Tech Won't Save Us - The Year In Tech 2023 w/ Gita Jackson, Molly White, & Aaron Thorpe

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

2023 is over, so it’s time to go through everything! In a special year-end episode, we review the biggest stories of 2023, what we’re thinking of the AI hype, how science fiction makes us think about the future, the worst villains in the tech industry, and what we’re watching in 2024. Gita Jackson is a journalist and cofounder of Aftermath. Molly White is the creator of Web3 is Going Just Great. Aaron Thorpe is co-host of Everybody Loves Communism. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.  The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.  Also mentioned in this episode:If you become a Patreon supporter before the end of the year, you’ll be entered into a giveaway for five signed copies of Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way and Paris Marx’s Road to Nowhere. Sign up now!Gita recently launched Aftermath, and you can go subscribe!Molly is getting started on TikTok. Go follow her!Aaron posts a lot of cool science fiction art over on Twitter. Give him a follow!You can see the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos photos we discuss in the Worst Person in Tech segment on Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.Paris was mistaken: Enya sang “May It Be” for Fellowship of the Ring, not “Gollum’s Song” for the Two Towers. That was Emilíana Torrini. But Paris listened to both of them too much.Support the show

I think a lot about the point of creativity, right? What is the point of creativity? It's synthesizing something new out of lived human experiences and the other art that you've seen. That is the one for the Year, but also episode 200 of the podcast. I did not plan that. It was a total surprise to me when I looked at the episode number and saw that actually the last episode of the year was also going to be like a

pretty notable milestone. So that's fantastic. Thanks so much for all of your support this year, for listening to the show, for sharing it with your friends. The show would be nothing without the support of listeners like you. And of course, without the support of our supporters over on patreon.com. And you know, if you didn't hear it last week, you still have time to get in on our end of year giveaway, where we have five signed copies of Joanne McNeil's book Wrong Way. You might remember our interview with her from just a few weeks ago, and five signed copies of my book Road to Nowhere. So if you become a Patreon supporter before the end of the year, you will be entered into a draw for one of those books. You know, you get a chance to get one of those signed books. You know, you get a chance at a little prize,

and you get to support the work that goes into making the show as well. So if you haven't signed up yet, consider going over to patreon.com slash tech won't save us in order to do it. If you are an existing supporter, of course, just go check Patreon and there will be instructions there for how you can get in on the giveaway as well. So with all that said, I hope that you are enjoying the holidays and are looking forward to, you know, a good new year celebration as we head into 2024 to end off the year like we did last year. I wanted to, you know, do something a little bit different instead of just having a conversation with a guest as we usually do, which is, you know, fantastic, which is great. You all love that. I wanted to, you know, have a few people on to discuss the year in tech to

discuss, you know, some of the people we liked and didn't particularly like in the industry. And to talk about, you know, what we are looking ahead to in 2024. So this is a recording of a live stream that we did back on December 17th for Patreon supporters. But you know, I wanted to make sure that you could all hear it because our guests had some fantastic insights. And of course, those guests are Gita Jackson, a journalist and co-founder of Aftermath, which is a new video game journalism website. Molly White, who you all know as the creator of Web3 is going just great and who is getting started on TikTok. So you should all go follow her. And Aaron Thorpe, who might be new to

you, but he is the co-host of Everybody Loves Communism, a podcast. And his Twitter account, Afrocosmist, is just fantastic because he posts a bunch of cool science fiction illustrations and graphics and things like that. So I highly recommend checking it out. Obviously, this episode is quite a bit longer than the usual Tech Won't Save Us episode because we went on and we talked for a little while. So I don't see the need to introduce it much more other than to note that when we do get into talking about the worst person in tech, this bracket that we run every year over on our various social media accounts. The results are obviously not coming in live at the time that you hear this, and so you might already know the winner. But we still have a good discussion about the people who were involved and our two finalists. I will also put a link in the show notes to where you can see some of the images that we discuss in that part of the episode, because I don't know, they're pretty funny images of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in some cases. You might enjoy them. So if you can give us a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice,

