January 18, 2025

Magical technological revolution

Thinking

Like a lot of people, I've been thinking a lot about generative AI and trying to articulate specifically where my resistance to it lies. This post is not about that (the answer, in brief: plagiarism, mostly, along with the sheer scale of resource-squandering that the fad has engendered and is at risk of entrenching).

Last fall I finished Brian Merchant's book about the Luddites, Blood in the Machine. This post is not about that, either, though I might write up a review at some point (in brief: it is worth your time to read though I wish it were a slightly different book).

I saw a thread on Bluesky a couple of weeks ago discussing the (lack of) parallels between resistance to genAI and resistance to the printing press. This post is sort of about that. Steffen Hope (@hopesteffen.bsky.social) wrote: "I believe that enthusiasts of generative AI desperately want to see themselves as neo-Gutenbergs because of how the printing press is seen as a dramatic epochal shift in the history of technology, & because they want to be seen as heroes. But the technologies in question are completely different." Hope's broader point was one about getting the history of the printing press correct: he argued that the printing press did not invent the book and that there was no widespread resistance among manuscript monks.

I think he's onto another point as well: today's loudest tech boosters, especially the wannabe-dictator-savior billionaires, want desperately to be important. They want desperately for their choices--to throw everything behind a specific technology, to move fast and break things, to squander mind-bogglingly huge sums of money--to be validated by society and by some vague sense of history.¹ Lots of people have argued that many of these guys (primarily Zuckerberg and Musk) also just desperately want to be seen as cool, which I also think is true. But the coolness is part and parcel of the need to be important.

The problem is, they have no way to ensure that they become important other than by spending huge sums of money, and even that is not a guarantee. Because it turns out that politics involves convincing people of things! It requires cooperating! It requires teamwork and persistence and making choices! And all of that seems hard and messy and unreliable. (Because it is.) So instead of doing politics, these wannabe prophets and their acolytes have spent decades dedicated to a worldview built on magical technological revolution. Then they simply need to bless the right technology, and poof! World saved, thanks to them and their money and big brains.

This isn't unique to generative AI. The overwhelming commitment to technological revolution--mediated by Great Men, of course, who are themselves merely conduits for the technology--has been a core part of the Silicon Valley technoutopian worldview for decades. It's so entrenched in our cultural understanding of the Internet, for example, that it can be hard to see until you read a whole book pointing out the assumptions baked into the common narrative. In my own research, this tendency is easy to spot; the cypherpunks in particular loved to use the language of technological revolution. Founding cypherpunk Tim May responded to early criticism about the group's extreme language, arguing "don't call it sedition, call it the natural trend of new technologies." He followed up with a list of technologies that "broke" political systems "in ways a political approach could never have done: the printing press, steam engines, incandescent light, and computers. This Greatest Hits list shows up again and again--just go back and watch the FTX and crypto.com Super Bowl ads from a few years ago.

In the case of generative AI, a generous reading is that some of the AI boosters, titans and regular people alike, are techno-utopians who genuinely believe genAI will make society better. But it seems like most of them refuse to make serious attempts to persuade their critics or to address the very many legitimate criticisms of their preferred technology; journalists and scholars often let them get away with it. Technological change has real effects on society, many of which are entirely unintended and sometimes unanticipated. But many unintended side effects are not only anticipated but shouted about! To ignore the warnings (and the evidence that you don't have a coherent business plan) is to stomp all over the agency of your fellows in favor of a fairytale magical revolution.

This is where the Luddites come back in: they weren't simple rampaging machine-smashers. They made many concerted attempts to raise legitimate concerns about new textile technology, its inferior products, and the "move fast and break things" (i.e., often illegal) way the tech was being introduced. But those entrepreneurs, like today's, weren't receptive to criticism, and they held on to their power.

But in both cases, technology doesn't change history. Along with institutions, economics, and other forms of culture, technology enables or hinders people to change history.

Reading

• I've put Ada Palmer's upcoming book Inventing the Renaissance on my reading list for this spring. To be clear, though, my reading list is gigantic and I'm scared to look at it.

• I found Kevin Baker's essay this week--on our dominant mode of technological verification and the accompanying collapse of our abilities to handle complexity and uncertainty--both insightful and (weirdly) a balm. Things don't need to be like this! We can do something different!

Doing

My word of the year this year is PERSISTENCE. My intention this year is to do more of the things I want to do and less of the things I don't want to do. Writing is at the top of the former list, of course.

I love hearing about other people's words or goals or even staunch opposition thereto; send me yours if you have one!