Adam, your dysphoria is real and the Mann comparison is apt. But I want to push on the gap between what you're feeling and what you're naming because I think the gap is doing political work that benefits the forces producing the dysphoria.
You describe the Berlin panelists playing "familiar tunes" i.e. municipal socialism, EU regulation, price stabilization, etc. in a world too ruptured for historical analogy. You feel the rupture viscerally. And then you reach for Mann rather than a mechanism. That's the tell. Mann gives you the phenomenology of rupture without obligating you to name what's producing it.
Let me try to name it.
What you're experiencing as a discordant timbre is unbounded pleonexia in its late phase; not ordinary greed, but the structural disposition that, when unchecked by adequate institutional containment, accumulates until the accumulated power can purchase the institutions designed to check it. The Berlin panel's "good, sensible people" are proposing changes within a framework whose operating assumptions the accumulated power has already captured. They are playing jazz in a room where the sound system belongs to someone else. The proposals are fine. The room is wrong. And the reason they can't hear the room is that their credentialing and discourse systems have been shaped, over decades, by the same force they nominally oppose. They propose what is proposable. The grammar of rupture isn't available to them without losing the institutional standing that makes them "good, sensible people" who get onto panels in Berlin.
The Ferguson horse question is where the sleight of hand is most visible. He asks whether we are the horses — and it's a legitimate question as far as it goes. But horses didn't own the steam engines that displaced them. Workers, through enormous social struggle, eventually won a share of the productivity gains from mechanization: unions, collective bargaining, the welfare state, the 40-hour week. The AI question isn't "are we the horses?" It's: who owns the horses' replacements, and what coercive or constitutional capacity do we retain to recover a share of the value they generate? The AI companies drew on publicly funded computer science, publicly subsidized internet infrastructure, and the entire accumulated corpus of human writing and art — every book, every essay, every act of civic and cultural life that the commons of meaning produced. That is appropriation of res communes omnium for private accumulation. In Roman law, which took these things seriously, there's a name for consuming the substance of the commons without compensation or restoration: abusus. Ferguson naturalizes the outcome as though ownership structure were a weather pattern. It isn't. It's a political choice, and it's reversible.
The AI-enshitification dimension you gesture at connects here directly. AI paired with knowledgeable human input — editorial, curatorial, epistemic — is a genuine tool. AI driven purely by the profit impetus, without that check, is a mechanism for producing fluent confabulation optimized for engagement rather than truth. The profit function and the quality function diverge as platforms mature. Enshitification is not a bug; it is the predictable output of a system with a single terminal objective operating in an environment of weakened competitive constraint. The commons of meaning, the accumulated substrate of human cultural and intellectual inheritance, cannot survive being processed at scale by systems optimizing for retention metrics. It gets flattened into the average of its training distribution, dressed in confident prose, and delivered as authoritative. The knowledgeable human is the only thing that can identify when the system is confabulating, and the profit impetus systematically removes the knowledgeable human because they are expensive and they slow things down and they sometimes say no.
Your Columbia students' anxiety is real. But I'd push back gently on framing it as merely epistemological: uncertainty about AI's economic impact. The deeper condition is that these students have been formed in a period of advanced atomization. The parallel enclosure that ran alongside the enclosure of material commons, the enclosure of meaning itself, the progressive commodification and fragmentation of shared story, has left them without a tradition of resistance to place the rupture inside. A population that shares no story is easier to manage as isolated consumers than as citizens with collective agency. The rupture you're feeling from the stage in Berlin is precisely the rupture between what the historical tradition of reform assumed (a citizenry with collective story, collective institutions, collective memory) and what the decades of atomization have actually produced. Municipal socialism requires municipalities. EU regulation requires a demos that believes in the EU. Both assume a substrate that the pleonexic logic has been methodically dissolving.
What's missing from your Berlin panel, and I say this with real respect for the tradition you're working in, is a physical baseline. Not better historical analogy from a slightly longer window, but thermodynamic constraint as a constitutional fact: the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, not an autonomous domain. The accumulation model consumes the substrate it depends on. This is not a moral claim. It is a thermodynamic one, and physics enforces its arguments on timescales longer than any oligarchy. The 1945–1990 window from which the familiar tunes are drawn is exceptionally short, and it excluded these constraints by design, because the growth model required their exclusion. Historical precedent drawn from inside that window will systematically mistake the exception for the baseline.
The Mann consolation you found is pointing in the right direction: the pre-war world became legendary. The post-oligarchic world needs, right now, to become plausible and be named in enough detail and with enough internal coherence that it can be recognized as possible when the moment arrives. That is the work. Not because the fire is dousable this afternoon, but because the next generation needs to know what a building that doesn't burn looks like, so they can argue for it when the ash clears.
For anyone who wants to see what that naming actually looks like in practice — the mechanism identified, the physical baseline established, and solutions proposed that are grounded rather than gestural — I'd point to a Substack called The Freeze-Frame Revolution (squirrelbrain77.substack.com). It does something rare: it names pleonexia as the structural threat outright, grounds the argument in Roman jurisprudence, thermodynamics, and evolutionary biology simultaneously, and proposes a constitutional architecture to match the diagnosis rather than offering policy tweaks inside a captured framework. It is not comfortable reading. It is honest reading. Which, given the times, is what the occasion requires.
