#digital-elites — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #digital-elites, aggregated by home.social.
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Taking the AGI pill
I thought this was telling from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. On loc 194 she describes how Altman narrates the ‘process’ which he claims most of the OpenAI staff have been through, which he believes most of the human population will go through over the coming years:
“It wasn’t that long ago that almost no one believed in AGI,” he said. “And still, maybe most people don’t. But I think more people are willing to entertain it now. And I think a lot of the world is going through a process that most of the people here have gone through in previous years, which is, like, really grappling with this. And it is hard. It is exciting. It is terrifying. It’s a lot. And so I expect that process to unfold in the world over the next few years, and we’ll try to be a voice of some guidance along the way.”
I think we urgently need a sociology of this process which engages with it as an empirical phenomenon, rather than a front in the culture politics of technology. I’ve found a lot of journalistic coverage (of variable quality) but I need to search to see if there’s qualitative social science which I’ve yet to stumble across.
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The ‘vibes shift’ as a preemptive declaration of hegemony
This from the consistently excellent John Ganz (highly recommend his book) captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate since Trump’s victory. Why has there been such a rush to frame this in hegemonic terms when there was a 1.5% difference in vote share between the two candidates? There’s clearly an elite recomposition underway, with tech capital taking the leadership role for the first time, which is starting to produce substantive outgrowths. Watching JD Vance’s speech I immediately found myself thinking about how Bush era leaders would have talked about issues relating to the oil industry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64E9O1Gv99o
The richest people in the world with unprecedented control over the media and communications realign politically and then—coincidentally—there is a “big cultural shift.” Why? “Can’t say for sure, but probably has something to do with how annoying liberals are.” Come the fuck on. They are already putting pressure on the media to soften coverage. It’s not that things are just happening, they are doing things. And the media is already bending or being taken over by regime-friendly oligarchs. It’s not a mystery what’s going on—we can still read about it in the newspaper—so let’s not mystify ourselves.
One last thought. What this insistence on a new order—the vibes—remind me of a lot was the hysterical run-up to the war against Iraq. The sense was created of an unstoppable momentum and there was relentless, insidious sidelining and castigation of critics and dissent. Even if people did not think they were warmongering, they helped the regime’s cause by attacking those who objected as fuddy-duddies, hopelessly out-of-date, and unfashionable. Obviously, we were in a New Era™ after 9/11. Obviously, the administration had the winds of history at its back. It wasn’t conservatives and right-wingers who did a lot of this work, but liberals who rationalized and justified what was a series of absurd lies and ultimately a catastrophe. This is what I was trying to get at when we were moving into a Vichy era: a lot of people are just going to go along to get along. But not all.
#capitalism #digitalElites #hegemony #JDVance #JohnGanz #trump
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Digital elites and reactionary modernism
From Wikipedia:
Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf[1] in the 1980s to describe the mixture of “great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy” that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.[2] In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.
From John Ganz on this Peter Thiel op-ed:
When Thiel writes about a “war on the internet” and “the internet” that had “begun our liberation,” the natural assumption is to assume that he’s speaking figuratively, that this is a metonym or synecdoche meaning “people on the internet.” But let’s say he’s being literal: for Thiel, the internet is a subject, it is doing something and the machines, The Big Machine has agency—it is “agentic,” as the tech people like to say. This is the viewpoint of the “Dark Enlightenment” and “neo-reaction,” which forms part of Thiel’s intellectual milieu. The belief is that a technological singularity is coming and the elect must work to accelerate it. The state must organize itself like an enterprise for this work to be completed. Progress, which is hampered by democracy, must have an authoritarian state to continue unabated. This is, of course, reactionary modernism: a belief in technological advances without the sentimental baggage of the Enlightenment.
#accelerationism #digitalElites #modernism #modernity #peterThiel #technology #theInternet
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There will be 13 billionaires in the Trump administration
It is the wealthiest administration in American history 👇 does any past administration even come close to this?
President-elect Donald Trump has assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts.
They include a wrestling magnate, a private space pioneer, a New York real estate developer, the heir to a small appliance empire, and the wealthiest man on the planet — with several being donors and close personal friends of the incoming president.
In total, the combined net worth of the wealthiest members of his administration could surpass $460 billion, including Department of Government Efficiency co-head Elon Musk — whose net worth of more than $400 billion exceeds the GDP of mid-sized countries.
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From Parmy Olson’s Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World loc 643:
To handle his anxiety, Altman got into meditation, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed and concentrating on just his breath for up to an hour at a time. Over time, he later said, he developed an increasingly diminished sense of self. “One thing I realized through meditation is that there is no self that I can identify with in any way at all,” he told the Art of Accomplishment podcast. “I’ve heard that of a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about [powerful AI] get to that in a different way too.”
