Life under Capitalism

AI is shit

Published on May 27, 2026Leave a comment

Patrick Galey says exactly what I think about ‘AI’:

We’ve reached a point where the belief in Gen AI’s inevitability must be treated as an article of faith, a pseudo-religious belief system founded upon impossible-to-prove claims made by highly unobjective people. This would be merely weird, were businesses and governments not putting all their eggs in this extremely dubious basket, and were investors not saddling enterprises with dangerously onerous debts just so they can get a vague, future-shaped piece of the pie.

There have been attempts to rationalise this obsession by outside observers, by either buying into the hype a little bit and assuming chasing its promises is rational behaviour therefore, or by assuming there are hidden reasons behind the mania. The most common reason given being the idea that AI can replace and deskill workers and therefore discipline an (IT) work force that had gotten a little bit of power over its employers. If anybody can program using an AI you don’t need expensive programmers anymore. (On that note, it’s no coincidence that a lot of AI cheerleaders tend to be in the more meta parts of IT: scrum masters, architects, tech gurus, people who don’t actually test or develop that much themselves…). All of this would make sense had we not just been through similar, if smaller manias the same people bought into: first crypto and then NFT. The blockchain was going to revolutionise business as well.

Patrick’s essay is mostly about the impossibility of the AI dream, but here he briefly touches upon something else that vexes me enormously about the AI hype:

I see the argument that the Gen AI fetish taking over the world is no more than the logical end point of the “pet rock” economy, a feature of late-stage capitalism where content is the opiate of the masses, content that doesn’t have to be original, or true, or even especially good, so long as it may be consumed.

I think he means it more in terms of CEOs chasing market fads rather than ordinary people looking for entertainment, but that view of content as an endless through of slop for us to eagerly lap up is something that was already omnipresent in the media and AI has only accelerated that process. From a producer’s point of view, that AI makes it so much easier to ‘create’ a book or a picture or a movie is great, but who wants to read something that wasn’t written, just generated?

There are more good movies and anime than I can watch in my lifetime, more books to be read than you can finish in a century, more music made every day that would take you decades to catch up to: you do not need the fire hose of generated content. The only way normal people consume AI content is if they’re cheated in doing so. Again, it’s in a producer’s interest to do so of course. Spotify doesn’t have to pay even its too low royalties on AI music it generates itself, but if people really wanted that, they could’ve generated it themselves. Why pay Spotify if the AI music you yourself generate promises to perfectly match your tastes?

The oncoming enshittification of Discogs

Published on October 7, 2023Leave a comment

Natalie Weiner writes about the fears that record catalog site Discogs is starting to enshittify itself.

Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.

If you’re serious about music, especially buying vinyl, Discogs is essential. It has the largest catalogue of actually existing records in the world, created over several decades by the users itself. It’s arguably the place to buy obscure records, often cheaper than on Ebay or Amazon. But with it starting to up its fees and other moves, it may be preparing for an IPO or being sold. Even if this does not happen, it’s already in the process of enshittifying its platform, making it worse for users and sellers both.

For me, I mainly use it to get information on music and albums and it’s always my first stop for that sort of information, so it’ll be vexing to see it gone.

Line goes up…

Published on February 5, 2022Leave a comment

If you wanted to know about NFTs, where they came from, what they’re being used for and especially why they are harmful but were afraid to ask, this is the video for you.

At almost two and a half hours it’s a long sit, but that’s because Dan Olson takes the time to set the context in which NFTs arouse. To understand NFTs you have to understand Bitcoin and all the other electronic currencies that were inspired by it, not to mention the dreaded blockchain and the whole spectre of ‘web3’ technology. As important, Olson understand that just knowing the technological context isn’t enough and therefore starts with the real driving force behind Bitcoin and NFTs: the 2008 recession.

Because in 2008 the world economy crashed and while it may superfically look like the world has recovered since, the truth is it wrecked the opportunities of an entire generation. The idea that if you get the right education, go on to get a good job you can have a good, stable career the way your parents could in the sixties had been undermined for decades of course, but the 2008 recession made it official. The ladder had been pulled up and the normal ways of bettering yourself are no longer available. Even people lucky enough to graduate and start a middle class career are finding life precarious; you may be temporarily affluent but are you secure the way your parents were secure in their careers? And it’s not just careers that are insecure: something as basic as owning your own house is increasingly out of reach of all but the most upper of middle class people. Be it London, new York or Amsterdam, it’s hard to find a house when investors routinely overbid you. The average housing price here in Amsterdam is now 10,000 euros/square metre, which means my own appartment of 48 square metres is worth half a million euros. It’s absurd.

