Ethan Marcotte

@ethanmarcotte.com

10537 Followers 424 Following

designer, writer, roommate to two kittens. here’s my website: https://ethanmarcotte.com/ I think you deserve a union, and I wrote a book about that: https://youdeserveatechunion.com/ hi friend

“ I’m far less interested in moralizing about the use of “AI” tools than in considering their use symptomatically. What desire lines or unmet needs can we perceive by critically observing the ways people make use of these tools?”
Screenshot of a tweet from username @getfiscal says, “ me: 'So, Karl Marx, that's basically what the world is like in 2018. What's your analysis of the situation? Is capitalism still doomed?' Karl Marx: 'Holy shit, you went to the moon?' me: 'Does communism still have a future?' Karl Marx: 'The moon in the fucking sky?'”
Digitally altered copy of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, but the title has been clumsily replaced with the words “Das Goose”.
Screenshot of the phrase “Become the weird space wizard you want to see airbrushed on the side of a van” overlaid atop a cosmic, star-filled background.
Photograph of a rainbow partially eclipsed by a massive, dark tornado. Caption reads “YOU CAN BE BOTH.”
Screenshot of the Accessibility/Motion preferences on my phone. Reduce Motion is turned off, Show Vehicle Motion Cues is off, and Dim Flashing Lights is off. Auto-Play Animated Images, Auto-Play Video Previews, and Auto-Play Message Effects are all set to on.
Screenshot of a post from a user named Wraith, which says, “Goblin adventurer whose catchphrase is ’no goblemo’”
Screenshot of a massive overlay that says, “Get the app to keep using Reddit. Search better, personalize your feed, and never miss an update on your favorite communities. Get the Reddit App.” This overlay popped up over the bottom of Reddit while I was reading in my phone browser, preventing me from scrolling any further.
A Star Trek shuttlecraft flies through a cloudy sky. Caption reads, “(screaming)”.
A gray-and-white cat named Olive stands proudly on an open laptop’s keyboard, having just locked the screen with her feet.
Screenshot of the word “precarity” underlined by macOS as a misspelled word, which it isn’t, and with the word “precocity” suggested as a possible replacement.
Animated GIF of an adult in 80s-style clothing spraying something all over a child who has their hands covering their face. The adult is labeled “me,” the child is labeled “this.”
Photograph of the Charles River on a sunny day, winding its way past a tree-lined park on its way to the ocean. The Zacom bridge is in the background.
A gray-and-white kitten named Olive sits loaf-style on my open laptop’s keyboard.
A sleeping gray-and-white kitten has a green blanket pulled up over them. Some headphones have been placed over their ears, and an audio player of some sort has been placed next to one of the kitten’s front paws. Caption reads, “it can be friday again if we all agree”.
Screenshot of a Twitch chat, with two messages from user “thatbeep” that read: “chat is that good” and “time to lock in”
A series of black letters, each on a yellow square, styled to look like a Waffle House logo. The letters spell out “THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR”.
Detail from a poorly-rendered, AI-generated “illustration,” showing two spools of wire connected to each other and also to a nearby mop handle.
Screenshot of a social media post by rob elliott says “The amount of cookies l've watched the Cookie Monster waste with his bullshit chewing makes me sick”.
Long shot of the underside of a bridge, with great sweeping arches along the sides and top. The Charles River is flowing beneath.
Photo of Ethan standing next to a projector screen showing a slide titled “The design systems between us.” He’s wearing an N95 respirator mask, glasses, and a gray cardigan, and is gesturing with his presentation remote.
Milton, a character from the movie “Office Space,” is a disheveled-looking man wearing extremely thick glasses while sitting alone in a messy office cubicle. He’s on the phone.
Digital illustration showing two silhouetted people shushing a computer covered in red alert icons. Caption reads, “Dear computers! Thank you for all the ‘notifications’ but from now on WE will notify YOU. Oh sorry!! Let me speak your language!!! Beep Boop shut the hell up!”
Screenshot from an excerpt from the linked article reads: “The head developer of the project is O’Leary Digital, owned by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian tycoon and one of the investors on the reality show ‘Shark Tank,‘ where his nickname is Mr. Wonderful. O’Leary also made his movie debut last year, co-starring with Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme.’”
Photograph of the actor Burt Reynolds, presumably taken from one of the “Smokey & The Bandit” films as he’s wearing a big cowboy hat and holding a CB radio to his mouth while he drives. Caption reads, “Diane, 11:30 AM, February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks…” (Explanation: this is Dale Cooper’s dialogue from the TV show Twin Peaks.)