This was AI assisted writing, with strict rules, direction and ideas to cover. The human curation at its best. It is a good example I think, of what AI can be used for: democratization of debate. No AI has the impetus to read, formulate an opinion, formulate a sense of answer, anchor it in reality, and provide an adequate answer, on its own. And it is something that would have more readily engaged Adam - have you watched any of his presentations? - and maybe light a spark in him, or get out the very little speck of magic mirror that I think has found lodging in his eye and that misdirects him...
What you have done here could be considered a perfect ad hominem attack, trying to cover the argument with what can be considered an insult without going to the effort of engaging with the subject of the posting, of the 100% AI content. So your point at best deserves to be disqualified. Like an ape, you picked your own poo to toss at something that was upseting you deep down.
Was I "cheating"? The enagement lacked purity of human thought... Do you think 1,000,000 chimps, typing for 1,000,000 years at the keyboard would have come up with my answer?
Is this response AI written?
Anyways, the proof is in the pudding, the upvote. People should take their votes back if they feel that they were cheated of a genuine answer. But I think the majority felt that there is truth in what I posted and I think that is what matters.
It did cross my mind that it read like an AI generated comment in its matter of fact manner. Disappointing it was not acknowledged by Kouros but maybe it was all an in joke. Still the points made resonated.
I really wonder why it matter that it was AI assisted? Because the points, all of them, where mine, sharpened by a better writer. And I think the substance of my argument is sound and speaks truthfully, and it resonated with many regardless of the fact that I had an assistant.
Well all I can say is that if you are wondering why , notwithstanding the cogency of the points you made , you are lacking insight , with all due respect.
Oh, I can enumerate quite a few reasons people might feel icky about the use of AI. Not satisfying the "purity" axis probably being the primordial, basic one. Purity has been a big thing for humans for a long time, see the Brahmin caste for instance. And we can keep going with reasons.
But did I use it to find targets and kill innocents? Or did I use it to better pinpoint the je ne se-quoi Adam and other were beting around the bush and not hitting? I tried to put together the best way to express that, especially since English is not my first language and I am not a talented writer. Heck, I did a public service.
And you know what else I am using AI for? writing to express my dissaproval as a citizen for this or that reprobable action done by my government or institution. It is done fast and with high quality, one can do a campaign that way... You can throw the book at them...
The way drones and less expensive missiles have democratized war, same way LLMs have democratized quality discourse and debate. Why to shun it? If I can elevate the debate? It sharpens everyone's mind, doesn't it? You did feel the gears moving when you read my post, didn't you? Made you think, didn't it? We moved a step away from Idiocracy, did we not?
I say with enough training and sparing, we'll all become mentats.
This post is so on point, Kouros. The assumption of the inevitability of AI’s dominance and consequences commonly leaves out the role of a handful of oligarchs- individuals with agency. They are the “rate-limiting reaction” in the thermodynamics of our future.
The techbro set generally is hardly a limiting factor, quite the opposite (yes, there are cults like the Zizians and the Rationalists around Yudkowsky who see themselves as Cassandras, but this is just the ‘criti’-side of the criti-hype coin that keeps the AI bubble rolling). If you meant it in the sense of taking the technological inevitability of ‘AGI’ as granted and seeing the relevant humans there as an inevitable friction that would attenuate a ‘singularity’ scenario, you are still doing criti-hype.
There is no such thing as AGI anywhere even close on the technical horizon, and the economics of AI (largely LLMs) as actually applied in the current economy are mostly abysmal. The real issues are around enshittification, deskilling and labor discipline, not around unhinged ideas of humans-as-horses echoed by people enhanted by a sci-fi spectacle. That Adam seemingly completely accepts this Hollywood framing of what is only a clever marketing term around machine learning betrays not only his own lack of technical or even economic understanding, but how deeply the tech industry's grift reaches otherwise intelligent people. A real case of computer-onset boomeritis for sure here. Cue Richard Dawkins assigning sentience to “Claudia”.
For actual numbers on ‘AI and US capitalism’, I strongly recommend Ed Zitron; Tooze hasn't had anything of interest to say here for years as he just keeps repeating industry talking points without looking under the cover. For the TESCREAL cults that dominate the upper echelons of Silicon Valley and where these sci-fi fantasies emerge from, Émile P. Torres.
I read your post several times to get my head around it. I do think you have described and framed the source of our discomfort very well indeed and I thank you for it. Our humanity is being unwound and AI threatens to tear it to shreds unless we control and shape its destiny. I do think Pope Leo is right when he says we need to disarm AI and put it in service of humanity and not the paradigm we currently inhabit of humanity in the service of AI. Big tech is mining human capital and it’s an extraction regime that must be stopped .
I certainly agree with the idea of attending to our way of life now, before it goes, like trying to be good ancestors. I can feel a sense of disquiet already when I read cogent arguments like yours. Emphatic sentences like "That is the work" seem characteristic of Claude. Is that because Claude is based on writing like yours? This is the uncanny abyss we are looking into.
