... twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, it's been a day where the news media has been looking back at the events, and stories of people who were there, or otherwise affected by the event. There is, I think, something of a temptation to make that a very expansive set, but while it may be safe to say that the population of the United States as a whole saw some impacts from the al-Qaeda attacks, I don't think that it's accurate to say that each of us, as individuals, were affected.

Perhaps because I was sleep-deprived that morning, but still needed to drive to work, it wasn't something that I could pay very much attention to when I was first hearing about it. News reports were preliminary, and so while I made the drive from Seattle to the office, things would change, but I was busy navigating the expressway.

As the full picture started to become clear, terrorism took on a new urgency in the lives of a lot of people I knew (and very many more that I didn't know). For me, though, it was simply another thing to be added to the series of vague background threats that populated my life. I was still in my early thirties, and so, statistically speaking, gun violence was still far and away the most likely thing I would have had to worry about. And while any number of people advocated for moving (Islamic) terrorism into that top spot, I was never really moved by any of it. I think that's because the threat of terrorism made a lot of people feel unsafe in a way they hadn't before, that wasn't true for me; I was already aware that an unseen clock was ticking down somewhere; it perhaps ticking slightly faster than before wasn't a cause for alarm.

Now, it's true that the new airport security measures created changes for everyone who flew, and I did get on a plane from time to time (in fact, I went on a vacation in early 2002), but it didn't take much to realize that rather than solving the problem, it just shifted it. Coming back from London in 2004, Heathrow airport struck me as a dream target for a bomber; they wouldn't have needed to get a bomb onto a plane, there was a perfectly good mass of people in the run-up to the security checkpoints, similar to what I encountered at Chicago O'Hare in 2023. The infrastructure of flying was protected, but the actual fliers themselves were exposed until they reached that secure infrastructure.

While I can be something of a suspicious person, I never harbored enough of a mistrust of government to buy into the whole Trutherism movement that sprang up around the event, even if some of the literature was moderately entertaining. I might not have a high opinion of the Powers That Be, but I tend to consider them more ineffectual than malicious. And so that was another side effect of the attacks in which I found myself an observer, rather than a participant.

In the end, while I can remember what I was doing when I heard the news, that's mainly because it happened to coincide with a change in my daily routine prescribed by my doctor. Being on the other side of the continent from the attack places a lot of literal distance between me and the events. I do think that I have more interest in how people in other parts of the world see the United States. I recall spending a fair amount of time on red, double-decker, busses explaining how Americans tend to see the world. And while the initial idea for this weblog predates the attacks, it was having conversations that entailed me laying out aspects of the United States for people not native to it that finally convinced me to launch it.

I understand that I'm a different person now than I was then, but that's mostly because it was more than two decades ago, and very little of thirty-something me has survived the intervening years. And now I live in a world in which many of the people I interact with were too young for it to be significant in their lives; that honor belongs to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic. So it seems like a big splash in a fast-flowing river; an event when it happened, but with little in the way of visible ripples this far downstream.

Islands

LinkedIn differs slightly from other social media sites due to its general focus on networking (although one might say that nowadays, it's primarily about social selling and general self-promotion). A side effect of this is that people, at least those who aren't hoping to defraud someone, tend to use their real names.

This leads to an interesting facet of the site; when people complain about businesses, they tend not to name the business they're referring to. Since their comments can be attributed to them by potential employers who peruse their profiles, there is a particular style of "LinkedIn speak" that people tend to use. This is most visible when people are discussing their own layoffs, but it appears when other topics are talked about as well. When people address the topic directly, the rationale tends to be the same... they don't want to risk being thought of as a bad hire of one sort or another. And so they don't name names.

And this makes sense. What I'm not sure makes sense is the broader response to this from the overall LinkedIn community. Or, for that matter, the public at large.

People fear burning bridges with potential future employers. And this frees up businesses from having to fear burning bridges with prospective (and current) customers and employees. Given that businesses don't have to care what people think of them (because they won't be named) they can act as they choose. They can suddenly throw people out of their jobs, they can treat employment candidates poorly and they can even mistreat their customers. Because even if someone takes to LinkedIn to decry this behavior, the company won't be named.

Especially ironic in this sense are the posts that purport to be warnings to businesses of the potential reputational damage of bad behavior when they detail the behavior, but don't name the business that perpetrated it. After all, how can a businesses reputation be damaged when no-one is willing to say that they did it?

The perception of powerlessness begets powerlessness. People feel that businesses can punish them with impunity, and this prompts them to keep their heads down, and not do anything that might draw negative attention to themselves; even when they believe that a business has behaved badly. This allows businesses to retaliate with impunity, because even if people were inclined to hold them accountable, they often don't know who the bad actor is. People see the overall lack of consequences, and the cycle continues.

One of the things that I tend to harp on is the idea that the United States is not a unified polity. Big picture, it's made up of a number of different ethnic and racial groups, most of whom feel that they have their own interests that are independent of (if not at odds with) those of the society at large. Drilling down, the overall individualism of American society creates circumstances where people look out for themselves first (even at the expense of others) because they are convinced that everyone else will do the same. And so it takes some pretty remarkable events to inspire people to collective action, and even that unity tends to be tenuous and short-lived. This prompts a feeling of isolation and powerlessness, which can often become a reality of isolation and powerlessness.