A New Kind Of Fire

When rubbing two seemingly unrelated concepts together, sometimes you get a new kind of fire.

For example, in the left hand of our contemporary muse:

Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri

The old world is dying. The new one is late in emerging. And in this half-light monsters are born.

—Antonio Gramsci, from his prison notebooks

And in the right hand:

In fact, the overwhelming impression I get from generative AI tools is that they are created by people who do not understand how to think and would prefer not to. That the developers have not walled off ethical thought here tracks with the general thoughtlessness of the entire OpenAI project.

—Elizabeth Lopatto in the Verge article, The Questions ChatGPT Shouldn’t Answer, March 5, 2025

If we rub these particular concepts together, will anything interesting really be ignited? That depends, I think, on whether or not we believe that the old world really is dying, and whether or not we also share the consensus developing among our professional optimists that the technologies we’ve begun to call artificial intelligence represent a genuine hope of resurrecting it.

If we believe that Gramsci’s prescient vision is finally being fulfilled, what monsters, exactly, should we be expecting? The resurgence of fascism and fascists is certainly the one most talked about at the moment, but the new fascism seems to me less like a genuinely possible future, and more like the twitching of a partially reanimated corpse. Vladimir Putin can rain missiles down on the Ukraine all day long, and we learn nothing. Donald Trump can rage and bluster and condemn, and still not conquer France in a month. Despite the deadly earnest of both these tyrants, Marx’s “second time as farce” has never seemed more apt.

The more interesting monsters are the tech bros of Silicon Valley, the idiot savants who modestly offer themselves up to serve as our once and future philosopher kings. They give us ChatGPT, and in their unguarded moments natter endlessly on about AGI and the singularity as though they’d just succeeded in turning lead into gold, or capturing phlogiston in a bell jar.

Never mind asking Sam Altman why, despite his boasting, we haven’t yet achieved AGI on current hardware. Ask a simpler question instead: Why don’t we yet have self-driving cars? More specifically, why don’t we have self-driving cars that can drive anywhere a human being can, in any conditions a human being can? Then ask yourself how you would train a self-driving car to handle all the varied versions of the trolley problem that are likely to occur during the millions of miles driven each day on the world’s roads.

We do know how human beings handle these situations, don’t we? If we train a car’s self-driving system in the same way human beings are trained, should we not expect equivalent results?

The answer to our first question is no, we can’t actually describe with any degree of certainty what mental processes govern human reactions in such situations. What we do know is that mind and body, under the pressure of the split-second timing often required, seem to react as an integrated unit, and rational consciousness seems to play little if any part in the decisions taken in the moment. Ethical judgments, if any are involved, appear purely instinctive in their application.

Memory doesn’t seem to record these events and our responses to them as rational progressions either. When queried at the time, what memory presents seems almost dreamlike—dominated by emotions, flashes of disjointed imagery, and often a peculiarly distorted sense of time. When queried again after a few days or weeks, however, memory will often respond with a more structured recollection. The rational mind apparently fashions a socially respectable narrative out of the mental impressions which were experienced initially as both fragmentary and chaotic. The question is whether this now recovered and reconstructed memory is data suitable for modeling future decision-making algorithms, or is instead a falsification which is more comfortable than accurate.

With such uncertainty about the answer to our first question, the answer to our second becomes considerably more complicated. If we don’t know whether or not the human reactions to an actual trolley problem are data-driven in any real sense, where should we source the data for use in training our self-driving car systems? Could we use synthetic data—a bit of vector analysis mixed with object avoidance, and a kind of abstract moral triage of possible casualties? After all, human reactions per se aren’t always anything we’d want emulated at scale, and even if our data on human factors resists rational interpretation, we already have, or can acquire, a considerable amount of synthetic data about the technical factors involved in particular outcomes.