There is insight and then there is judgement. Then there is waffle. You are drifting into waffle now , and if AI assisted I don’t blame you “ cos you know not wot you do”. Have a great day mate. Liked the French bit.
What does it take for a human to survive? Food, shelter, a community where he/she can find status? What else? For most of the "civilized" era lower classes the later was achieved by work and skills. Butcher, baker , barista, goat wrangler, ect. But as machines take over the search for status get harder and more frustrating. What has been coming for working class jobs for 200 years is now coming for high status jobs. As a retired carpenter I have to ask. Why is it suddenly a crises?
The shift in labor you describe that spanned 200 years will happen in the span of a few, over a very compressed timeline. The accelerated collapse of systems as we know them is existentially horrifying because our ability to respond happens at "human" speed, over decades. A response is already too late and we haven't even agreed on the problem.
We'll have to translate our myths into a plan to rebuild in an unprecedented new world. We'll have to set aside what no longer serves us, like political and economic systems that don't function well today and will be incoherent in an AI-saturated tomorrow. We need post-labor economics, consensus to set aside inadequate political systems, in a massive undertaking at global scale. We need supporting systems that match the speed of the tech platforms that are now in the drivers seat, for better or worse.
Most importantly, we must remember why we build: presumably to elevate existence for all living things, not just a few.
That you approvingly cite something by Niall Ferguson -- especially in comparison with your Berlin panelists -- should have set off some alarm bells. There are ruptures in the world that have nothing to do with any capabilities of AI and the way you seemingly have bought entirely into the tech industry's AI (criti-)hype is in a word, embarrassing. I would recommend more digging deeper into the numbers (cf. Ed Zitron) and less musical analogies.
Which may be why it reads more like somewhat over worked and yet strangely vague literary criticism. Of course, that's true for a great deal of what is to be found plastered on Substack. But, now that I think of it, the people who earn a living producing the content found on Substack as well as in media in general, are really just doing what AI does: mining, processing and restating online content. I quess it makes sense for them to be worried that AI is going to replace them. As for the rest of us who work in those parts of the economy based on producing material goods, well there really isn't much to worry about.
Aaron posted that comment twice in the thread and like you, has nothing to say about the substance of the posting, but cringe at the idea of AI assisted writing and literary style. As I mentioned prior, the entire structure and arguments were mine and the tool followed my instructions. Plus, it is something that I keep open so it gets slowly trained with my particular inputs. It can be a good assistant. I don't think it gives the uncanny valley vibe in its production. Too polished, maybe, but then, if you read Adam's essays, you want to respond in kind, don't you, and maybe he'll notice and next time he might be a bit braver...?!
Unsettling post, and drawn in by your layered temporality and timbre distinctions. It calls to mind the musicologist Eszter in Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance, whose monologue on tuning is really a way of asking whether the apparent order of the world rests on compromises we no longer notice. Your sense that the ‘tone color’ of our moment has shifted while our political vocabulary still assumes an older key signature is compelling.
I think your Mann passage similarly analogizes, but one lesson from his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is that recognizing a rupture and correctly interpreting it are not the same thing. Mann also sensed the historical break at the time, but later readers were not always persuaded by the meaning he assigned to it. You pose a difficult question with ‘What times are these?’ Is it fair to add: how do we distinguish historical discontinuity from the experience of our world becoming unrecognizable to us?
I share your incredulity at the lack of urgency, especially but not only in Germany.
What's striking is that the groups most in denial are those who could have part of the answer, if they were only able to make the bridge from their own traditions of thought.
The embodied work of the German Mittelstand is one of the forms of intellectual labor likely to survive longest in the face of AI. Years after the white-collar work of the anglosphere has been eaten by Claude and Codex, there will still be a role for the hands-on engineer able to construct a custom piece of industrial machinery. Probably the robots will get there too in the end, but there's a good decade more runway than for the programmers and the lawyers.
And the progressives of all stripes -- we're facing a boom in (digital) production and a crisis of distribution. Redistributive ideas which were abandoned for their perverse incentives on the highly productive suddenly fit with the current moment, but we're hearing them more from tech-bros than from old-school socialists.
I suspect part of this is cautiousness inflicted by being on the losing side of economic debates for thirty years. When you've spent so long fighting a rearguard action to defend your position, it's hard to recognize when you might genuinely have something to say about the future.
The timbre image deserves to be pushed one step further. A note's timbre is set by which overtones the instrument's structure lets resonate — change the structure and the same fundamental is a different sound. That may be why precedent feels almost camp right now: invoking it assumes the resonating body underneath — the institutional structure the old tunes were scored for — is still the same instrument. The Mann preface makes the same point in reverse: the chasm makes the immediate past legendary not because time passed, but because the structure broke. So "what times are these?" can be cashed out empirically: which of the slow structures — settlement systems, alliance architectures, energy regimes — still stand as scored? Where they persist, precedent binds. Where they have quietly been swapped, history is costume. Thank you for this one — the dysphoria reads as the sound of someone hearing the instrument change beneath the music.
