“What a time to be alive,” I regularly say, exclusively ruefully, about drawing breath in the year 2025. I’m sure you do, too. The planet is on fire. The internet has devolved into an AI-generated slop puddle. Everything costs too much, and also it’s all busted. A mass of inconveniences have congealed to form a crisis, but if there’s one silver lining, at least we know where to point the finger: management types who spent the past several decades ushering in this tedious, wasteful world. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about why they need to go.
This time around we engage in a savvy act of brand synergy by bringing on extremely vocal AI critic and friend of the show Ed Zitron to celebrate the release of Aftermath’s new “Destroy AI” shirt, which we made in conjunction with Kim Hu, an incredible (human) artist, and are very proud of. We eventually get around to talking about the extra-shimmery AI bubble, but first: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Ed started watching it recently, and three-fifths of Aftermath have been obsessed with it for years, so obviously we’ve got to ramble like a runaway train about the good (cool powers, clever fights, fun characters), the bad (a season that you can cut the entire middle out of), and the ugly (baby poop jokes) of the incredibly idiosyncratic anime.
Then we discuss the societal rot AI continues to inspire, with kids cheating their way through school, normies having no idea what hallucinations are, and vulnerable people being talked into believing they’re god. Still, Ed doesn’t think this thing – or at least, the companies undergirding it – can last. The people in charge have no idea what human beings actually want or need, and that will come back to bite them eventually.
Finally, we discuss Grand Theft Auto VI, which is a departure for the series in that it seems like a romance between two legitimately likable main characters. But can it sustain such an intimate dynamic in a game where you’ll inevitably end up murdering 9,000 dudes? I guess we’ll see!
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can turn “Destroy AI” into an entire designer fashion label.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Ed: We’re in the era of the business idiot. The business idiot controls everything. The business idiot is so excited about AI. Why? Well, AI’s transformational power. What is that power? I need to take a phone call! I will be right back, but when I’m back I will tell you about the power.
Here’s a tweet from [Box CEO] Aaron Levie: “AI lowers the barrier to getting started on anything, which means people start doing far more. But to do great work still has a long tail of execution, judgment, creativity, and knowledge about the specific domain, which means AI replaces far fewer jobs than we think.”
What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck does that mean?
Gita: That just slid off of my brain.
Nathan: I started thinking about what I’m gonna have for dinner.
Ed: This is exactly it, though. There are people out there that that’s what they want to read. It doesn’t mean anything, but it makes them feel good about… management? They think that management is “I’ve read enough LinkedIn stuff, and I’ve been to enough conferences that I am now manager mode, and my people under me are doing good, and if not, I’ll get them fired. And then they’ll bring me new people that can be fired if I do anything wrong.”
Nathan: “This is definitely not a sign that I’m doing something badly every time and that sometimes the people are just good enough that they overcome all the unnecessary obstacles I place in their path.”
Gita: I have a very good friend who’s in a management position, and I think what differentiates her, specifically, from a bad manager is that she understands that her job is helping individual real human beings do their best possible job at work. And she spends a lot of time, on an individual basis, working with these people so that they can feel empowered to do their jobs and feel enriched by their work.
I’ve also worked with managers of the kind you described that clearly see me as an anonymous human resource, and I do daydream about throwing a giant steamroller at them.
Nathan: That’s what all the going to the gym is for: to help you lift the steamroller. Eventually you’ll be like “Alright, I’m strong enough. Today’s the day.”
Ed: But anyway, Clubhouse, fucking pointless, but everyone agreed on it. Metaverse, same deal. Crypto, same deal. AI, same deal, except AI has more of a product. The same theme through all of this is that the people making the calls and telling us what the transformative future will be are not participating in it. None of these people! None of them!
Now, AI allows them to, to an extent; these middle managers love it because they can make it look like they did a job. It can make them look productive, which usually they’d have to do by being in an office. Usually they’d have be like [faces of consternation] and it’s 7:05 PM when they could have left at 6 PM.
Nathan: Staring at Minesweeper on their computer screen like “This is the hardest decision I’m gonna make all year! Argh, it blew up.”
Ed: Looking at a Word doc and you can’t quite see the words, but if you look closer, it just says, “Notes. Work today?”
Nathan: It’s that Spongebob bit where he’s writing for hours and then it’s like “THE–”
Ed: The thing is, what’s happening right now was inevitable. It was inevitable that we would eventually get a situation where real people who do stuff would get overwhelmed by people who don’t. And it goes beyond the fact that they want to automate labor. It’s beyond that because they don’t understand what labor they want to automate. They don’t understand what it is they’re trying to do. They’re like “You just write fucking content, right? I can just have AI do this. Suck my asshole.”
And it’s like, why do you think people read words? “For information, right?” Sure, OK. How do you think words provide that? Is it that they’re written with a purpose? “Yes, but AI can do that.” Can it? Is there purpose behind anything AI does, other than a prompt? No. Why do people like my writing? It’s because I am writing it. It’s because it is my voice, and I’m explaining things so that they understand a message that I have in my head. Same with you.
I think we’re watching what happens when the people who don’t really understand work control everything. There is no reason to really do this AI stuff. No one’s making the money. It’s popular, I guess, but in the way where if everyone agrees to do something, something is popular.
Gita: The macarena was popular. A lot of things get popular.
Ed: And even then, you didn’t have CEOs being like “Let’s all do the macarena once a day to improve corporate happiness.” But I think if Sam Altman told them to, they’d consider it.
