Ryan “Garbage Day” Broderick thinks the bubble’s near to bursting. So do I—but in the name of honesty, I’ve thought it for the better part of two years now and, well: here we all still are!
Nonetheless, the gap between the hype and the word on the street is acquiring the status of a genuine chasm… which, as Broderick and many others happily concede, is nothing to do with what various new devices can actually do or not do, and everything to do with the sweeping transformative claims made for the suitcase word of Those Two Letters when compared to the actual impact of gimmicky apps and plugins on ordinary people. Even folk far more committed than I to “tech” as an inevitable and necessary expression of capital-P Progress now seem willing to admit that, while they’re not going to throw around strong words like “naked”, maybe the emperor does appear a little under-dressed for the weather.
I don’t do predictions, and this isn’t a prediction so much as what I will freely admit is a guess based much more on instinct than any half-way serious grasp of economic or history or economic history, but nonetheless: I think we’ll hear the pop shortly after the big SilVal IPOs later in the year. It may even be a matter of days: just long enough for the vampires of finance to siphon off the profits of everyone else’s irrationality before dumping the stock and bringing down the whole house of cards.
In a very real and concrete sense, I don’t want this to happen, because the economic shockwaves are likely to be very damaging to everyone but the aforementioned vampires who surf upon them. Broderick suggests something closer to the dot-com bust than the Great Depression of a century ago, but I’ve seen the opposite suggested elsewhere, and I’ve no way of knowing who’s more likely to be right.
But in an equally real and concrete sense, I should admit that I do want this to happen, because the way out is through: we are trapped in the rotten, putrefying corpse of The Future, and only its catastrophic failure to deliver on its shop-worn promises can realistically discredit it in a way that might allow us to move forward. Yes, this is an apocalyptic vision, but in the true sense of that term: apocalypse as in revelation, the act of revealing—a tearing aside of the veil.
This is a question I keep asking myself about, well, the entire internet lately. “What if this all just doesn’t work this time?” What if AI companies can’t replace search? What if streaming video can’t replace Hollywood? What if short-form video apps can’t replace social media users? What if Silicon Valley can’t brute force their products — and ideology — onto the masses again? To take it even further, what if the dot com crash and the AI crash are actually part of the same 25 years epoch of technological stagnation? I’m not going to lie, I find this line of questioning exhilarating.
I do, too. Because for all the likely wreckage, it is a prospect of change—an end to this awful Red Queen’s Race, and reason to rethink a whole lot more than smartphone user interfaces and the aesthetics of conspicuous consumption. The supposed age of “AI” is not the beginning of a new paradigm, but the ignoble, hysterical end of an old one.
(For all my griping about its sometimes infuriating stylistic and structural choices, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance has proven very thought-provoking with regard to thinking about paradigmatic historical pivots. The final third of the book has made me glad I stuck it out through the frustrations of the previous two.)
Because it’s not about “tech”—and I realise now, rather belatedly perhaps, that this is why it’s been so tiring to deal over and over again with human robots repeating the same specious arguments and whatabouteries in the same sequence, every damned conversation like an encounter with a freshly-booted LLM with zero context and some very crude doctrinal directives copy-pasted directly from Marc Andreesen’s echoing brain-pan.
It was never about “tech”, not least because there’s no such thing as “tech”. There is only people using things to do stuff, and if that is anything, then it is politics—not party politics, not identity politics, not the politics of resentment or aspiration or anything else, but rather the very basic question of how we do things, and how we decide, and why we think it matters.
And so I’ll leave the last word to Chris Butler:
This is why I have come to hold hope as something sterner than optimism. Optimism is a mood, and a mood is a luxury; it comes and goes with the weather of a comfortable life. Hope is a discipline. For the people a system does not serve, disengagement was never on offer — they cannot file politics under background, because it arrives, daily, in the foreground of their lives. For them, the belief that effort is not wasted, that arrangements made by people can be remade by people, functions less like a feeling and more like a structure. It is something they stand on. The luxury is being able to look away. The necessity of hope is in staying able to believe that looking is worthwhile, action is necessary, and change is possible.
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