Not humans as horses, but humans on an unfortunate side of the superstructure suddenly and rudely awakened to their status as "less rigorous" workers. Horses and horsepower were handling among the most rigorous work, which is (among the reasons) why steam power and ice had to develop for quite a while and replaced them over time. AI is sniping, relatively speaking, some or most of the less rigorous work (the economics suffer on the most rigorous tasks, and those still require human touch). The knock-on effects are similar or perhaps worse, but the analysis around it is different.
For example, the creation of such a large bubble of less rigorous work is politically tinged and supported by excesses or surpluses in production brought by capitalism, and while in some long-term ways it is useful and important, in the short to even medium term (nationally speaking, so years to decades), the entire thing can rot to the core before negative outcomes feedback into the rest of the system. In many ways the entire thing *has* rotten to the core, which is why AI is sliding so smoothly into the gap. Rot replacing rot has much lower requirements than replacing a specific tuned blend with a completely new one.
Rupture. It is the word of the times, thanks to Mark Carney. I have been thinking about rupture since attending the Hay Festival Cartagena and listening to a panel that included Leah Ypi, who framed the discussion of rupture around those in her fantastic book "Free." It made me realize that thinking about one's own life is a good way of thinking about rupture. So in Chartbook 451, at the end, when you write "We may not have experienced a Great War, but is there not a similar sense of rupture separating us from the the 20th century and its precedents, its models and its inspirations?", I wonder whether we should not identify this rupture in relation to not that of the 20th century, but those of the 20th century through which "all that is solid melts into air." I was born in 1958, just 13 years after the end of World War II. While I was still a youth I experienced two ruptures, one personal and one global: emigration from the UK and the collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus in which I was raised. The next rupture, for me, was the collapse of the centrally planned economies alongside the Balkan Wars. The world order had profoundly changed, but this was not a change of tone -- this was an epistemological transformation, just as the end of the post-war consensus had been. In terms of technology, which is what Chartbook 451 is about, to me the real rupture was the introduction of the iPhone because it transformed the use of information technology in everyday life. It was the foundation upon which social media addictions are built. It was the end of innocence for children born around 2000, who have been subjected to its full fury. The rise of AI may change the economy, but unknown to us at the time the introduction of the iPhone was an epistemological transformation. Finally, we have what I consider to be the most recent epistemological transformation: the normalization of barbarism seen in the genocide in Palestine. Srebrenica had the capacity to shock the world and cause governments to collapse (in the Netherlands). No more. We can watch 70,000+ being killed and then switch the channel while they continue to be killed. So, to me, rupture takes place when the way people see and understand the world shifts; when Gramsci's "integral state" of “political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony armoured by coercion” (Gramsci 1971, 263) is disrupted and civil society, where hegemony is organized, must be reconstituted by "organic intellectuals." That is what I mean by epistemological transformation. Finally, it seems to me that what does differentiate the ruptures of the 21st and 20th centuries is what David Harvey referred to as "time-space compression"; ruptures occur more rapidly and impact more widely now.
Moving summary. I do love Leah Ypi, she is a wonderful person and an exceptional academic.
What is unmooring for me is the unspeakable hypocrisy that the western civilization seems capable of. George Orwell and his double speak is a kindergarten play compared to the heights the west has reached, in toto. While you see some examples in the past of a frenzied behaviour, i.e. the inquisition, the which hunts in the central Europe, the 30 years war, the Salem witch hunt, the nazification of Germany, the McCartney commie hunt, the levels of defense of the barbarity in Palestine coupled with the amping of Russophobia across the board, it is something that I do not find a parallel in history.
It is this madness that scares me the most, this acceptance and perpetuation in the public discourse by the MSM and the political class that I find the most problematic. The question becomes, what is the limit? I can see a speck of the limit: the months long siege of the city of Antioch in 1098 ended up in acts of cannibalism from the side of the crussaders when the finally conquered the city.
Personal comment, for which I hope I will be forgiven, but I feel a kind of psychic relief reading this. A quote from my most recent journal entry, about feeling disconnected from even close friends at the moment, though “I realize not everyone is as fascinated by the parallels between the world of 1914 and the world of today.” And just last week I remarked on that same passage as I began the audiobook of “The Magic Mountain”. Have recently been reading the work of Peter Turchin on Structural Demographic theory. I wonder if you have encountered it and, if so, curious if you have any thoughts? Thank you for your work.
Adam, your dysphoria is real and the Mann comparison is apt. But I want to push on the gap between what you're feeling and what you're naming because I think the gap is doing political work that benefits the forces producing the dysphoria.
You describe the Berlin panelists playing "familiar tunes" i.e. municipal socialism, EU regulation, price stabilization, etc. in a world too ruptured for historical analogy. You feel the rupture viscerally. And then you reach for Mann rather than a mechanism. That's the tell. Mann gives you the phenomenology of rupture without obligating you to name what's producing it.
Let me try to name it.
