Why I don’t care about the AI bubble
No chip on my shoulder to be seen.
A friend sent me a lengthy article from a writer I previously enjoyed at his suggestion: The Hater’s Guide to the AI Bubble. Though I enjoyed it well enough myself, upon dictating it to my husband he revealed to me how desperate the author sounds. I also found a similar tone in another article linked from the piece—Contra Ptacek’s Terrible Article on AI—and it performs much the same. This is not to denigrate their work or criticise any point they make—quite the contrary—but rather to highlight the one part of all this I depart from them on, because I wholeheartedly agree with everything else they have said there. If you are new to this debacle, please read their articles first before continuing mine.
One of the things I came to realise about the tech industry years ago—and have indeed written about at some length on this weblog already—is that it is corrupted by organised crime to an extent only rivalled within the thunderdomes of electoral politics the world over. Because of the presence of the tech mafia—a term I coined as a superset of the well-known PayPal Mafia—the industry is increasingly financially and socially dependent on deliberate lies and suppression of spontaneity to maintain an illusion of consensus around their host of scams. Their first blood was in the form of cryptocurrency, their current chew toy is ‘AI’, and pretty soon it will be quantum computing if they are not stopped. None of this is new, but I’ve reiterated it here to highlight how deep and intentional the darkness at hand here actually is.
Most key influences in tech—public or otherwise—are keyed into the reality that this is a scam to whatever extent they are comfortable knowing. In other words, they are assets—willing tools and implements of outside forces—and one of the most confusing realities of assets to espionage greenhorns is how often—and preferred—it is that assets do not know they are assets. Organised crime loves people who “don’t stick their noses in places they shouldn’t”! They love people who are cynically and singularly motivated by things like profit or egotistical fame chasing. And it’s not an accident that increasingly people exhibiting those character flaws are the only people remaining in the world of online influence.
One of the big substantiations Edward Zitron focuses on in his article is the harrowing financial reality of the tech companies at hand here. I need you to understand something he is not quite keyed into about that: this doesn’t matter to them because all of the ‘lost money’ is simply being stolen from the public and explained away with creative accounting. The New York Times reveals how their bullshit term of ‘ARR’ is a work of art, which is a gentle way to describe a legalised lie. Unfortunately, they share a similar disaffection with most of the American left about all of this: they simply don’t give a shit. Curtis Yarvin spent his writing career in part publicly flogging this paper of record, and they turned around and proved his insults towards them right by interviewing the bastard.
This really is a simple game of taking money out of the public’s pocket, and putting it into their own. The Wolf of Wall Street was too on the face. Why do you think Thom Tillis resigned from reelection after being one of two Republicans to vote against Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’? He was the only one who had the brains and the conscience to realise what was in that and how bad it really is for Americans. Everyone else is out to lunch. $500 billion in the name of John Q. Public right into the pockets of an unaccountable international crime syndicate who wants to build a bunch of datacentres that serve no purpose to the public and don’t conceivably do anything at all except entertain the powerful cabal of criminals who asked for it.
When you centre the reality that this is a simple game of looting, your attention should shift exclusively to their business in government that they invited themselves into with no assent whatsoever from the American public. Nobody voted for this—no voters asked for a giant datacentre in Texas—yet here they are building it with government money they don’t have. Forget the parties—why are so many Americans cynical and resigned to this shit? Do you really think this isn’t your problem to deal with or that it doesn’t affect you? This is why your purchasing power is in the fucking toilet! This is literally fucking why! This is where the money went! Call it inflation, call it deficit spending, or call it a big beautiful shitshow, it doesn’t matter: it’s a bunch of money signed away in your name and it’s going to shit that will never conceivably benefit you at all! How does this not transcend the circus for you? Do you really think this was the evil Democrats or the evil Republicans? I don’t think you do, but I do think the modal American is entirely too cynical: too much “it’s all bullshit” and not enough “it’s bad for ya.”
I have led a very unusual life. Unlike many others, I detected at a very young age the poison increasingly present in systems like postsecondary education and even the job market writ large, and chose to defer gratification and resist peer pressure by going somewhere else. As I have continued living in this world I have found, increasingly, there is nowhere to run. The criminals have stolen just about everything of significant value from us and gloat and gaslight us on social media about going into the trades like that doesn’t destroy your body by the time you hit 40. You need to understand like I do how controlled these online discourses are, how well and truly the people controlling them hate all of you—especially you Americans—and how they are robbing you out of contempt and a narcissistic sense of fatalistic superiority.
Nobody who is apologising for AI sincerely believes in it—either they are knowingly lying, or they are marginally dumb and are too embarrassed to admit their ignorance—and AI is just one instance of this kind of psychological warfare being conducted by this cabal of psychopaths. They put themselves in control of things by effectively manipulating people through the disinhibition and embodiment that people experience on the Worldwide Web. I can’t explain to you casually in the course of an afternoon over a nice cup of tea what has happened here—it would take too long—and that asymmetry is exactly what is being exploited by them. Even the Chinese are clued into this game, shilling their garbage products like Audio Engine speakers and Chi-NUC PCs and gaslighting the few sorry Americans who bought into the lies when they come to complain on Reddit about it. Their lack of proficiency in spoken English is more than made up for by a minority of idiots who are too ashamed to admit they got scammed out of $900.
In much the same way this waste, fraud and abuse is unlike anything that came before it—questionable as things like Uber and AWS were, they were at least understandable—this manipulation is also a new breed, and it is killing us all. It’s moving entirely too quickly for us to be able to afford to sit back and wait out the inevitable collapse.
So, that’s where I sit apart from all of this. I don’t write so much about why I hate AI because the truth is, none of us can afford to do that anymore. Writing like ours is increasingly being blackholed by the mob running this scam, because they’re the same people who created social media and effectively control it. What’s the fucking point of writing this all out longhand when your work is just going to be hellbanned by powerful, delusional assholes who tweak algorithms to make themselves feel better? There is no point. It’s time to go outside and rally the troops. Find out who your real friends are, or suffer the consequences.
I have found my calling in politics. I’m not waiting. I’m fighting this, and that’s not rhetoric. The time for ballads and fables will be when all of this shit is over and dealt with. I’m sick of it, and you should be too. You feel this in your bones as well as I do, so don’t ignore that. Join the fight. Your livelihood depends on it.