Sergey Brin. You probably know the guy as the co-founder of Google and also part-time Big Tech bro. The man has re-emerged from his billionaire nuclear bunker to issue a God-like decree. It reads like a desperate emperor who is trying to keep his empire together with sheer willpower and the sweat of his overworked engineers (read: slaves).
Brin’s message to his workforce. . .
Work harder. Sixty-hour weeks are the “sweet spot,” but hey, feel free to burn yourself out beyond that.
Work longer. Remote work is a thing of the past. You will be in the office every weekday — no exceptions.
Speed at all costs. If a process is slowing you down, cut it — even if that process exists for a reason, like, say, making sure your AI doesn’t accidentally break reality.
Forget safety. Google has been “building nanny products” for too long. The future of AI belongs to those who let it run free.
And for the love of God, get back to the office so he can see you suffer in real-time.
Well, congratulations.
You now work in a freaking monastery but you’re not worshipping an higher power. Your devotion is to a tech bro that measures you against the number of daily pilgrimages you make to the office and how unwavering your commitment is to “turbocharging efforts”, whatever that frigging means.
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Zucky implements Stalinism
Over at Meta, Zucky’s army has a slightly different strategy. Their CTO, Andrew Bosworth is running things with the charm of an executioner.
And he is making it crystal clear:
If you leak anything to the outside world, you’re done.
No trial.
No nuance.
No corporate “learning moment”.
You’re going straight to the Meta Gulag.
More than twenty employees have already been fed into the wood chipper. And more will follow. There are ongoing investigations.
People are being purged.
Meta builds paranoia. They live it. And now, they’re turning it inward.
Sounds to me like a form of corporate Stalinism if you ask me.
But hey, you’re talking to a tech-Marxist.
But know that this isn’t about a couple of tech giants throwing a tantrum. This is a shift. A total, unapologetic abandonment of the ideals that they pretended to stand for.
Google, once smiled and whispered Don’t Be Evil, is now smashing the accelerator on AI, ethics be damned.
Meta, once the self-proclaimed champion of “connection” and “transparency”, has finally embraced its true evil nature, a corporate panopticon that survives by controlling every single thing its employees do, say, or even think.
They aren’t trying to shape the future anymore. They’re just trying to survive in it. And that’s where things get very, very dangerous.
Welcome to the era of corporate human sacrifice
Brin’s grand plan to save Google AI is to grind employees into dust and hope innovation leaks out of their broken bodies.
Forget moonshot ideas.
Das war einmal (German)
Forget groundbreaking breakthroughs.
No, no, no.
The only way to get ahead, according to one of the richest men alive, is to stretch the workweek until it snaps, throw out anything that slows them down, and lock engineers in an office so they can properly marinate in their own excrement.
Sixty-hour weeks?
That is apparently the sweet spot of Big Tech.
And how about Remote work?
Hell no.
Brin demands physical proximity. He wants butts in seats, code being typed on-site, and human misery fully visible under the flickering glow of fluorescent lights.
Too many safety protocols?
Rip them out.
If AI systems accidentally generate genocidal propaganda, well… move fast and apologize later.
This isn’t the playbook of a visionary. This is corporate panic in a cheap disguise of “bold leadership.”
And the best part is the sheer hypocrisy.
Brin isn’t pulling sixty-hour weeks himself.
He isn’t skipping vacations.
He’s probably sending these memos from the deck of his superyacht while his assistant holds an umbrella over his billionaire bald forehead.
But his employees? They can burn themselves alive, because, hey, that’s the cost of staying competitive, right.
And the worst part is that it won’t even work.
Studies have repeatedly shown that after 50 hours a week, people get stupider. Creativity crashes. Mistakes pile up. Productivity nosedives. But none of that matters to Brin, because what he is selling to his slaves isn’t logic. It is a fantasy. A fantasy where it’s still 1999, and Google is still a scrappy startup, and engineers are sleeping under their desks, fueled by stock options.
But now the stock is already Brin’s, and the people grinding, are just trying to keep their jobs.
Meta’s paranoia has officially hit surreal levels
I am not talking about corporate espionage here, and nor I am talking about rogue employees who are feeding confidential data to the competition.
Nah.
Nonnothat.
Riley Berton, one of many Meta’s employees, was telling his wife about a workplace update he got. That’s it.