What you're experiencing as a discordant timbre is unbounded pleonexia in its late phase; not ordinary greed, but the structural disposition that, when unchecked by adequate institutional containment, accumulates until the accumulated power can purchase the institutions designed to check it. The Berlin panel's "good, sensible people" are proposing changes within a framework whose operating assumptions the accumulated power has already captured. They are playing jazz in a room where the sound system belongs to someone else. The proposals are fine. The room is wrong. And the reason they can't hear the room is that their credentialing and discourse systems have been shaped, over decades, by the same force they nominally oppose. They propose what is proposable. The grammar of rupture isn't available to them without losing the institutional standing that makes them "good, sensible people" who get onto panels in Berlin.
The Ferguson horse question is where the sleight of hand is most visible. He asks whether we are the horses — and it's a legitimate question as far as it goes. But horses didn't own the steam engines that displaced them. Workers, through enormous social struggle, eventually won a share of the productivity gains from mechanization: unions, collective bargaining, the welfare state, the 40-hour week. The AI question isn't "are we the horses?" It's: who owns the horses' replacements, and what coercive or constitutional capacity do we retain to recover a share of the value they generate? The AI companies drew on publicly funded computer science, publicly subsidized internet infrastructure, and the entire accumulated corpus of human writing and art — every book, every essay, every act of civic and cultural life that the commons of meaning produced. That is appropriation of res communes omnium for private accumulation. In Roman law, which took these things seriously, there's a name for consuming the substance of the commons without compensation or restoration: abusus. Ferguson naturalizes the outcome as though ownership structure were a weather pattern. It isn't. It's a political choice, and it's reversible.
The AI-enshitification dimension you gesture at connects here directly. AI paired with knowledgeable human input — editorial, curatorial, epistemic — is a genuine tool. AI driven purely by the profit impetus, without that check, is a mechanism for producing fluent confabulation optimized for engagement rather than truth. The profit function and the quality function diverge as platforms mature. Enshitification is not a bug; it is the predictable output of a system with a single terminal objective operating in an environment of weakened competitive constraint. The commons of meaning, the accumulated substrate of human cultural and intellectual inheritance, cannot survive being processed at scale by systems optimizing for retention metrics. It gets flattened into the average of its training distribution, dressed in confident prose, and delivered as authoritative. The knowledgeable human is the only thing that can identify when the system is confabulating, and the profit impetus systematically removes the knowledgeable human because they are expensive and they slow things down and they sometimes say no.
Your Columbia students' anxiety is real. But I'd push back gently on framing it as merely epistemological: uncertainty about AI's economic impact. The deeper condition is that these students have been formed in a period of advanced atomization. The parallel enclosure that ran alongside the enclosure of material commons, the enclosure of meaning itself, the progressive commodification and fragmentation of shared story, has left them without a tradition of resistance to place the rupture inside. A population that shares no story is easier to manage as isolated consumers than as citizens with collective agency. The rupture you're feeling from the stage in Berlin is precisely the rupture between what the historical tradition of reform assumed (a citizenry with collective story, collective institutions, collective memory) and what the decades of atomization have actually produced. Municipal socialism requires municipalities. EU regulation requires a demos that believes in the EU. Both assume a substrate that the pleonexic logic has been methodically dissolving.
What's missing from your Berlin panel, and I say this with real respect for the tradition you're working in, is a physical baseline. Not better historical analogy from a slightly longer window, but thermodynamic constraint as a constitutional fact: the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, not an autonomous domain. The accumulation model consumes the substrate it depends on. This is not a moral claim. It is a thermodynamic one, and physics enforces its arguments on timescales longer than any oligarchy. The 1945–1990 window from which the familiar tunes are drawn is exceptionally short, and it excluded these constraints by design, because the growth model required their exclusion. Historical precedent drawn from inside that window will systematically mistake the exception for the baseline.
The Mann consolation you found is pointing in the right direction: the pre-war world became legendary. The post-oligarchic world needs, right now, to become plausible and be named in enough detail and with enough internal coherence that it can be recognized as possible when the moment arrives. That is the work. Not because the fire is dousable this afternoon, but because the next generation needs to know what a building that doesn't burn looks like, so they can argue for it when the ash clears.
For anyone who wants to see what that naming actually looks like in practice — the mechanism identified, the physical baseline established, and solutions proposed that are grounded rather than gestural — I'd point to a Substack called The Freeze-Frame Revolution (squirrelbrain77.substack.com). It does something rare: it names pleonexia as the structural threat outright, grounds the argument in Roman jurisprudence, thermodynamics, and evolutionary biology simultaneously, and proposes a constitutional architecture to match the diagnosis rather than offering policy tweaks inside a captured framework. It is not comfortable reading. It is honest reading. Which, given the times, is what the occasion requires.
This comment is 100% AI-written, probably to shill that substack.
https://www.pangram.com/history/b4cfab16-93c3-4bd4-bf7b-0580e4bb2e8f
This was AI assisted writing, with strict rules, direction and ideas to cover. The human curation at its best. It is a good example I think, of what AI can be used for: democratization of debate. No AI has the impetus to read, formulate an opinion, formulate a sense of answer, anchor it in reality, and provide an adequate answer, on its own. And it is something that would have more readily engaged Adam - have you watched any of his presentations? - and maybe light a spark in him, or get out the very little speck of magic mirror that I think has found lodging in his eye and that misdirects him...
