by
Adrian Daub
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A myopic perspective on the world has long characterized the tech industry, but success has amplified it. Age and wealth often inhibit contact with people whose lives and careers have unfolded in fundamentally different ways. When great fortune befalls an individual, they might ask themselves some lonely nights: "Do I really deserve all this?" But when a group collectively rushes from success to success, when truly extraordinary success has become the norm by the age of twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five, and you are forced to then age alongside one another for decades, each constantly aware that your peak lies ever further in the past, then it helps when fellow travelers constantly reassure you that you are still relevant, that the gnawing feeling of irrelevance is, in truth, the fault of others. A concept like "vibes" allows them to understand their aging process, and the alienation that inevitably accompanies it, as identical to the course of the world.
This doesn't mean it's wrong to warn people about Palantir. But our warning shouldn't focus on what the company's tech can do. Our warning should co-cern the fact that that tech is deployed at all. It simply doesn't matter whether Palantir's newtangled systems are more scarily omniscient than the old ones.
If the people to whom this technology is applied include undocumented immigrants in the US or Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, then it is almost immaterial whether the algorithm picks out the "right" people. Those in power have already decided that there are essentially no "wrong" targets in these groups. Palantir is necropolitics, pure and simple. The data sets are merely window dressing. It's not the fact that the data miner might miscategorize someone that makes an individual a victim of Palantir, but rather the fact that Palantir is categorizing them at all.
Certainly, this ready identification with villains, often totalitarian villains, is already plenty creepy by itself-and also explains the large personal and ideological overlap with an administration dominated by online Nazis, who often like to draw inspiration from cinematic heavies. But there is also a fundamental poverty at the heart of an ideology that gets excited about fictional dystopias, villains, and totalitarianism. Not because those are evil, but because they're usually so thinly drawn. The fact that we always see these cinematic villains dominating, but rarely governing, likely strengthens their suitability as a source of inspiration rather than weaken it. We are fairly well informed about Galactic Empire's supply of fully operational battle stations in Star Wars. We know less about how the Empire handles wage negotiations or pensions.
But identification with dystopia is only one aspect of this now well-established language game among tech companies. The other is disidentification with power. One is a witness to one's own power rather than wielding it. One experiences power as an aesthetic effect in two senses—it doesn't feel entirely real, even when it is deadly real to those upon whom it is exercised. And it is, like sensation in Kant's transcendental aesthetic, something that is given rather than made in its precise parameters. Power is something that happens to the powerful.
Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts tounded a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, from which over time several other microchip companies spun off. Among the "Fairchildren" were Intel and AMD, but so were venture companies like Kleiner Perkins. Like the "PayPal Mafia" of the late 1990s, the "traitorous eight" were fairly homogeneous in their backgrounds, their age profiles, and their management styles. And they were the grandfathers of today's Silicon Valley. The VCs who funded their endeavors were very similar people: investor and inventor spoke the same language, specifically because they shared the same generational experience.
When compared to the "traitorous eight" or even the PayPal Mafia, the generation of founders and their backers that have dominated headlines and the contemporary image of Silicon Valley appears a bit more diffuse. Still, the age cohort remains a clearly identifiable phenomenon in the Valley, in particular since so many cofounders met in college. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the same age; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who met at Stanford, were both born in 1973. Mark Zuckerberg and the entire original inner circle of Facebook were the same age, which is the same age as Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It's not really true, as is sometimes said, that through tech our world is dominated by solitary geniuses. It is dominated by cliques of people who are more or less the same age.
makes me think of that quote about generations, napoleon, etc
The botanist, eugenicist, and peace activist David Starr Jordan wrote in 1903 that the Civil War had delivered "the best" of the "race" unto death; those Americans who took their place and sired the youth of his own day, he thought genetically inferior. The wrong kinds of Americans predominated in 1903, because the right kinds of Americans had been needlessly sacrificed between 1861 and 1865. When he wrote his pamphlet, Jordan was president of Stanford, the university's first. In 1965 a Stanford professor gave a long interview to U.S. News & World Report with a similar thesis. In the United States, he claimed, the "abundant welfare state" all but insured that unfit and less intelligent people "will be multiplying at an enormously faster rate than more intelligent people do."' That professor was none other than William Shockley, who had begun teaching at the university after his company failed. And who had turned his yen for hierarchies into speculations about race, the welfare state, and intelligence.
This argument attained its modern form in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. The two made the same argument as Shockley before them-that the welfare state subsidized "births among poor women ... who are disproportionately at the lower end of the intelligence distribution" - but this time under the banner of "group 10."* According to Quinn Slobodian, this marked the comeback of the IQ concept among American conservatives. And even during times when Silicon Valley Presented itself as far more liberal than it does today, it could still be enthusiastic about IQ.
In that sense, Musk's enthusiasm for Al-generated images of himself is another triumph of the imaginary over the grim reality, which is this: Elon Musk is not a warrior of some galactic empire, not a Roman centurion, not a rapper or an astronaut. He is a middle-aged man with all the problems that come with being a middle-aged man, minus the ones having to do with money. His children don't like him, his subordinates don't like him, his time is running out, and his body can perform the tasks it once accomplished with ease only with the help of drugs. AI promises someone like him more endless role-playing. And, in his understanding, Al also renders meaningless the years or even decades of accumulated expertise that generally lend our biographies their characteristic rigidity and inflexibility.
