THE CONTEMPORARY READER IS UNHAPPY. What troubles him? It’s the critics: they are lying to him. He encounters them on the back cover of every new book, promising the world. “An exhilarating debut, poignant and thrilling” . . . “A much-anticipated return, necessary and trenchant” . . . “Dazzling sentences” . . . “An unforgettable voice” . . . “Words that will rend your garments and kiss you on the mouth, that’s how good they are!” The reader trusts the critics. He buys the book. But from page one it is trash: listless, forgettable, unnecessary. He is outraged! He thought false advertising was illegal.

“Like, I marry a wife, and they take her, and then give me back the legs of the wife,” Ali Ayyad joked, and we all laughed. “Did they offer you money for their use of the hotel?” I asked. Ayyad said, “You agree to rent to them, it’s like this: They say, we will give you a ring as payment. But in order to give it to you, we need to cut off your hand. Then, we will put your hand in a freezer for one hundred years. If you ask, where is my ring, they say: We are still preparing the ring.” We all laughed again. Ayyad’s entire family is in Abu Dis, but on the other side of the huge concrete separation barrier. It takes him one hour and $20 USD in taxi fare to visit his relatives, who, before the wall went up, were a one-minute walk down the road. Can you call to them? I asked. “Yes,” he said, “from the roof we can shout hello.”

“I want to live in peace,” Ayyad told me. “I want to take my family to Tiberius to swim in the sea, I want that kind of life, of happiness and pleasure. Instead, no one has pleasure. We are afraid and the Israelis are afraid. We are all the sons of Abraham. We have only one God. There is no paradise. This place is paradise, but we are wasting it. When you die, you can’t take anything with you, no dollars, no euros, no black whiskey, no red whiskey, nothing. You sleep alone. So what is the point. We all need peace. We want peace.”

GPT-3’s most consistent limitation is “world-modeling errors.” Because it has no sensory access to the world and no programmed understanding of spatial relationships or the laws of physics, it sometimes makes mistakes no human would, like failing to correctly guess that a toaster is heavier than a pencil, or asserting that a foot has “two eyes.” Critics seize on these errors as evidence that it lacks true understanding, that its latent connections are something like shadows to a complex three-dimensional world. The models are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, trying to approximate real-world concepts from the elusive shadow play of language.

But it’s precisely this shadow aspect (Jung’s term for the unconscious) that makes its creative output so beautifully surreal. The model exists in an ether of pure signifiers, unhampered by the logical inhibitions that lead to so much deadweight prose. In the dreamworld of its imagination, fires explode underwater, aspens turn silver, and moths are flame colored. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world, Science has no color; it has no motherland; It is citizens of the world; It has a passion for truth; it is without country and without home. To read GPT-3’s texts is to enter into a dreamworld where the semiotics of waking life are slightly askew and haunting precisely because they maintain some degree of reality. It writes Christmas carols in which Santa Claus and Parson Brown are riding together in a sleigh, defying the laws of time and space, or an article in which Joaquin Phoenix shows up to the Golden Globes in a paper bag (in real life, it was Shia LaBeouf, at the Berlin Film Festival, and the bag said “I’m not famous anymore”). Freud believed dreams were “of a composite character,” mixing different pieces of life, like a collage. Dreamwork required presenting the dream to the patient “cut up in pieces” and asking her to decode each symbol.

A lesser-known outcome of the study is that it was seized on by critics of psychoanalysis as evidence that most (human) therapists are similarly offering unthinking, mechanical responses that are mistaken for something meaningful — a complaint that lives on in the term psychobabble, coined to describe a set of repetitive verbal formalities and standardized observations that don’t require any actual thought. The charge is in many ways typical of the drift of technological criticism: any attempt to demonstrate the meaninglessness of machine intelligence inevitably ricochets into affirming the mechanical nature of human discourse and human thought.

A woman peered intently at her. This turned out to be Laci. To meet people in real life after meeting them on social media was always going to be slightly disappointing. Earl the Girl, a witty and fierce commenter online, was entirely ordinary in person. What did Sam expect? Sam hated her own shallowness, but she always wanted beauty on some level, or maybe a significance to the ugly, a deliberateness that indicated a sense of control. Laci’s hair was undyed (good), but a coarse gray and blond that just looked dull, weirdly matted and nesty. She was in variously pocketed knee-length khaki shorts, despite it being January. Her oversize T-shirt said Resist. Good god. The overall feel was sloppy and beige. Sam — lately kind of a slob herself — felt ashamed for being so harsh. She wanted to admire Laci’s person, wanted her look to match her wit. Maybe her frumpiness was a form of resistance, rebellion? Sam tried to see it that way. She knew that she shouldn’t always need to be seduced.