What you have done here could be considered a perfect ad hominem attack, trying to cover the argument with what can be considered an insult without going to the effort of engaging with the subject of the posting, of the 100% AI content. So your point at best deserves to be disqualified. Like an ape, you picked your own poo to toss at something that was upseting you deep down.
Was I "cheating"? The enagement lacked purity of human thought... Do you think 1,000,000 chimps, typing for 1,000,000 years at the keyboard would have come up with my answer?
Is this response AI written?
Anyways, the proof is in the pudding, the upvote. People should take their votes back if they feel that they were cheated of a genuine answer. But I think the majority felt that there is truth in what I posted and I think that is what matters.
Incredible. Can Adam ban this account please?
Hahaha, Homeric laughter... Why are you trying so hard to prove my point?
It did cross my mind that it read like an AI generated comment in its matter of fact manner. Disappointing it was not acknowledged by Kouros but maybe it was all an in joke. Still the points made resonated.
I really wonder why it matter that it was AI assisted? Because the points, all of them, where mine, sharpened by a better writer. And I think the substance of my argument is sound and speaks truthfully, and it resonated with many regardless of the fact that I had an assistant.
Well all I can say is that if you are wondering why , notwithstanding the cogency of the points you made , you are lacking insight , with all due respect.
Oh, I can enumerate quite a few reasons people might feel icky about the use of AI. Not satisfying the "purity" axis probably being the primordial, basic one. Purity has been a big thing for humans for a long time, see the Brahmin caste for instance. And we can keep going with reasons.
But did I use it to find targets and kill innocents? Or did I use it to better pinpoint the je ne se-quoi Adam and other were beting around the bush and not hitting? I tried to put together the best way to express that, especially since English is not my first language and I am not a talented writer. Heck, I did a public service.
And you know what else I am using AI for? writing to express my dissaproval as a citizen for this or that reprobable action done by my government or institution. It is done fast and with high quality, one can do a campaign that way... You can throw the book at them...
The way drones and less expensive missiles have democratized war, same way LLMs have democratized quality discourse and debate. Why to shun it? If I can elevate the debate? It sharpens everyone's mind, doesn't it? You did feel the gears moving when you read my post, didn't you? Made you think, didn't it? We moved a step away from Idiocracy, did we not?
I say with enough training and sparing, we'll all become mentats.
And you are welcome.
I'm sorry you're terrible at writing. That must suck.
This post is so on point, Kouros. The assumption of the inevitability of AI’s dominance and consequences commonly leaves out the role of a handful of oligarchs- individuals with agency. They are the “rate-limiting reaction” in the thermodynamics of our future.
The techbro set generally is hardly a limiting factor, quite the opposite (yes, there are cults like the Zizians and the Rationalists around Yudkowsky who see themselves as Cassandras, but this is just the ‘criti’-side of the criti-hype coin that keeps the AI bubble rolling). If you meant it in the sense of taking the technological inevitability of ‘AGI’ as granted and seeing the relevant humans there as an inevitable friction that would attenuate a ‘singularity’ scenario, you are still doing criti-hype.
There is no such thing as AGI anywhere even close on the technical horizon, and the economics of AI (largely LLMs) as actually applied in the current economy are mostly abysmal. The real issues are around enshittification, deskilling and labor discipline, not around unhinged ideas of humans-as-horses echoed by people enhanted by a sci-fi spectacle. That Adam seemingly completely accepts this Hollywood framing of what is only a clever marketing term around machine learning betrays not only his own lack of technical or even economic understanding, but how deeply the tech industry's grift reaches otherwise intelligent people. A real case of computer-onset boomeritis for sure here. Cue Richard Dawkins assigning sentience to “Claudia”.
For actual numbers on ‘AI and US capitalism’, I strongly recommend Ed Zitron; Tooze hasn't had anything of interest to say here for years as he just keeps repeating industry talking points without looking under the cover. For the TESCREAL cults that dominate the upper echelons of Silicon Valley and where these sci-fi fantasies emerge from, Émile P. Torres.
I read your post several times to get my head around it. I do think you have described and framed the source of our discomfort very well indeed and I thank you for it. Our humanity is being unwound and AI threatens to tear it to shreds unless we control and shape its destiny. I do think Pope Leo is right when he says we need to disarm AI and put it in service of humanity and not the paradigm we currently inhabit of humanity in the service of AI. Big tech is mining human capital and it’s an extraction regime that must be stopped .
I certainly agree with the idea of attending to our way of life now, before it goes, like trying to be good ancestors. I can feel a sense of disquiet already when I read cogent arguments like yours. Emphatic sentences like "That is the work" seem characteristic of Claude. Is that because Claude is based on writing like yours? This is the uncanny abyss we are looking into.
There is insight and then there is judgement. Then there is waffle. You are drifting into waffle now , and if AI assisted I don’t blame you “ cos you know not wot you do”. Have a great day mate. Liked the French bit.
As I said, Brahmin.
What does it take for a human to survive? Food, shelter, a community where he/she can find status? What else? For most of the "civilized" era lower classes the later was achieved by work and skills. Butcher, baker , barista, goat wrangler, ect. But as machines take over the search for status get harder and more frustrating. What has been coming for working class jobs for 200 years is now coming for high status jobs. As a retired carpenter I have to ask. Why is it suddenly a crises?
