“Josh, I have some terrible news and I wanted to let you know first,” my friend and boss, Jack Buckby, said on July 25th.
The content production company he founded, Lancashire Hudson, eventually lost its battle with bots.
You can no longer keep your head down and operate quietly as a conservative in the media world: the left and its increasingly powerful digital golems will find you and kill you.
Our cash-strapped clients were increasingly turning to AI for the daily news, marketing and other copy they needed for their ad-supported websites and newsletters. This writing wasn’t as effective, but it was a lot cheaper.
Overnight, Jack and I lost our jobs and could not pay our bills, and so did 30 hard-working and talented writers and editors at our company.
Future confusion
We often think of AI as a threat to manual labor and low-level service jobs, but in fact, AI is also targeting creative people like us.
This wasn’t unexpected: The immediate benefits of automation are abundantly clear, especially when companies are struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible and easy,” says Jack.[Even if] That’s not necessarily a good thing.”
That being said, this temporary solution could end up hurting the brand in the long run.
“For businesses that want to maintain good relationships with their audiences and customers, that’s not the answer,” says Jack.
“Ask yourself: how would you feel if you tried to call a company and a robot greeted you? If you read an article in the newspaper and were told it was generated by AI, would you still feel compelled to read it? No. The honest answer is no. If your readers and customers are human, then your content should be human too.”
It is this vision that kept Jack fighting until he could no longer deny the economic reality.
The monster they created
While the entire media industry is feeling the pinch, businesses that do not align with mainstream progressive views have been particularly hard hit, including Lancashire Hudson’s customers.
“We once had a client’s website completely taken down when Google blocked traffic from their news search engine after they slightly criticised the vaccination rollout. They hadn’t posted anything against vaccines, but they were against mandates – and that wasn’t a view shared by most of their staff. It was just one editorial. And the site was taken down,” Jack says.
It was this censorship by big tech companies that ultimately led to Lancashire Hudson’s downfall.
Jack has been there before. If you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because he was once the enfant terrible of the British far right.
Jack, a young man from a working-class town in the north of England, joined an extreme group of angry and disaffected young people. They had reason to be angry: the remaining high-paying jobs were something they had to compete for with foreigners and “asylum seekers”. These young British men were told they were morally inferior because they were white, British and blue-collar.
It was then that Jack discovered that racism, anti-Semitism, and violence were swirling just beneath the surface of his new “community.” As he grew older, he became more insecure and reverted to more traditional conservative positions.
This experience led him to realise that the social and economic punishment that the left has inflicted relentlessly on conservatives and workers is precisely what creates the “far-right extremists” that the left hates, as he explains in his book. “A monster of his own making”
Hiring the Unemployable
Jack built Lancashire Hudson specifically to provide work for people who had difficulty finding work.
His employees included Claire, a retired teacher living in the Midwest who supplemented her modest income by writing daily while caring for her husband and disabled sister, and Denise, a disabled, housebound but fast, talented writer who could churn out a perfect manuscript in 15 minutes. Working with Jack was the first time in years that she’d made her own way off welfare.
Jack also works with people who have been shut out of the job market for ideological reasons – Anton, for example, has a journalism degree but can’t find work in the media because he is known to publicly express conservative views, and Patricia is relying on her job at Lancashire Hudson after being forced out of her managerial role at a UK university after 10 years for not being socially appropriate enough.
And then there’s me. At the end of 2022, I was forced out of my 20-year career as the head of a consumer protection nonprofit, in an internal coup that saw me labelled a racist, bigot, misogynist and transphobe for my personal political views outside of work. My job as an editor at the Lancashire Hudson kept me afloat.
The Left’s Digital Golem
In a way, losing these jobs is indirectly a second cancellation. You can no longer keep your head down and work quietly as a conservative in the media industry. The left and its increasingly powerful digital golems will find you and terminate you. Take our word for it.
We are watching an entire industry eat itself. The problem isn’t just that humans are being pushed out of the field. If you think the news is biased to the left right now, how much worse is it when you remember that AI models are trained on biased, left-wing, partisan content coming from traditional media?
Jack says:
“When Google and other big tech companies restrict visibility and traffic to companies they don’t agree with, they destroy livelihoods. When they restrict advertising revenue, they’re saying it’s OK to have one opinion, but not another. Ultimately, many companies will be forced to take huge cuts to survive, and in some cases, that means replacing workers with AI. Companies that comply may not have to. That’s not good for unifying the country, and it’s not good for our political discourse.”
As we regroup and find ways to work again, we all feel blindsided by this new world of increasing digital control and digitally created “content.”
I myself cannot tell you how to navigate this world as you learn, but I hope you will heed my warning. Your job, your career, including that of you fellow “creatives”, is not safe. If you are conservative, your number will be cancelled sooner than others. Be prepared.
In the meantime, Jack and I are looking for companies looking for quality content that’s produced, directed, and quality checked by real humans with real beliefs. All of us who value excellence, truth, and accountability that serves the human world had better find each other soon.
