Canceled AGAIN
Episode 182
Once again, I’ve lost my paid job along with my boss and 30 other writers. Why? Digital cancellation. Don’t miss this episode—Jack Buckby explains how AI and leftist-controlled media “watchdogs” are targeting conservative news producers with success. As of Friday, we’re all out of work. Watch to find out why.
-Josh's boss Jack Buckby joins the show to reveal how digital cancel culture just cost us our jobs (yes, again, recently). We talk about how online news content works, and how leftist censors and AI are targeting conservative news producers.
-The Kamalapalooza is in full swing as the White House and the media try to convince us how much we love the most unpopular vice president in American history.
-Narcissistic control tightens on all of us every day. Pro-Hamas protestors are vandalizing U.S. historical monuments in Washington, DC, and harassing the Israeli delegation to Congress by pouring maggots and worms on their hotel dining tables and burning Netanyahu in effigy.
May I suggest that you move sideways into a different line of work? It turns out that technical writing is going to be much less affected by AI than other types of writing, because it concerns novel content.
I've been in tech writing since 1999. I was first hired by a tech-writing firm that believed (correctly) that it's easier to teach technology to writers than teach writing to techs. I learned a truckload about computer networking protocols by playing around with our mock setup, and then after that I went to an actual software company where I was right there with the software devs -- I could walk over to their cubes and ask what they were doing. Most of us tech writers studied the Humanities in college -- not tech -- so it's not like you need to know how to code in Python to get one of these jobs.
There's no way to turn an AI loose on a code base and have it come up with end-user instructions. It can catalog the functionality for the devs, but not for the users. What I'm currently doing involves explaining an extremely complicated system to software devs who must integrate with it. All of the knowledge of how to do that is in people's heads, so what I'm writing can't be generated by an AI.
I know you have the intellectual chops to deal with learning the technology. (It's all just a Rube Goldberg contraption, with a lot if if/then/else statements.) If there were an opening at my company, I'd invite you on over.
I would advise only that you stick with companies that didn't originate in Silicon Valley, for obvious reasons. (I work for a company that originated locally, then was bought by an SV company, but we've still got enough independence that the culture isn't overly woke.)
The fact that tech writing usually involves writing about net-new things means that it's not going to be clobbered by AI anytime soon. The money's decent, it's fun working with software devs, and it's fun being involved at the cutting edge of things.
Obamala. It’s surreal that this is even possible.