No Artificial Intelligence!
Recently, and intermittently for the past eight months or so, there have been what are called "No Kings" Protests. In my own neck of the woods, these have mostly consisted of small knots of sexagenarians lining the major roadway by my house, holding signs that say things like "HONK IF YOU HATE ORANGE CHEETO." In other parts of the world, including in adjacent downtowns, these have been impressively large: by one account, the largest single-day protest in American history. Like all protests for the last five years, though, they have had no political effect whatsoever.
This is, of course, not an accident, but almost entirely by design: for they were not conceived of as political protests. America, in the year 2025, has never been a less political country: and has never had a less political population. Indeed, people today, in America, are more or less incapable of thinking in political terms, or engaging in politics as people throughout history would have understood it.
I am still, after five years, in deep mourning over the catastrophic failure of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the greatest spontaneous mass movement of my lifetime, and it did not achieve a single lasting political gain. All it sufficed to do was to inspire a backlash: or, perhaps, merely give one more pretext for a deeper and growing perversity in American society, an obsession with the techniques of power and punishment, a willful blindness to the suffering of the weak, a overwhelming indifference to justice.
I don't know who came up with the name "No Kings": if they were not a GOP political operative, I certainly hope they were at least paid by one. This person did more good for Donald Trump and the Republican Party than anyone since Joe Biden: they deserve to be paid at least as much as Kamala Harris profited off her losing political campaign.
A protest is really only an effective political tool, and indeed really only a political act at all, when it is clearly and efficiently tailored for a single end: rapidly applying public and media pressure to existing rulers to get them to immediately carry out certain political acts or make certain political legal or policy changes which can be relatively rapidly achieved.
For this, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is an obvious exemplar. The NAACP carried on their campaign of popular protests and civil disobedience quite intelligently and tactically, deliberately picking fights that they could either win on the local level, or rapidly escalate and so translate into greater political leverage on a national level. In 1961, Martin Luther King made certain demands of the new President John F. Kennedy; when these demands were not granted, he accelerated protests to apply pressure. As a result, he was in the White House negotiating with the President of the United States less than six months after children faced dogs and fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, after one of the most brilliant tactical acts of political pressure ever carried out, the March on Washington, sealed the deal. MLK and his allies certainly had their grand aspirations and utopian ideals; but they understood that protests were not a path to victory, let alone a decisive weapon, but in essence a negotiating tactic.
Another way to think about this issue would be to put in military terms: protests are a tactic, not a strategy. As a book I just read on the failures of the German Imperial military, Absolute Destruction, lays out very carefully, tactics is what wins battles, but only strategy wins wars: and strategy is inevitably and necessarily not merely military, but political. No war in human history has ever been aimed merely at military goals, or been won on the battlefield: rather, war is a political act aimed at achieving political goals, and military tactics, battles and advances and victories and defeats, merely one of many means for achieving those ends. As such, tactics are only effective where they are tailored to overall strategies and subordinated to clear political ends.
Where militaries forget this, even tactical victories end up inevitably as means, not for victory, but for defeat. The Germans implemented a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War 1 knowing that it would inevitably bring America into the war against them: because it promised (and indeed in the short term delivered) a tactical victory over the British. Many wars have been lost by winning battles--including both World Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current Israeli war in Gaza.
The Black Lives Matters protests, to do them justice, were in their origins political: they were inspired by genuine, widespread anguish at the death of George Floyd, were aimed at applying pressure to politicians currently in power, and at achieving truly political ends of justice and reform. Where they failed was largely in translating their urge for justice into any widely acceptable and rapidly implementable policies and political acts. Most immediately, they lacked an agreed-upon, respected, politically astute leadership, capable of actually negotiating with those in power, as MLK and the NAACP had been able to do in the 1960s.
There was no Black Lives Matter Act passed by the national Congress; no Executive Order by the President; and precious little even in state laws or city ordinances. Instead, local governments and police departments, lacking guidance, took their own paths of least resistance, altering their policies and enforcement priorities and tactics in unwise ways to avoid conflict and bad PR--and then changed them back once the backlash set in.
The No Kings Protests have no chance of being anywhere near that effective. The BLM Movement had political ends capable, with sufficient political intelligence and will, of being translated into tangible political and legal reforms. The No Kings Protests do not. They have a slogan, a painfully parochial slogan that, if taken seriously, poses the entire movement, not as aiming at achieving any actual political goal, but merely at preventing a transformation of the United States government into a monarchy--a defensive act that is, depending on one's perspective, either fantastically early or much too late.
Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag: it was still a much better and more political slogan. It expressed a positive sentiment, one with obvious political implications, and demanded political action. No Kings expresses a negative sentiment, at best personal hatred of political figures, at worst a mere stubborn resistance to political trends.
