The Machine Rages Back
The dawning of the internet enabled a creative revolution, where one guy like me, with a laptop, could develop a publishing system and an audience that could compete with major, branded publications. During the dot-com boom, five people from the New York Times came to my South of Market, San Francisco office because they wanted to get advice about their newsletter strategy. The age of indies had arrived. We were where it was all happening. During the current AI boom, it feels more like something is happening to us. Giant corporations with unprecedented amounts of capital and no real oversight other than the hollow promises of self-regulation are making massive decisions about the future of everything, while we’re left to hope our tech overlords are benevolent in the way they choose to delete the role of mere salaried NPCs, and where they decide city-sized data centers will drink our milkshake. All that indie creativity has been sucked into giant database farms, where it gets regurgitated as bulleted outlines. The internet empowered. AI is overpowering. Both the reality and the marketing around AI are overwhelming. Charlie Warzel explains why so much of the current tech revolution makes people want to hit a giant ESC key. “That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Too Much Is Happening Too Fast. “I’d argue that the most common feeling about AI is somatic: a low-grade hum of difficult-to-place anxiety that’s the result of loud people constantly suggesting that the near future will look very little like the present and that nothing—your job or the social contract—might survive the transition.” (To save space, I’m skipping the interim tech years where the internet annihilated attention, polarized populations, razed reality, totalled truth, and demolished democracy.)
