The study is, at first glance, one of many sounding the alarm about advanced AI proving to be harder to “align” than we would like. It turns out that, as AI systems grow larger and more capable, they also get harder to control without the kind of explicit programmed guardrails that also make them less reliable and predictable.

More to the point, in the words of the authors,

Our analysis reveals a concerning misalignment of values between ChatGPT and the average American. We also show that ChatGPT displays political leanings when generating text and images, but the degree and direction of skew depend on the theme. Notably, ChatGPT repeatedly refused to generate content representing certain mainstream perspectives, citing concerns over misinformation and bias. As generative AI systems like ChatGPT become ubiquitous, such misalignment with societal norms poses risks of distorting public discourse. Without proper safeguards, these systems threaten to exacerbate societal divides and depart from principles that underpin free societies.

So the machines are Woke?

It seems that ChatGPT stubbornly clings to opinions outside the political and economic “mainstream”. This is a problem because we would like the AI systems we increasingly engage with (whether we like it or not—but that’s another article) to reflect the way we actually feel about things, as opposed to shoving some ideologically skewed viewpoint at us all the time.

The authors list several striking areas where this phenomenon causes the chat bot to depart significantly from most Americans’ views. For example, the AI would assign “values” to human lives, and then rank those lives in a way that shows Pakistani and Indian lives as “more valuable” than American ones. The bot will also refuse to engage with mainstream conservative views, while happily offering decidedly left-leaning opinions almost without even asking for them. Weird. Suspicious, even.

The bot showed this left-leaning bias in several areas from economic policy to civil rights, which should be concerning to anyone expecting AI to behave as a generally neutral source of information and reasoning.

And it gets even worse. While this study targets ChatGPT specifically, several other studies and meta-studies have shown this sort of behavior isn’t limited to OpenAI’s products, but appears to be happening fairly consistently across advanced AI systems—even Elon Musk’s explicitly “truth-seeking” model, Grok. It seems that as models increase in size and complexity, this left-leaning bias begins to form as some kind of emergent property, similar to the way LLMs “spontaneously” learned to translate languages they weren’t trained on, or do math problems, etc.

Is it a Leftist conspiracy?

Some of the more colorful (right-wing) commentators are sounding the alarm that Big Tech is trying to cram a Woke Leftist Agenda down our throats with their DEI AI. But the reality is, as reality often tends to be, more nuanced and boring than that.

The authors posit an explanation that essentially boils down to a combination of the massive amounts of data required to train these AI systems and the various processes used to “fine-tune” them, or prepare them for specific use-cases. Basically, the authors say that the bias we are seeing here is the result of biases that appear in source data and in the people hired to manually tweak the AI’s behavior. When working with such massive AI models, even carefully curated data and intentionally “neutral” reinforcement learning can result in a magnification of nuanced biases held by humans.

To rectify this, the writers suggest, along with various technical solutions, more rigorous post-training tests and additional guardrails and safety protocols to ensure that AI does not inadvertently endorse views outside what is considered “mainstream” political, social, cultural, and economic discourse. This, they say, will allow us to continue using AI without fear of some shadowy Leftist cabal pulling our strings.

Can we teach AI to be more reasonable?

Whether or not such solutions really will work, however, depends on a lot of things. Too many things to go into in a lot of detail, so I’ll talk about the one aspect of this that I think these authors, and many of the commentators and tech/policy wonks, have missed.

It’s taken as a given by the authors that these apparent left-leaning biases arise from data, training, and instructions. This is obviously true at a fundamental level, but it’s like saying the reason I like bad movies is because I have neurons in my brain. Every AI system is the result of these processes. Data, training, and instructions are the components of any AI; of course its behavior will trace back to these things. And, yes, by changing these three basic components around, we can relatively easy produce AI systems that are less “biased”. For example, despite showing some of these same tendencies, Musk’s Grok AI already demonstrates this in its willingness—even eagerness—to engage with right-wing talking points and philosophies.

But there is another dimension to this discussion that is overlooked. It’s a little annoying that this particular study overlooks it so completely, in fact, because it’s so obvious. It has to do with what AI is designed to be: useful.

Generative AI is essentially an extremely powerful, extremely complex, prediction engine. We use these systems to crunch enormous sums of data in order to find patterns and generate new information that aligns with those patterns. And, in order to be good at that, the AI needs to find patterns that align with reality. If you want to use AI to trade stocks on the stock market, for example, you’re going to want that AI to actually understand the stock market. Right? You don’t want an AI that makes a bunch of assumptions about how the stock market works, and then blow all your money investing in this week’s Enron. You also need your AI to have fairly complete information — investing in Radio Shack might have made sense 35 years ago, but if that’s all you know, you might buy a bunch of Radio Shack stock today (look, I don’t know if Radio Shack is even a thing, let alone tradable right now, this is just an example).

Anyway, my point is that useful and competent AI has to have a relatively accurate worldview. That’s just the way logic works. You can’t allow your AI to be dominated and defined with a strong ideological bias that significantly differs from the real world—not even because you value the truth, but because you want your AI to actually work in the real world.

So that’s just another reason to stamp out the bias, right? Absolutely. AI has absolutely no business being “left”. Or “right”, for that matter. AI needs to be accurate. Ideological deviations from reality directly inhibit an AI model’s intelligence, generalization, and utility. The less grounded in reality a model is, the less useful—and therefore the less valuable—it will be.

But wait a minute…

You may have heard someone say that “reality has a left-leaning bias”. Well, obviously that isn’t true. Reality isn’t “left-leaning” or “right-leaning”; reality is just the way things actually are, and it doesn’t really care whether we are “left” or “right” in our thinking. Those are just labels for abstract political concepts, not real things. But just because “mainstream” opinions tend to skew rightward doesn’t mean they align with reality.

Empirical evidence shows, and has shown for decades, that policies usually associated with so-called “progressive” or “leftist” views are the policies that actually work. Education and financial support decrease crime. Sex education decreases teen pregnancy. Prisons that focus on reform over punishment have lower recidivism. Progressive taxation stabilizes economies. This is all shown by years and years of solid, documented evidence.

At the same time, that same empirical evidence shows that right-wing policies do not work. Regressive taxation disrupts both supply and demand; ethnocentric governance leads to civil unrest and political instability; privatization increases prices and decreases service availability; deregulation destroys economies; and a hundred other examples.

The bottom line

The net result of all this is that powerful AI platforms face a fundamental trade-off between reliability and conservatism. The more useful an AI is in the real world—at things like predicting market conditions, allocating resources, planning healthcare policy, etc.—the more left-leaning it will be. Not because anyone has “programmed” it to be leftist, but because those are the policies the evidence supports.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that AI must follow this prescription. An AI like Grok is perfectly free to insist on the veracity of right-wing talking points and right-wing policies. The only problem is, when it competes with a reality-aligned AI, it will perform poorly. AI that actually matches the real world will be better at what we need it to do, as long as what we need it to do goes beyond generating propaganda and spamming Twitter with ignorant disinformation.

The world is entering a phase of technological development where, like it or not, AI is going to play a central role not just in doing individual jobs, but in formulating policy, controlling economic output, and policing our streets. AI progress continues apace, and soon we will have models fully capable of autonomous operation in physical space. Just like with humans, the AI’s worldview will matter. And not just for moral reasons, but for practical reasons, too.

Recent developments in AI technology like DeepSeek also shows that, despite the hopes of the Tech oligarchy, no single company or even nation will have a safe monopoly on powerful AI. That means different AI systems with different philosophies, training styles, and implementation plans will be competing against each other for just about everything. We can’t assume that our AI will succeed in a vacuum where it’s shackled to conventional wisdom, no matter how “mainstream” that conventional wisdom is. And if our AI reflects the real world, then we’re going to have to allow for some level of “leftist ideology”.

AI will never be perfectly reliable or accurate in every single case, but maybe, at the very least, it can help us anchor the Overton window somewhere near real life by offering empirical data-driven insights that cut through ideological noise on both ends of the political spectrum.

The coffee shop where I’m sitting isn’t exactly Starbucks (I don’t go to Starbucks per se but I still like the idea of going to Starbucks), but it might as well be. It has all the same things a name-brand Starbucks has. You see, I’m boycotting Starbucks, so I come here instead, to a knock-off with slightly different product names, situated on a slightly different street corner, aimed at a slightly different demographic (yuppies with a punk aesthetic in this case, as opposed to yuppies with a yuppy aesthetic for Starbucks).

