I hope that one day it will no longer be hilarious to me the degree to which the critical wing of academia lives rent-free in the increasingly founder-brained head of poor Ben Bratton, but that day is not today.

Some of his critiques of critique are on the money, to be sure—though many more of them amount to a sophisticated remix of “I know you are, but what am I?”—but I can think of few people in the pro-“AI” academic space whose writing betrays such a desperate yet frustrated desire to be affirmed and approved of by those whose ranks he once aspired to join.

Ethan Mollick, for instance, is an intellectual pygmy by comparison to Bratton; perhaps that’s why he has that air of vacuous contentment, uncomplicatedly delighted at the attention and opportunity afforded him by the bandwagon? Bratton, meanwhile, is more the Holden Cauldfield type, still seething at the phonies, identifying ressentiment everywhere he looks, with the notable exception of his mirror.

I genuinely want to get over my amusement, because there is a pity waiting somewhere behind it — and because my schadenfreude is exactly the sort of attitude that can curdle into something like its current target. That said, I doubt he’d appreciate my pity, were I able to muster it. Better for both of us, perhaps, if I didn’t think about him at all… but he wants, he needs to be thought about, and it is hard not to respond to that hunger.

Well, then: tat tvam asi, ever and always.