Do we actually make things?
We are not ready to play with fire.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
In 2018 or 2019, I don’t remember exactly when, the writer Manu Saadia posted a (long-since-deleted) tweet thread, the gist of which was: humanity has never actually generated energy, at least at scale. We’ve only ever unleashed it.
I’m not sure if it was an original observation, or if he was riffing off of someone else, but the comment has stayed with me to this day, when a podcast I was listening to on the way to work made a similar point about humanity’s millennia-long relationship with fire. We’ve tamed fire. We’ve organized our entire society around it. But we are not its creators. We burn shit, turn the heat into motion, the motion into money, and then we pay to burn more shit and start the cycle again.
That process works just fine, as far as it goes. But problems tend to arise when we trick ourselves into believing there’s more to it than thermodynamics.
OpenAI just hired its first CMO to help the company develop an ad-based business model, because getting people to pay for its products directly, at a scale that justifies the massive cost of training its models, doesn’t seem likely.
Training generative AI models literally burns enormous amounts of fuel, but now OpenAI’s business model will likely follow suit, at least metaphorically. Like every advertising-driven company before it, if it goes this route, OpenAI will spend massive amounts of money not to provide value to its end-users, but to offgass data it can harvest and sell to advertisers. In so doing, it will inevitably enshittify its products to squeeze out as much as it can before the likely trillion-plus-dollar bill for its excesses comes due.
That’s not to say generative AI isn’t a truly amazing innovation. Of course it is. But at what point does the tail start wagging the dog? If all the field’s leading company can manage to do in the end, after expending so much capital and energy, is produce a technology for retrieving information that’s both significantly less helpful and 10 times less efficient than boring graph-based search, and then sustains itself on the same old advertising business model, why should we reward that company with our attention and money? Are they really creating something of value, or are they just taking credit for burning fuel in novel ways?
I don’t mean to pick on OpenAI, or even tech. It’s just one example that’s in the news. You can pick almost any company that makes money from digital advertising, or makes money by aggressively using advertising networks, and find someone lighting money on fire and calling it innovation.
“Collapse of the global system, return of agrarian lifestyle, a feasible solution to climate change.” That’s what an extremely online sixteen year-old who self-identifies as a neo-fascist recently told artist and culture writer Joshua Citarella they most want to see change in the next forty years.
I, too, had weird ideas at 16. But I grew up just before the dawn of social media, when we still believed unfettered access to information would rid the world of all ignorance, bigotry, and oppression. If I was 16 today, and all I had ever known was a world where people could make themselves unfathomably rich by releasing a ton of greenhouse gas emissions to do math in specific ways so that knowledge workers can do the work of what is essentially playing video games more efficiently, I might also want to, well, burn it all down in favor of returning to an agrarian lifestyle where the most valuable work to be done is growing food.
I’m old enough now to know that burning it all down risks the fire consuming everything. What we can do, though, is at least acknowledge what Cory Doctorow, who also invented the lovely e-word I linked to above, calls, “the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us.”
We can acknowledge that much of what we call innovation has far more to do with value capture than value creation. We can acknowledge that the global understanding of economic value is way out of balance, particularly when climate externalities are factored in. And we can acknowledge that, until we learn how to truly make things, we are not ready to play with fire.