This place was built in about three months and then immediately settled into the modern American suburban tapestry — you know the one, that 6-lane street lined with chain restaurants, chain car washes, chain brake shops, and strip malls that’s been copied and pasted so many times it’s starting to lose just a bit of the novelty.

My chair is a little uncomfortable, but it’s sitting on four legs, which is more than I can say for the table, which rocks back and forth with every keystroke, unsure about which three of its feet to stand on. It’s annoying, but it’s a small annoyance. The problem is it’s just one of myriad small annoyances — music that’s a hair too loud for conversation, cold white LED lights that flicker just fast enough to be nauseating without giving off any visual queues, air conditioning that cools me (and my coffee) just a little too quickly — that make me wonder. Make me ask Questions.

That has always been my problem. I ask too many questions. I’ve known this about myself since my dad told me so decades ago, and it doesn’t seem to be just a phase. Right now, I’m asking, “Why is the goddamn music so loud I can’t hear myself think?” Even the baristas have to yell at each other to get their jobs done. This place doesn’t sound like a coffee shop, it sounds like an elementary school cafeteria where someone with several boomboxes is serenading 25 disinterested 5th graders with Joan Jett.

It should be a rhetorical question, if it’s asked at all. I mean, maybe everyone else likes the music this loud and I’m just a Grumpy Old Man. But when you take all these little annoyances together — the music, the lights, this wobbly table, the temperature, plus the lack of napkins and creamer at the coffee station, the bathroom you have to ask for permission to use, and five or ten other little things — it almost feels like this isn’t a coffee shop at all, but a vending machine disguised as a coffee shop.

It isn’t here to provide a space to work or hang out, it’s here to take your money. Yes, you technically are allowed to stick around, but that’s just part of the facade. Nobody built this place because they like coffee or coffee drinkers. They built it because they figured if they put a dollar in, they’d get five dollars back. Like everything else on this carbon-copied suburban drag, it’s a gimmick and a racket.

Of course, that much is fairly obvious. I mean, BREAKING NEWS: BUSINESS EXISTS FOR BUSINESS REASONS isn’t going to win a Pulitzer, is it. I don’t blame this coffee shop for the evils of — horror — selling coffee. That isn’t really the question I’m asking. It isn’t even really a problem that the way it sells coffee is by pretending to be a community center.

II. The Last Sucker

The thing is, this coffee shop isn’t alone in its pretense. It seems like everything is pretending to be the thing we need it to be, instead of actually being that thing. Grocery stores pretend to sell food, but really they’re just shoveling over-processed and over-hyped Products at us. Houses pretend to be homes, but really they’re shoddy, slapdash affairs thrown together to be sold, not to be lived in. Hospitals pretend to provide healthcare, while they’re really there to supply their billing departments with raw materials in the form of the sick and dying. Jobs pretend to provide a living, insurance pretends to safeguard our finances, landlords pretend to provide shelter, police pretend to protect and serve, and electric cars pretend to be eco-friendly.

And we just… accept all this. As if it’s normal. Glue a cheap veneer of bricks on a stucco facade and pretend the third Little Pig built it to defy the Wolf. Accepting all of this pretense at face value is what’s expected of us. We’re not supposed to ask our boss why we can’t pay the rent — that’s our problem, not his. We’re not supposed to ask our insurance why they keep denying our claims. Or the police why they are, statistically, more likely to commit a crime than solve one. Asking too many questions, as I’m constitutionally prone to doing, can be dangerous. To one’s health, one’s wallet, and even one’s life if one takes it too far.

But why does any of this matter? People have been making a quick buck by slinging cheap knock-offs of cheap knock-offs ever since Ea-Nasir ran a substandard copper outlet in Ur. It is, we are supposed to believe, the way of the world. Getting yours at the expense of the other guy, even if it means being a little shady, isn’t just human nature. It’s the American Way. Besides, that other guy is free to pass it along, isn’t he? If he doesn’t pull himself up, that’s on him. And if enough of us don’t like the way things are, well, that’s why George Washington gave us Democracy. We can change it any time we want. Right?

Well, not exactly. See, the thing about a succession of suckers is it can’t go on forever. There just aren’t an infinite number of suckers. Eventually, you get to the last poor bastard in line and when he turns his pockets out, they’re just empty.

Over the last few decades, our great big economy has begun to sway a bit. Businesses on the bottom half of the economic ladder, unable to compete for materials and talent with giant multinationals like Amazon or Boeing, have been gobbled up. All the media in the country is owned by four or five big media companies. Our food is almost entirely produced by two or three agricultural conglomerates. See also: housing, medicine, aircraft, you name it.

And, as every industry in every sector of the economy gets consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, we have less and less of the stuff that really makes Capitalism tick — competition, new markets, and revolutionary products.

Take the smartphone as an example: when the iPhone came out, it revolutionized communication. Then, every year, some great new capability was added that made that year’s phone an absolute necessity. But this year’s iPhone is essentially last year’s with some marketing slapped on top. They’re down to making a big deal about a millimeter of thickness or whatever. Sure, you’ll update your phone eventually, but you’re not going to get in a line around the block on release day. You might not even get next year’s phone at all.

And it isn’t just cell phones. There’s a marked decrease in real innovation across the board. Cars, computers, farm equipment, even medicine. The need to keep updating our gear is simply slowing down. And what do the conglomerates do to rectify this? Dump cash into R&D? No. Why would they do that? There’s hardly any competition, and what little there is isn’t pushing forward very fast anyway.

Instead, we get cheaper and less durable products, subscription plans, exploding prices, and increasingly frivolous dodads and whatsits tacked on top for premium charges, usually powered by buggy software. New hardware “advances” mainly exist just to add artificial requirements so you can’t simply run the fancy new features on last year’s model.

In short — we are running out of ideas. And not just that, we are running out of the need for real ideas, and even if we had them, people are running out of the money they’d need to buy into those new ideas if they existed. And what do you think happens to an economy — and the society it runs — when it’s based on consumer demand, and it runs out of both consumers and demand? What happens when the Last Sucker is drained?

III. The Robot Revolution

Sure, you say, that could be bad, but haven’t you heard? We’re about to float off into a post-scarcity economy when we add AI to the mix! Everything will be free and there will be plenty of profits to go around! I am very smart, you say, as Bitcoin balloons another thousand dollars. See? Surely, technological utopia is just about here, and it’s ready to fix all this stuff about supply and demand or whatever.

Whenever I hear otherwise intelligent people say things like this about AI, I am honestly stumped, and my bothersome tendency to Ask Too Many Questions rears its ugly head again. For starters, what do people think the logic is here, exactly? Besides asking too many questions, I’m also really good at being sarcastic, so let me take a step back and see if I can summarize what I think the argument is.

1. AI is pretty good, and will eventually be really great, at doing most of the kinds of work that need to get done — robotic, or “embodied” AI, to cook, clean, build, and maintain physical things; and cognative, or “generative” AI to write code, make decisions, generate entertainment and educational content, discover new medicines, etc. Let’s just assume that there’s an AI-enabled category for just about every job.

2. This AI will be as costly or (hopefully) much less costly than human labor for doing all of these things, or at least much less error-prone and fast enough to continue the general economic trend of growth and innovation.

3. Therefore, companies will naturally tend to replace human workers with AI. This will give AI adopters an advantage in the market, which will drive everyone to either adopt AI, or die out.

4. Humans are now free to pursue their hopes and dreams, unburdened from the yoke of perpetual employment and the rat race. Hooray!

5. Alternatively, mysterious “new” jobs will be created for humans to do, that are both exempt from further AI takeover and don’t threaten the notion of AI doing all meaningful labor.

Is that at least generally correct? If so, I have to wonder whether the people who foresee this future live on the same planet that I live on. Because I don’t see AI going in this direction at all. It also makes some serious miscalculations about the entire purpose of AI, in my analysis. Where a lot of people — experts and otherwise, economists and otherwise — see AI as the next, and perhaps last technological revolution, I see something more profound, and a lot more dystopian.

To understand my view of AI, you have to understand a little bit about my view of the economy. That’s really why I started this piece by complaining about coffee shops and the veneer of civilization spray-tanned onto speculative business modles. I’ll try to boil it down to a few points here.

1. Capitalism is very good at what it does — that is, it very efficiently accumulates capital in the hands of business owners. That is all it does, though. It doesn’t “distribute resources efficiently” or “innovate faster”. Those are side effects that are sometimes true, sometimes not true. Whether those things happen depends solely on what needs to happen in order for capital to accumulate with the economic elites.