I am told by reliable informants that numerous signs at a major northeastern protest seemed to be taking the theme literally--posing the entire protest in opposition to the British monarchy of the 18th century. As Chesterton pointed out, the American colonists were hopelessly parochial and out-of-date in thinking that the British monarchy still governed England, let alone America, in 1776, rather than committees of wig-wearing Whig businessmen. In 2025, one would think the American colonists would have figured this out. But perhaps they are right; perhaps it is King Charles II who still runs America today. After all, he is on television.
I am, of course, being facetious. I am well aware that, despite occasional whimsy, the "No Kings" slogan is merely an expression of a much more basic concept: commitment to democracy, by which people today mostly seem to mean respect for the orders issued by unelected federal judges. I am also aware that most of the genuine political energy of the movement is in fact generated by, and aimed at, expressing personal dislike for one or more current politician(s). Understood properly, that is the real significance even of the slogan: merely one more hazy way of expressing one's hatred for Donald J. Trump.
Hating Donald Trump, alas, is not a political position. It is not even, in most of its typical forms, a political sentiment: which is why it mostly expresses itself, still, to this day, in various jokes about his skin color and hair and affect. It is most definitely not a clear legal or policy goal capable of being rapidly implemented by existing rulers: especially when those existing rulers are precisely the thing being protested.
Compare this, again, with a contemporary protest movement against an unpopular President currently going on in a country with many intellectual and cultural ties to the US--but a country that, almost uniquely in the Western world, still retains actual democratic politics. I mean, of course, France. As we speak, there are people on the streets all over France protesting Emmanuel Macron, the well-groomed, intellectually-pretentious, deferential-to-investment-bankers President of the Fifth Republic. These people, though, are not merely protesting Macron as an individual: his precious mannerisms, say, or his penchant for fashionable scarves, or his inability to communicate in plain, non-meandering sentences, or his marriage to his former high school teacher, or even his famously autocratic and insular way of making decisions. They are protesting actions, real and proposed, by his government.
In particular, Macron insists that, to reduce France's deficit and attract outside investment, the government must cut pensions and raise the retirement age. The people affected by these actions, by and large, do not want this: and so they are in the streets protesting these government actions. Some of them, mostly on the Left, want billionaires to be taxed instead; some of them, mostly on the Right, want immigration restrictions. A large majority would prefer it if Macron resigned and allowed new Presidential elections to be held. But virtually all protesters are clear on what they individually and as a group want, and all parties agree completely on what they do not want, and view their protesting as a means to communicate that to the government. This is politics.
And it has, in fact, worked: after elections handed Macron a crushing defeat, and after multiple Prime Ministers were voted out by parties beholden to the protest movement for proposing budgets that slashed pensions and raised the retirement age, Macron has backed down. He has not resigned: but then, for the protestors, that was never the main thing. They have certain political goals they want to achieve; and they want rulers to either serve them, or get out of the way. And this, too, is politics.
Americans, once again, are the least political people on the planet. They do not view protests as political acts, aimed at communicating or achieving something: they mostly seem to view them as extensions of opinion polls and online product reviews, expressing their personal likes and dislikes for particular government services and service-providers. If a service-provider gets low enough ratings, they assume he will eventually, somehow simply disappear; but they have no particular plan for achieving that goal, let alone one into which protests fit in any obvious way.
They also, increasingly, view protests as a social outlet, in a country that is getting lonelier and lonelier with each passing year. Themed protests have been a thing for a long time, rising in parallel with the inability of Millennials to attend actual themed parties. When I was in grad school, the local protest movement held rave protests and handed out ice-cream and snow-cones. Another way to process the "No Kings" hashtag, and accompanying puzzling anti-British content, is merely as a fun party theme. Protest King George! Wear your best wig and waistcoat! Pretend it's 1776! After all, it worked for the Tea Party--and progressive politics in 2025 are among other things an increasingly desperate copy of right-wing populist politics from ten years ago.
I should be clear, however, that my disappointment in the "No Kings" protests is in no way based on an endorsement of Donald Trump. As President, Trump has done many unjust and monstrous things, and continues to do them: and it is eminently right for the populace to take action to stop him doing these things. I not only support protests with these ends: I encourage them. Nay, I demand them.
I very much support protests calling on Donald Trump to stop his campaign of mass deportation and deliberate terrorization of the immigrant population of America. I very much support protests calling on him to restore humanitarian funding to key projects in the developing world. I very much support protests calling on him to end the war in Gaza. I very much support protests calling on him not to let food stamp funding lapse on November 1st, plunging many American citizens into something approaching starvation. I very much support protests calling on him to stop the wave of brutal repression meted out against the poor and homeless across America.
Certainly, some or all of these causes motivated many people who joined the No Kings Protest. Nevertheless, their voices were not heard; and their protest was in vain. Fearing apparently to offend anyone, we crammed a thousand disparate grievances against Trump, real and nonsensical alike, into one overall protest whose only publicly-accessible message was a statement against the symbols of 18th century Whig monarchy--a symbolic and political regime that has about as much to do with the actions of the American government in 2025 as the empire of Genghis Khan.
