IOW, where vapourware was once just a method to stifle competitors and maintain the stock price, now it is a key part of the financial Ponzi scheme. When conglomerates were used to buy low PE stock earnings to create the illusion of growth to maintain a high PE, analysts eventually understood that game and acted accordingly. Now, large dollops of vaporware are used to create that exciting future, skip making any real business, and maintain the financial illusion. It is all smoke and mirrors. Do I detect a new version of the "South Sea" bubble?
I think Karph's point is that it doesn't matter whether it's vaporware or not, the hype and the comms are the financial product being invested in. After all, OpenAI has products that "work". Some people even pay for them. But that's not the business of OpenAI, they make money by describing a future they promise to invent. Like the market value of Tesla, it makes no sense but it "works" for now, and for now is what matters. For now.
All the science fiction writers I know -- and I know quite a few -- will tell you that SF, like futurism, is very much about the present. I think I read Future Shock back in the day, but among my cohort of commune-experimenting people, Toffler was definitely a joke.
And as always, I appreciate your professional analysis of the AI hype machine.
It was interesting seeing this and Mills Baker's post around the same time; they both express a similar skepticism that the announcement is, by itself, particularly newsworthy and look for a broader strategy: https://thedeadhorses.substack.com/p/humane-in-the-1-infinite-loop
I feel like we're in need of a neologism as a corollary to 'enshittification' to describe how more and more of the most-discussed, most-visible, most-capitalized sectors of the economy are transmuting into grifts. Transgriftation.
From the outside it all looks like a scam. Trick a bunch of affluent to rich gullible idiots with promises they'll be getting in on the ground floor of the next Amazon or Google or BitCoin and keep pumping the dream forcing your investors to either admit they made a mistake and pull out because they know what sunk cost fallacy is, or get them to double down and keep pouring money in while taking a nice skim off the top of every dollar invested.
Given some of the very bad people these VCs and tech bros are getting money from, I wonder how many of them will die under mysterious (or not so mysterious) circumstances when the bubble pops and billions of dollars of wealth belonging to violent dictators goes up in smoke.
Intentional or not, the video of the two protagonists was shot at Cafe Zoetrope. "Zoetrope" is an optical toy that produces the illusion of motion. How apt.
I entirely share your scepticism (to put it gently) around futurists. It's all hokum.
But the comms from Sili Valley aren't just to raise valuations and investment, recruit talent and persuade people they are really lucky to be working 18 hours a day. The subtle shift - from prediction to propaganda - is also designed to soften up legislators early so that any legal problems are massaged out of existence before anyone can think seriously about consequences. There's a weirdly creepy 2012 video of Jerry Brown signing such legislation to enable autonomous vehicles as Sergey Brin, sporting piratical Google Glasses, tries to explain that this great breakthrough will liberate the blind and free up parking spaces for parks and gardens. By the time the people who might be hurt understand what's going on, it's too late. Whenever anyone tells you they know the future, they're just trying to impose it on you.
Casey Newton - "Every time I think I see a man behind the curtain a bright flash goes off and makes it really hard to see for a minute."
Damn, that is daggers
IOW, where vapourware was once just a method to stifle competitors and maintain the stock price, now it is a key part of the financial Ponzi scheme. When conglomerates were used to buy low PE stock earnings to create the illusion of growth to maintain a high PE, analysts eventually understood that game and acted accordingly. Now, large dollops of vaporware are used to create that exciting future, skip making any real business, and maintain the financial illusion. It is all smoke and mirrors. Do I detect a new version of the "South Sea" bubble?
I think Karph's point is that it doesn't matter whether it's vaporware or not, the hype and the comms are the financial product being invested in. After all, OpenAI has products that "work". Some people even pay for them. But that's not the business of OpenAI, they make money by describing a future they promise to invent. Like the market value of Tesla, it makes no sense but it "works" for now, and for now is what matters. For now.
now = this quarter. That summer house mortgage isn't going to pay itself
All the science fiction writers I know -- and I know quite a few -- will tell you that SF, like futurism, is very much about the present. I think I read Future Shock back in the day, but among my cohort of commune-experimenting people, Toffler was definitely a joke.
And as always, I appreciate your professional analysis of the AI hype machine.
It was interesting seeing this and Mills Baker's post around the same time; they both express a similar skepticism that the announcement is, by itself, particularly newsworthy and look for a broader strategy: https://thedeadhorses.substack.com/p/humane-in-the-1-infinite-loop
I feel like we're in need of a neologism as a corollary to 'enshittification' to describe how more and more of the most-discussed, most-visible, most-capitalized sectors of the economy are transmuting into grifts. Transgriftation.
Ed Zitron has been using “the rot economy.”
Oooh, that's good!
Is Dave Karpf secretly Ed Zitron?
Dave is Ed with an editor.
Now it all makes sense.
From the outside it all looks like a scam. Trick a bunch of affluent to rich gullible idiots with promises they'll be getting in on the ground floor of the next Amazon or Google or BitCoin and keep pumping the dream forcing your investors to either admit they made a mistake and pull out because they know what sunk cost fallacy is, or get them to double down and keep pouring money in while taking a nice skim off the top of every dollar invested.
Given some of the very bad people these VCs and tech bros are getting money from, I wonder how many of them will die under mysterious (or not so mysterious) circumstances when the bubble pops and billions of dollars of wealth belonging to violent dictators goes up in smoke.
Intentional or not, the video of the two protagonists was shot at Cafe Zoetrope. "Zoetrope" is an optical toy that produces the illusion of motion. How apt.
when does PR become fraud?
I entirely share your scepticism (to put it gently) around futurists. It's all hokum.
But the comms from Sili Valley aren't just to raise valuations and investment, recruit talent and persuade people they are really lucky to be working 18 hours a day. The subtle shift - from prediction to propaganda - is also designed to soften up legislators early so that any legal problems are massaged out of existence before anyone can think seriously about consequences. There's a weirdly creepy 2012 video of Jerry Brown signing such legislation to enable autonomous vehicles as Sergey Brin, sporting piratical Google Glasses, tries to explain that this great breakthrough will liberate the blind and free up parking spaces for parks and gardens. By the time the people who might be hurt understand what's going on, it's too late. Whenever anyone tells you they know the future, they're just trying to impose it on you.