Hype about artificial intelligence has been cyclical in the past. The pattern typically saw some cause for expectations that the big moment everyone has been waiting for--the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence of genuinely human-caliber, and all it betokens--is really, finally, at hand make excitement about the technology surge, and then when this proved not to be the case the excitement collapse, "AI spring" followed by "AI winter," though usually not for very long because, the grip of artificial intelligence on the imaginations of so many being what it is, some new development soon enough prompts a resurgence of excitement and the return of spring. Thus the ebullience of the "tech"-obsessed '90s and the forecasts of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and company produced a great wave of such excitement, which, as the predictions failed to come to pass in the '00s, waned. However, progress in neural network design, and promises about the uses to which it might be put, like the production of self-driving cars, prompted a new surge of interest in the mid-'10s. Of course, those expectations were disappointed in their turn, leading to declining interest by decade's end, but then the pandemic's disruptions reminded the cloistered idiots of the board rooms far removed from where the economic rubber meets the road just how much the structures of everyday life rely on lots and lots of boring, tiring, physical labor that hasn't been automated, while they were excited again by the chatbots that, at least one set of scientists said may have been the real thing, artificial general intelligence--in a crude and incomplete form, but nevertheless, the moment in its way having already arrived . . . as the idiots of the media seized on every cliché they could to fan the hype.
The result has been an historic investment in artificial intelligence evident in ways from the level of individual firms and even individual fortunes (Tesla's being valued more than all the really major automakers combined, the chip maker NVIDIA becoming the world's first $4 trillion company, Larry Ellison's buyout of OpenAI making the valuation of his fortune leap a hundred billion dollars in one day), but also at the level of the stock market as a whole, as shown by the "Buffet Indicator" (the ratio of the market capitalization of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. to the Gross Domestic Product of the country). Simply for comparison purposes, at the height of the dot-com boom of the '90s, when the capitalization of the U.S. stock market had been growing on average 20 percent a year for five years it stood at about 150 percent. Today the Buffet Indicator stands at 220 percent.
Of course, the Indicator's standing much above 100 percent usually means an overheated market full of overvalued firms. So did it prove to be the case when the dot-com boom was revealed as a dot-com bubble that burst just after the turn of the century, all as, if one assumes the principle holds good, barring the Technological Singularity being very, very near (read: a lot nearer than even the stubbornly never-admitting-he's-wrong Kurzweil said it was at last check) an even more painful correction is coming. In either case the consequences are incalculable. Should it be the case that in this era in which we have so often seen smoke without fire (for all the self-important talk about INNOVATION! today's neoliberal economy is far better at generating hype than progress) the Electronic Herd prove to have made their very large bet correctly (for once!) then we may be looking at the unleashing of enormous technological potentials. I say potentials because one cannot be sure of precisely what they will actually be, or what one should never overlook, what people will actually do with them--a matter which is most certainly political, however much a great many persons would like to ignore the fact. (Indeed, we get so much Frankenstein complex crapola in our science fiction because it is far, far safer to point to the danger of an imaginary machine developing a mind and will of its own than the actual danger posed by the minds and wills of the very real people who control the machines in the world in which we happen to live.) Moreover, it has to be admitted that recent experience does not instill in any intelligent person great confidence in the practicalities of how our political-economic model presently works realizing those potentials for the benefit of all, with the Internet a case in point. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley who falsely take credit for having invented all of the technology in their garages but actually deserve credit mainly for having taken what had already been invented and thoroughly enshittifying it seem almost certain to be the owners and controllers of the hardware and software of any imminent artificial intelligence revolution, while these have already expressed some very dark--frankly, dystopian--intentions regarding it indeed.