This is a proem, though, to another cause that I very much wish we could protest; a cause that has far more public and universal support than condemnation of deportations or even personal dislike of Donald Trump. It is also, importantly, a cause that could relatively easily achieve its goals given popular action.
This cause is, of course, the halting of the current AI technological regime and the economic and political dominance of so-called tech companies: who as we speak seem poised to crash the global economy and destroy the natural world for the sake of bad chatbot technology.
No Artificial Intelligence!
Sometimes I sit and think about how much the lives and deaths and happiness and misery of billions of people during my lifetime have been determined by the decisions of an infinitesimally tiny group of the dumbest, least interesting people in the history of the human race. By this, I naturally mean the founders and runners of tech companies.
"Tech companies," though, is a misnomer, since these companies do not in fact make money by selling technology. In 2025, and for decades previously, they mostly make their money by an uncanny combination of selling personal data and conning financiers and venture capitalists.
This was all good fun for a long while, when these companies' evolutionary proto-selves just gave us all personal computers and laptops to make us more productive at work and allow us to surf the 'Net. It was even pretty fun when they gave us all smartphones and created Facebook for us to follow the 24-hour news cycle and post about how addicted we were to our phones with colored filters on our profile pictures. It stopped being fun sometime around when successive generations grew up addicted to Instagram and/or pornography and/or TikTok. Then the endless post-mortem began: a perpetual 24-hour news cycle of serious thinkpieces and books and podcasts and longform journalism and studies about the suicides of adolescent girls, the end of childhood play, the death of sex, fake news, disinformation, the rise of fascism, the pandemic mental health crisis, and so on and endlessly so forth.
In 2020, everyone was forced indoors in isolation for months upon months, spent all their time on the Internet, went well and truly insane, and ended up truly fed up with digital technology. Somewhere around 2022, the entire tech industry formally surrendered: people began being fired at scale throughout the industry, and Congressional hearings began on just how badly they had screwed us over. In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg, the main character of the 2010 film The Social Network, weepily apologized to all the parents of children who had been harmed by social media on live television. Republican Congressmen began talking about writing laws to regulate social media and grant standing for civil lawsuits: the ultimate sign of defeat.
This surrender, though, did not really take place because Mark Zuckerberg and his compatriots came to some kind of deeply personal, moral terms with their confused role in ruining a lot of people's lives and driving us all insane. It took place for a much more basic, fundamental reason: because of an undeniable and uncontroversial truth that the entire world has known for more than a decade. The vast majority of what the tech industry has done since 2010 or so has been merely increasingly elaborate efforts, not so much to keep us from finding out this truth (we all already know it), as to distract us from actively thinking about it or acting on that knowledge. All those perpetually random, annoying graphical updates to your phone's UI, and Facebook's UI, and Microsoft's UI, all those new software packages, all the trending articles and trending features and algorithmic entertainments and the perpetual enshittification of everything on the Internet you once enjoyed: all just methods in an elaborate shell game to keep you from noticing the card hidden in the clown's sleeve.
The truth is simply this: that tech companies do not make money. This is because, fundamentally, they do not actually provide a good or service for which people are willing to pay: or at least, pay enough to fund tech companies.
It did not have to be this way. In the beginning, Apple made smartphones: physical objects constructed cheaply in third-world factories by slaves out of materials mined by corporate-funded companies of child-soldiers in the Congo, that could be sold for a straightforward, immediate profit. This was good business, in the beforetimes.
The catch, though, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, was that a smartphone, by itself, is not a very good product at all. It costs, according to my lazy Googling (please do not correct me if you know better) roughly in the ballpark of $500 to manufacture a smartphone at scale. You then sell it for a ridiculous markup, let's say for $1000, as another Google search reveals Apple's latest smartphone sells for. A smartphone, in itself, is merely a combination phone, calculator, and GPS: and would you pay $1000 for a combination phone, calculator, and GPS? The answer, naturally, is no. What people are paying $1000 for is the privilege of connecting to the Internet anywhere and at any time.
The Internet, though, fundamentally sucks. Or, to be more fair, it sucks as what it has been squeezed into being: a perpetual, 24/7 entertainment-and-information slideshow on which all people are assumed to be focusing on all the time.
The Internet started out as a government and military tool, then morphed into a way for nerds to play video games and talk about extremely niche subjects together and produce and share extremely niche works of fanfiction and transfer pornographic images and text and videos and go mildly insane together. (I do not say this primarily to castigate: I was one of them). In this form, the Internet wasn't a particularly nice or pleasant place, but it served its basic purpose well: giving otherwise maladjusted and isolated people an easy route to reinforce the personality traits and obsessions that made them maladjusted and isolated. Normal people, though, watched television, which was a nice, passive way to absorb mainstream information and entertainment 24/7 without having to think or make choices: an essential part of the great American compact of desire-suppression.
