Robber barons better look out

Karen Attiah is done with being anyone's good girl. The journalist from Texas was something of a rising star at the Washington Post, before Jeff Bezos decided to rein in "his" writers. She led the newspaper's Global Opinions section. She wrote her own opinion pieces about race, gender, culture, human rights -- the stuff that disquiets billionaire boys. She was fired for, perhaps among other causes, not being properly respectful about the murder of right wing agitator Charlie Kirk, condemning the crime, but posting on BlueSky: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence." Seems merely accurate to me, but apparently too much for her boss. There are lawsuits ...

The Met Gala was one of her beats -- beautiful people performing varieties of beauty for charity and ego gratification. On her Substack, she lets loose on that scene, now sponsored by Bezos.

... Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence. 

When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.

In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people. 

We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past. 

No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress. 

Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.

But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.

What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.

A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.

We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans. ...

 Now there's a terrifying picture of the future, one which is not the only way to envision where we are going, but certainly a possible way. I am grateful for Attiah's incisive courage. I am grateful for her rage.

AI for the love of lucre

Yesterday I ran across a polling finding that stopped me cold. According to the Pew Research Center: 

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’.

Apparently the sense that some kind of radical break is imminent is very powerful among us. (For the record, for myself, I doubt this. History records societies and the species evolving over time, not through genuine disjunctions. We're stuck in time, and not going to escape.)

But the notion of a coming apocalypse does seem to have become the norm among our tech overlords. And their vision seems a combination of vicious and silly. But what would you expect from a bunch of emotionally crippled white men unleashed by their wealth?

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer who investigates one of the core questions of this time:

How the Tech World Turned Evil 

... The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. 

That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.

There's a good deal of Greek mythology about what happens when humans think we are as gods. If their educations were a little wider, the bros might have heard of Icarus. 

Peter Theil of Palantir has made himself the spokesman for tech hubris. Noah goes on: 

... Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

... Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024. Amazon and Meta lobbied against Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them. 

ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days after his second inauguration, issued an executive order reversing what he later called “my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry.” 

Trump also eased up on antitrust enforcement and within a year drove away the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms.

Seems pretty evil to me, though evil rich guys are a dime a dozen in history. There's not as much novelty here as they like to think. Noah insists that human beings need to do an intervention to stop these boys and their toys.

... to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). 

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity, and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think otherwise.

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon. But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is rich—and it’s really, really rich. 

If our societies can't figure out how to intervene, I suspect material reality will. Climate apocalypse seems more likely than the bros' Singularity.