Screenshot from the video game Super Mario World. Mario is standing on top of a castle. Far above him, Bowser looks down from his flying Koopa Clown Car, which is a flying machine painted to look like a weird smiling clown face. Naturally.
Digital rendering of a three-dimensional purple rectangle. There is text engraved on it that reads “measure once cut also once. no prablem”. The words have been cut off from the bottom and top edges of the rectangle.
Melinoë, the main character from the video game Hades 2, is an angry pale-skinned woman with a blonde bob haircut. Her right eye is green, her left eye is red, and she’s glaring defiantly at you. A speech bubble has been hastily inserted into the image to make it look like she’s saying the previous post.
A gray and white kitten named Lily, taken when she was just a month old. She’s sitting on a gray and white striped blanket and looking skeptically at the camera. Behind Lily, another kitten is in soft focus in the background.
Two kittens named Olive and Lily standing on two separate shelves in an open cupboard. On the top shelf, Lily looks up to gauge if she can jump to the top of the cupboard door. On the lower shelf, Olive stares off into the distance. I cannot begin to tell you how much this encompasses their two personalities.
Kirby sitting in a chair with a flat, neutral expression on his face. Caption reads, “my honest reaction”.
Screenshot of a discussion between Mario and Wario. Mario says, “I hate you.” Wario says, “And I hate you.” Mario says nothing. Wario says nothing. Mario says, “do you wanna play tennis.” Wario says, “lmao hell yeah.”
Screenshot of a GitHub commit message I wrote yesterday. It reads, “ethan middlename marcotte turn in your responsive design badge”.
Still image from the TV show “Toast of London,” showing Matt Berry portraying disasterbomb Steven Toast. He’s standing in a recording booth while wearing headphones, with an impressive-looking studio microphone positioned in front of his face. Toast is looking off-camera at someone while he’s yelling.
Screenshot of the 2026 Oscar nominees for original score. The nominees are: "Bugonia," Jerskin Fendrix; "Frankenstein," Alexandre Desplate; "Hamnet," Max Richter; "One Battle After Another," Jonny Greenwood; and "Sinners," Ludwig Göransson.
A gray-and-white kitten named Olive sits loaf-style on a bookshelf, in the gap next to some books.
Screenshot of an email that begins, “Hi Ethan, We see you have credibility in [topic], and we’d like to sponsor you.” “Topic” is set off with square brackets, suggesting that it was supposed to be replaced with something else before sending.
Screenshot of an excerpt from my book, YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION. Excerpt reads: “But money alone isn’t enough to introduce wide-scale automation to an industry; it also takes influence. And right now, many of tech’s most powerful investors are talking openly about how human labor is dramatically overvalued in the tech industry — that there are simply too many tech workers. In no particular order: “Marc Andreessen, the noted venture capitalist, recently opined that ‘the good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more’. “Nat Friedman, the investor and former CEO of GitHub, says on his homepage that he believes ‘many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed’. “A venture capitalist named Brad Gerstner wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that Meta reduce its head count. As Gerstner put it, ‘It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people’. “A billionaire investor named Christopher Hohn wrote a similar letter to Alphabet’s CEO, demanding the company take “aggressive action” since ‘the company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high’. “After Alphabet conducted a massive round of layoffs, Hohn wrote again to demand Google reduce its head count even more — by another 20 percent.”
Screenshot of a paragraph reads, “I don’t think the main barrier in the US is fear. It’s skepticism. Most people don’t believe in our ability to change things. So one of the most important things for organizers right now is to pick campaigns that are ambitious, tangible, and winnable — wins that aren’t so small they feel meaningless but are still actually achievable. Because one of the biggest things we need to prove to ordinary people right now is that we really do have power over how the government operates, and over what happens in our society.”
A sports mascot dressed as a big red bull runs full speed down the basketball court while wearing a blindfold. The mascot just misses the springboard they were presumably going to use to dunk their ball into the basket, and instead plows into a popcorn vendor standing in the audience. Popcorn flies into the air as the two of them fall to the ground.
An illustration of a metronome labeled “me,” with the pendulum swinging rapidly between two points labeled “lol” and “lmao”.
Dozens of ducks hunkered down on the edge of a massive sheet of ice that’s floating in the Charles River. The Boston skyline is just visible in the distance.
The sun hangs in a cloud-flecked blue sky above the Charles River, which is partially covered with thin, snowy ice.
Black-and-white selfie. I’m wearing a dark suit and gray tie, and holding my phone in front of my face as I aim it at a bathroom mirror. I’m standing in front of a tiled bathroom wall, with a closed shower curtain with a massive floral print.
