Can confirm that one of the things that drove me to the left was how it got harder and harder to believe in any sort of future. The processes and institutions I'd put my faith in weren't doing anything about climate change, weren't doing anything about ecological devastation, were making living and working conditions worse, and proved impotent at every turn against the rise of the far right. And in the framework of capitalist realism, if capitalism couldn't fix it, then we were on an inevitable doom spiral toward extinction.
Honestly, I think we probably still are, but knowing that a better world is possible and that you can work toward it is a small comfort, however unlikely you are to succeed.
I'll second that. I have enough brain problems that I don't need a layer of doomerism painted over my dysfunctions.
Before reading the article, i just have to say that technology has advanced hugely in the past 20 years, in ways that have completely changed the world. And we are on the cusp of further tremendous advances, especially involving artificial intelligence.
So if the thesis of the article is really what you said in the title, its just not anywhere close to true.
That said, I’ll report back after reading it.
lmbo, AI is 10% matrix multiplication and 90% exploiting the global south for slave waged piecework "training the model".
Technology has not progressed since Benjamin Franklen. We’ve been stagnant since 1776.
The only way to convince America to switch to renewables will be making a corporation with the stated goal of replacing the entire grid system with lightning kites that collect power from thunderstorms and calling it FreedomPower. Put a cartoon Ben Franklin in all the ads and it will work.
Well yes. AI is just a tool. It is no different than a lathe or a loom. The only thing that matters is who controls it and for what ends.
Something something This Machine Kills episode about Potemkin AI.
AI is impossible. like one individual cockroach is smarter than the best computers in the entire world. It's all a scam to rope in money from nerds who think sci fi is real
Mate.. have you listened to/read the Ian Wright talk on capital as a living god? (here
It’s pretty tangential but any talk of controls or feedback in data processing, and my mind jumps to it. I find it super interesting at least, and I feel like you might enjoy it
If/then still outperforms their most advanced AI. 90% of AI startups just end up hiring humans in secret.
If/then still outperforms their most advanced AI
At doing what? ai is a type of tool. As it stands right now, it augments what humans can do.
That's all fine and good but often the AI are built to work on their own rather than alongside us, and are impossible to work with as a result.
How do you mean? I agree that they work best when designed with augmentation vs replacement in mind.
A lot of AI is just capitalist attempts at worker replacement. Notice how few of them say "will make work better" and how many of them say "will make work obsolete"
Like one individual cockroach is smarter than the best computers in the entire world.
What’s your definition of smarter? I’ve never seen a cockroach play chess, generate art, or calculate the likelihood of financial fraud on transactions.
90% exploiting the global south for slave waged piecework “training the model”.
Do you have any sources about this? I’d love to read up on it.
Before reading the article, i just have to say that technology has advanced hugely in the past 20 hears,
how? society has not moved and inch since the 80's. if technology was as transformative as it was in the past we'd see the 80's as a hopelessly antiquated time abyss instead of the last time mass culture created anything
This is just head in the sand doomerism. You’re deliberately ignoring the evidence of your own senses.
The internet has put the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of our hands. I have a universal translator in my pocket that I can point at a road sign or written document and see it translated in real time. These are changes that are fundamentally changing society the world over.
You could argue that the changes haven't been for the better, but the changes aren’t finished yet. These technological changes are causing social upheavals that likely wont be resolved for decades to come.
For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
It's really so much more than that, though. Besides, the person I'm responding to said that technology hadn't advanced since the 1980s, and that's just not true.
I mean, there's more to it in that - as u/GenXen quoted - the internet has primarily brought about new ways of exerting social control, surveillance, marketing, financialization, and admin.
We all spend increasing amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents, brokers, and accountants
Graeber isn't saying that the internet isn't a technology that's developed, he's saying that it's been developed in forms that work against revolutionary or poetic activity. That's, like, the whole thesis. Unless you're suggesting that social media is actually good.
This is a boomer-tier understanding of the internet and technology lol
We went from full genome DNA testing costing 100 million dollars in 2001 to $1,000 today.
Fat load of good it's done, we don't even have brain computer interfaces or implantable drug glands or people with Iridescent skin because of gene editing
We now have the full genome of over a dozen Neanderthals.
If we wanted to we could bring them back like they plan to do with the wooly mammoths.
Unless I get to eat one and they taste super good it aint worth it. I can pet elephants already and they are way cooler because they're grey and grey is a fun color for an animal to be
Graeber really emphasizes in that article about the importance of “blue sky” research.
Doing cool shit for the sake of knowledge is exactly what we should be aiming for. Shouldn’t be all of our focus, but someone fascinated in wooly mammoths should be able to run with that.
same. At this point I read Peter Watts books and go "WOW Cool Future!" because at least that has cyborgs and brain implants that eliminate the need for sleep
Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.
how? society has not moved and inch since the 80’s
lol I love how cranky this take is. I’m not going to go and list all the tech advancements and medical breakthroughs that have occurred because it would honestly be a waste of time.
You’re delusional (and likely privileged) if you really believe that we haven’t advanced technology, culture, and society at all.
You’re watching the wrong kind of movies and need a better hook up for your drugs.
