Thread sourced from https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/2022355407763837229

I thought it was good enough it needed to be in a single shareable doc that isn't behind a paywall. If Cassie has a blog or something it would be better to go there, but I don't see one.

Post one

a lot of leftist “AI is fake hype” sentiment is motivated imo by the fact that the silicon valley overclass is the most morally and aesthetically revolting elite in living memory. They’re just so repugnant (and that is true) that they *must* be wrong, there *must* be comeuppance

post two

Of course this is nonsense; the worst people alive often win. More often than not

I don’t want to overstate this, but there’s a historical parallel to the American slaveholding class—for a long time northern capital was convinced slavery would naturally die out, and part of that belief was because the plantocracy of the South was just so fucking backwards and revolting.

Of course they had to be swept away by the course of history; how could an elite so barbarous, backward, and ugly compete? In fact, they had to be defeated—the problem didn’t solve itself—but it was very tempting to believe that the rational forces of Enlightenment would naturally and inevitably do away with Those People.

That’s not to say silicon valley is as morally evil as slave owners (although you get the sense they’d be happy to be, if it were allowed, and the dream of AI is in some sense the dream of being able to own slaves again, and their fears of rebellious AGI are a rehash of paranoid fantasies of slave revolt), but they do have that barbarous, self-aggrandizing, cretinous quality of the plantocracy. Northern capitalists at least built libraries and hospitals and schools and museums, you know?

They thought art and literature were important, they had a sense of noblesse oblige, of wanting to ‘improve’ society because they had a sense of stake in the society they ruled. They wanted to rule over an impressive and enlightened society, with impressive and enlightened subjects. It was still tyranny, but not the neglectful tyranny of the slave holding class that never built schools or libraries for their social inferiors.

Silicon Valley has more than a bit of that neglectful attitude, of being totally uninterested in the welfare and advancement of the people beneath them in the hierarchy. In fact, they want to get away from us (by going to Mars, maybe), or to remove us altogether. They’re not erudite, but cretinous losers who disdain culture and art (see: Elon)—they think in terms of “content,” and dream of removing artists from its production altogether. They disdain doctors and nurses, and think themselves superior, with their nootropic supplement stacks and longevity experiments, to the proletarianized healthcare workers. They disdain teachers and academics, and dreamed even before AI of replacing them with Khan Academy or whatever, lol.

They think they’re the only valuable and useful people in the world, and everyone else is just holding them back. We’re all just inconveniences to them. They’re the natural masters of all.

The narcissism is utterly revolting; their disinterest in everything and everyone else outside their little world is its expression. They really are just the ugliest people in the world. And so it feels like saying AI will stick around—finally, a technology with the kind of grandiose promise that somewhat matches their own sense of revolutionary importance as a class—is too much a concession to their vision of themselves.

These people made burrito taxi companies but consider themselves the greatest revolutionaries in history; it can’t be possible that they might actually build something really grandiose—even if it’s evil—can it? These ugly, cretinous, scrabbling, venal narcissists can’t actually be capable of anything transformative, can they?

Unfortunately it seems like this time they might be, and that’s galling to admit! So we don’t want to admit it.

post three

Of course they make it easy to feel this way, both by being so proudly repugnant—you can tell they get a lot of jouissance from their transgressions against decency, morality, and beauty, even as they are also overflowing with resentment for whenever anyone besides them is afforded even one iota of status or respect or agency—and by constantly overstating AI’s present capabilities.

The praise of AI-produced slop, in a particularly bitter way (think of the endless “looks how amazing my AI short film is! Hollywood is fucked! Artists are gonna be out of jobs! Ha ha! These tools will let me finally put them in their place beneath me!”), invites exactly this kind of reaction. Partly because it really still looks so inferior to even the slop made by humans, but partly because their motivation is so transparently vindictive narcissism.

When the cretinous nerds say “I hate art and I finally have the tools to destroy it once and for all,” we want to say “the fuck you don’t!” But they might, soon. Maybe not in another society with a different mode of production, but we don’t live in a society where what’s best always wins out—and certainly but usually what’s cheapest and fastest.

Like, no, it won’t replace what we value in art, or literature, or teaching, or healthcare but it may displace these things to a large extent in mass production