He wasn’t leaking it to the press, not forwarding it to investors, just sharing a stressful moment with the person he presumably sees every day.
And for that, Meta decided to fire the guy
This isn’t an isolated case.
Hundreds of Meta employees have faced the same fate, according to Berton, who got fired for sharing workplace-related stress with their partners. Some didn’t even send messages. They simply copied an internal post into their personal notes app, and because Apple Notes syncs to iCloud, that was enough to trigger Meta’s corporate inquisition.
The company has gone full dystop—no, scratch that, full lunatic dictatorship, where merely writing something down is an offense worthy of termination.
But the hardest kick in the plums for the man was the darn timing of it all.
Berton’s termination just so happened to land the day before he was due to receive a massive performance bonus.
A pure coincidence, of course.
Uh-huh.
That are truly shady practices that Meta is using, to scrub highly-rated engineers from the payroll before cutting their well-earned checks. If you’re a high-performer at Meta, your real challenge isn’t impressing your boss apparently. It is making it to bonus day without getting fired for blinking too hard.
So again, is about power and fear.
Not security.
Meta isn’t protecting trade secrets. It’s manufacturing fear, making sure employees live in constant paranoia, knowing that even the most innocent act could be twisted into a violation. A system where loyalty is enforced.
If your company is policing conversations between spouses, something has gone deeply, freaking wrong. But Meta doesn’t seem to care. They are too busy hunting their own people to realize just how evil they’ve become.
The panopticon
Google’s strategy is simple. Break people. And Meta’s is keeping them scared.
Meta’s leadership is punishing leaks and actively hunting leakers.
More than 20 people fired. More to come. They even have a dedicated team tracking internal dissents.
Andrew Bosworth put it bluntly:
“Doesn’t matter if it’s accidental. Doesn’t matter if you thought it was innocent. Doesn’t matter if you were just trying to help. We. Just. Fire. Those. People”.
Meta has given up even pretending to be a normal company.
They have become a surveillance state.
Employees aren’t workers. They are subjects, monitored, tracked, and discarded at the first sign of disloyalty.
Meta has spent years obsessing over leaks, but here we are. Reading yet another leak. Because no matter how much they tighten their grip, employees keep slipping through the cracks.
Because people don’t trust them.
People don’t leak because they hate their company. They leak because they know the truth.
And that truth is this:
Meta isn’t a place to build a career.
Meta isn’t a place to change the world.
Meta is a machine, and you are just another cog.
And the moment you stop spinning? They toss you in the trash.
Power doesn’t come from innovation, it comes from control
Tech used to be about building the future. But now, it’s about owning it.
Google isn’t trying to make the best AI.
Meta isn’t trying to build the best platform.
They’re trying to outlast, outscale, and outmuscle everyone else.
They don’t have to be good at what they do. They just have to control the game.
And what does that control look like?
For Google, turning AI into an unchecked, unsupervised wild beast.
For Meta, turning employees into a loyalty cult.
For everyone else. . . . Too bad.
Big Tech has been quietly building walls for years.
- AI requires massive compute power. Guess who owns all the cloud infrastructure?
- AI requires huge datasets. Guess who has been hoarding data for two decades?
- AI requires distribution channels. Guess who controls every major app store, ad network, and online marketplace?
If you’re not inside the walls already, you never will be.
Google and Meta aren’t playing the game anymore. They own the board.
Let me make it clear.
AI isn’t about building smart machines anymore. It’s about control.
- AI will decide who gets hired.
- AI will determine who gets loans.
- AI will shape what information is visible and what disappears into the abyss.
And the people controlling AI aren’t scientists. They aren’t visionaries.
They are monopolists.
And they don’t want to create a better world.
They want to own the one we have.
So what can YOU do about it
Fight back. Expose them. Build outside their walls.
Use Bluesky, play with Mistral, don’t pay for a subscription on an AI that lies more than 60% of the time.
Because this isn’t just a battle for AI.
It’s a battle for who gets to decide the future.
And if we don’t act, that future belongs to them.
Signing off from Big Tech.
Marco.
Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Stick around if you like what I write. If not, don’t worry, the AI already already knows you were here.
To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
- ‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight | LinkedIn
- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
- Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
- One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that? | LinkedIn
- The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
- People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
- The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
- Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
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