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This week’s question comes to us from Geoff McIntosh:

A lot of people on the Internet who I once respected seem to have full-blown AI brain worms. Am I going to get conned like them at some point? Have you ever been conned by something as pervasive as this?

Yes, no, and yes.

I’m not being indecisive. That’s the answer to your questions in order. Although the first one wasn’t really a question, I suppose. I’m just agreeing that a lot of people I once respected also have full-blown AI brain worms. I’m also glad we’re both using the past tense. Because these people are either truly AI-pilled, or in on the con. Neither of those deserve our respect, although the former might deserve our pity. Which honestly, I’d rather save up for the people whose lives have been impacted by the AI con. But the latter deserves our vengeance.

Over the last couple of years I’ve seen way too many people in the design field pledge their allegiance to AI, in one form or another. And a lot of those people refer to themselves as “design leaders,” which at the best of times is a cringe thing to refer to yourself as, but attempting to deliver design “wisdom” while your mouth is still attached to a tech oligarch’s asshole is both messy and difficult to understand, and I’d appreciate an Altoid or a mint before you did it.

Yes, I may have some feelings about the people who appointed themselves leaders in our profession feeding us into the woodchipper in order to achieve favored boy status with their VCs. To quote David Bowie: “to be insulted by these fascists is so degrading.” And yes, AI is a fascist’s tool. I don’t feel like we need to go over the case for that since Ed Zitron already exists.

(Fuck. I’m writing angry. Don’t write angry.)

I know I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again: When I was a kid comic books came with ads for Sea Monkeys. The ads were glorious (hand-drawn) illustrations of a good-looking Sea Monkey family hanging outside their Sea Monkey castle. While some dipshit kid, who I was supposed to identify with, looked down on the whole scene, which was happening in a fish bowl. The whole thing gave good vibes, and looked like an amazing shortcut to making friends, which my awkward insecure self desperately needed. And here was this ad telling me that for a buck I could get a fishbowl full of very sophisticated good-looking friends. So I filled out the form, asked my father for a dollar, and sent off for my sea monkeys.

Then I waited 6–8 weeks for my new friends to show up.

Readers, what showed up was a package of dead freeze-dried brine shrimp that settled right to the bottom of my newly acquired fishbowl. Even then, I checked that fishbowl multiple times a day to see if those brine shrimp had turned into new magical friends. Surely, there’s hope right around the corner. Maybe they needed more water. Maybe they needed more sun. Maybe they needed more compute. But they remained dead. I looked at the ad in the comic books again. It was full of promise. A promise not fulfilled by the fishbowl in front of my eyes. And yet, I wanted to believe the ad so badly. After a week of giving the fishbowl way too much of my attention, my resources, and my hope that a breakthrough was right around the corner, my mother emptied the fishbowl into the toilet, called me an idiot, and told me to go outside and make friends.

When you asked me about getting conned, that’s the story that came to mind. My stupid little self sitting in my room for 6–8 weeks glued to a promise, and a shortcut, that I was sure was going to solve a real problem. A shortcut that, in hindsight, was only ever going to end with a toilet flush and being told to go the fuck outside and interact with people.

This lesson cost me $1, a fishbowl, and 6–8 weeks of waiting time. Which… not bad. It was honestly a great lesson to learn at an early age, for a relatively low price. Some of our “design leaders” apparently never ordered the Sea Monkeys when they were kids, so they’re learning the lesson now. Except that instead of a $1, a fishbowl, and 6–8 weeks of waiting time, our design leaders need all the world’s water, all the world’s computational power, the exploitation of workers in the Global South, half the world’s land for data centers, and the disappearance of all the actual people who were doing the actual work. In return, they will deliver a machine that may or may not keep telling teenagers to kill themselves, and decide which girls’ schools to bomb.

(Fuck it. We’re writing angry.)

Turns out it’s good to get conned at an early age and learn some lessons on the cheap.

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with a friend. They’d been recently laid off and a bunch of us got together to cheer them up. They were laid off from a company where they’d been working for a while, and where they’d been told time and time again they’d been doing an exceptional job. (Companies do measure that shit.) They were laid off not because the quality of their work had dropped off, or because the company pivoted, or because the company itself was in decline. They got laid off because their company was replacing the majority of workers in their department with someone typing prompts into Claude. (And look, we can argue whether these jobs are being lost to AI, or whether these jobs are being lost to corporate greed, and I would say yes. Yes to both. But I’d also argue that someone losing their livelihood and access to health care is a more pressing issue than why they lost their job.)