In fact, if we try to encapsulate what Al promises, we could just say: immaturity. That may not sound particularly tempting, but loitering in immaturity also means emulating those in power. Our historical moment is characterized by the power of immaturity. Or rather: Our time is characterized by immaturity as a technique of power. As soon as a person (assuming they have the right skin color and gender) is old enough that their transgressions are no longer excused as "youthful indiscretions," they already shift into the paradigm where they are simply "part of a different generation" and therefore cannot be held responsible for their words and deeds. The power of our day is always immature. And so are the technologies that wield it.
If this promise sounds a lot like a curse, it's probably because it essentially turns the main threat AI poses into a positive. Because if the trends of recent years continue, Al will primarily have the effect of keeping people in a state of untrained, undetermined adolescence for longer. In Silicon Valley, the jobs falling victim to Al are those entry-level coder jobs that previously represented the first rungs of the career ladder. Whether this is due to the true potential of the technology or instead due to the self-deception of the bosses, Al is destroying that phase of life in which one gains professional experience, contributes, and makes mistakes. In which, as Hegel would say, one "determines" oneself, opens some doors, and closes others.
What happens at that moment is the following: The remote operator in the data center doesn't take over the steering wheel, as passengers sometimes assume, but rather plots a new course for the car on the city map. I don't know why the company opted for this form of human intervention. The important thing is that it opted. Behind the AI of a self-driving car, therefore, lies not only human intercession but something far more significant: a fundamental framing decision about when and how humans intervene in the system. The passenger is completely unaware of this. They drift along, whether they like it or not, in their black box.
The point, therefore, is not whether Al will eventually become more sophisticated or not. Whether Al will be able to do what its creators promise or threaten. The point is that talk of maturity deprives the public of a whole range of decisions and choices, by pretending instead that there are no decisions and choices to be made. When in fact, the maturing technology will involve more and more of these decision points. When the Irish capital, Dublin, decided to build a new subway, Dermot Desmond, the ninth richest person in Ireland, proclaimed that the government should cancel the project. After all, "Al" would make the project "obsolete" anyway. He was referring to cars from manufacturers like Waymo.
In such a statement, "AI" is used as though it were a familiar and agreed-upon concept that—once it's fully developed—will have a clear and unambiguous effect, as it happens precisely the effect the speaker's argument requires. It will negate or render obsolete whatever decisions he dislikes. It will make inevitable the outcome he desires. Dermot Desmond doesn't address how this is supposed to happen, how exactly "Al" is supposed to implement autonomous driving and make public transport obsolete. More importantly, the Irish billionaire didn't seem to grasp what's obvious to anyone whose Waymo car has to be controlled by a data center: that even when the technology is far more advanced than it is now, its deployment isn't a given, but will depend on political, legal, and business decisions - decisions made by programmers and product designers, CEOs, regulators, and politicians. Or perhaps Dermot Desmond does know this; perhaps he's hoping that Irish newspaper readers will forget the fact as quickly as possible.
There are plenty of people like Alice in San Francisco. People who were fed up with tech, or who found that tech no longer wanted them. Who had become wealthy enough to find something new, or who simply wanted more out of life. What Alice discovered that evening (and on many evenings since) is that many in the tech industry have an intuitive, yet all the more keen, sense of the boundaries of their sociotope. A young woman like Alice, impressively tattooed and nonwhite, especially a young woman who served them Cuervo shots and mixed good drinks, isn't part of it to them. And the suspicion that she might speak their language, know their world, comes as a shock, almost a betrayal. In other words: These people understand their own industry as both dominant and esoteric; everyone must be in its thrall, but not everyone can be allowed to be part of it.
heh
[...] One reason why we simply ignore the failures of the Boring Company, like those of the Metaverse or self-driving Teslas, and then eventually collectively forget them, is because we generally tend to talk and complain about government projects in this way. Think what you will about the California High Speed Rail, but the new system will definitely be more useful once built than the Las Vegas Loop. Even when Silicon Valley's efforts become monuments to hubris, failure, and incompetence, they are indicators of power.
Because, as is almost always the case when Silicon Valley talks about itself these days, they are based on the unspoken distinction of who is allowed what. In a September 2025 interview, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta's investments in Al might not pay off. "If we end up having wasted a few hundred billion dollars, that would, of course, be very unfortunate," Zuckerberg said!" But it was important to be involved. He considered AI "the most important technology enabling the most new products, innovations, and value creation in history." A potential $600 billion of wasted investment, he argued, was the lesser of two evils. This was six months before the company quietly sunsetted the metaverse, another 8o billion dollar investment that failed to pay off.
Skepticism toward government power can be a very good thing. But those who criticize the capacity of government have simply redirected their childlike belief in the creative potential of the central state toward private industry. They now naively believe that the future is identical with whatever the Silicon Valley tinkerers will present at the next developers' conference. More importantly, they believe that the founders' mistakes, ruins, and failures are merely minor hitches along the path to a future dominated by them. Everything the state touches gives them cause for skepticism, a sign that the nation-state and its specific form of sovereignty are on the wane. Nothing-no Vegas Loop, no metaverse, no AI nonsense clogging every communication channel—can shake their belief that the tech giant and its specific form of sovereignty represent the future