and make sure to share the show with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it, that would be most appreciated. But the most important thing, if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week and get in on our giveaway for five copies of Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way and five copies of my book, Road to Nowhere, is to go over to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and support the work that goes into making the show every single week. So thanks so much. Enjoy the new year and we'll see you on the other side of it in 2024. Now enjoy our wrap up of the past year in tech. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our year end live stream. Hopefully you can hear me. I have a Now enjoy our wrap-up of the past year in the tech industry, 2023. As you all know, I don't need to tell you that. You've been following along on the show and hearing all the crazy things. I'm sure you've been reading it as well. And we have three fantastic guests today on the live stream to go through all of that with us.

Someone's already caught my holiday sweater. Yeah, I'll introduce our pal on my sweater in just a minute. But before we get into it, obviously, this is a live stream for the patrons. It will go out to everyone else later this month as the audio form. Big thank you to your support for the show. Of course, without your support, it wouldn't be possible to do all of this stuff, to have this live stream, to do the show every week, to do the premium episodes we've been doing, the Elon Musk series, all the fun things. And I'm sure there'll be so much more in the new year. So the plan is I'm going to bring in our guests in just a second. We're going to talk about the

year in tech. We're going to talk about some bigger topics that we want to dive into. And then around 5.30 Eastern time, in about an hour and a half, we'll be talking about the worst person in tech, this contest that we've been running over on the social medias and controversially on Google Forms because it's free and didn't cost a lot of money for me to use in order to do a bracket that way. But yeah, so that's going to close it around

in about an hour and a half. And then we'll talk about who's the winner. You'll hear it first before anybody else. And then of course, I'll post it on social media once the live stream. And of course, stay tuned to the end because once we kind of make that announcement, there's also something a little fun for all of you guys that you might be happy to hear about as we start to close off the year. So a little foreshadow, a little tease there. So make sure to stick around. So with that, I think we're going to start by bringing in some guests. And we're going to start with our returning guest, Gita Jackson. Welcome back to the

show. You're a journalist, co-founder of Aftermath, this fantastic new games journalism website. I hope I'm talking about that properly. You know, whose work is so good, it's always getting plagiarized out there. How are you doing? Well, I'm doing fantastically. I really am. I was watching The New Girl with my husband and now I'm joining you on a wonderful live stream. It's a great television show, actually. I was a real hater about it.

But yes, as you mentioned, I've ended my year with a plagiarism scandal, which I was not expecting to have happen to me. But I made it out the other side. That person's obliterated their social media presence. So who's to say who won? You're the winner on that one. You might have had a little piece plagiarized here and there,

but listen, you destroyed somebody. So, you know, we'd love to hear that. If you want to support a website where people never plagiarize anything, you should go to AcroMath.site slash products where you can subscribe and help us support ourselves in a 100% reader supported website. It's a lovely thing to have done. I can't believe how many people are so excited for it. And I'm so happy that I own my own business with my friends. I love it.

I'm excited for it. And I've been reading since it came out. Very excited. happy that I'm own my own business with my friends. I love it. I'm excited for it. You know, and I've been reading since it came out. Very excited. I don't know if I hit the subscribe button. If I didn't, I'm going to change that once we get off this live stream and you should all follow me over there to do it, of course. And I feel like this is part of, how would you say, like a wider shift? You know, obviously it's been a terrible year in media, but we've seen a number of people like you kind of going off and starting their own thing. 404 Media, the folks over at Remath, you know, this is pretty exciting. Yeah, no, it's fascinating to see. Like, I feel less like we're making an extremely risky move and more like I'm joining a wave

of the shifting of how journalism is produced. You know, all of us have stories. I know all the guys at all those websites. We all have a story about trying to report something and being unable to because of the business model, right? Because we are running, working at an ad supported business where we have to, or someone else has to please the advertisers and we're not supposed to be so adversarial. But it's incredible when you start writing and you realize that's not a problem anymore, just how much more creative and how much more interesting your stories get. So I think everybody at 404 is doing amazing work. Everyone at Remap is doing incredible work. Everyone at Defector is obviously our biggest

