Edward Ongweso Jr.

Edward Ongweso Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer covering the intersection of technology, finance, and labor. A former staff writer at Motherboard, Vice’s technology desk, he has written for The Nation, Bloomberg, and his own newsletter The Tech Bubble, and co-hosts the podcast This Machine Kills, which describes itself as agitprop against innovation and capital.

The obscurant function of ‘AI’

Ongweso’s central argument is that “artificial intelligence” is as much a marketing frame as a technology — a phrase that obscures the low-paid data labor, the concentration of capital, and the labor-displacement agenda underneath. He is especially critical of what he calls the industry’s use of existential fear as a sales tactic: warnings about all-powerful future AI, he argues, function to make today’s unprofitable products seem indispensable and to lock in enterprise customers.

His analysis draws on political economy more than product reviews, situating the AI boom within a longer history of Silicon Valley bubbles and venture-capital incentives. Critics from the industry counter that the enterprise adoption he distrusts reflects genuine demand, and that his structural read leaves little room for the real, if uneven, gains users report.