“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
— Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
The most annoying people on the internet have become infinitely more goonish and servile, as they’ve spent the last few years defaulting to a stock refrain: “Use AI or be left behind.” AI’s hothouse economy is not any more logical than the broader one from which it is carved out by a lack of anti-trust or copyright enforcement, but then, any marketplace that’s considering an Anthropic or Open AI IPO is by definition not a rational one. Big Tech’s not-quite-free market tends to reflect the minor-key depravities, general cynicism, and self-dealing of American capitalism circa-now, if only because the same private equity lordlings and reptilian swells sit atop both. But it has quirks and perversities of its own. In their drab avarice and ravenous self-interest and relentless drive to make various numbers go up, corporate execs will discuss AI as if it’s a massive productivity boost that has led to redundancies and layoffs, but this all feels more like a casual narrative that has metastasized into something that still falls short of demonstrable proof or even a plan, and which doesn’t really fit into anything like a vision.
AI isn’t really driving productivity as much as it’s a convenient cover for myopic incompetence, and the reason for this is the same reason why so many other things about the economy are broken or breaking. The reason being, at bottom, is that the people in charge of major corporate decisions are disconnected from the means of production, don’t understand the granular details of how their companies work, and are openly contemptuous of their customers and employees—but they want to cut costs under the guise of efficiency. This selective austerity, which the billions of dollars poured into AI have come to embody, isn’t about economics. It’s about principle. There’s really only one that has remained consistent during the several decades of increasingly attrition-intensive labor relations, and it’s that rich people have decided, separately and in suspiciously perfect harmony, that they will see how little they can get away with paying their employees. It’s a real scumbag economy.
It’s easy to imagine the pliant willingness to gamble the economy on AI as an oligarchic drift from a set of mostly unexamined pro-business beliefs into the more fragrant and overtly deranged suckholes of contemporary Trumpist rot, simply because rich guys are shielded from accountability by a broken politics that serves them lavishly and everyone else not at all. Unchecked and overdetermined executive dipshittery has become like the weather because these leaders are not visionaries—they’re capitalists. These corporate one-hit wonders got lucky with a few hyperscale ideas in a low-regulatory, low-interest-rate environment, and have since been trying to convert hype and speculation into innovation: The Metaverse, crypto, blockchain, NFTs. When AI is discussed as maximizing efficiency, in practice, it entails companies slashing jobs and depressing wages while empowering gormless maladroits to take cognitive shortcuts towards feigned competence.
Corporate life is premised on moving fast and being the first to market. While those certainly carry advantages, there’s also value in walking our amygdalas off the cliff and contemplating the intentionality of our actions as opposed to speed-vomiting spam for its own sake. I’m not denying the niche additive qualities of AI in the medical fields, but this technology has mostly made it more efficient to generate and proliferate bullshit. People use AI to write LinkedIn posts about the power of authenticity, or to produce AI content for others to use AI to summarize that content. We’re proving that we’re not a robot before interacting with a chatbot. AI-generated influencers are selling products to bots navigating the dead internet, and this is somehow a viable business model. AI is supposed to help us “get ahead” and be productive, but it’s not as if these efficiency gains are progressing us toward a four-day workweek or even more take-home pay. The people who are sprinting towards this version of the future describe a world with less art, less connection, less privacy, less trust, and less humanity.
In his encyclical, Pope Leo explains the existential and political stakes of how Silicon Valley and the logic of hypercapitalism are plunging the world into a dehumanized pile of algorithmic ass, and he describes two potential futures:
The Tower of Babel as tech authoritarianism: This monument symbolizes the limits of any project that arises from self-affirmation, degrades human dignity for the sake of efficiency, and aspires to reach Heaven without God’s blessing. The architects of Silicon Valley are similarly aiming to make themselves omnipotent CEO kings through tech that flattens diversity and centralizes power into a small group of misanthropic billionaires.
The rebuilding of Jerusalem as humanist collectivism: Nehemiah’s project convened the families affected by the destruction of their city, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts, and addressed any opposition. Civilizations are reborn through communities working together in a sense of shared responsibility to prioritize the humanity of all over the grand aspirations of the powerful.
Our contemporary Babel is an anti-human project of financial and technological optimization with profit as the only metric of success. We think of AI as a network of computers and LLMs, but there’s a human and material correlate; any time it answers a prompt, its long chain of mediation involves consuming vast amounts of electricity and water, invading communities to construct data centers, and people whose livelihoods are jeopardized or degraded. And like our concept of “efficiency,” these technologies are not neutral. The heavyhanded adoption and wild speculation around AI leaves plenty of room for cheesy venality, and it’s a clear example of how technological development can’t be completely divorced from the economic imperatives that develop it and the economic incentives that deploy it. AI and surveillance tech are making decisions on where to launch missiles, who can qualify for a loan, and who gets access to healthcare. It’s reshaping our media platforms in a way that homogenizes human expression into a sludge of wallpaper music and second-screen shows, shaping the scope of possibility while controlling the possibility of ideological narratives. We’ve lost so much by choosing “convenience” over culture, by sacrificing our capacity to think, make decisions, learn new skills, develop value judgments, and to grow—just so we can 10x our productivity.