The shift in labor you describe that spanned 200 years will happen in the span of a few, over a very compressed timeline. The accelerated collapse of systems as we know them is existentially horrifying because our ability to respond happens at "human" speed, over decades. A response is already too late and we haven't even agreed on the problem.
We'll have to translate our myths into a plan to rebuild in an unprecedented new world. We'll have to set aside what no longer serves us, like political and economic systems that don't function well today and will be incoherent in an AI-saturated tomorrow. We need post-labor economics, consensus to set aside inadequate political systems, in a massive undertaking at global scale. We need supporting systems that match the speed of the tech platforms that are now in the drivers seat, for better or worse.
Most importantly, we must remember why we build: presumably to elevate existence for all living things, not just a few.
Hah, you are asking for something like this:
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/basic-law-of-the-commonwealth-1ae
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/playing-devils-advocate
A person of action, that knows exactly what can scratch her itch. I like you.
That you approvingly cite something by Niall Ferguson -- especially in comparison with your Berlin panelists -- should have set off some alarm bells. There are ruptures in the world that have nothing to do with any capabilities of AI and the way you seemingly have bought entirely into the tech industry's AI (criti-)hype is in a word, embarrassing. I would recommend more digging deeper into the numbers (cf. Ed Zitron) and less musical analogies.
Adam, think you’ve been captured by an extraordinarily effective hype campaign
The top comment on this post is 100% AI-written shilling a substack.
https://www.pangram.com/history/b4cfab16-93c3-4bd4-bf7b-0580e4bb2e8f
Which may be why it reads more like somewhat over worked and yet strangely vague literary criticism. Of course, that's true for a great deal of what is to be found plastered on Substack. But, now that I think of it, the people who earn a living producing the content found on Substack as well as in media in general, are really just doing what AI does: mining, processing and restating online content. I quess it makes sense for them to be worried that AI is going to replace them. As for the rest of us who work in those parts of the economy based on producing material goods, well there really isn't much to worry about.
Aaron posted that comment twice in the thread and like you, has nothing to say about the substance of the posting, but cringe at the idea of AI assisted writing and literary style. As I mentioned prior, the entire structure and arguments were mine and the tool followed my instructions. Plus, it is something that I keep open so it gets slowly trained with my particular inputs. It can be a good assistant. I don't think it gives the uncanny valley vibe in its production. Too polished, maybe, but then, if you read Adam's essays, you want to respond in kind, don't you, and maybe he'll notice and next time he might be a bit braver...?!
“Food for thought.” The expression now sounds archaic since I can have all the thinking done for me.
Rupture is a word that weighs more now. The ties of history perhaps need to be cut, or not, since the horse analogy is apt.
Unsettling post, and drawn in by your layered temporality and timbre distinctions. It calls to mind the musicologist Eszter in Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance, whose monologue on tuning is really a way of asking whether the apparent order of the world rests on compromises we no longer notice. Your sense that the ‘tone color’ of our moment has shifted while our political vocabulary still assumes an older key signature is compelling.
I think your Mann passage similarly analogizes, but one lesson from his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is that recognizing a rupture and correctly interpreting it are not the same thing. Mann also sensed the historical break at the time, but later readers were not always persuaded by the meaning he assigned to it. You pose a difficult question with ‘What times are these?’ Is it fair to add: how do we distinguish historical discontinuity from the experience of our world becoming unrecognizable to us?
Maybe this time, the obscenely wealthy aren’t destroying an empire but the world.
Maybe this time it’s civilizational collapse, like what imperialists did to their colonies.
Maybe our leaders are magnitudes more insane than I think they are. There is nothing they won’t do to feed their greed.
And to be clear, I absolutely am not joking.
They’ve shown no limits.
I share your incredulity at the lack of urgency, especially but not only in Germany.
What's striking is that the groups most in denial are those who could have part of the answer, if they were only able to make the bridge from their own traditions of thought.
The embodied work of the German Mittelstand is one of the forms of intellectual labor likely to survive longest in the face of AI. Years after the white-collar work of the anglosphere has been eaten by Claude and Codex, there will still be a role for the hands-on engineer able to construct a custom piece of industrial machinery. Probably the robots will get there too in the end, but there's a good decade more runway than for the programmers and the lawyers.
And the progressives of all stripes -- we're facing a boom in (digital) production and a crisis of distribution. Redistributive ideas which were abandoned for their perverse incentives on the highly productive suddenly fit with the current moment, but we're hearing them more from tech-bros than from old-school socialists.
I suspect part of this is cautiousness inflicted by being on the losing side of economic debates for thirty years. When you've spent so long fighting a rearguard action to defend your position, it's hard to recognize when you might genuinely have something to say about the future.