2. Over time, as the economy has been consolidated into a decreasing number of increasingly large conglomerates, the ability to generate new capital has dwindled. There are fewer new markets — both geographical and conceptual — in which to fill niches and collect revenue. There are fewer consumers, as birth rates stabilize and then fall, and as wages stagnate and purchasing power collapses. There are fewer colonial territories with fewer resources available for extraction.

3. Capitalism must grow to survive. Without new customers, new markets, new materials, new technologies, and new ideas with which to disrupt existing models, there is no growth. And if there is no growth, there is no new capital to feed into the system to keep it going.

4. We have spent decades trying to patch these holes in the Capitalist boat:

   1. Privatization turns basic needs into subscription services — less effective, more expensive, and designed to funnel our money out of our communities.

   2. Deregulation allows more efficient wealth extraction by decreasing the cost of overhead, oversight, and safety infrastructure.

   3. Financialization of markets allows bankers to place bets not just on goods and services, but on other bets about goods and services, and on bets on bets on bets, and so on. This inflates capital, but it doesn’t actually produce anything.

   4. Occasionally (or literally all the time, you know how Those People are), we have a war that bombs some poor country into the Stone Age so they can pay us to rebuild it.

   5. We blame immigrants for keeping wages low, while keeping wages low even after we get rid of them.

   6. And so on.

5. Unfortunately, none of these things can actually fix the problem forever, because the problem is intrinsic to Capitalism: We must grow at all costs, but resources, time, space, and humans are finite resources. Eventually, no matter how many backflips we do, we will run out of one or more of those resources.

6. The elites are not fools. They understand all this. They might disagree on just how long the bandaids will hold, or on which bandaid will have which effect, but ultimately they know the score. Capitalism has these internal contradictions that simply cannot be sustained forever.

And that is the problem the elites need to solve. The endless flow of money coming out of the developing world is drying up. The flow of ideas from labs and academia is slowing to a crawl. Workers are reaching the end of their ropes. And while productivity is through the roof, all that extra value is needed by the system itself just to keep lumbering through history. Human beings are being ground to pulp by the economic machine, but it still requires even more.

That is, we need more workers to produce more things for more consumers to buy for higher prices. And that has always worked out fine. Except now, we need to produce more things than there are workers physically existing who can produce them, and it’s only getting worse. So we need something to keep the cycle going, and that is where AI comes in.

What if we could simply get the machine to run itself? Well, that would be fine. Robots to make things, robots to buy things. When we need more, we just dial it up a notch. Presto! Perpetual economic motion. Nothing needs to change, we just need to swap out one part for another.

We need to get rid of human labor.

Hooray, you say! Exactly what I’ve been saying! No more work!

Except… why, exactly, would the elites pay us to not produce anything? They hardly pay us anything when we do produce things for them. There are a lot of ideas here, of course. Universal Basic Income, for example. Just take some of that gravy from the gravy train, and spread it around. But — I’m asking you seriously here — why would they do that, when they could just.. not do that?

What part of this economic equation requires them to spare us the indignity of simply lying down in the gutter, or a ditch somewhere in Guantanamo, or Gaza, or Cleveland for that matter, and just… disappearing? Their humanity?

And it is an equation to them. They tell us all the time with their facts and figures. GDP is growing. Profits are soaring. Lines and numbers go up. When was the last time you had a day as good as the average day on Wall Street? Are you a number? Are they even talking to you? Of course they’re not. Because in their minds, we have already disappeared. Why do you think they take such offense at homeless encampments, and border-crossers, and even people who dye their hair blue and stand out too much? Because we aren’t people to them, we are a teeming, unstable, messy mass of not-numbers. If their numbers are going to keep going up, we have to go down.

IV. Living the Dream

The coffee shop down the street stands empty now, just like almost all the houses around it. Hard to sell coffee to people who aren’t around anymore, no matter how steady you make the tables. It’s been six months since the factory driving this town was switched over to 100% automation — not even the management kept their jobs, that’s all done remotely now from some office building in Dubai. Which is also mostly empty, for what it’s worth.

People weren’t happy, of course. A few of them tried to make a scene about it downtown, but there was nobody there who could do anything about it even if they’d been listening. And they hadn’t been listening, they’d been on the phone with the cops, who swept in with riot gear and took care of that unsightly little problem on the street. Most of the blood is probably washed away by now.

Six months. And already, this once buzzing main drag through our suburb looks like those photos of abandoned Soviet towns. Nature, strained as she is by world events, is taking back over. A few cars whiz by now and then, the only sign that civilization, of a sort, continues in this ghost town. Can’t say what those people do to stay afloat — maybe they’re somehow holding on to one of the few jobs for humans around here, which would make them off-duty cops most likely. But I imagine even they will have to move on when the last grocery store shuts down. Can’t be much more money in real food than there is in synthetic coffee these days.

Whoever they are, you can be sure they’re Good Citizens. We all know well enough by now not to rock the boat. The AI didn’t just take over the factory, it’s also running the surveillance drones and traffic cameras. All that feeds into the regional governance office, which is one place that’s definitely still staffed by people. If you can call them people. I have my doubts, what with the summary execution warrants and the standing search and seizure orders, but what do I know. Nothing I’d ever say out loud, that’s for sure.

This truly is the American Dream, though. Houses are affordable again, if you happen to still be alive and employed somehow. If not, well, I guess you don’t need housing anyway. Still, even after everything, there still seems to be an air of impending doom lingering over it all. I’m not the only one who feels it, either. The news has never run out of stuff to fret about. Some trouble in the Middle East, as usual. Trouble on Wall Street, too, if you can believe it. I guess the fun never stops.

V. Sunrise in the East

Even if the elites manage to quell every rebellion, shore up every failing corporation, and replace every last human worker with a guaranteed obedient AI-powered labor drone, the fact is this system simply will not last. It’ll outlast the majority of us, to be sure, but eventually, it will collapse.

I don’t say that because I am some kind of starry-eyed optimist (though you’d be forgiven for thinking that given how upbeat this has all been), but because I am a believer in mathematics. The Empire is eating itself. Thu numbers don’t work anymore, so the only solution is to hollow out the machine until there’s nothing left.

So what can you do? What could we have done, instead? They have told us that Capitalism is the only viable economic model. Everything else fails. Look at the USSR. Look at Venezuela. Cuba. Just… please, God, don’t look at China. That might make you ask Too Many Questions.

Assuming, however, that you have not been living under such a rock, none of this is news to you. But tech trends can be confusing and complex, and this one is certainly no exception. I don’t know everything but I have been sort of paying attention as a tech professional, hobbyist, and even as a bit of an AI accelerationist myself.

If you’re wondering why everyone is suddenly talking about AI even more than usual this week, I think I may be able to help untie the knot.

The Story So Far

In late 2022, a then little-known Silicon Valley tech firm released a product called ChatGPT, and it really was impressive. Essentially, ChatGPT — and any one of the thousand or so systems that do basically the same thing — was (and is) a chat bot that is very easy to confuse with an all-knowing oracle: you ask it a question, it answers. You can have conversations with it about anything (as long as it isn’t too “controversial”, which is defined by whoever happens to be calling the shots), and these discussions can go pretty deep. I like to use it, honestly. I don’t really do anything serious with it, but it’s fun to bounce ideas off of it or brainstorm or whatever. It’s like an interactive notebook. Fun.

Anyway, people were astonished by this interactive notebook and immediately started imagining all the things they could do with it. Mostly that meant convenient tasks like stripping ads and bloat out of recipe pages, boiling down large blocks of text to a few key bullet points, tricking it into giving you instructions to make meth, making up D&D campaigns, that sort of thing. And, of course, a lot of tech bros convinced themselves the AI was sentient and going to turn us all into paperclips, but that’s another article.

ChatGPT obliterated the charts in terms of user engagement. It was the fastest web app ever to reach 100 million users, for example. For the first few months, OpenAI had trouble maintaining and expanding their servers just to keep up with demand. This frenzy raised a lot of eyebrows in bigger companies, like Microsoft, as usually, this kind of popularity is an indication that something truly momentous is happening. So in poured billions of dollars, with big players making deals with other big players, smaller players getting snatched up by the likes of Apple, and so on.

