I’ve been getting lots of your emails about Artificial Intelligence and its place right at the center of so many inflection points — alliances in the new world of oligarchs, the global authoritarian movement, the Gulf princes and their money and more. One of those emails was from TPM Reader AO. AO’s central point was that this is principally a technology, productivity and economics question, and really not a political one. People may hate it but mostly because they don’t know what it is. And in any case it doesn’t matter. Because this is a transformative technology being driven by private capital investment and it’s a change that’s coming regardless of what anyone thinks. With that roll out you may think we were off to a bad start. But it was an interesting conversation and it continues. I reiterated various points I’ve made in posts here, etc. But there was one point that I realized I hadn’t made explicitly enough in those posts.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s really important to distinguish between the actual technology — LLM-based AI — and the political formations forming around it. They’re not the same thing. They’re both really important on their own terms. It’s important to give both sufficient room in a discussion of either topic.
So here goes.
Whatever the power of LLM-based AI (a basic and unsettled question) a central part of this conversation is about who controls it and on what terms. Whatever this thing is, we can have it transform society on civic democratic terms or on authoritarian and oligarchic ones. The difference between those two scenarios is very large. We start with the fact that the Silicon Valley of 2024 (set aside what happened last year) is vastly different from that of 2004. Wealth and power are both highly concentrated and platform monopoly is the dominant business model. From 2023 to 2025 you had big parts of Silicon Valley move decisively into the camp of the global authoritarian movement.
In my conversation with AO there was a lot of talk about trying to stop LLM-based AI or letting it take its course. But nothing is ever that simple. If it’s a truly transformative technology the manner of the transformation and the values encoded into it will be set now. That is a political question. At this moment, it’s being rolled out for 4 or 5 Rahad Jackson-type characters (the infamous and glorious coke dealer in Boogie Bights played by Alfred Molina) doing truly whatever the fuck they want and what society thinks or cares about, or what any of the impacts are, is just so much bullshit that NPCs (Non-Player Characters), as they’d probably put it, think up to make themselves feel important.
The world that creates is not the one I want to live in.