In 2025, though, the Internet has swallowed television whole, and the maladjusted nerds (and infinite successions of imitators) have been transformed into content creators for the vast, passive mainstream audience. The result has been that instead of ordinary people watching television and passively absorbing the hallucinogenic mainstream subconscious fantasia produced by panels of corporate men in black suits, they now sit and watch their phones and passively absorb all the horrifying regurgitated nightmare fuel of the tiny coterie of maladjusted obsessive isolated people that make all the content--and increasingly, the AI chatbots trained on that horrifying regurgitated nightmare fuel.
Anyway, this is somewhat beside the point, which is that fundamentally while Americans are addicted to the Internet in the sense that most of our social and political systems now require everyone to have a smartphone to be a citizen and access basic goods and services, our social compact absolutely requires that we have a reliable form of entertaining desire-suppression, and also in the sense that the Internet has swallowed or consumed or simply destroyed all the sophisticated corporate-produced entertainments that once played this role, they are fundamentally, as individuals, not willing to pay very much for this privilege. Or rather, more fundamentally, they are not willing to pay anywhere remotely near enough to fund tech companies.
This became clear a very long time ago--which is one reason why, by and large, the last fifteen years of the Internet have not been driven either by selling Internet services, or selling smartphones, or even selling software, but by selling data and advertising. Instead of end-users paying for the privilege of accessing the Internet, companies and governments were going to pay for the privilege of accessing the abundant personal data harvested by people using the Internet. This is, more or less, the reason why virtually everything on the Internet has gotten continually worse for the past fifteen years, as companies have stopped servicing users entirely and instead tried to find ever more extreme ways to get more and more people addicted to using ever fewer websites filled with ever worse algorithmic content, all so that they could "harvest" your data more effectively.
In a real sense, it was the breakdown of this delusion--the delusion around the perpetual profitability of harvesting and selling data--that led to the beginnings of the collapse of the tech sector in 2022. So long as tech companies could convince corporations that targeted advertising and user data would make them money--so long as tech companies could convince governments that personal data would make them more secure and help them achieve their ends--and most importantly, so long as tech companies could constantly increase the number of people accessing the Internet, constantly increase the amount of data harvested from them, and above all else use blatantly monopolistic means to maintain their control over this data, then, while we might all be living in a retro-Guilded Age in which the global economy was dominated by three or four Trusts dedicated to buying out or crushing or politically targeting all competitors while not competing among themselves, the economy continued to grow, and all was (sort of) well.
However, after more than a decade of this, corporations and governments alike realized that such data was not precisely the bonanza they had been promised. Google is full of news stories and threads where corporations complain about how Internet targeted advertising simply doesn't work, or at least isn't as effective as they had been promised: a possibly fake source informs me that 8 out of 10 advertisers on Google Ads lose money on their advertising. The rate of Internet adoption inevitably plateaued. As the amount of personal data ballooned, corporations and governments alike began wondering whether it was really worth while to sort through it all, anyway, and what it was even really good for, exactly. A popular backlash set in against both targeted Internet ads and the harvesting of personal data: people stopped clicking on things or opted out, laws were enacted, and--truly terrifying!--anti-trust action was threatened. Mark Zuckerberg began practicing his apology face in front of the mirror.
Still, tech companies undeniably provide services that people find valuable, and so undeniably have a place in the economy. In the year 2025, whether freely or out of coercion, people undeniably rely on the Internet; and would certainly be willing to pay something for the privilege of accessing it. Corporations and the government undeniably rely on the Internet for advertising and harvesting data. Yet the terrifying truth is that, even at its fraudulent height, none of this was or ever could be enough to sustain tech companies. For tech companies, it must be said, are truly insane entities.
The 19th century term "capitalism" has not really been applicable to the government-protected, financialized, globalized economies of the so-called "developed world" for nearly a century now. Whatever capitalism might still mean, though, tech companies are not capitalist. In fact, they are much closer to a working model of Soviet communism.
If I were a professional writer of thinkpieces, and not a humble blogger, I could write a whole fun article pointing out the similarities, real and fantastical, between Soviet Communism and tech company ideology and practice. I could point out the highly similar basic approach to labor; the abject worship of scale and power; the love of infrastructure for its own sake; the prevalence of personality cults for awkward, unpleasant people; the fixation on increasing efficiency through personal sacrifice; the penchant for giant, ugly buildings; the fanatical belief in an inevitable historical progress culminating in a labor-less utopia; and so on and so forth.
Tech companies are not companies that simply exist to make a profit by selling goods and services. Indeed, most of the things they do are not for sale at all. They are not corporations in a classical sense; they are not, for the most part, in the business of doing business. As a wise man of my acquaintance once said, there is Nothing for Sale.