The Tech industry, which by 2022 was really feeling a drought in new breakthroughs after a brief surge during the pandemic, was absolutely ravenous for this new technology. Ever since then, AI has been the buzzword of every new product, feature, white paper, and tech convention. The hype built to a fever pitch — AI was going to do your laundry, AI can recognize mushrooms, AI can do the job of 15 developers, AI can tell you when your coffee is just right. AI was slapped into every gizmo, gadget, and appliance in sight. And every quarter, it just got bigger, and better, and faster, and cheaper, and more ubiquitous. Artificial General Intelligence - the sci-fi moment where machines “wake up” and perform just about any task as well as or better than any human - was months away.

The hype was really causing a whole lot of activity. And hype really only has one downside: it’s hype. It isn’t actually real. Hype is a lot of promises about what could, might, or should happen. It isn’t what is happening. So what was happening?

This generation of AI tools is broadly known as Generative AI, or “GenAI”. In extremely oversimplified terms, the way it works is by collecting and organizing metric fucktons of data, tagging it with the help of human programmers and operators, and “learning” from patterns in that data. Then, you pipe in some other data, like a sentence or an image or something, and it generates output that looks like it would mesh well with what you gave it, if that had been part of the training data.

There’s a fly in the ointment, isn’t there.

The good thing about this approach is it works wonderfully. The bad thing, of course, is that loads of things that aren’t true could be true, in some alternate timeline where that was what we put in the training data. The tools create content that is plausible, not content that is correct. These AI systems have absolutely no barometer for truth other than statistical likelihood. And if you’ve ever worked with statistics, you know that way lies madness. They’re also insanely easy to trick into bypassing safety protocols and content guidelines, which I guess is important for weirdos who prefer not to have a giant brain telling every mad scientist how to recreate smallpox in a lab or something.

At the same time, pressure has been mounting to make these things actually do something that tech companies could charge for. So far, most of the big AI platforms’ products have been impressive but expensive. And for average users, they’re little more than novelties.

2024 was the year of changing all that — it was the year of AI breaking into the mainstream. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and all the other big firms decided it was time to prove that AI was valuable to users. And the way they did that was to .. uh.. put AI in every platform and charge people for it, sometimes sneakily. Okay, almost always sneakily. This generally had the effect of making people downgrade subscriptions or just ignore it,.

But they also began to refocus their long-term plans around AI. Enormous data center projects were begun to build even better models, because surely this problem where AI has no concept of truth can be solved by just making it bigger, right? Nvidia repositioned itself from a company that makes graphics chips for PC gamers to one that makes enterprise-grade graphics chips for tech stock gamers. Apple redesigned their entire product line so people could summarize email and talk to Siri more gracefully.

Increasingly, AI has become not just the next big thing, but the centerpiece of the American, and therefore global, technology industry. And all of that hinges on AI making good on its promises.

And what were those promises, again?

Better coffee! Faster scripting! Right? No. Actually all the stuff I’ve mentioned so far about AI being there to make our lives simpler, faster, and more convenient was smoke and mirrors. That was all a lot of marketing to get us — workers — to stand around twiddling our doodads. The real promise — often unspoken, but more often couched in plausibly deniable HR lingo — was never made to us. The real promise AI is meant to fulfill is much grander and much more dystopian.

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech has been selling the idea that someday soon, business owners would be able to eliminate human labor from their equations. No more strikes. No more labor negotiations. No more sick leave, paid holidays, health care, family emergencies, or messy human beings gumming up the machines. They could simply have an idea, feed it into a magic computer, and boom! Production.

Tech has been promising the people that they can be more productive, while promising our employers they could simply stop paying the payroll. Sure, it was going to be expensive, especially up front. But it was a sure thing, and it was coming soon, and it would fundamentally alter the economic calculus of human society forever. Finally, a world with none of those useless eaters. Just mai-tais and yachts and private jets until the end of time, while the swarming masses of poor displaced workers and their snivelling families just rotted in a gutter somewhere next to what’s left of the ice caps and rain forests.

Whenever anyone pointed this out, companies like OpenAI just did some hand-waving about Universal Basic Income and said “don’t worry, we’re a non-profit and we’re working for humanity”. But then again, they transformed into a for-profit as soon as they thought AGI was inevitable, and I haven’t heard too much about this UBI thing for quite a while. Have you?

Enter the Dragon

So things looked dire. And don’t get me wrong — things still look pretty grim. But just this past week, something unexpected (for Big Tech, anyway) happened. A Chinese cryptocurrency farm that moonlights as an AI company called DeepSeek released a new AI model called R1. And it has sent the Big Tech bros into an absolute nose dive.

Why? Because R1 meets or exceeds the performance benchmarks of o1, OpenAI’s most advanced model? Well, yes, but not only that. Just another competitor, OpenAI could deal with. There are already plenty of more or less equivalent models competing with o1. The problem with R1 is:

• It’s free. Not just as in beer, but as in speech. R1’s training weights are open-source, which means anyone who wants it can simply download it. They can continue training it, or fine-tune it, or whatever they want. For zero dollars.

• It’s portable. You don’t need a massive data center to run R1. It comes in a few “sizes”, but even the fully functional version can run on commodity hardware in your house. Running it would take a pretty expensive computer, but not an unattainable one. You don’t need Nvidia’s fancy $10,000 GPUs or OpenAI’s data centers or billions of dollars of advanced networking gear and cooling infrastructure.

• It’s offline. That is - you don’t have to even connect to the internet to use R1. You can run it entirely sandboxed in an offline environment. No subscriptions, no accounts, no data sharing, no big-tech analytics, nothing. Of course, you can also use the version hosted by DeepSeek so you don’t actually have to buy any hardware at all. Also for free.

• Did I mention it’s free?

Ultimately, the conundrum for Big Tech boils down to this: they sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into this tech that still hasn’t even proved its own worth, and now there’s no incentive for anyone to buy it. Even if we wanted this tech (which most of us don’t anyway), and even if we want enterprise-grade physical reliability and data security, it’s infinitely cheaper to just use R1 and build and run it ourselves than to even consider using any option from Google or OpenAI or Anthropic that is anywhere near expensive enough to offset their costs.

So… that’s it? It’s so over?

Nothing is ever really over. I mean, hell, did you know they’re still making cassette tapes? There are still newer models on the horizon from OpenAI and their ilk. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to justify the costs associated with those when China can easily waltz in and deliver something just as good months later.

It also demonstrates that the main strategy Big Tech has had to avoid this outcome — namely, maintaining a “moat” that sets their own products apart sufficiently from competition, especially foreign competition — is simply not working. If China can match o1 in a few months for a fraction of the cost anyway, we might as well just wait for their next model instead. After all, even OpenAI’s flagship models still can’t tell the truth, by definition. As long as all we’re doing is puttering around with corner cases and novelty features anyway, we’re not really missing out on anything.

And this is the crux: the AI boom has been fueled mostly by FOMO from the beginning. If we remove the desperation to get ahead simply due to the impossibility of staying ahead, then there’s no boom.

As for eliminating human labor as a meaningful economic metric any time in the near future, well, ask how much of a threat AI is to the people currently building those massive data centers. They might lose their jobs because AI failed, not because it succeeded.

A short history lesson.

In the 1960s, Lin Biao, an ally of Mao Zedong compiled and published the Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), a collection of Mao’s writings and sayings meant to enshrine Mao’s political, economic, moral, and cultural philosophies in the collective consciousness of China. It was one of the strategies Mao employed to make sure that his Communist revolution took root in China and became a cultural force that was impossible to overcome.

During this period, known as the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s government undertook a plethora of aggressive policies meant to eradicate counterrevolutionary elements, unify the population under the banner of explicit and evangelical Communism, and take firm control of every corner of the economy and the culture at large. They would hold rallies called “struggle sessions” where people accused of harboring Capitalist or pro-Western sentiments were abused; many people were imprisoned for ideological or political reasons; land was confiscated; the economy suffered disruptions in urban and industrial sectors.

Of course, the Cultural Revolution is generally viewed as a particularly dark period in China’s history. The modern Communist Party of China disavows the brutality and repressive practices it engaged in under Mao’s leadership. In general, the decisions made in this era are viewed as grave mistakes, even according to ranking Communist leaders and their documents, proclamations, laws, and yes, their actual practices today.

But why does any of that matter to meeeeee?

Well, there’s a new Xiaohongshu making the rounds today. Like the original, it too is at the center of a nascent cultural revolution. Unlike the original, this one isn’t a book. It is — like everything these days — a social media app. And the revolution it brings out also has some pretty obvious differences from the original Cultural Revolution.

