I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.
The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.
You also have big techs hunger for the next big thing, the thing that will revive and expand the explosive growth that the tech platforms enjoyed in the first decade of the 21st century. We can see this most clearly in the momentary rage and spending sprees for the “metaverse” (lol) and to a lesser extent NFTs. The crypto fascination is part of the same equation. The platforms are dominant and very profitable. Their monopoly power is vast. But they’re not going to have growth like they had in that first decade of the century. They are mature companies. They’re monopolies. They are protecting rents more than creating dazzling new things. And the economies and milieus they come out of are based on that kind of growth. So the desire for the next thing is firing the coals of all the tech platforms, even into absurd things like the metaverse. But AI and machine learning are not absurd. They’re real. And the great mystery and, I would say, the way to make a vast fortune, either by shorting or investing, is to delineate just how much of this is paragraph one and how much paragraph two. (If a billionaire wants to pay me a lot of money I will pretend to know the mix.)
Then you have the how and the why of those at the commanding heights of Silicon Valley throwing their weight in with the global authoritarian movement. And related to that is this complicated question of how much of this is transactional and, to an extent, naive versus how much is driven by the ideological transformation of tech’s ownership class. And I mean, ownership ownership. The big, big players. It’s clearly both, and it’s clearly fluid and changing but understanding the precise mix is at the center of everything. Both the astronomical sums of wealth built up in Silicon Valley and Big Tech more broadly and the maturation of those monopolies play strongly into this political and ideological transformation for all the obvious reasons. Some of it is simply wanting to keep on Trump’s good side. Knowing the precise mix of which is one thing and which is the other is everything.
A friend of mine has this theory that the real root of the rightward tilt of the Big Tech world is rooted in the late teens of this century, and the interrelated mix of the maturation of the platform monopolies and softening of the IPO market. They are of course two sides of the very same coin. At a certain point, the incredibly well-paid tech workers making maybe half a million a year realized they were never going to catch a ride on the next big unicorn and end up in the $100 million or $100 billion ranks.
Five-hundred thousand dollars a year is not penury certainly, even if it doesn’t go as far in San Francisco as it might in Ohio or Kentucky. But it did create a kind of Silicon Valley class war in a way that had not existed before. Because the fluidity that had genuinely existed from the late 80s through the first decade of the 21st century had tightened. That made the bosses look different to the fairly fabulously well compensated workforce. As is always the case with the insecurity of wealth and the brittle grip — why are you there and I’m here? Happenstance and luck aren’t stable or reassuring answers. And if you’re worth $100 billion and people are always telling you you literally changed the world, you just don’t have a lot of patience for the griping. Why would you? And power creates griping as surely as night follows day.
How true this prism is, how much it captures and how much it helped set the stage for the rightward shift of the owners in Big Tech I don’t know. But it’s part of the equation. Monopoly power, the stasis it creates and the fabulous wealth it generates are all different parts of this elephant we, as semi-blind men, are trying to see and understand. This is part of why I’ve returned again and again to this theme of the “brittle grip” that the early 21st century ultra wealthy experience today. There’s is both a fabulous wealth and dominance and an insecurity that is not simply paranoia. It’s scary to be standing that high off the ground. And when you’re that wealthy and powerful a lot of people want to take your feelings and insecurities very seriously.
There are two additional points worth considering.
There’s always been a part of the tech world plotting escape, building fantasies of transcending the bonds of society and its sovereignties or even the ultimate bonds of mortality itself. That’s where “network states” come from, or the idea of building floating sovereignties out in the middle of the ocean or simply building an epic compound in New Zealand for whenever shit gets weird. Harvest from society but exit the demands of its sovereignty. Why not?
The reigning leaders of Silicon Valley venture capital today believe deeply in founder-run companies. I admit to some sympathy with this preference. And the idea comes from some genuinely good places. Don’t be the suits who were stupid enough to boot Steve Jobs out of Apple and make it a tired board room-based company that only bringing him back undid. Who can argue with that? Keep the founder, the man with the vision and the impatience in charge. My jocular comment aside, there’s a good deal of logic to that. But you don’t have to look far to see that there is a genetic similarity to that view and the pretensions of our authoritarian age. Committees may not generate genius visions. But they also less often grind people under their feet.
In any case, this is what to me makes the current questions about “AI” so interesting and genuinely important — far beyond the narrow questions of its utility and certainly the frothy nonsense about sentience and self-awareness. AI and the money being poured into it are at the center of each of these contests currently shaping the world. And to understand that world, it’s important to have the best understanding possible of what is real technological innovation and what is actually being generated by the equivocal blessings of monopoly power, the ferocious power combined with the lack of dynamism and the fading prospects of fantastical growth. Similarly, in precisely what ways are the vertiginous sensations of ultra-wealth driving our authoritarian moment in the US? And finally, how is AI — the bright shiny object at the center of the whole show — being deployed to advance the power of the authoritarians? It’s all connected together and that’s what makes it both fascinating and important.