Screenshot of a website showing a badly artifacted image set against an orange background. The orange in the image doesn’t match the orange background it rests against. These people want you to think they’re professionals.
Screenshot of an excerpt from techforce.gov reads: “How is Tech Force related to other government technology programs, including ones at GSA or the United States DOGE Service?”
Photograph of two people wearing black, futuristic-looking clothing are leaning back against some boards held up by people wearing entirely green head-to-toe material. The room is entirely green as well, presumably because this shot will be replaced with visual effects for a movie. The two futuristic-looking people are labeled “Cool Tech Companies”; the people in green holding up the boards are labeled “An underseen army of underpaid global workers”.
Five bright red copies of “You Deserve a Tech Union” are stacked on a gray wooden surface. The stack is flared slightly, so that the corners of the lower books are peeking out from below. A gray-and-white cat named Lily is rubbing her head against the books while I’m trying to photograph them, which is incredibly helpful.
Three bright red copies of the book “You Deserve a Tech Union” are stacked on a gray wooden surface. The stack is flared slightly, so that the corners of the lower books are peeking out from below.
Screenshot of a Tumblr post and three comments. The post has a screenshot of a math question that says, “An orchestra of 120 players takes 40 minutes to play Beethoven's 9th Symphony. How long would it take for 60 players to play the symphony? Let P be number of players and T the time playing.” The person who posted the image says, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.” The first commenter says, “4800 players, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony Speedrun”. The second commenter says, “its not even music anymore it's just a shockwave that kills you instantly”. The third commenter says, “reblog this to beethoven blast your enemies”.
Diagram of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, except it’s been retitled “Link’s hierarchy of needs”. The bottom four layers of the pyramid have been colored over with a region labeled “wearing a slutty little outfit”. The topmost level is now labeled “hup hyup”.
A person sits in front of an old-school personal computer. Over their shoulder we can see the computer screen, which displays the words “YOU ARE UNDER ARREST” in imposing green letters.
Photograph of a green picket sign held in front of a busy downtown street. Sign reads, “OPEIU Local 153 Kickstarter United: ON STRIKE.” The Kickstarter United logo appears in the center of the sign, showing two hands shaking over some lines converging on a point in the horizon.
Screenshot of a browser’s right-click context menu, with a new “Ask an AI Chatbot” menu item selected. The submenu has three options: “Summarize page (labeled as new)”, “Choose an AI Chatbot”, and “Remove AI Chatbot”.
A small brown-and-white dog with big poofy ears is hanging out of its person’s bright red backpack. The dog’s tongue is sticking out slightly as the dog pants happily.
Close-up photo of a refrigerator magnet I’m holding in my left hand, which has a picture of Morrissey, former singer of The Smiths and human-shaped pile of dirty laundry. The bottom of the magnet reads, “SHUT UP, MORRISSEY”.
A gray-and-white kitten named Olive is hiding behind a wooden box that’s underneath a nightstand. Her ears are just about the only thing visible from behind the box.
Screenshot of the title screen for “Hunt the Wumpus,” a very old video game. A pixelated drawing of the wumpus, an orange two-legged monster with huge teeth, sits next to the text “The hunt is about to begin…”. The word “WUMPUS” is drawn in big blocky letters, with the “M” stylized to look like a bat. The copyright notice at the bottom reads “©1980 Texas Instruments”.
Screenshot of an old school video game with multiple panels. The main center panel shows the character’s view as they look down a long, dark hallway in a dungeon. The leftmost panel shows icons for the actions the player can take, like “speak”, “pick up”, “look”, and so on. The rightmost inventory panel shows a person framed by the objects they’re carrying. The bottom panel spans the width of the screen, and shows a log of what’s happened in the game.
Screenshot of two paragraphs from my blog entry on leaving 18F. Excerpt reads: But what’s happening right now is not about “government efficiency,” nor is it about “cost-cutting.” I would gently urge you to look at the net worth of the people who are telling you otherwise. After all, there is no financial analysis; no review of possible downsides, no weighing of potential negative impacts. There is no discussion of what could happen if our math is wrong? Or even more importantly, no consideration of who might be harmed? Instead, as Anil Dash predicted, the billionaire’s so-called “efficiency” “department” is best understood as a sprawling form of procurement capture, in which a group of impossibly rich individuals are trampling over the regulations — and the federal workers — that stand between them and a deep, deep revenue stream: your tax dollars. And as they do, they’re making an explicitly fascist move to roll back rights for every marginalized community in the country — for anyone who doesn’t look like them, or who stands in their way.