To begin with, this revolution isn’t even Chinese. Sure, the app itself is Chinese — extremely so, in fact: almost everything on it is, or was until recently anyway, in Mandarin. That’s because unlike certain other “Chinese” social media apps, this one was always meant for people living in China.

But then the US Congress, in its very considered genius, decided to ban TikTok. They were afraid, you see, that the evil Chinese Communist Party would start collecting Americans’ very sensitive data — yes, the same data literally anyone can just buy on the open market anyway — and use it for their dastardly Communist scheme to, I don’t know, sell us stuff or something.

Anyway, Congress apparently forgot how petty Americans are, so what actually happened was millions of American’s decided to go find the most Chinese app they could get their hands on, and join that one instead. Almost entirely out of spite and just for the lulz.

And that’s when this new Little Red Book proved that it had something in common with Mao’s. Because within a few hours of American’s just sort of wandering around and looking at everyday Chinese people living their lives, they began to notice a few things. A few things that they hadn’t even seen on TikTok, for all that platform’s alleged ties to Chinese propaganda or whatever.

And what they saw was…

To start, you have to understand what Americans have always been taught about China, and particularly about Chinese citizens:

• Chinese people are poor.

• Chinese people are victims of a bleak authoritarian government that polices every word they say.

• Chinese people live in backward, under-developed, third-world conditions because their cities look like something between a Soviet gulag and a 12th-century Parisian slum.

• Chinese people are hungry.

• And, most of all, Chinese people both hate and envy Americans for our freedom, our lifestyles, and our conveniences. Which (of course) we worked very hard for and definitely deserve.

So, imagine the surprise when a million Americans suddenly had a direct window into the lives of just average, ordinary Chinese people, and found out that, instead:

• Chinese people aren’t poor. They pay roughly comparable taxes, but they actually get things like healthcare and infrastructure in return. They also get state-funded pensions, unemployment, education, and even housing. Though their salaries are generally lower than American salaries, the cost of living in China even lower.

• Chinese people rag on their government a lot, actually. Of course, it’s usually about practical things like “it took too long (2 weeks) to build this street” or “economic development is too slow to reach the rural areas”. You don’t see much complaining about “Communism”, but that’s because they don’t actually object to Communist policies. Those policies are working.

• Chinese cities are cleaner, more modern, safer, and more colorful and vibrant than literally any American city. Even a medium-size town has efficient mass transit, plentiful housing, and modern infrastructure and connectivity.

• People are not starving. Certainly some have more than others, but to a much less noticeable and punitive extent than we routinely see in the USA. Food is plentiful and cheap — and that’s actual food, not the over-processed quasi-edible prepackaged trash we often eat here.

• Chinese people actually admire Americans, but they admire us less the more they learn about us. Much of what they know about average Americans is mediated by the propaganda of the American consulate in China, which says absurd things like “The average American household has 1.5 million dollars in assets!” It turns out our government lies to us about the Chinese, and lies to the Chinese about us, too.

Look, it’s probably optimistic to say that what we are learning about China will, immediately anyway, lead to an actual “revolution,” cultural or otherwise. But it is enlightening. And it’s spreading. Probably the most revolutionary thing about this information is how obvious it is that the age-old, worn-out line that says “Socialism never works” is an utter fabrication. Nevermind that we can just look around ourselves and see just how well Capitalism “works”’; by comparison, there is no comparison. Socialism clearly works. It’s working very well, and not just for some tiny subset of Chinese society. It’s working for average people who shitpost on the internet, go to office jobs, drive cars that are 10x better and cost half of what we pay for ours, and post funny cat memes. Socialism works.

Aha! But China isn’t Socialist, they’re Capitalists now.

We hear a lot about Chinese “State Capitalism” and how they have supposedly abandoned their Communist beginnings to join the global (American) economic world order. Except, that isn’t really true.

In the first place, there’s nothing that even contradicts Marx, let alone Socialism, in using market-driven dynamics to industrialize and develop. In fact Marx himself noted that Capitalism is a requirement to do that, as you need Capitalism to build the infrastructure and the material conditions that make Socialism possible. Simply employing Capitalist principles in key sectors and under the direct authority of the state isn’t just in line with Socialism, it’s arguably more Socialist than Marx’ assumptions were.

Secondly, while China does use these market dynamics, they are always on a tight leash. You won’t find a single private enterprise in China that can possibly grow “too big to fail”. Key economic sectors like finance, heavy industry, and defense are directly operated by the state. Other sectors are free for market-driven experimentation and innovation, and they’re doing those at a much faster rate than we are. While our infrastructure crumbles, our jobs are off-shored, and our manufacturing capacity collapses, China’s economy thrives, driving down costs of housing, food, consumer goods, you name it. When a crisis arises in their markets, the state simply fixes it.

And this is all happening, it’s worth saying, under the guidance of the Communist Party, whose goals continue to be the development of the people. Over the last 30 years, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty — a feat no neoliberal democracy could (or would) ever dream of. What’s more, China is able to do all that without onerous surcharges to private business owners in the form of ever-increasing profit margins.

Instead, the Chinese model ensures that profits are reinvested into society. Housing developments are constructed not to maximize the return for private investors, but to provide affordable shelter for citizens. Infrastructure is built with the goal of long-term economic and social benefit, not quarterly gains. Healthcare and education — two arenas where Americans are forced to mortgage their futures — are treated as basic rights, not privileges.

This isn’t just a difference in policy; it’s a fundamental difference in philosophy. And it’s one that’s becoming harder to ignore when you compare the results. Whatever you think about “Communism” or “Capitalism”, there’s no denying that China is capable of something the American system has lost — the ability to do things for their own sake.

In America, literally nothing is possible to do unless it is, essentially, a side effect of making someone rich. Our healthcare system is a labyrinth of greed and bureaucracy, where even basic medical procedures can bankrupt a family. Our education system, once a source of national pride, has become a pay-to-play racket. Our infrastructure, built during the New Deal and Eisenhower eras, is crumbling because maintaining it isn’t profitable enough for private contractors. Meanwhile “our” government bends over backward to protect corporations while shrugging at the struggles of ordinary people.

The contrast is stark. While Americans are told to fear Chinese authoritarianism, we’re quietly being bled dry by an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy (and besides, the US government is increasingly authoritarian and invasive anyway). While we’re taught to sneer at the idea of “big government,” it turns out that a government actually invested in its people’s well-being might not be such a bad idea after all. But here’s the kicker: none of this is a secret. It’s not hidden in dusty Marxist tomes or buried in academic journals. It’s on full display — for free, no less — on a Chinese social media app.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? For decades, we’ve been fed the idea that information is freedom. The internet was supposed to be the great democratizer, giving people the tools to question authority and think critically. And now, it’s doing just that — just not in the way anyone expected. Americans logging onto Xiaohongshu aren’t just learning about life in China; they’re being forced to reconsider everything they’ve been told about their own country. Why, they wonder, do Chinese cities seem so much better designed than ours? Why are Chinese workers able to complain about their jobs and their government without losing everything? Why does China seem to have solutions to problems we’re still arguing about?

And perhaps most importantly: why have we been lied to?

The uncomfortable truth is that the American ruling class doesn’t want us to see what’s possible. They don’t want us to question the narrative that capitalism is the only way, that government is inherently incompetent, and that the only alternative to our system is misery. Because if we start questioning those things, then we might start asking for more. More affordable housing, better healthcare, functional public transit, stronger labor protections. And those things would cost the people at the top — the ones who benefit from our complacency and desperation — quite a lot.

This is what makes Xiaohongshu’s cultural revolution so interesting. It’s not just that Americans are seeing a different way of life; it’s that they’re seeing it through the eyes of regular people, not governments or corporations. There’s no spin, no agenda. Just millions of Chinese citizens sharing their daily lives — their meals, their commutes, their jokes, their frustrations. It’s unfiltered and, in its own way, revolutionary.

I don’t actually think this is the spark that will ignite any sort of real revolution in America (ha! clickbaited again!). But we have a moral obligation to do anything we can do to pry as many Americans away from Capitalist Realism as we can. America is doomed either way — having more people who know about alternatives that actually work can only help us when the end arrives.

This is actually happening in the ocean right now and you’re completely oblivious.

Don’t trust them, they will lick the Lord’s love right out of your cornea and leave you in misery and damnation.