Technology has advanced hugely. What the predictions of the 50s and 60s got wrong is the notion that those advances would be working to improve the lives of the average person. The sophistication of the algorithms running Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon are truly staggering, and are leagues ahead of what was possible even at the turn of the century (much less 50 years before that). The issue is not that we haven't advanced--it's that all those advancements have been turned to the purpose of enhancing capital, exploiting normal people, and generally making the lives of everyone except the ultra-rich much, much worse. We live in an age of wonders, but those wonders ain't for you.
absolutely excellent article, forms one of the main chapters of the utopia of rules, which brings together a lot of excellent thoughts on bureaucracy and related issues. makes a really good followup read after bullshit jobs
i also recently watched a graeber lecture covering a lot of the same ground, which i can also recommend
This is the article that introduced me to Graeber. I've never felt such a profound loss at a person's death, not even my own family.
The man was articulate about our current age and its many dissapointments in a way so few writers are
:doomer:
Yeah, I got done reading Bullshit Jobs and am reading Debt right now and he seemed like he really knew what was up. I think if he had lived longer he would have authored some incredible stuff.
It spun my head around for a few days when he was gone. It sorta feels like "oh shit now we have to face this stuff alone".
It struck me that when Graeber talks about industrial labor being outsourced, it's in essence a sleight of hand in the same way that the "cloud" in the IT sense is also a sleight of hand. There's nothing cool going on underneath - all there is is more brute forcing.
But it also goes back to the earlier point re: Baudrillard and Eco. For Baudrillard, it wasn't even about discovering the real, in fact it was practically impossible. What was interesting, and becomes increasingly so, is the further stratification of these alternate realities. The sweatshops already exist on a plane that isn't real, making products for a section of the Western world that doesn't materially encounter, and oftentimes mentally, encounter the sweatshop. Neither does it encounter the lower classes within its own cities, and if it does, everything is done to scrub its mind from such an encounter. And of course, now with the metaverse/VR still looking large, the stratification will increase further, and of course, will take place in the "cloud."
There are legitimately people I've met who don't put a thought into the idea of the physical layer that makes up the "cloud". Some of it is ignorance, and some of it is undergirded by thoughts of Disney-like ideology
There are legitimately people I’ve met who don’t put a thought into the idea of the physical layer that makes up the “cloud”.
That’s honestly by design. Technology should be as fluid to use as possible.
Comparing cloud computing and sweat shop labor conceptually is an interesting thought experiment, but the cruelty of sweatshops is on an entirely different tier than a server farm.
Good. Fuck cars already, it would be moronic to give drivers an extra dimension to hit protestors with.
i like that the illustrator for the header image is named mark fisher but it's literally just a guy with the same name lol
This article started with an interesting premise and then derailed itself. I love the point about the USSR being a competitive pressure on the US, it definitely resulted in more focused and centralized development.
What’s bizarre here is Graeber’s definition of the future being based in shit like flying cars and rayguns. It’s a very inflexible view and he has a surprising amount of nostalgia for the 50’s and 60’s. News flash: those eras fucking sucked for everyone who wasn’t a white cishet guy.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue.
This is a boomer-level understanding of how the Internet works, even back when this was written in 2012. Even then, “all we are talking about” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.
Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
And we have the beginning of those. Turns out this shit is complicated and we didn’t manage to advance the hardware as fast as we thought. Also, futurists were predicting things like video calls and remote shopping / work in the 50’s and 60’s.
In addition to that Graeber has some brief ableism in the paragraph where he dismisses psychotherapeutic medication as a tool of the working class meant to keep people working. That’s a general reductionist soapbox of his I strongly dislike and makes me wonder whether he’d have wound up as an antivaxer if he was still alive.
That all said, I agree with his assessment that neoliberalism has resulted in technological research being dispersed and less focused. The point on America as a nation of bureaucrats also rings pretty true.
I :soviet-heart: :graeber: but I'd feel remiss if I didn't make at least one comment on one of his sources here. Jeffrey Katz at Wash U certainly isn't the only scientist to have observed the very real escalation of bureaucracy that has been stifling science in the university since neoliberalism, but he is the only one I know that has other personal essays on his site that are exceedingly bigoted and imperialist.
In the mid to late 90s, the most powerful supercomputers on the planet were twice the size of your refrigerator and could barely push a teraflop of theoretical peak performance, if they were fully kitted out. Today, I am posting this message from a device that can do nearly twice that, and fits in my pocket.
The phone you get frustrated at for being slow as shit at loading cat pictures for like no reason is as powerful as some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet two decades ago, and more capable. A PlayStation 5 is literally more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer array of 2001.
Just because technology hasn't dramatically changed form in an obvious way doesn't mean it's not advancing, it just means that for most functionality, a keyboard and a mouse have remained the most functional input methods. You don't get to scream at how bad an idea like the multiverse is and in the next breath also demand that technology drastically change its form without at all changing form. And yeah, the multiverse is a bad idea. Keyboard and mouse are fine. That's why they have stuck around for 40+ years.
This sounds like an "end of history" prediction. Technology has most definitely advanced in the past couple decades. And a couple decades from now it will be very different than it is today.