Given enough Nvidia processors and enough electricity to power them, we could certainly construct a synthetic data approach, but could we ever really be sure that our synthetic data matched what happens in the real world in the way, and to the degree, that we expect? This might be the time to remind ourselves that neither we nor our machines are gods, nor are our machines any more likely than we are to become gods, not, at least, as long as they have to rely on us to teach them what any god worth worshipping would need to know.

I think Elizabeth Lopatto has the right of it here. Generative AI knows, in almost unimaginable historical completeness, what word is likely to come after the word that has just appeared—on the page, over the loudspeaker, in the mind, whatever—but historical is the operative word here. Every progression it assembles is a progression that has already existed somewhere in the history of human discourse. It can recombine these known progressions in new ways—in that sense, it can be a near-perfect mimic. It can talk like any of us, and when we listen to the recording after the fact, not even we ourselves can tell that we didn’t actually say what we hear coming out of the speaker. It can paint us a Hockney that not even David Hockney himself could be entirely sure was a forgery.

The problem—and in my opinion it’s a damning one—is that generative AI, at least as presently designed and implemented, can never present us with anything truly new. The claims made for successful inference algorithms at work in the latest generative AI models seem to me to be premature at best. While it may ultimately prove to be true that machines are capable of becoming independent minds in the same way that human beings do, proving it requires an assessment of all sorts of factors related to the physical and environmental differences in the development of our two species which so far remains beyond the state of the art.

Human beings still appear to me to be something quite different from so-called thinking machines—different in kind, not merely in degree. However we do it, however little we understand even at this late date how we do it, we actually can create new things—new sensations, new concepts, new experiences, new perspectives, new theories of cosmology, whatever. The jury is still out on whether our machines can learn to do the same.

If we’re worried about fascism, or indeed any form of totalitarianism that might conceivably subject our posterity to the kind of dystopian future already familiar to us from our speculative fiction, we’d do well to consider that a society based on machines that quote us back to ourselves in an endlessly generalized loop can hobble us in more subtle but just as damaging and permanent ways as the newspeak and doublethink portrayed in Orwell’s 1984. No matter how spellbinding ChatGPT and the other avatars of generative AI can be, we should never underestimate our own capabilities, nor exchange them out of convenience for the bloodless simulacrum offered us by the latest NASDAQ-certified edgelord.

The bros still seem confident that generative AI can transform itself in a single lifetime by some as yet undefined magic from a parrot into a wise and incorruptible interlocutor. If they’re right, I’ll be happy to consign this meditation to the dustbin of history myself, and to grant them and their creations the respect they’ll undoubtedly both demand. In the meantime, though, I think I’ll stick with another quote, this one by [email protected]‬ in a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT:

I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

Electrons and Promises

Money universalized the power of wealth, endowed it with the freedom to extend itself beyond the organizational capacity of soi disant divine monarchies and pious religious latifundia. For better of worse, it drove the ascendancy of the human species to total dominance over all creation. The principle of liquidity which money embodied was a revelation that even Saul of Tarsus would have found transformational, had he not been paying more attention to the delusions of religious fervor than the reality under his donkey’s hooves. Money was a store of value that was easily transferable, infinitely divisible, that permitted superb transactional granularity—a reliable accounting of who had what, and even more importantly, who owed what to whom—this was really what gave rise to the anthropocene.

In the beginning, money was gold and promises, then it was paper and promises. Now it’s capital accounting, which is to say electrons and promises. The bitcoin boo-yah boys understand everything about electrons, but nothing about promises, or the need to keep them if you want the world of human beings to remain stable.

God, or somebody, help us all.

A MAGA Bestiary

Cruelty, venality, mendacity, sanctimony, ambition, and greed. Also self-delusion. Also ignorance.