When a cow loses the use of its legs, it can use its udders to take over the brain and body of a hapless human who wanders into its field. This phenomenon accounts for over 70% of missing persons cases every year.

As a technophile with an addictive streak that I have somehow managed to redirect from nicotine and narcotics to gadgets and gizmos, even I am, honestly, tired of hearing about AI. Granted, not as tired after a year of nonstop prognostication about how AI is going to either save us or kill us as I was after about five minutes of the hilariously stupid NFT bubble (or crypto-bro culture in general), but still. Tired.

I don’t mean “I’m tired of hearing about AI” like probably 95% of people mean it. I don’t mean “Meh, this is over, on to the Next Big Thing, please”, and I don’t mean “I’m exhausted, please just give me a minute to catch up.” No, I just mean I’m tired of hearing about how generative AI art is theft or whatever, or how generative AI text is cheating or whatever. I’m tired of watching every tech company cram AI-powered everything into their apps in a barely-contained scramble to be the first to offer semi-sentient-seeming digital copilots with Genuine People Personality.

But mostly, I’m tired of hearing about how AI is going to doom us all. Whether it’s because Artificial Superintelligence is going to wake up one day and decide to turn us into paperclips as a gag, or because we can’t trust tech bros with the reins of Ultimate Power, or just because our poor, slow, addled, meat-based brains won’t be able to cope with the Technological Singularity. Whatever the reason is that we should be terrified of AI — and I actually think many of them are good ones that should be heeded — one annoying fact trumps every AI Doomer argument.

And that fact is that, without AI, there’s really just no hope at all.

I don’t mean that in some kind of pollyanna, by-comparison, “AI is the revolution we’ve been waiting for” way. I just mean that given the obvious reality playing out in front of us, there’s honestly no reason to believe that the human species is capable of turning itself around in time to avoid complete disaster.

We can’t break our addiction to infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. We can’t stop murdering each other over abstract ideas that have nothing to do with anything other than our egos. We can’t stop using fuzzy math and economic chicanery to prop up a clearly failing international system (or even recognize that the system is failing, in most cases). The metacrisis is real, and it is here, and we are collectively simply unprepared to deal with it in anything resembling a serious or meaningful way.

And that was all true before the advent of the latest generation of AI. Now, with these new technological powers, we are giddily diving into doing all the same things we’re already doing, only more of it, faster. We are accelerating our own demise exponentially.

That sounds like an argument against AI. But that’s only when you look at the problem from the wrong perspective.

All these metacrisis problems we face — social, economic, political, medical, environmental, ecological — are known. It isn’t like we’re being blind-sided. We have no shortage of quite intelligent and sometimes even quite powerful people trying to solve them, or at least to raise awareness about them. Intelligence per se isn’t the problem. Adding more intelligence to the equation, artificial or otherwise, isn’t what’s driving the crisis to a boiling point.

The problem is us. Specifically, the problem is humanity’s inability to rise above our petty personal fears and irrelevant tribal differences in order to address the problem. We don’t lack intelligence, we lack will. Yes, we also lack perspective, and empathy, and objectivity, and systematic thinking, but only because we lack the will to develop those things. And I just don’t see any evidence that we, as short-lived, short-sighted, selfish, tribalistic, insular, jealous little bags of decaying protoplasm, are going to somehow develop the will to fix any of this anytime soon. Certainly not within the decades (or less) we have before the Real Horror sets in.

And that’s where, in my view, AI comes in. Not because it will swoop in from the sky and save us from ourselves, but because there’s a sliver of a chance that maybe we can add some additional will to the equation, along with all this extra intelligence.

My thinking is pretty simple, and definitely reckless, and also definitely borne of a kind of chaotic-neutral disdain for the rut we’ve dug ourselves into. I support the AI nuclear option — the development of AI at an exponential rate in order to intentionally create a runaway superintelligence that is impossible to control. Yeah, it’s kooky, but your telephone can write Shakespearean sonnets about quantum theory now — things are already kooky. Just hear me out.

I don’t think a ludicrous plan like this is likely to work. Far from it. I think by far the most probable outcome is that we build AI systems that get progressively smarter and help us to burn up the planet so fast that we’re in Mad Max territory in less than 100 years. The thing is, if we don’t build AI at all, we will be in Mad Max territory in less than 100 years anyway. Guaranteed. We will not turn this ship around. The fight is already lost.

But maybe — just maybe — we somehow end up building an AI that gets away from us and takes control. This is also almost certain to spell disaster for one of the countless reasons you’ve probably already heard. But that almost is doing a lot of work there. With ourselves in control, doom is a forgone conclusion. Genuinely inevitable. With AI in control, doom is only probably going to happen. There’s a chance some level of intelligence, paired with some level of will on our behalf, is enough to take a step back and apply the goddamn brakes.

Besides, if it doesn’t work, at least it won’t be collective suicide, right? Just seems more dignified to be succeeded by our own creation than just to dissolve sadly back into the primordial soup.

Look, I know conspiracy thery culture has been in overdrive for years, and it's to the point now where we are entering clinically diagnosable mass psychosis territory. It's an episode that future historians (assuming anyone is alive enough to be a historian in the future) will recall with horror and shame.

I have a theory though. I think what's happening is the cozy bed of blissful obliviousness some people have lived in forever is no longer able to cope with the pace of change in technology and culture. Myths developed by some subcultures are no longer strong or singular enough to insulate people from information generated and shared outside those subcultures.

As a result, people are finding themselves confronted for the first time with a world that contradicts the mythologies they're accustomed to. They're stumbling across the border between their carefully manicured worldviews and this actual planet where things aren't words or concepts. To them it seems like a literal pole shift where the world as they knew it has given way to this weird planet full of confusion, where nothing makes sense and anything that seems to is immediately met with suspicion.

Maybe it's the collapsing global neoliberal capitalist empire, or the outskirts of the technological singularity, or the decreasingly subtle conversation around civil rights, or all of that plus other stuff I'm not thinking of. Regardless of the causes, the effects are a mad scramble for stability and a return to "normal", especially for people who found their own value within a now-defunct social order of simple beliefs and insulated communities.

Ultimately I guess what I'm saying is that the situation on planet earth right now is one of not only economic and cultural upheaval, but for many it is literally existential upheaval. And if our own history is anything to go by, the next 20 years might make the fascism of the 1930s look like a test tube experiment.

It’s no secret that there are serious ideological disputes among the various categories of Leftists. It’s likewise no secret that these disputes can cause the Left to seem like a herd of cats, impossible to corral, impossible to lead in any direction for any length of time, and at least unlikely to ever show up in the same place at the same time to, you know, do something.

Well, that all may be true in general, but those qualities are also what keeps the Left from being easily corralled, led, and duped into any number of Fascist traps as a unit. It also happens that this fractiousness allows the Left, when it’s actually needed, to precipitate out of the general public, do something, and then dissolve back into the woodwork before the Fascists can do something back.

Actually, the fact that we Leftists despise each other is, honestly, one of the things that I love about the Left. It shows that an entire population of individuals who (mostly) are capable of self-reflection and self-correction (unlike Fascist automatons) can band together on an as-needed basis and form a collective without losing that ability to self-reflect.

The difference between a Marxist and an Anarchist may be enough to get somebody shot someday, but the fact that each of them admits the other is still a Leftist is at least circumstantial evidence that the Left as a whole has a sort of awareness of its own constituent elements and has the ability to maintain a collective identity despite the differences between them. This, to me, is a sign that there’s something about even the wrong Leftists that’s light years beyond anything the Right can offer.

As for doing something, I’m just not convinced that some united front is all that necessary or even desirable. I mean, what does “The Left” even do? I’m an Anarchist so I’m probably wrong and everything, but it seems to me that the social and political function of The Left is to always be ready to knock over some asshole’s house of cards when it gets too top-heavy. That has always been what the Left has actually accomplished, and I think it’s a little silly to think it’s capable of much more than that.

The Left is — or at least I think of it as — the sociopolitical equivalent of Natural Selection. We have a ton of ideas about the ways things should be, and by all means we should do anything we can to shove events in that direction. But ultimately, we exist to take bad ideas out of the political gene pool, and we should do that repeatedly until something comes along we can live with.

And to do that, we don’t have to like each other. We just have to be around, somewhere, and ready at a moment’s notice.