Did you know that the present Alphabet, inc, the parent company of Google, also owns and runs "Calico," a shadowy biotech company entirely devoted to overcoming aging by any means necessary? "Verily," meanwhile, Google's other biotechnology subsidiary, spent billions of dollars developing a highly-publicized but now-discontinued product called Tricorder, a "disease-detecting nanoparticle platform," at the same time working on a contact lens to detect blood glucose levels, a special spoon for people with tremors, and all the while funding and running something called the Baseline Study, "a project to collect genetic, molecular, and wearable device information from enough people to create a picture of what a healthy human should be." Alas, none of these projects came to fruition or resulted in any visible product. Meanwhile, another Google subsidiary, "Mineral," is a shadowy corporate entity that according to its glossy website works with "partners around the world," including both NGOs and Big-Ag corporations, to use AI to fundamentally transform the nature of all global agriculture. And these are only a tiny proportion of even the many minimally successful projects to emerge publicly out of the giant black box of "X Development," into which billions upon billions of dollars are poured every year on an infinite proliferation of whimsical technology projects, the overwhelming majority of which never see the light of day.
Tech companies, it must be understood, are not companies that sell technology for a profit: they are, in fact, something much closer to government bureaucracies. Indeed, they are visibly much closer to Soviet-style communist bureaucracies, opaque, Byzantine, and prone to blowing huge amounts of money on ideological pet projects, than to their Western equivalents. The American Department of Defense is a model of efficiency in comparison: for while spending comparable amounts of money, the US military-industrial complex has created killer drone swarms, next-generation fighter jets, practical laser weapons, and manufactured and sold almost infinite amounts of military equipment to both sides of many global conflicts that have killed millions. Meanwhile, the Big Four tech companies have repeatedly failed to make VR, a technology from the 1990s, a thing while addicting millions of teens to TikTok.
That tech companies happen to also be privately-owned fiefdoms of insane people who like to spend billions of dollars flying William Shatner into the lower atmosphere and/or making giant statues of their wives is really, for the most part, beside the point. What is much more significant and impactful is that they are, like the Soviet Union and the Seventh Day Adventists, largely directed and driven by a self-conscious utopian cultish ideology aimed not at making a profit but at totally transforming every aspect of human life in service of various vague supposedly transhumanist, but really sci-fi-derived visions of heaven.
For most of my lifetime, though, this overpowering sectarian bureaucracy was supported by a quite broad and deep consensus of much vaguer techno-progressivism, whereby Americans really did believe, by and large, that history was bound of itself to get better and better and that as a consequence new technologies would always be good and would make life better for everyone. Hence, logically, companies that existed merely to indefinitely develop new technologies for any and every application and disseminate them to as many people as possible regardless of profitability or utility or morality were by definition at least good and quite possibly the key to the salvation of the human race.
This belief was even more fervent among American elites, who poured huge amounts of government money and wrote absurdly favorable regulations with the explicit goal of building up and preserving tech companies not just as companies providing technological services but precisely as all-inclusive techno-salvationist bureaucracies. More than this, American Presidents and government officials of all stripes actively lobbied for tech companies overseas, allowing them to penetrate deeply into every part of the world, and fighting especially hard to get them the rare minerals they needed to successfully carry out a crescendoing sequence of unprofitable schemes to transform human life tout court constantly and endlessly for no clear reason and for no clear end.
It is hopelessly naive to believe that the proliferation of smartphones and the Internet over the last decades have been primarily driven by and paid for by regular end-user consumers, and not massive subsidies and regulatory tax breaks and active campaigns by governments in both Western and Third World countries to build Internet infrastructure and give out laptops and tablets and ensure, by both positive and negative means, that every one had smartphones. I am always deeply amused when innocent, naive people criticize poor and homeless people the world over as obviously fake, with the proof of their lack of real poverty being the fact that they own smartphones--these poor, innocent people being apparently unaware that the government had in fact simply given them those smartphones.
Still, it was nonetheless true that all of this was sold to American elites and ordinary people alike through the basic, fundamental assumption that all this new technology would be good for us: that it would inevitably and naturally make people always and everywhere more happy, more human, more socially-connected, more politically informed, more responsible, more free, more kind, more thrifty, and...well, put simply, every day, and in every way, better and better.
This techno-naivete is, in the year 2025, simply lost forever in space, impossible to retrieve, just like Will Robinson. The idea that Facebook makes you a more connected and friendly and communal person is, to more or less everybody, as absurd as the idea that Twitter makes you better informed, or TikTok gives you a better attention span, or nuclear radiation gives you a pleasant tan.
In fact, the one thing that virtually everyone in modern America agrees on--importantly, very much including the employees and even leaders of tech companies--is that social media, smartphones, and accompanying Internet technologies have made people less happy, more isolated, and more insane.
There's a straightforward reason, of course, for this reality, one having to do with the basic nature of what tech companies are in fact offering most of the time: which is to say cognitive technology: which is, most fundamentally, not technology that, like airplanes or atom bombs, increases human power to accomplish certain ends, but rather technology that allows human beings to offload less necessary cognitive tasks, thus decreasing their power qua individual but making their lives theoretically less laborious. Offloading such rational activity and sensitivity, as I pointed out, always and inherently comes with tradeoffs--and taken to its logical end, it threatens to remove our humanity altogether, since individual human persons are really nothing more and other than the rational activity of perceiving and reasoning and contemplation. To the extent we get machines to perform our rational activity for us, then, we become, in a very real sense, less human.