This frictionless future is antithetical to the struggle that’s necessary for our own self-actualization. Pope Leo emphasizes that our finitude makes life interesting and the aspiration to be infinite is a desperate attempt to transcend humanity, as he writes: “Everything that appears as a limit, incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.” This is the sort of anthropomorphization of the neoliberal financial logic that has infected every crevice of the planet, that productivity and self-maximization are the ultimate end goals. Not finding love, or laughing with friends, or doing community work, or enjoying a hobby. Within the immediacy of digital hyperstimulation and the algorithmic drive towards efficiency and profit, the journey and the slow struggle toward wisdom is the truth that makes us human.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
―J.R.R. Tolkien, Gandalf’s Speech, The Return of the King
The type of humanism that can combat the logic of efficiency is one with a renewed sense of justice, community, and solidarity. The most important form of resistance is understanding that these consultant/finance/tech bro-types are not smarter than us, but they have convinced themselves of their Ayn Randian galaxy-brain geniusness because they can frame a debate in their language and on their terms, so only their form of quant evidence can be accepted as legitimate. They’ve constructed and normalized epistemological realms in which they are always “right,” even when they chase profit in clumsy and overstated ways. Due to the Dunning-Kreuger effect and our broader culture’s servile deference to Job Creators, their narrow skillset is projected onto a presumed expertise in macroeconomic planning and building social harmony—but these are mostly just Dumb Guys. One of the most common misunderstandings about Dumb Guys is that they are incapable of doing things. This is false, and the German general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord warned us of the “stupid and industrious.” They can and absolutely love to do complicated-sounding tasks like scheme and data-driven decision-making. They may do these things in arbitrary, ineffective, and oafish ways, but they will attack the work of scheming and maneuvering with the vigor of a dog trying to carry a too-big tree branch through a doorway.
Breaking their hold and envisioning an alternative is not to frame things in numbers, but to construct and champion other forms of knowledge and intelligence. Ursula K. Le Guin understood the power of imagination, and reading her works leaves you with a sense that a different way of living is not just possible, but inevitable. And rather than using GDP or initial IPO offerings as our metrics of societal success, maybe we should look at how society is treating the average worker and our marginalized communities.
And the sigma grinset grifters typically say that AI is the moment where we should be going to sleep exhausted, but can’t really explain The Why outside of some vague pablum about entrepreneurship and scaling. In this lightning-fast race to the grave, it’s worth noting the language these people use to describe taking a break. I need to recharge. I need to refuel. I need to get my batteries back to 100%. They talk about our bodies as if they’re machines that need to go into Sleep Mode to become productive again. To them, our energy doesn’t exist for its own sake, but to power the machine. It frames how we value our weekends and vacations, as rest that allows us to become economically useful, not to enjoy our existence. But rest isn’t a productivity hack; it allows us to be alive.
I used to crave achievement and milestones, but over the past decade, I’ve come to appreciate emptiness, focus, calm, minimalism, and boundaries as the bedrocks of mental health and happiness. In an economy focused only on revenue growth, shareholder value, and market share, we’ve become ones and zeros in data centers, a trail of locations, interests, photos, videos, and search queries to be targeted and persuaded and marketed to. Ironically, I’ve embraced a form of streamlining and optimizing to serve me by unfollowing and unsubscribing, by recalibrating and relinquishing and releasing. Part of growing means developing the discipline to say “no” to things you’d passively say “yes” to, to think critically before opting in, to create intentional space for yourself and your ventures into new horizons. In a sense, we need to get more snobby and more critical in our ability to evaluate what we’re being offered for the sake of convenience and efficiency. And before we engage in any endeavor, whether personal or in business, we could consider three simple guiding principles to reframe our priorities: For what reason? To what end? What are we doing it for? In his book, Post-Capitalist Desire, Mark Fisher tried to conceive of what it would look like to want a different future rather than simply resisting the present trajectory, and now that cracks are forming in this gilded bulwark, we can see the alternatives. We just need to care about our shared humanity enough to want the good ones.
Jack Welsh must be partying in his pine box with the vulgar display of power he inspired on so many CEO's😅 There are a ton of inept "boss men" who parrot the AI marketing lies - even outside the tech world - just to fit in and look "informed". But I'm finding that the silver lining is the AI slop, pointless ads (pharma, online gambling, insurance), and rise of pointless business ventures are all pushing me away from the hedonistic lifestyle that used to occupy my time and money. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes through the cracks in the upcoming years!