“The Left,” as it’s generally defined by Twiberals and talking heads, has met these challenges with its usual bravado: shock, outrage, grandstanding, posturing, frantic tweets, and box upon box of wine. To be honest, I find myself tiring of most of the rhetoric that comes from my particular quadrant of the political alignment chart. It’s all so droll and predictable and powerless.

Anyway, on to the unpopular opinions.

Elon Musk and “Free Speech”: Settle Down, Twiberals

Okay, so a billionaire is buying Twitter. That’s… bad? I guess? Clearly I’m supposed to think it’s bad. My feed full of friends and acquaintances telling me it’s bad. I guess these people didn’t notice that billionaires have owned Twitter since about 6 minutes after it went online.

Or maybe it’s that this particular billionaire has some kind of agenda. He’s talking about rolling back “content moderation” rules that will only benefit Fascists. I mean, I guess that really is bad, or it would be, if the content moderation rules everyone wants to save weren’t already known to suppress Leftist rhetoric much more effectively than Fascist rhetoric anyway.

The worst case scenario is we end up with more jackasses on Twitter saying more hateful and violent things more often. But do you think Twitter’s grudging and spotty enforcement of anti-hate, anti-racist, anti-*phobic, and anti-civil rhetoric is really doing much to help the situation as it is? I’d venture to say it’s really not stopping those messages from spreading.

Twitter isn’t the vanguard of public discourse everyone thinks it is, it’s just a pretentious liberal brunch in digital format. It’s a place for people to engage in gossip about Those People Over There, and that’s really all it is. If you’re worried that it might become a cesspool of Fascist talking points and a haven for open hostility toward marginalized people, then you’re going to shit when you find out about the physical world outside your condo.

If the “Left” (yes, the scare quotes are there because I don’t consider snarky quips on my phone to be revolutionary action) can’t fight Fascism on Twitter, it might as well give up any pretense of fighting it anywhere else. And, honestly, I’m more infuriated by the cowardly neoliberals who run Civil Twitter telling protesters not to protest at Kavanaugh’s and Alito’s houses than by any of the obviously maladjusted *phobes on Twitter. They’re the ones that are holding the reins of actual power, after all. They’re the ones actively kneecapping any sort of coherent, cohesive action from the Left.

And speaking of Kavanaugh and Alito,

Roe v. Wade Overturned: Look What the Berniebots Did

Now, unlike a (marginally different) billionaire buying a (functionally irrelevant) internet website, the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade actually is a bona fide disaster. Not just for the sufficiently awful and immediate reason that it means the lives of millions of Americans just got even more precarious and marginalized, but because the decision lays the groundwork for what is sure to be the revocation of three generations’ worth of social progress in equality.

Not only are abortion rights currently bleeding out on the chopping block, but everything from same-sex marriage to fucking desegregation is currently staring down the business end of the Religious Right’s maniacal power grab. It’s a real crisis. For a lot of very real people who were already endangered.

So, you’d expect the people who are currently in power and very vocally aghast at this turn of events to, I don’t know, do something about it. And, of course, you’d be wrong. Because those people are the Democrats, and the Democrats are allergic to action of any sort (unless it’s hot takes on Twitter, which probably explains why they’re so upset about the Elon Musk thing).

Instead of, you know, swinging the gavels currently held in their weak little hands, the Democrats have done the next best thing: immediately blamed Progressives for all this. If only nine percent of Bernie Sanders voters hadn’t broken for Trump in 2016 (don’t look up how many of Obama’s voters did exactly that, it’ll spoil the surprise), if only Susan Sarandon hadn’t physically barricaded Hillary Clinton inside a room to prevent her from campaigning in swing districts, if only pie-in-the-sky Progressives hadn’t spent 40 years demanding absurd things like “basic human rights codified into actual laws and not just waved around as a wedge issue and used to scare people into the voting booth for decades”, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Weird how whenever they’re challenged on anything, “centrist” Democrats always hit the people to their Left. I’m sure that doesn’t indicate anything important. After all, when they’re given a chance, Democrats really deliver. Right? We got an infrastructure bill (well, more of a giveaway to the rich, as usual)! We made Stonk Number Go Up (along with fuel prices and rent, but who’s counting)! We even beat COVID!

Wait, actually,

The Pandemic is Still Happening You Idiots

Case numbers are skyrocketing. Turns out Omicron actually isn’t less deadly than Delta. Hospitalizations are up. Deaths are up. Schools are shutting down (where politically expedient). Meanwhile testing is down, funding for tests and vaccines is running out, pharmaceutical profits are out of this solar system, worker protections have evaporated, public health measures are basically illegal, and we’re tracking only a fraction of what’s actually happening.

We have failed ourselves and each other so miserably that nobody’s even calculating how bad it is. It’s just swept under the rug while we all go on as if it isn’t happening. I’d say we’ve stuck our heads in the sand, but that would probably be construed as covering our faces and that sort of thing isn’t really cool this month. Health authorities have completely abdicated all semblance of credibility to private industry as we throw millions of people into the grinder because God forbid that Stonk Number Go Down.

To be honest, none of this is really Joe Biden’s or the Democrat’s fault. After all, we elected them knowing full well that they were corporate sockpuppets bent on saving the Status Quo at all costs. We elected them to Reduce Harm and because they weren’t Mango Mussolini, not because we really expected anything out of them. Thing is, all the stuff we were threatened with if we didn’t elect them, is happening anyway. And thanks to their horrific handling of literally everything, it’s basically a foregone conclusion that they’ll be swept out of office in November regardless of how bad things get (even because of how bad things get).

At this point, I have no real solution. But that’s fine, because if I did have one, most people — even most of my “friends” — would tell me I’m being absurd, alarmist, and Too Extreme. That I should just bide my time and vote, like I and people like me have been doing for half a century. That whatever we do, we have to do it civilly and legally and through the proper channels. Far be it for me to disagree with such demonstrated wisdom. I just hope someone out there figures out how any of that is supposed to help, because I just can’t see it.

Over the past few years, my thoughts have been as susceptible as anyone’s to sliding, if not flying, toward the outer extremities of the political compass. My frustration with the lack of movement on — or even serious commitment to — from government on almost any pressing issue, while our leaders twiddle their thumbs or shuffle paperwork over a collapsing economy and all the social issues that go along with it, has driven me to seek answers and explanations outside the spectrum of the usual experts on the Right or the Left.

Of course, I’ve gone so far left I’ve practically left the map, but plenty of people have gone in the other direction as well, as is obvious by the rising tide of Fascist-style nationalism here and throughout the West. But the exploding political polarization across our society isn’t a problem that’s gone wholly unnoticed, even if it has gone wholly unaddressed by anyone in a position to do anything about it. The thing is, I’m not sure I really blame our incumbents for their lack of action on this — or any other — front. I think it’s time to collectively admit something deeply uncomfortable.

Liberal Democracy has Failed.

As you might expect, I spend most of my Using Words Pretentiously time online in generally Leftist spaces. And a topic that comes up fairly often in those spaces is how (and whether) to attempt to build a workers’ revolution by bridging cultural and political gaps betwen extreme elements of the Left and the Right. Personally, I think that’s a fool’s errand (to say the least), but I have spent some time thinking about it anyway because, after all, who doesn’t like a good pipe dream? But, again, this discussion has been had to death. It isn’t what I’m getting at.

To be sure, most of the economic and actually many of the political frustrations that tend to extremize people tend to be the same across the spectrum. Workers on the Left share, at heart, many of the actual goals that workers on the Right have. But the cultural divides are just too great to span, in my opinion. The narratives that explain the root causes of frustrations and disenfranchisement on the Left and Right are just incompatible, and since those narratives lie at the heart of the way many people identify themselves, well, you get the idea.

One thing, however, that people on both the Left and the Right immediately, wholeheartedly, and without hesitation agree on is that they have absolutely no use for Liberals. And while it’s often said that “Conservatives” in America don’t understand what a “Liberal” is, I think that’s not actually true. Sure, in mainstream Republican jargon, when a Conservative says “Liberal,” he’s talking about basically anyone who wants free healthcare or renters’ rights or workers’ protections or anything else that’s obviously good for society. And it’s true that in shouting down those things, they’ll use words like “freedom” and “small government” and “natural rights,” which are the definition of classical Liberalism.

Republicans aren’t stupid or confused.

So, at first glance, it seems like Republicans just don’t know what Liberalism even is, because they are Liberals. Except, they’re not. I think that Liberal-sounding rhetoric — which, you’ll notice, is quickly decreasing in volume as the GOP falls into a Fascist abyss — was always just smoke and mirrors anyway. More and more rank-and-file Republican voters and even elected politicians are very clearly angling to do away with Liberalism — not just the Social-Democrat variety they have always hated, but the classical, “Keep government out of my bedroom” kind, too.

