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Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? (www.noemamag.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/collapse@slrpnk.net
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[–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

As expected from an article that attributes "insanity" to people, it misses the root for why it is happening. It talks about board members, CEOs, and regular personnel, but it fully ignores shareholders.

AI promises to be the final conquest of capital: a form of labor that is privately owned and wants to be privately owned, which can be removed from existence when it is not needed and which needs comparatively little to exist. No revolution, no union, no secret loathing.

In a world that is rapidly going up in smoke, capital owners have few places to invest. The stock market is a bubble where speculation is far more important than return on investment. AI is just about the only hope shareholders have for the continuation of their wealth.

All the "insanity" of corporations is them trying to cater to shareholders' actual need. Not profit, and definitely not production, but the development of a form of labor that will not rebel as billions perish.

If AI not working means the rich will get eaten, the rich have no incentive to care about realities in which AI does not work, no matter how likely. AI fanaticism is perfectly sane, from their perspective.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Very well said. Agreed with those material realities or at least fantasies.

    I also think there is a more immediate, less existential incentive, that lets individuals pretend like they're just acting out the (bad) efficiencies of the rational new market while ignoring the awful existential endgame of continuing to enact the will of capital (I won't say the will of shareholders because many of them would also claim their hands are tied).

    They can pretend it's just one more of their money tricks where they extract more profits or externalise more costs, like with the Metaverse or Web3 or NFTs before it.

    I like how Rushkoff puts this: "going meta" as owners' way to keep the grift rolling, just keep going more meta, more abstract, more virtual. Until the market is so far removed from the reality of trees and rivers and human bodies and clean air.... well anyway I'm on a rant.

    But my point is I hate how this fucked over financialized worldview makes it seem like every step along the road to apocalypse is rational and inevitable. Like we're powerless to stop it.

    It's an economic theory, not an asteroid hurtling towards us. It literally runs on people.

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