spent my morning coffee today reading Ed Zitron's piece on the "AI" bubble, whose bubble-ness the relevant ruling class seems remarkably in denial of across the board. it got me thinking about the whole absurd cycle that brought us here, VC disruption startups to bitcoin to NFTs and now "AI", each hyped as a civilization-scale revolution based on little more than the promises of rich tech CEOs and their sycophants. it must be understood first and foremost that capitalists are crooks and skittish herd animals, that always beneath the story they sell the world their only real aim is to make money. like yes, perhaps the Sam Altmans of the world do on some level believe their own hype, believe in the supposed promise of their tech... but if the tech fails, if the promise is broken, that's a minor inconvenience because at least they made money.
but there is something dreadfully fascinating about the story they're telling, right? there's this insulated ecosystem where these tech guys fail spectacularly, pissing millions or billions of dollars into the toilet and laying off countless employees, yet are only rewarded for doing so. each failure is met not by self-reflection or material analysis, but by a cult-like doubling down, an exponential increase in the scale of the promise (and the capital required for its realization), no, for real, this time we're going to fix everything.
the promises they make about how bitcoin, NFTs, "AI" will change the world are beyond absurdity, totally unmoored from the material conditions of the world they exist in, yet it has to be the case that a lot of these people do believe it. however disconnected from reality they are, the fact of reality cannot help but assert itself at the margins-- climate change, rising fascism, political division, you name it. whether they identify the problem as "too much woke" or "not enough tech" (probably both), either way their actions are a response to tensions at the very least orthogonal to the very real tensions being felt by the global working class.
profit motive aside, i think the core of what's going on here is a class of isolated, secular rich people desperate to invent a god that will liberate them from having to care. no, we don't need to radically transform society, redistribute wealth, dismantle the organs of capitalist society... we just need "AI"! they're like children being told santa claus isn't real, except they're fucking adults at the center of a cult of personality around the very concept of world-changing tech. their delusions are echoed by court stenographers larping as journalists, an echo chamber they themselves helped to create by radically undermining the traditional news business model, by encouraging every entity under the sun to turn into a Wall Street financial vehicle.
these people more or less bought the public facing apparatus that reproduces their hype, they've pushed their libertarian ideology absolutely everywhere it can fit, and while it has been immensely profitable in the short term (by a layman's definition of profit, anyway), there remains the unfortunate inconvenience of a material reality that trundles on without care for their machinations. there is no use-case for "AI" on the scale they're demanding, if any at all. OpenAI could own every single outlet tasked with covering their tech and push a unilateral & uncompromising "AI" vision with no opposition, and it still wouldn't change that reality. there is no making healthcare, transit, schools, or any other public infrastructure "profitable," no matter how many overtures are made to that effect. there is no fixing climate change that doesn't involve radically reducing car dependency (which means directly attacking the mob-like car dealer fiefdoms that exert heavy influence over local politics), investing heavily in nuclear energy (which means directly attacking the fossil fuel companies that invest enormous sums of money into maintaining the public's irrational fear of nuclear power plants), and strictly limiting the ability of profit-seeking companies to exploit public infrastructure to its breaking point (which means directly attacking tech companies voraciously consuming electrical grid capacity for their pet projects, as well as companies that fuel droughts by stealing public water and reselling it at a massive profit). you just can't affect the base by gussying up the superstructure, man! and this cold, hard reality is one that no capitalist is prepared for or interested in facing, let alone the libertarian tech elite whose vision of the future is "sci-fi stories are cool, let's do that, no i don't know what "dystopia" means."
"AI" is, in many ways, the ultimate endpoint of the capitalist's dream, a self-generating economy with no need to cater to specific customer needs, no need to hire pesky laborers (especially unionized ones), no need to bother with regulations. it's an infantile vision of the world doomed to failure, yet it's an infectious vision. wouldn't it be nice if we could invent our way out of this mess? wouldn't it be nice if things could just keep on going as they are, stewarded into a perfect technofuturist utopia by a caring God of our own invention? if you're a marginalized person of any stripe, your answer is probably an instinctively repulsed FUCK NO, but their audience is the disconnected suburbanite, the white (likely Christian) middle class home-owner aspiring to perfect independence. in this way, the secular tech world has become an extension of fundamentalist evangelical ideology. there is no cost too great if it means ushering in our Savior. all the death and misery and inequality and exploitation, disease and genocide and climate change and gun violence and bigotry, these are Signs and Portents my friend, signalling the end times.
"the end times" are, really, just a poetic verbalization of the civilization-level need for a people's revolution in everything, an objectively extant pressure correctly identified but wildly misdiagnosed. it's a refusal to countenance any possibility that we can become better than ourselves in a way that actually matters, not through technology or devotion or purity, but through action. it is a desperate plea to the universe for an all-knowing adult to just take charge already so we can stop pretending like any of this is actually our responsibility. please, someone, save us from ourselves, bring on the Rapture, bring on the Grey Goo, bring on the Zombie Apocalypse, bring on the Alien Invasion, something, anything else, just please, make it quick!
their pleas will not be answered. there will be no spectacular end, just as Twitter didn't explode the way we all wanted, just as Covid didn't wipe out civilization overnight the way we all feared, just as the Roman Empire never truly fell but simply crumbled under its own weight over centuries. no amount of delusional thinking & frantic technological interventionism on the part of the ruling classes can change this fact. they tell us, and themselves, stories of the world they wished we live in, but material reality trundles along unchanged as it always has and always will do.
no one can save us but us.
good piece and also
court stenographers larping as journalists
sick fucken burn hell yeah
