You may not have noticed, but we’re pretty fed up with the cash-ravenous marketing scheme otherwise known as generative AI around these parts. We – like so many others – are sick of being exploited and tired of the computer getting more expensive. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we rant about that for even more than an hour.
This time around, we find ourselves tangled in a rat king of interrelated AI stories: leftists apparently hate technology because they’re rejecting AI (and the mass exploitation that comes with it), the computer – a theoretically magical device hijacked by tech industry perverts – has become massively more expensive as a result of AI, and a former indie games luminary has dived into the deep end of AI psychosis and given agents free rein to blow nearly $10,000 on the stock market.
Keeping in mind that AI is nothing but stringing together sentences by predicting words at mass scale, we maintain a theme by moving along to prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, which also had a big week with the former announcing Substack integration. How is “data” that arises from what is functionally just gambling useful to writers, news organizations, or anyone? Beats us! But here we are. Finally, we answer an all-timer of a mailbag question: “How many owls would you have to see in a day before you thought something weird was going on?”
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 create our own prediction market where CNN pays the five of us to each flip a coin, and then gives us one million dollars.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Chris: Every part of the computer [is being affected by AI], and it’s just a bar full of guys that are doing this – that are ruining the computer. I love the computer. I love the computer so much. I love the computer with all my heart. I love technology. Somebody described me as a technologist the other day, and I had never thought of calling myself that, but it is true: I love technology.
The thing that makes me saddest about this is that we are constantly made to hate the thing that many of us love, which is the computer. Because it either does evil things – which, fair, it’s technology; technology is often morally neutral to evil sometimes – but also because now we can’t even have it. The end of the personal computer, they want this now all in the cloud. They want you to rent their server space. It’s the enclosure of the commons.
Nathan: This also all raises the larger philosophical question that’s kind of answered by the powers that be that are propagating AI, which is: Who wants to surrender control to the cloud or AI agents or whatever? That’s not a thing that humans typically do well or that we enjoy. But then the question becomes: Who wants you to surrender control and why? AI is part of a larger push, under fascism, to make us more willing to just go along with whatever. It’s like “Oh, there’s always gonna be a degree of unpredictability or variability in AI agents handling stuff for us; look at how convenient it is.”
Similarly, people in charge basically say “There’s always gonna be a degree of friction or strain under Dear Leader, but that’s fine; it’s the price of whatever good thing we’re collectively getting.” All of these are interrelated ideas that complement each other and, again, lead to the erosion of freedom and control in your own life – and being OK with that, at least philosophically.
Chris: But even within that framework, it doesn’t make sense. I think that gives them too much credit, because even phones aren’t going to be affordable. How are you gonna talk to their chatbots? The thing you need to talk to the chatbot needs RAM. They are now hoarding the RAM.
This sucks for everybody, but it also sucks for me personally. It makes me mad, because none of them want to talk about the fact that the computer’s fucking expensive now. … It’s all just five guys being annoying, like “Isn’t this great? Isn’t this fucking great?” No! Leave me alone, you fucking freak. I don’t care! But I have to care because that’s my job. I have to care because it’s something I love. I have to care because the computer means more to me than it ever will to these fucking people – any of them! They do not love the computer. They do not have love of the computer in their heart. They love the shape of the computer, they love selling the computer. They don’t fucking like being on the computer. They don’t like getting a computer to do things. They don’t like enjoying struggling with the computer and then having it pay off.
This is a thing I feel in my heart. It makes me so fucking mad, and I hate these people so much for insisting that I should be fucking excited for this. Because they have ruined a thing I like; they have made a thing I love hard to get, and I cannot stand that. None of them want to talk about that. None of them want to face that because they are either too stupid, too sold on this, or they’re looking at their Vanguard portfolio. And honestly I cannot stand that. Go away. Leave me alone. I want everything you do to crash.
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