Greg Abbott
Samuel Alito
Steve Bannon
William Barr
Maria Bartiromo
Lauren Boebert
Pam Bondi
Don Bongino
Dan Caine
Tucker Carlson
Kenneth Chesebro
Tom Cotton
Ted Cruz
Paul Dans
Ron DeSantis
John Eastman
Tulsi Gabbard
Newt Gingrich
Rudy Giuliani
Neil Gorsuch
Paul Gosar
Lindsey Graham
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Alina Habba
Sean Hannity
Josh Hawley
Pete Hegseth
Kay Ivey
Mike Johnson
Jim Jordan
Brett Kavanaugh
Robert Kennedy Junior
Jared Kushner
Karoline Leavitt
Brad Little
Nancy Mace
Mitch McConnell
John McEntee
Linda McMahon
Christopher Miller
Katie Miller
Stephen Miller
Stephen Moore
Elon Musk
Peter Navarro
Kristi Noem
Bill O’Reilly
Mehmet Oz
Kash Patel
Mike Pence
Vivek Ramaswamy
John Ratcliffe
Tate Reeves
John Roberts
Kevin Roberts
Marco Rubio
Rick Scott
Jeff Sessions
Roger Severino
Roger Stone
Enrique Tarrio
Clarence Thomas
Ginni Thomas
Donald Trump
Donald Trump Jr.
Eric Trump
Ivanka Trump
Lara Trump
Melania Trump
Tiffany Trump
Tommy Tuberville
J.D. Vance
Russell Vought
Ryan Walters

How It’s Going

Politics as usual hasn’t been as usual lately as it used to be. Were he still among the living, even our 20th century Nostradamus, Mr. Orwell, might be surprised to learn that Oceania has finally and definitively lost its war with Eurasia, and is presently hiding the rump of itself under the skirts of a demented real estate developer with delusions of grandeur. Definitely not the Big Brother Mr. Orwell promised us, this one, although the red hat rubes hardly seem to have noticed. Eastasia, meanwhile, is licking its chops, oblivious to its own vulnerabilities, doing its unctuous best to look as inscrutable as western racists expect.

A couple of degrees more of global warming, a nuclear exchange or two between idiot regimes, and even Elon Musk and his sycophant armies might find themselves roasting rats-on-a-stick over burning rubber tires somewhere where angels fear to tread. That, my fellow deeply concerned citizens of the First World, is actually how it’s going, and you didn’t even have to sit through a commercial to hear about it.

All Your Base Are Now Belong To Us

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen.
Der Musk maschiert mit mutig festem Schritt
Kam’raden, die Wokist’n vernichtet haben
marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.

(For those of my readers who don’t know German, this is a contemporary parody of the 90 year-old Nazi party anthem das Horst-Wessel-Lied.) In English, it goes more or less like this:

The flag held high, ranks firmly closed together!
Musk marches on with bravely stiffened stride
Comrades who’ve done away with Wokeists
march with us in our ranks in spirit now
.

GERMAN CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: Reproducing these lyrics is, with few exceptions, currently illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the US our laws are more permissive. My apologies to the citizens of the Federal Republic, but given the current constitutional crisis in my own country, I felt the need to fiddle with them here.

Im Westen Nichts Neues

Judging by the chaos engendered by our Orange Furor’s decree cutting off all aid to everybody everywhere, it’s a good thing our cut-rate Nazis weren’t trying to invade France. And will somebody please tell Stephen Miller that even if he shaves his head, squints malevolently, and shouts a lot, people will still know he’s a Jew, and will still find a Jewish Goebbels unseemly.

The Irrelevance of Precedent

What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?

What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.

The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.

Novus Ordo Seclorum

Along with many others, I’ve long thought and said as much here and elsewhere that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:

A map of the united states with the words " dumbfuckkistan " written in it.

The Rush To Surrender

Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:

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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

—@[email protected], from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT

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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.

And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.

The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.

The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.

—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung

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Remember, imbeciles and wits, 

sots and ascetics, fair and foul, 

young girls with little tender tits, 

that DEATH is written over all. 

Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul 

they are so rotten, old and thin, 

or firm and soft and warm and full— 

fellmonger Death gets every skin.

All that is piteous, all that’s fair, 

all that is fat and scant of breath, 

Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, 

is Death’s collateral: 

—Basil Bunting, Villon

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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so obviously eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.