To be fair, I’ve read the transcript and he doesn’t describe himself as enlightened. But he does use what I believe are real meditation experiences to construct a public image of himself as spiritually refined: from the talk about “no self”, reports that “I feel incredibly joyful all of the time” through to how you “deeply feel” “nonduality” and distinguishing himself from the strung-out non-enlightened tech bros around him.
And yet this man with no self he can be find spends a lot of time and money preparing for doomsday. From loc 653 in the same book:
The idea of death seemed to terrify Altman. He was a self-described prepper and spent a great deal of time and money preparing for a catastrophic global event, like a synthetic virus being released into the world or being attacked by AI. “I try not to think about it too much,” he was quoted as telling a group of start-up founders in his New Yorker profile. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
The description of Altman’s relationship with Paul Graham reminded me of what I’ve read of how Macron cultivated the backing of elderly billionaires in France. The capacity to position yourself as a dutiful discipline to powerful men is a unique skill, even if Paul Graham is younger and less wealthy than Macron’s sponsors.
The reality is that, as Olson clearly conveys in an otherwise weirdly hagiographical book, Altman positioned himself at the centre of an innovation network, at exactly the right moment, with increasing returns as his social and financial capital grew. From loc 621:
His place at the top of YC meant he was better positioned than many other venture capitalists to win jackpots like that, getting an intimate view on hundreds of companies who’d already been carefully screened, and in the middle of one of the greatest bull market runs in history. Getting pitched by all those start-ups also helped him see into the future.
This is why his self-construction is so interesting to me. The obvious parallel is Musk who, as Dave Karpf once put it, possibly constitutes the most dramatic case of survivor bias in human history. If you dimly sense that your wealth and status accrue from the accumulating gains of being at the centre of the right network at the right term (relying in Musk’s case on government contracts and interventions to a degree unparalleled amongst the 21st century class of tech lords) then there’s a psychological and strategic need to construct an image for others (and yourself) as a visionary preoccupied with lofty purposes unlike the banal fixations of the others within your class.
#bigTech #billionaires #digitalElites #elonMusk #openAI #ParmyOlson #samAltman #Supremacy #techLords
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I’ve spent the week wondering this as I contemplate deleting my Twitter account. here are influential people across every sector who have significant online followings who are reluctant to leave but the logic of this is complex:
- In part this is the sunk cost fallacy: a declining user base and declining engagement rates mean the utility is continually diminishing. The perceived costs of setting up elsewhere, particularly given the likely absence of a single replacement platform, buttress an unwillingness to abandon the labour they have put in.
- However you still gain reputational currency from having a lot of followers. If I’m honest the main reason I didn’t delete my account last year was so I could add to my promotion application that I had around 10k followers. No idea if it helped but I’m sure it didn’t hurt, as part of a narrative of engagement and impact.
- Furthermore it remains for them “the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse”
- Finally I think a lot of these ‘power users’ are addicted to the platform, speaking as someone who I guess is basically a recovering Twitter addict. They think in tweets, they crave the dopamine hit of virality and they need an adequate substitute before they can kick the habit.
- There’s still a ‘wait and see’ mentality of people disengaging but being unwilling to actually delete the account.
These reasons create a coordination problem. As long as there are a critical mass of influential users within a given sector, the costs of leaving are non-trivial. But the further Twitter travels along the path of turning into Gab or Parler means the social capital embedded in accounts decreases in value. There will come a point where there’s a reputational hit involved in remaining on Twitter and, if the great unravelling of the network comes, it will rapidly accelerate. But it’s disturbing how far Musk can go without this unravelling taking place.
I’m less convinced than I was that the platform will fold financially, given that Musk does seem to be on track with subsuming it into the GenAI bubble. The real test will be if the bursting of the GenAI bubble goes hand-in-hand with a wider winter for the tech sector (let alone the global economy) in which case the impossible maths underpinning its commercialisation might finally kill it, particularly if the court cases prove onerous and consequentially timed. But there’s a realistic prospect that a hard core of ~200m daily active users remain, legitimated by a small digital elite of mega-influential accounts, fuelling the continued development of xAI on a platform which otherwise becomes a genuinely mainstream version of Gab or Parler.
In other words I think it will either (a) fold, (b) become something even more horrific than it as present, an affectivity engine through which the far-right fuels the GAI-infused stack or (c) gradually unravel into semi-relevance while being kept afloat through Musk’s vanity. If (a) or (c) then any gains from remaining are inevitably short-term and possibly illusory when considered in terms of opportunity costs regarding time/energy invested (b) there’s a moral responsibility to get away from the platform and stop fuelling the development of this complex.
So wtf haven’t I deleted my account yet!?
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/07/why-hasnt-twitter-x-died-yet/
#digitalElites #farRight #generativeAI #platforms #twitter #X