The timbre image deserves to be pushed one step further. A note's timbre is set by which overtones the instrument's structure lets resonate — change the structure and the same fundamental is a different sound. That may be why precedent feels almost camp right now: invoking it assumes the resonating body underneath — the institutional structure the old tunes were scored for — is still the same instrument. The Mann preface makes the same point in reverse: the chasm makes the immediate past legendary not because time passed, but because the structure broke. So "what times are these?" can be cashed out empirically: which of the slow structures — settlement systems, alliance architectures, energy regimes — still stand as scored? Where they persist, precedent binds. Where they have quietly been swapped, history is costume. Thank you for this one — the dysphoria reads as the sound of someone hearing the instrument change beneath the music.
More banal — but curious how you develop your summer reading plan.
Not humans as horses, but humans on an unfortunate side of the superstructure suddenly and rudely awakened to their status as "less rigorous" workers. Horses and horsepower were handling among the most rigorous work, which is (among the reasons) why steam power and ice had to develop for quite a while and replaced them over time. AI is sniping, relatively speaking, some or most of the less rigorous work (the economics suffer on the most rigorous tasks, and those still require human touch). The knock-on effects are similar or perhaps worse, but the analysis around it is different.
For example, the creation of such a large bubble of less rigorous work is politically tinged and supported by excesses or surpluses in production brought by capitalism, and while in some long-term ways it is useful and important, in the short to even medium term (nationally speaking, so years to decades), the entire thing can rot to the core before negative outcomes feedback into the rest of the system. In many ways the entire thing *has* rotten to the core, which is why AI is sliding so smoothly into the gap. Rot replacing rot has much lower requirements than replacing a specific tuned blend with a completely new one.
I sympathize with the disorientation you are simultaneously feeling and trying to describe, Adam — indeed, “the time is out of joint.”
But beware the AI grifters — it’s not what they would have you believe.
Rupture. It is the word of the times, thanks to Mark Carney. I have been thinking about rupture since attending the Hay Festival Cartagena and listening to a panel that included Leah Ypi, who framed the discussion of rupture around those in her fantastic book "Free." It made me realize that thinking about one's own life is a good way of thinking about rupture. So in Chartbook 451, at the end, when you write "We may not have experienced a Great War, but is there not a similar sense of rupture separating us from the the 20th century and its precedents, its models and its inspirations?", I wonder whether we should not identify this rupture in relation to not that of the 20th century, but those of the 20th century through which "all that is solid melts into air." I was born in 1958, just 13 years after the end of World War II. While I was still a youth I experienced two ruptures, one personal and one global: emigration from the UK and the collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus in which I was raised. The next rupture, for me, was the collapse of the centrally planned economies alongside the Balkan Wars. The world order had profoundly changed, but this was not a change of tone -- this was an epistemological transformation, just as the end of the post-war consensus had been. In terms of technology, which is what Chartbook 451 is about, to me the real rupture was the introduction of the iPhone because it transformed the use of information technology in everyday life. It was the foundation upon which social media addictions are built. It was the end of innocence for children born around 2000, who have been subjected to its full fury. The rise of AI may change the economy, but unknown to us at the time the introduction of the iPhone was an epistemological transformation. Finally, we have what I consider to be the most recent epistemological transformation: the normalization of barbarism seen in the genocide in Palestine. Srebrenica had the capacity to shock the world and cause governments to collapse (in the Netherlands). No more. We can watch 70,000+ being killed and then switch the channel while they continue to be killed. So, to me, rupture takes place when the way people see and understand the world shifts; when Gramsci's "integral state" of “political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony armoured by coercion” (Gramsci 1971, 263) is disrupted and civil society, where hegemony is organized, must be reconstituted by "organic intellectuals." That is what I mean by epistemological transformation. Finally, it seems to me that what does differentiate the ruptures of the 21st and 20th centuries is what David Harvey referred to as "time-space compression"; ruptures occur more rapidly and impact more widely now.
Moving summary. I do love Leah Ypi, she is a wonderful person and an exceptional academic.
What is unmooring for me is the unspeakable hypocrisy that the western civilization seems capable of. George Orwell and his double speak is a kindergarten play compared to the heights the west has reached, in toto. While you see some examples in the past of a frenzied behaviour, i.e. the inquisition, the which hunts in the central Europe, the 30 years war, the Salem witch hunt, the nazification of Germany, the McCartney commie hunt, the levels of defense of the barbarity in Palestine coupled with the amping of Russophobia across the board, it is something that I do not find a parallel in history.
It is this madness that scares me the most, this acceptance and perpetuation in the public discourse by the MSM and the political class that I find the most problematic. The question becomes, what is the limit? I can see a speck of the limit: the months long siege of the city of Antioch in 1098 ended up in acts of cannibalism from the side of the crussaders when the finally conquered the city.
Personal comment, for which I hope I will be forgiven, but I feel a kind of psychic relief reading this. A quote from my most recent journal entry, about feeling disconnected from even close friends at the moment, though “I realize not everyone is as fascinated by the parallels between the world of 1914 and the world of today.” And just last week I remarked on that same passage as I began the audiobook of “The Magic Mountain”. Have recently been reading the work of Peter Turchin on Structural Demographic theory. I wonder if you have encountered it and, if so, curious if you have any thoughts? Thank you for your work.
The Tonality of Thought by Byung-Chul Han may be relevant here.