All of which means is that life is as unstable as it has ever been since the 1930ties for the vast majority of people even in rich countries, the gap between the rich and the rest of us as great as it ever has been while ever attempt to level this gap has been smashed. We’ve seen how the establishment in the UK reacted when Jeremy Corbyn almost won the 2017 elections, which led to the Labour right smashing their own party while the entire press conspired to put Johnson in Number 10. When regular politics are no longer allowed and regular ways to have a stable career and life are equally smashed, that leads to people looking for alternatives. In politics, this lead to Trump and Brexit. Similarly, if people cannot get rich conventionally, they’ll seek out other ways of doing so. There’s a huge market of precarious, affluent middle class people ripe for exploitation.

Which brings me to Albania. A former ‘protectorate’ of fascist Italy, after liberation at the end of the Second World War it became a communist dictatorship ruled by Enver Hoxha. Hoxha was a Stalinist so orthodox that he broke with the Warsaw Pact for being too soft. Under his leadership Albania was so closed a country it made North Korea seem positively welcoming. The collapse of communism all over Eastern Europe also reached Albania and in the early nineties it became a normal democratic, capitalist state. Now if you know your recent European history, you know that all these countries that had lived under communism for almost half a century were incredibly vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and were plundered on an unprecedented scale by their own ex-communist elites and western advicers. Albania was worse than most and its economy became dominated by pyramid and ponzi schemes, with millions of people investing their savings in them. When it all collapsed in 1997 it led to civil war.

As Dan Olson argues here, all electronic currencies are pyramid schemes, people buying them to sell to a bigger fool and NFTs even more so. There’s a ready made market for them, of those precarious middle class, usually tech adjecent people who want to find a way to get rich or die trying. Which is worrying. It’s not just the godawful realities of bitcoin and NFTs, it’s that once it all burst, once all these people, already primed by Trump and Qanon, lose their shit, they’ll lose their shit and what will that mean for America?

Faces of Deathbook

Published on April 25, 20181 Comment

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant interviewed an ex-Facebook moderator about how the moderation process worked and it was shocking:

De haat, dat is wat hem meteen raakt. ‘Ik schrok daarvan.’ De intense haat, tegen asielzoekers, Marokkaanse Nederlanders, zwarte mensen. Erik: ‘En alles in Nederland is kanker. Kankerjongen, kankerneger, kankerhoer.’ In Vlaanderen krijgen de ‘makakken’ de schuld, in Nederland de ‘Marokkanen’. Elk gebied heeft zo zijn eigen ‘overlast’: gewelddadige foto’s en video’s van bendes in Latijns-Amerika, porno en geweld tegen vrouwen in het Midden-Oosten. De Portugese en Griekse moderatoren hebben het relatief rustig. Zij kunnen nog weleens Netflix aanzetten. Nederlanders niet: Nederland is het land van de haat, zegt Erik.

First, it turns out the Netherlands is about the most racist, hateful European country on Facebook, with the most complaints per day, lots of it racially motivated. Most of this occurs below the radar, but we saw the tip of the iceberg last year, when Dutch politician and media personality Sylvana Simons who had become the target of racial hatred on Facebook, reported this to the public prosecutor and examples of this hatred were given in the resulting lawsuits. To hear that this is indeed a common occurrence for Dutch people of colour on Facebook is disappointing, but not unsurprising. There is a huge amount of resentment hiding behind the white Dutch liberal pretence.

But second, there’s also the way Facebook treats its moderators, who turn out to have no support whatsoever except from a dodgy “feelgoodmanager”. Barely trained people working for little more than minimum wage are supposed to review material that goes beyond “just” racist comments, but includes snuff videos, child porn and other traumatic material even experts are supposed to only see in moderation, not eight hours a day, five days a week. No wonder so many moderators either quit or self medicate with alcohol or drugs.

But of course moderation is only a cost to Facebook and their real interest is to get as many people as possible posting and who cares what they’re posting. As long as ad revenue keeps coming, Facebook don’t give a fuck.

The financial realities of going viral

Published on November 28, 2017Leave a comment

One of Lucy Bellwood’s cartoons went viral a while ago, being shared by Boing Boing, Chris Hadfield, the Atlas Obscuria, George Takei and others. So what does this exposure mean in terms of cold, hard cash?

SO: To date, including the money I was paid to produce the artwork, I have made $1,761.50 from this image. Not bad! Notably: $814 of that came after Boing Boing decided to feature the art with a proper link pointing people to my shop. There are a bunch of factors to consider here.

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But I also think it’s important to share these numbers as a reminder that just because you’ve seen someone’s work shared on a popular platform (or by a popular person), doesn’t mean they’re automatically set for life. It does, however, mean they might be making a couple hundred bucks more than they usually do in a given month, and when you’re trying to make it as a freelancer that makes all the difference in the world.

I’ve shared one of her sailing cartoons before, on Metafilter, but I’m not sure I’d buy a print myself, if only because it’s usually such a hassle to get that sort of stuff shipped from the US. Bellwood’s essay is a good reminder of the financial realities of “going viral” and what that means for an artist or cartoonist and why proper attribution is so important. Something I’m not always practising myself, I’ve realised. Not often we get such a honest, open look into what large scale exposure means for an independent artist like Bellwood.