By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he’s satirizing. Perhaps because he’s written from their perspective, he’s empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. “It’s like how the politician always thinks they’ve got the answer,” he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley’s scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington’s sclerotic politicians. There’s less oversight too. The innovators don’t ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. “In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,” he said. “You’d need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don’t think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.” (From Charlie Warzel's "It's the End of the World, and It's Their Fault: The tech bros have ascended to movie villain status")
I've finished reading two books from which I learned a few new things, but mostly the benefit was to confirm my biases. The first book I mentioned already, John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and the second is Karen Hao's The Empire of AI, which is mostly the story of Sam Altman and Open AI. Both books, I think, are good preparation for viewing HBOs Mountainhead this weekend. The quote above is taken from Warzel's article about Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, who wrote and directed Mountainhead.
The cumulative effect of these media events–in books and on TV–is to reinforce what now seems a truism to everybody who isn't a billionaire tech bro, which is that we are giving the future of humanity to very high-IQ, but emotionally and spiritually stunted human beings. We should be much more alarmed about that than we are. And it reinforces my argument that the real threats don't come from Trump and his tin-pot dictator corruption, but from these "geniuses" who are the demon spawn of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
Ok. That's unfair. These people are not evil, they're just morally oblivious nerds. They are man-children who are simply being swept along by evil, dehumanizing forces they don't even begin to understand. They sincerely believe they are working to benefit humanity according to their perverse, transhumanist way of thinking. We can criticize them and satirize them, but it makes no difference because there is no one with the moral authority or political power to stop them.
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I spent a good chunk of my career teaching a communications class in the business school of the University of Washington, and a big part of that was in encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit by having students present a a kind of Shark-Tank style business plan to the rest of the class that played the role of potential investors. It was fun, an for many students and interesting way to challenge their rhetorical skills to make the case that they had developed effective, innovative solutions for real problems. So I value the entrepreneurial spirit. I value creativity and innovaton. I value people who find clever ways to solve problems and to meet human needs. There's nothing wrong with any of that.
What I don't value is how in the real world as defined by late capitalism, the goal for the founders of most startups is to build it and then cash-in by selling it to people who usually don't understand the business or care about it. It's almost always just a transaction that destroys its uniqueness as it gets absorbed into something larger and more impersonal; it's almost never about creating something that's one's baby, that one would never sell just as you wouldn't sell one of your children. It's not about bringing something new and substantive into the world; it's about cashing in. The cash value is the only real measure of value. There's something terribly perverse about that. But according to the ethos that governs late capitalism, that's just normal behavior; it's what's expected. It's the logic of the system, and you're a fool among your peers if you don't play by the rules as late capitalism has established them.
So my point is that I'm not anti-business. I'm not anti-innovation. I'm not anti-people making a decent living for themselves. (But how do you define "decent".) And I am against the way that the logic of capitalism, whether early or late, in so many ways crushes the souls of people, including especially those who are its winners, like the people satirized in Succession or Mountainhead. I am against the way the wealth that people like that accumulate that gives them so much power that insulates them from any accountability. And I'm against the way they use that power destroy the common-sense efforts of people who have some measure of common decency would put constraints on both their wealth and their power in the name of the common good.
These billionaires can make all kinds of labored, self-serving arguments about what's "fair", but in the end it's really about what is truly just. The kind of accumulation of obscene wealth that late capitalism generates for its winners is just plain ugly unjust and destructive to the souls of those who accumulate it, and yet we allow these stunted souls unfettered power to shape the human future. It's just crazy.
So this is going to play out the way it's going to play out, and there's not much the rest of us can do about it. We humans seem capable of learning only the hard way. I think about what I've been writing about here in the "Rescuing Aristotle" posts as mostly something that can be effected only after our current delusional consensus reality has one way or the other been shattered.
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One last thought. The Catholic Church seems to be having a moment. It's unlikely to last, but you never know. I think that recent public interest in Catholicism is mostly driven by two things: the love of spectacle and the need for the ontologically dizzy to find some structure in a chaotic world. Neither of these has much to do with the subversive spirit of the gospels. Nevertheless, either reason might be an entryway into the deeper reality that for someone like me is the truth that the church uniquely mediates.
Also, as I said in my cathedral talks, the Catholic Church could possibly play a significant role in providing the global infrastructure necessary for effective resistance to the TCM. It’s hard to imagine now, but we live in a world where things change very quickly because nobody remembers anything from five minutes ago. So it’s quite possible that the Church’s current negative public image could change. Could the new pope be the world-historical figure that Armstrong calls for? Again, unlikely, but we’ll see. At the very least, there have been strong signals that Leo is attuned to the threats to the human good posed by AI.
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