This abstract philosophical truth, though, has been more than confirmed by our actual, lived experience of the effect of cognitive technologies on the people of America and the world. Over the last ten years, we have all watched numerous people, friends and family and total strangers alike, offload more and more of their fundamental rational activity--political, religious, personal, social, contemplative, erotic, group-forming, and identity-forming alike--onto terrible Internet machines, and in the process go truly and visibly insane, gradually transforming, nightmare-like, into things that (if we are honest in our perceptions) are visibly inhuman, cognitive cyborgs with holes torn by metal hands in their reactions and likes and dislikes and personalities and identities and selves and visibly replaced with wires.
Cognitive technology has its place in human life: we all necessarily make use of such cognitive technology, including such basic things as writing, to accomplish various highly-specialized cognitive tasks we are all called upon to perform. Used properly, it can aid our human selves and our human ends. Yet the fundamental reality is that cognitive technology is perhaps uniquely dangerous among all technologies, that it must always be kept within fundamental limits if it is not to destroy people and civilizations alike. Certainly, if there is one thing cognitive technology could not conceivably do, it is to make us happy, let alone let alone create a perfect, eternal social and civilizational utopia.
But wait, you might ask: if this is true, if the most basic, fundamental assumption behind the existence of tech companies as free-standing techno-salvationist bureaucracies funded by the government and finance capital is both catastrophically false and has been largely rejected by society as a whole, why are tech companies still here?
And, moreover, why are they, at the present date, more economically dominant than ever before, making up a higher proportion of American and global GDP, taking up more taxpayer dollars and receiving more regulatory breaks the world over, and engaging in even crazier and more comprehensive techno-salvationist schemes?
You would be right to ask this question. It is, in fact, the fundamental question to ask in the year 2025.
One answer to this question would be to point out that the degree to which the American and global economy has become bound up with tech companies' Byzantine operations makes them, like the famous banks of the 2009 crisis, politically and economically "too big to fail"--that the US government, and governments worldwide, have taken and will continue to take steps to stop the tech bubble from bursting, and will likely continue to do so indefinitely. Another would be to point out, once again, that tech companies have never fundamentally been entities whose existence was justified by making a product that people were willing to pay for, or even by making a profit at all: that they were always ideological state-like constructs driven by utopian-sectarian belief and tied to the government.
But of course, even in asking this question I am, to a degree, being deliberately opaque. Everyone knows, or seems to know, that the reason why tech companies have, in the last two years, taken over an even greater portion of the global market and domestic GDP is because of...Artificial Intelligence!
A few years ago, I asked what Artificial Intelligence actually meant in the modern context, and said, correctly as it turned out, that it was nothing particularly revolutionary, merely an extension and reification of the existing cultural and economic fixation on endless algorithmic content.
In 2025, though, I can finally provide a much better and more succinct account of what AI actually is: AI is a con, a scam, a bubble, a lie, a desperate last-ditch deception to save tech companies from economic and technological and moral and human reality. Unfortunately, it is working.
For those who believe in it, AI as we know it today is merely the tip of the iceberg, the first, halting steps in a fundamental shift in human society and labor as large or larger than the Industrial Revolution. For a small subset of those, including a large proportion of people working on AI, it is in fact an entirely new thing, the embryo and birth and few halting steps of something unknown in all of cosmic history: a non-human, mechanical, immaterial intelligence, a creature that may well destroy the world and exterminate the human race, but a creature that may be our species' only hope of salvation, a creature that may be God.
These fantasies, openly and secretly expressed by virtually every supposedly intelligent or elite person in the world over the past two years, have led to some truly interesting and striking and fantastical works of art, that will be looked back on, hopefully, as fondly and generously as 1950s retrofuturism. Nevertheless, these fantasias remain entirely false and indeed impossible: and function in reality as tactical distractions from the fundamental con.
We have, all of us, been living and working with AI for nearly three years now. The results, such as they are, are visible to everyone--so, too, are the costs. And the latter in particular, are, to be frank, totally absurd: taking the already Soviet-style inefficiency and ideological stupor of tech companies, and blowing them, literally, sky high.
At the present moment, the "benefits" of AI are: (1) A way to offload certain very basic technical tasks onto an error-prone machine whose inputs must be carefully planned and whose results must be checked for anything of any genuine importance, resulting in a boost in productivity for certain industries; (2) A way for students to cheat on their assignments and never learn basic reading and writing skills; (3) A way for people to generate an infinite supply of nightmare-fuel videos and art that mostly are just used for memes and jokes and that mostly have no artistic or creative value whatsoever; and (4) A way for people to get into addictive, pseudo-erotic fake relationships with chat bots that drive them insane, possibly lead to suicide, but certainly make them more isolated and unhappy than before.