After a few years of this work, through her acquaintance with young staffers involved in the audit’s administration, the mother met her husband. She preferred not to go into detail about the husband. He was young and attractive and they fell in love, though the mother would admit now that she had been so young she could not perfectly distinguish one strong feeling from another, and they were probably each, in some part, mistaking their excitement about the lives they had begun with excitement for each other. It was also true, though, that most loves depend on such confusion, or perhaps even consist in it — of choosing to give someone else credit for what we have become.

What these movements represented was the supersession of the supposedly populist consciousness of the postwar era by a new consciousness of class struggle. Postwar leaders of the New Deal order had depicted economic growth as a positive-sum game: there was no need to fight over how the pie was divided so long as everyone’s slice was getting bigger. Squeezed by inflation and international competition, the radical labor movements of the 1960s asserted that the working class deserved a larger slice, whether the overall pie was growing or not. If corporations passed on the bill for wage hikes to middle-class consumers in the form of rising prices (arguably the most popular explanation at the time for the inflation of the 1970s), that might be regrettable, but it wasn’t the responsibility of workers like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement to deal with it. They had sacrificed enough.

The radical labor movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s ultimately failed because they proved unable to overcome the divergences in short-term interests that the postwar political economy had established among a working population divided by geography, race, and gender. Over the course of the 1970s, many blue-collar white workers in the deindustrializing and rural US chose to ally with small business owners and corporate plutocrats rather than to join with a cross-racial, working-class movement that seemed to threaten their short-term livelihoods. When the unionized truckers in the Teamsters collaborated with growers to bust the United Farm Workers union in 1970, or when 200 white UAW members broke up a largely Black wildcat strike at three Chrysler plants in 1973, or when the AFL-CIO organized one thousand union construction workers to attack an anti-war rally in the aftermath of Kent State, they were not simply troubled by their opponents’ cultural elitism, as Frank suggests. These groups perceived — correctly — that their already tenuous middle-class livelihoods depended on precisely those features of the New Deal–order economic edifice that the radicals were attacking: racist labor market stratification, wage increases carefully managed by union leaders to avoid provoking capital flight, and torrents of federal defense spending.

As Walmart expanded, the middle-class consumers of Sun Belt suburbia also came to benefit from its always low prices. For the cowboy capitalists, low prices were a hedge against government dependency. By supporting supply chain deregulation and resisting unionization and minimum-wage hikes, consumers could continue to enjoy the “American standard of living” without having to rely on government handouts or high wages attained through class struggle. Behind middle-class consumerism lay the producerism of the Populists’ favorite scripture verse: “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” Low prices were prices that the middle class could pay, ostensibly, with the sweat of their brow.

Walmart workers and shoppers were not loyal to Walmart “because of” Walmart’s cultural conservatism and “despite” its economic conservatism. Rather, Walmart formed a nexus where economic and cultural conservatism were inseparable and even indistinguishable. As with Amway and McDonald’s, Walmart’s strategy was masterminded by elite leaders capable of astonishing cynicism. But the cynicism of elite leaders does not entail, as Frank and other contemporary left-populists often imply, that the commitment of “ordinary working people” to institutions like Amway, McDonald’s, and Walmart — or the Republican Party — is shallower than it appears. Rather, conservative populism fed on the powerful compatibility between widely and firmly embraced cultural values and the economic interests of particular capitalists.

But the lesson of the past fifty years of grassroots American conservatism is that there’s more than one way to promise economic prosperity. What people take to be an attractive vision of economic well-being simply cannot be separated from ideology and cultural values — and those values can’t be taken for granted. Of course it’s true, as Frank writes, that ordinary people “want their mortgaged farm or their postindustrial town or their crumbling neighborhood to be made ‘great again.’” Clintonian “It’s the economy, stupid” neoliberalism never disagreed. The question is what counts as “great again.” The New Deal–style social democracy that Frank prefers is not the self-evident answer for many “ordinary people.” Citizens do not sprout from the American soil with an innate thirst for economic democracy and worker power; their economic aspirations are shaped by their experience of the making and unmaking of class. Even the traditions of generations past — such as populism — that have been deployed to radical ends in particular contexts can animate a conservative economic vision in periods of working-class decomposition. When institutions of class struggle are dissolving, as they have been over the past fifty-odd years, reaching out for the lost possibilities of the past comes more naturally than embracing the uncertainties of the future. This is the lesson we must draw from the emergence of the powerful working-class conservative movements Frank dismisses as “pseudo-populism.” Political nostalgia, an uncritical turn to an unusable past, is among the greatest dangers for the left today.