There is a special level of hell for taking away a competent person’s confidence.

During dinner, my friend kept pointing out situations where maybe they could’ve done x instead of y and saved their job. And that to me is the heartbreaking part. Thinking there’s a damn thing that could’ve changed the outcome. But I get it. The idea that we made a mistake is what passes for having agency in disaster capitalism. The idea that had I cut the red wire instead of the green wire, I’d still be able to go to the doctor. The idea that somehow we fucked up gives us the cold consolation that we could’ve also not fucked up. That we had some sort of control over how this went.

It’s the hope that you had some manner of control that kills you.

This morning I talked to another friend who’s decided to take on extra projects at work, and has some strategy for making management very aware of all this extra effort. And I did not want to take this away from them, but this is what passes for hope in the “age of abundant intelligence.” The truth is that it will not matter. The cuts come when they come and they come regardless. Believing you can change that is the same as believing that everyone who’s been laid off didn’t do enough to save their jobs. And I know that’s not true.

For a con to work properly you need two types of participants. You need a confidence man (and yes, I’m keeping this gendered because it’s true, and because the biggest promise of AI is that it takes consent, which the sloplords see as a big drag, off the table) and you need a mark. You need someone to do the convincing, and someone to be convinced. The con man’s job is to extract value from the mark by making the mark believe that they’re offering something that solves a problem. (Sea monkeys will be your new friends.) But more importantly, for this to be remotely believable you need a system where real hope has been taken off the table. (It’s inevitable, don’t get left behind.) You need a system that both rewards the con and creates the situation that makes it necessary to believe the con. (I have to learn AI if I want to get another job in tech.)

And the system’s the thing, right? Because the truth about a con is that the confidence man is also a mark. He’s (again, gendered is correct here) out here trying to con you because he’s working a system that has him believing that he has more in common with the oligarch class than with you. And yes, we’re talking about design “leaders” again.

Disaster capitalism’s greatest trick was the invention of the management class, which is teeming with self-described “design leaders.” The promise of upward mobility is written into their brief. And they will always behave in a way that signals to oligarchs that they are on their side. They want to be the favorite boy because favorite boys get treats. But if you are truly “leading” there isn’t an asshole in front of you to lick. There’s no cornucopia of future funding within your lips’ reach.

The only way to win a con is to not play.

It is depressing that so many people I used to respect have fallen into this trap. And again, I would pity them, if I had the pity to spare. But the trail of blood in their wake requires all my reserves of pity. My unemployed friends require my empathy. And the non-metaphorical body count that their stupid slop tools are racking up requires all my rage, and more.

It also requires your rage.

In the middle of writing this a friend shared a post with me from an AI-pilled VC. He was going on about taking a walk with ChatGPT in his ear, having a conversation, talking, listening. The way you would “with someone who called you on the phone.” And I found that I did have a reserve of pity left. For someone who didn’t have a real human being to talk to. Someone who couldn’t call on a real friend. Someone who obviously had a need for human connection but lived in a world where it wasn’t available to him. It was short-lived though. Because what he really wants is a world where “human” connection bends to his will. A world where “human connection” isn’t messy, doesn’t have its own sets of needs, or desires, or dreams, but exists only to serve him. A world without consent.

This won’t work, of course. It will all come tumbling down, because it’s all sea monkeys with a bigger body count. It will hurt a lot of people in the process though. But eventually all those “design leaders” will come crawling back, needing an audience. Pretending this never happened. Pretending that they weren’t talking about an “era of abundant intelligence” while you and your entire department packed your belongings in a small cardboard box, wondering if you could make a doctor’s appointment before your insurance got cut off. Pretending that they weren’t talking about an “era of design efficiency” while you applied for ghost jobs that didn’t really exist.

The best news I can give you is that the tide is already turning. No one but the deeply flawed and insecure want this shit. You are not the only person who understands it’s a con. You have friends everywhere. Find them. Make yourselves known. Make yourselves a beacon for others.

And save your receipts.

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