The costs of AI, on the other hand are (in no particular order): (1) An absurd, exponentially-escalating burden on an already buckling power grid, driving consumer prices sky-high and requiring a massive outlay of power infrastructure even to keep up; (2) The devastation of the natural world, the sucking up of huge amounts of water needed by humans to survive; (3) A global race for territory and control over rare earth minerals, resembling in general strokes the materials race that led to modern colonialism, and/or an endless increase in the black market supply at the cost of war and anarchy and child labor in the Third World and many, many human lives; (4) The destruction of the global education system; (5) Making untold numbers of people, mostly children and the old and weak and vulnerable, even more isolated and inhuman and insane through some combination of fake chatbot relationships, fake erotica, and/or fake information; and (6) The devastation or outright destruction of the global economy as it now exists.
The above, it should be said, is actually an optimistic appraisal of the costs and benefits of AI. In particular, more or less every objective study on corporate productivity and AI to have come out of the academy in the last year has shown either no or only very marginal gains on productivity--even when corporations spent millions of dollars on AI products and training. One recent study, in particular, showed that while tech workers self-reported a roughly 25% gain in productivity from the use of AI tools, they actually performed nearly 20% slower on assigned tasks when allowed to use those tools than when they were (temporarily) disabled. Given the still very poor performance of AI tools at anything but the simplest tasks, and given the basic cognitive deficits produced by reliance on cognitive technology, this is a very reasonable and intuitive result.
Likewise, in the above I am assuming that AI actually succeeds, either technologically, or at least economically and politically. At the present moment, when data centers are being built willy-nilly for no visible profit, when nearly all the growth in the US economy is being driven by AI, when NVIDIA is buying from OpenAI who is buying from NVIDIA in an obvious circular cycle, when spending on AI is outpacing not only real-world returns on investment but any possibility of returns, when articles and thinkpieces on "the AI bubble" are proliferating faster even than data centers, the question is not so much will AI crash the global economy, as when it will do so, and what consequences will result.
The fundamental problem with AI, once again, is the same as the fundamental problem with the tech industry broadly: namely, that while AI does any number of fun and diverting and marginally useful things, it is not a product that anyone sane, including corporations and governments, would be willing to pay enough for to justify the insanely bloated costs attached to it.
Nor is this something that anyone at major tech companies is even bothering to hide anymore. All justifications of AI, practically all justifications of tech companies now, are centered not around arguing for the present utility of AI, but rather the urgent necessity of spending even more money, backed by no clear revenue streams and with no obvious profit in sight, in order to create an unimaginable future where AI will be at the center of every aspect of human life for everyone on the planet forever, and hence, presumably, in some sense, at some point, profitable.
Of course, the bubble may not burst. It may be prevented from bursting by the same insane, Soviet-style bureaucracies that created it in the first place--it may, much more likely, be prevented from bursting by the increasingly insane governments attached to those bureaucracies. But that result is, if anything, even worse. For if the bubble does not burst, if the con succeeds, what we get is a global economy based on despoiling the natural world, driving ourselves insane, and and covering the surface of the earth with data centers to force everyone to use a fundamentally stupid and mostly useless product that no one is willing to pay for, all funded by your taxpayer dollars and an infinite, inflated stream of finance capital.
As I wrote this, I happened to see a news story about a drop in Facebook's stock, caused by Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of massive capital expenditure with no clear profit motive or opportunity. On a call with the shareholders of his company, Zuckerberg justified this by arguing that Facebook simply had to spend all that money, not to make profits on existing technology, but rather to be in a good position to profit from the imminent "arrival of superintelligence." The key word here, of course, is arrival. Not even Mark Zuckerberg in salesman mode has any idea of how he or anyone else could possibly create or develop or initiate a technological process that could in any reasonable way lead to the all-powerful machine god: but he nonetheless possesses, or at least pretends to possess, the unswerving faith of a Seventh Day Adventist that the predicted arrival of the Messiah will come within the next year regardless. The most powerful people in the world, governing the fates of billions, are now openly sacrificing everything in pursuit of their occultist dreams of creating God.
Let's assume, though, that AI won't crash the global economy. Let's assume that it's not really a complete bubble: that it has, or will, lead to productivity boosts in the long-term in at least some industries. Let's even assume that AI art actually has some creative value, that AI chatbots can be regulated to not drive insane and kill lots of people, or have some use case to in some way promote human flourishing. The question still remains, though--the question that every person has to be able to ask, that every society has to ask, about each and every technology in order to not be insane: is it worth it?
The only conceivable answer, given the present costs being asked of us for the sake of AI adoption, is no. The ability for people to use AI is not worth, as Sam Altman has put it, covering most of the surface of the earth with data centers. It is not worth the psychological, ecological, political, economic, and social devastation that even the least ambitious current plans by tech companies would unleash.