However, should this prove to be another case of the same old neoliberal crap writ even larger than before (not least with regard to ultra-loose monetary policy fueling speculative madness as the engine of the economy in their gotta-keep-the-roulette-wheels-spinning way until it can't anymore and the bubble bursts) and the investors (just as they did every previous time) prove to have bet incorrectly then it is hard to imagine our not looking at a massive destruction of values--perhaps on an epoch-making scale. Indeed, according to a recent study by the British-based research firm MacroStrategy Partnership, that 220 percent of U.S. GDP represented by the Buffet Indicator bespeaks a bubble seventeen times as big as that New Economy bubble of the '90s, and four times as big as the real estate bubble that burst in '07. One can thus very easily imagine there being close at hand something much, much worse than what the world faced in '07--which, contrary to the stupid mainstream media narrative about the matter that made it seem like a speedbump we all got over together (yay!) really was an epoch-making event, dealing the world economy a blow from which it never recovered as the euphemistically called "Great Recession" went on and on (it was not just Japan but the world that saw a lost decade turn into a lost generation, with outside China per capita Gross World Product today pretty much where it was in the 1970s), with the consequences of the catastrophe--and one should not forget, the manner in which what pass for world "leaders" addressed that catastrophe they did so much to make happen--including the stalling out and fraying of the once-seemingly "like the rising of the sun" progress of globalization, the ascent of the far right all over the world, and the resurgence of great power warfare that already has Europe "not at peace" with Russia as the bloodbath in Ukraine nears the end of its fourth year, and once again under German leadership Europe rearms for a contest with the colossus to its east. A far vaster crash hitting a U.S. economy looking much more vulnerable than it was in 2007 (from the Federal debt load to the Federal Reserve's asset portfolio to the standing of the U.S. dollar to the ability of America's working people to stand a shock things are in just about every way different from what they were two decades ago, just about all of them for the worse), at the center of a world economic and political order that likewise look even more decrepit than they did two decades ago, one would not be wrong to shudder at the thought. They would also not be wrong to retch in advance at the way that the professional economists will demonstrate their worthlessness by dutifully sniveling that no one could have seen it coming, and the financial community wheel out its favorite spokesperson to tell us "It was all black swans, see?" as middlebrows beguiled by the imagery in which he wraps up his banalities of cheap epistemological nihilism nod their empty heads--never mind the reality that a great number of people saw it coming and said so but were ignored completely by those who held all the power and disclaimed all the responsibility, supported by their lickspittles in the Mainstream Media's platforming only the "right" views as they snarl at anyone who points out such inconvenient truths as a Know-Nothing piece of scum fighting the "war on experts" with "fake news." However, rather than wallowing in doomism (and contempt for those responsible for it) one would do better to think very, very hard about how the world might do better this time because of the sheer direness of the consequences if it doesn't.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
The Privilege of Turning off Your Telescreen
People love to talk about George Orwell. Far more than have ever actually bothered to read Orwell, going by a certain poll of a few years ago--with the fact of the poll's reliance on self-reporting, and the rapid decay of what little propensity then existed to read books rather than just speak of them in the years since the poll strongly suggesting that that much fewer of those who talk about Orwell have had any real content with the writings they are talking about. Meanwhile it seems that few of those who actually have read him did so closely or completely--a testimony not only to the falling standard of literacy (so evident among our commentariat, whose "Good Schools" failed miserably in imparting to them a "Good Education") but the ideological blinders of three-quarters of a century. After all, even if at the time he wrote his most famous book George Orwell still espoused socialist ideas intellectually way deep down he had gone over to that mix of muddle, pessimism and psycho-babble that became the sine qua non of critical respectability in the twentieth century, which made it the easier for the fiercest of anti-socialists to appropriate him and his work for his cause as they interpreted him to the public.
Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.
Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. Assuming they can find the options, which isn't a certainty given that the updates frequently deliberately remove them, forcing the user to learn a new procedure that is typically more complicated and involves accessing a more obscure, risk-laden, user-unfriendly part of their system, if there even is an alternative procedure for regaining that particular bit of privacy protection at all.
It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."
Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.
Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. Assuming they can find the options, which isn't a certainty given that the updates frequently deliberately remove them, forcing the user to learn a new procedure that is typically more complicated and involves accessing a more obscure, risk-laden, user-unfriendly part of their system, if there even is an alternative procedure for regaining that particular bit of privacy protection at all.
It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."
The Dead Dream of Democratizing the Means of Communication
While the rhetoric of the Internet as a great democratizer was everywhere in the market populism-dominated 1990s, and remained widespread many years after (with Mark Zuckerberg's vulgar PR hacks turning the revolutions of 2011 into a moment for corporate self-promotion) all this is little heard today. After all, in this age of advanced enshittification of the Internet of which anyone at all online is all too aware NO ONE WOULD BUY IT--all as our lobotomized media's remembrance of things past is invariably very selective as, while it makes a point of keeping certain national wounds permanently open for the sake of raison d'etat (like keeping a critical mass of the public frothing with fury to sustain support for illiberal, authoritarian, militarist, racist policies), it drops what is not serviceable to such raison down the Memory Hole, with those promises of yesteryear certainly that. After all, a reminder of the Internet we were promised would just make people even more furious with the Internet we actually got, where we are endlessly surveilled by Authority, endlessly lied to and manipulated by its spokespersons, endlessly exploited for money by those Authority serves, and yet left on our own to cope with the ever-worsening danger from cyber-criminals and their ilk ("Personal responsibility!" they tell us as we wonder just why it's legal for private companies to go around collecting and trafficking our most private personal information), the public bound but unprotected as the monopolists of Big Tech and the security state are the extreme opposite in a world where, just as in that book by Orwell that people love to cite but never read, it is becoming a mark of privilege to be able to turn off the telescreen.
Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.
Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.
Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.
Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.
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