This reads like an avocado toast critique. Businesses which respect their staff, particularly junior staff, are few and far in between. Why should anyone not “silently quit” when the attitude of their employer is to extract as much value for the lowest cost before a round of layoffs?

>> "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage"

This is .. not quiet, but extremely noisy, quitting of the bargain by the management/authority class.

This is how we get the low trust dystopia where all the remaining human workers have to put up with a camera watching them at all times (backed by AI, of course) doing Taylorism on their eye movements.

I believe that most people naturally want to work, to contribute and build in groups. They want to do it and should expect to do it with reasonable boundaries and benefits for their labor. Silent quitting is a response to ever increasingly extractive work relationships for fewer and fewer benefits and increasingly irrationally low levels of compensation.

Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?

OTOOOH its very naive to think that "quitting social media" is the solution.

The earth is rotting from us leeching from it, there is no future for these juniors, and we're on the verge of more war and destruction, fascism, et cetera.

There is nothing for them to build towards, other than the typical House, wife and kids, which will be in the same boat.

Knowing this, if someone comes up to you and says "yeah, well, you should just accept it", obviously people are not going to support this

I think Silent Quitting is some chattering class concoction feels-wrapping the observation that most workers have the incentive to work as little as possible.[1] Just like employers have the incentive squeeze as much productivity from their commodities (labor).

What was the first instinct of the venerable business leaders (spoken a bit too publicly)? Great, we can get rid of labor. Do they need any excuse or reason beyond maximizing profit? They don’t. It’s just incentives.

[1] And some workers can genuinely benefit from doing more than that, even as wage workers. “Some people have jobs; others have careers” as Chris Rock paraphrasedly said.

I agree - but it's too easy to just 'call Luddism', and use the insult to not engage with all of the shared issues that make the comparison apt. Issues like:

- no serious plan for mass unemployment

- the risk of an underemployed middle class leading to violent outcomes as it has in the past

- (many) humans wanting to be useful, to have purpose in life through that

- concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of people, from a couple of countries making up 20% of the world population

Luddism came from a place of genuine suffering and fear, which was not misplaced - the industrial revolution lead to amazing new jobs, but not for the Luddites themselves. With AI it's not even clear if those new jobs will come - it seems like the goal is a world where humans will not need to worry about thinking anymore.

So is wanting this to slow down really such a ridiculous notion?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone who is brave enough to deserve to be called a (Neo) Luddite.

People that have negative opinions about technological progress at least have the will to form an opinion backed by arguments. Contrast that with the faith order of dismissing negative opinions simply because they are negative about tech. Are technologist tech professionals? Or tech priests? (No wait, priests have to have a theological education where they are taught to make arguments. So can’t be that either.)