It is not, in the final balance, even worth the happiness or sanity of a single human being. As Chesterton quite correctly stated, the first principle of politics is always the test of a little girl's hair. And regardless of some mythic future in which AI gives us techno-utopia, what AI is doing, here, now, is simply hurting people. And it must be stopped.
Hence, I will end this screed by asking for a personal commitment from you, my dear hypothetical readers.
AI cannot be stopped via non-political, means accessible to ordinary people--certainly not by economic means accessible to ordinary people. Governments, financiers, podcasters, influencers, advertisers, and trillions of dollars of already-allocated and invested money are at the present moment totally committed to keeping the AI train going by any means necessary.
Nonetheless, as discussed earlier, the main thing that ordinary people can do in the face of political evils of this scale is to band together politically to send a message--to communicate clearly to their rulers what they want, and apply pressure to them to do it.
So, I ask you: I beg you. Clearly communicate to our rulers, in every way you can, that you do not want this, that you do not want data centers, that you do not want tech companies, that you do not want AI.
First and foremost, do not use AI yourself, in any form; encourage others to not use it also. Whatever you do, absolutely do not pay for it. If you are in a position of responsibility at a corporate entity, do not allow your company to use it. If you are a financier, do not invest in it. If you are a government official, do whatever you can to stop it from receiving government funds or support or license or regulatory advantage: to the extent possible, deny it what it needs to survive.
Negative rejection is only the beginning: wherever possible, send a positive, direct message to your politicians and corporate leaders and pastors and leaders about what you want them to do. If there is a data center planned for your community, tell them not to approve it; fight in whatever way you can. If there is already a data center or tech campus present in your community, tell them to remove its tax breaks and positive regulatory environments. Tell your representatives, tell your congresspeople, tell your mayors and officials in whatever way you can: we do not want AI.
Protests and protest actions are only effective to the extent that they communicate a clear message to politicians to take clear, rapidly-achievable action. In this case, the political case is actually quite easy. We do not have to break the hold of tech companies on the global economy: we simply have to tell our politicians to let them fail. We do not have to tell our politicians to take forceful action against AI: we simply have to tell them to not go out of their way to protect AI. Civil and criminal liability is, at the end of the day, the most powerful force in America: and if governments simply do not protect AI companies, and tech companies, from liability for the harms they cause and have caused, they will die. Likewise, we do not have to tell our politicians to actively regulate against AI: we simply have to tell them not to fund and provide tax incentives and regulatory breaks and environmental waivers for the massive, overwhelming influx of data centers. If we do that, AI will die.
No doubt, many hypothetical people who have been reading this have for the last two thousand words or so been fuming and raging and cursing under their breath with one, total, undeniable objection to what I have been saying: you cannot turn back the clock! You cannot refuse to adopt new technology!
As a simple matter of historical fact, this objection is false, as any number of failed and unadopted inventions and technologies and techniques would show; nonetheless, in the present instance, I acknowledge the force behind the objection. Indeed, I fully grant my hypothetical objectors their basic point.
I am not in this instance advocating a true Ludditism, a rejection of the underlying technology behind the Internet and smartphones and even AI: not so much because I think such Ludditism irrational or absurd as because I think it simply besides the point. Given a normal, sane society, the technology to connect computers in a hypothetical "world wide web" would have many practical and helpful uses: I fully support us retaining this knowledge, and using it for those purposes. Given a normal, sane society, the technology to put connective power in a tiny package would also have its uses: and I suggest, nay I urge, that we make use of this as well. Given a normal, sane society, even the more limited use cases for Large Language Models and related trainable "Neural Networks" of the sort that computer scientists have been programming for decades, but with the recent refinements produced by all those billions of dollars, are worth retaining and making use of, even despite the fact that such Large Language Models inherently require vast processing power to function usefully and perform even simple tasks. I am not suggesting we "forget" these technologies, or refuse to make use of them tout court.
All I am suggesting--me, the moderate, the kindly rationalist, your friendly neighborhood blogger--is that when the misshapen representatives of bizarre utopian bureaucracies come to us, and tell us to take those simple and innocent technologies and, for the sake of a fundamentally insane cultish-utopian-Soviet-sectarian dream of creating God, spend untold trillions of dollars, increase these technologies' resource and environmental and energy and economic costs a millionfold, force everyone in society to use them all the time for even the simplest task easily achievable by much easier and less expensive means, employ them for anything and everything, even tasks for which they are inherently and obviously badly suited and cannot in fact carry out, use them in ways that are directly and pervasively harmful to real people and which overwhelmingly outweigh in negative effects any conceivable positive benefits, and in short, destroy people's minds and wreck the global economy and ruin the lives of our children for the sake of a childish con: I merely ask that we, the collective people of America and the world, kindly and politely respond, just as our collective mothers taught us, with a gentle, but firm, "No, thank you."
The political means exist to stop this: but they are only effective if they are used. I ask you all, dear readers, to make use of them.
NO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!