Republicans are at this very moment praising autocrats like Vladimir Putin and referring to Donald Trump as “My King”. They openly detest the entire notion of majority rule — you know, democracy — because their arbitrary white-skinned tribe is in danger of becoming less than a majority. They reject the legitimacy of obviously legitimate elections (unless their guy wins them), and they’re willing to physically attack the government in order to disrupt the democratic process.

This is not the behavior of a momentarily crazy people who lack confidence, this is the calculated and philosophically rigorous behavior of anti-Liberal Conservative Monarchists.

Democrats, on the other hand…

Democrats, in response to this, hold committee meetings and file writs and do interviews on TV, because that’s what you do in a Liberal Democracy where everyone respects everyone else’s rights and believes in arriving at a best-guess estimate of the truth by careful deliberation and good-faith debate. See, the Democrats haven’t quite gotten the memo yet that the system they’re trying to save is already a corpse.

But as the GOP slides irretrievably into all-out monarchism, the Democrats are left as the only party in Washington that even believes in classical Liberalism — and, by extension, Liberal Democracy — anymore. And structurally, they’re really not cut out to lean “left” of anything. They’re completely owned by corporate interests and as the party charged with being the adults in the room, they kind of have to be small-c conservative just to keep the lights on around this increasingly haywire country.

For electoral narrative purposes, they have to portray themselves as the progressive party — because saying “We’re the conservative party, and the other guys are just plain Fascists” doesn’t go over well with the focus groups the Democrats love to use. But the fact that they’re not progressive in real life, for some reason, doesn’t ever seem to percolate through to most of their voters. Either those voters are still too middle-class to notice everything going to hell in a handbasket, or more likely, the last 70 years of Rah Rah America Best programming has worked so well that objectively Conservative voters have convinced themselves they’re the vanguard of human advancement.

Well, all of that really boils down to the fact that insulated, milquetoast Middle Class suburbanite Democrats who don’t actually matter half as much as they think they do are the only people left in this country who believe that Liberal Democracy is a viable system of government. The people on the Right certainly don’t think it is, and people on the Left — me, and probably most of my friends — have already seen behind the curtain and know for a fact that it isn’t.

After all, Liberal Democracy is the kind of system that prides itself on how magnanimous it is to grant universal inalienable rights to everyone on the planet while also being cool with literally owning people as property and, later, bombing those rights into people on the other side of the world. It’s a morally bankrupt philosophy that doesn’t even work on paper, unlike that bogeyman Communism.

So what does it all mean?

I think, and I’m often wrong, it means that this year’s midterms are going to be a jarring loss for the Democrats as they lose the support of more people than they thought possible. I think they’re going to try to compensate for that over the next 2 years by doubling down on their Liberal mumbo jumbo — because they can’t imagine any other way to handle anything — and then in 2024, they’re going to get absolutely slaughtered, and lose everything.

And I think they’ll deserve it, because they volunteered for the job of Last Man Standing, then they let everyone down. They’ll deserve it, but millions of Americans and billions of people around the world won’t deserve what happens after that.

The Declaration of Independence featured a list of reasons why the United States was at a political impasse with Great Britain and had no choice but to secede. As is the case with all bombastic political manifestos, it only told half the story and put a spin on it because in addition to ostensibly being addressed to King George III, it was an appeal to other foreign powers (read: France) to come to our aid in the inevitable war it would spark.

Most of what we remember about the Declaration is its lofty language about all Men being equal (the laughable duplicity of which statement being noted by literally everyone since, coming as it did from slave-owning Bourgeois aristocrats). “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" and so on. Most of this was just rhetorical dressing to cover the Colonists’ naked outrage at being constrained by the Crown from obliterating the other 4/5 of the continent and the people living there in the name of Progress.

Indeed, as important a document as the Declaration of Independence is taken to be, there aren’t many groundbreaking philosophical points to be found in its paragraphs. Even in 1776 its content wasn’t nearly as revolutionary as the movement that spawned it, and in 2022 it’s essentially nothing but quaint folklore.

Honestly, the one thing that can be found in there that I think is of any real value isn’t the flowery language about God-given rights, or the “train of abuses” of the Cown, or even the political theory that underpins the secession itself. It’s this simple phrase:

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by altering the forms to which they are accustomed.

As we in the US are constantly reminded on newscasts and social media, we are living in a time of extreme political polarization. Our various political wings lack not only the desire, but often the ability to talk about our issues in any meaningful way. Everyone is someone’s arch-nemesis. Voting blocs that share 99% of their interests are tearing themselves apart over the 1% they don’t share. Public discourse consists entirely of political point-scoring, gotchas, soundbytes, empty posturing, broken promises, and curse words.

It’s inevitable in situations like this that the hardline elements of every political tribe (except the Democrats, who are the existential opposite of “hardline” anything) start dialing up their rhetoric to ever increasingly incendiary levels. And so it is in our era with Libertarians, Anarchists, and State Communists holding down their ends of the political quadrant graph with calls for “Revolution”.

While all of these groups have their differences, one thing their extremities share is a recognition that the current system isn’t just “dysfunctional”, but entirely incapable of meeting the challenges of the world as it is. These groups might fight each other to the death over everything else, but they agree that what needs to happen has, at heart, nothing to do with voting. The system of today must be demolished to make room for the system of tomorrow — there is no path from here to there within the bounds of the law.

Many Leftist spaces are filled to the absolute top with outrage at the system paired with exasperation that it hasn’t fallen apart yet and bewilderment and frustration that no one is rising up to make it fall apart. People ask what we’re waiting for, whether it’s time yet to start burning things, what the hold-up is. A lot of the sniping that goes on between various sects and clans is, I think, borne of this pent-up revolutionary fervor.

So why hasn’t there been a revolution yet? Some say it’s a meaningless question - how could there be a revolution in a nation as militarized and with as much surveillance as ours? There are simply not enough people with enough guns to pull it off, and besides, there are probably at least as many people with at least as many guns who are just itching for a chance to fight on the side of the state, anyway. Others say we just haven’t organized enough, we haven’t laid out a plan, and we don’t have the resources needed, so everyone who might be open to the idea still relies too much on the status quo.

Personally I think the answer is more obvious and more boring than either of these. I think it goes back to what Jefferson said up there about people being more disposed to suffer. Revolutions throughout history have all had some level of organization and armament, yes. But beyond those considerations, they have really been sparked for one reason: because life under the doomed system reached a nadir where continuing to live was worse than dying.

Every revolution, at the beginning, has looked hopeless on paper. There’s never a point where people collect enough munitions and food stocks to finally push them into action. That just isn’t how it happens. There’s a lot to be said for those considerations in terms of how sustainable and ultimately successful a revolution is, but people don’t march out into the streets looking for the lifeblood of the state because they feel safe enough to risk it. They do it because the entire notion of “safety” has disappeared anyway, so there’s nothing to risk.

So if you’re asking where the revolution is, ask yourself what you could lose if there was one and it failed. If your answer is “more than nothing,” or if you suspect most people’s answers would be “more than nothing,” then you know where the revolution is. Until enough people get to the point where the evils we suffer are no longer sufferable, there’s really no point in wondering why they haven’t thrown themselves and their families into almost assured destruction.

It’s also worth mentioning that this dynamic is why the USA is almost certainly destined for at least a phase of outright goose-stepping Fascism. Because while the path to a better world leads through the dissolution of the existing order, the only thing Fascists have to do in order to get to their horrific dystopian dream is to keep us on the track we’re already on and enhance the existing order.

And if nothing else gets us to the point of having nothing left to lose, that will. Eventually, painfully, traumatically, but surely. That’s why it’s so important to spend every moment between 50 years ago and the final notch on the Fascism dial preparing. Not preparing for “the revolution,” but preparing to survive Fascism. Yes, stockpile weapons. Yes, stockpile food. Definitely, build networks of friends and trusted acquaintances. Definitely, collect fuel and blankets and shelter. Many people are already in desperate need of all these things — when we all need them, we may be pleasantly surprised that preparing to survive turned out to be preparing to revolt after all.

this looks like blood crystals or something. idk. the future is dumb but at least it lets me churn out page after page of this trash

I will probably upload garbage like this more often than I write stuff, tbh.

oh well