inspiration and they made like three million dollars which is wild i think i think you should aspire for that you know we need to make that happen for you thank you very much i would love that and i would just say we already got some people in the chat here nicholas miller just subscribed to aftermath thank you nicholas like from the new girl yeah right yeah awesome all right gita do you have a holiday sweater for us i mean this is about Like from the new girl. Yeah, right? Yeah. Awesome. All right. Gita, do you have a holiday sweater for us? I mean, this is about as holiday as I get, right?

You know, it's a matching sweatsuit outfit that I actually have. And I like to think this is, you know, this is what Shinji would be wearing around the holidays. This is a matching Evangelion sweatsuit in the unit 01 colors. So I love it. Very cozy, which is what we all want this time. Exactly. All right. Next guest, you will be very familiar with her. She's been on the podcast a number of times.

Molly White, welcome to our live stream. Very happy to have you. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, you know, you are obviously the creator of Web3 is going just great, and it is not doing that at all, which we are very happy to see. And of course, you know, you're our resident future TikTok star. You've just gotten started. Everyone should go subscribe.

What's your TikTok handle? I'm sure it's the same as the rest. It's the same as Molly0xFFF. There you go. You all need to go subscribe on TikTok. If I was at all technically savvy, I would have the URL ready to go, but I do not have that. So maybe I'll grab it in just a second.

Molly, how's everything going? How's the year been? Oh, it's been a year. It is been a year. No, the year's been good. The focus of my writing has not been going well, which is sort of going well for me, I guess. So that's been an interesting year. Yeah, it's been wild. I've started basically doing this writing full time, which has also been incredibly

mind blowing to even be saying that. So that's been really awesome, too. Yeah, no, it is fantastic. And you know, I'm in a similar boat doing this stuff full time, which is totally wild. I did just put a link to your TikTok in the chat so people can go there. I'm now going to look up... Yes, I'm breaking new ground here. Yeah. I figured out how chat rooms work and URLs. I'm really ahead of the game here 2023 is ending on a real high note for me um i've also just put the link to aftermath.site slash products molly do you have a uh holiday sweater for us i have a holiday overalls um okay to model. We love this. That's wonderful. That's wonderful.

Oh my God. In every way. The cats go all the way down, but the big cat is actually a little bit puffy, which is very weird. And it has terrified my dog. He was like, what is on you? So this is my, uh, festive sweater. I love it.

I hope you wear that all holiday long. Yes, I bought it and I was like, oh, this is going to be year round for sure. Fantastic. I love it. And, you know, we'll be very excited to see your TikTok success continue into 2024 when you become, you know, one of the big stars and we're hearing about you on the tiktok news or whatever however or whatever yeah yeah whatever they do over there i'm still not sure imagine like an old-timey newsreel guy it's like this tiny microphone i love it maybe that should be like my TikTok persona. I think,

no, that wouldn't work for you. Yeah. I feel like every few months I'm like, you know what? I'm really going to join TikTok soon. I'm going to figure this out. And then I'm like, nah. So now I'm saying next year and we'll see if that's actually going to happen. Someone needs to hold you to it. Yeah. You know, well, you know, you're all here. My accountability, all the, all the listeners will be, will be pushing me. I don't push too hard though. Now our fourth guest, you know, you have not seen him on the show before, but hopefully

you've seen him over on twitter.com, excuse me, x.com. Aaron Thorpe is the co-host of everybody loves communism which of course we all do some people in the chat are being like holy wait now hold up what where am i right now i think you're familiar with the show at this point i love aaron because he posted ton of cool sci-fi like illustrations and stuff all over twitter all the time um and he's also a fan of for all mankind which i love and we're going to talk about later uh yeah um aaron how's it going welcome to the live stream um it's going well man and i'm happy to be here because uh your your show and also uh

this machine kills um jathan and ed which i'm sure are friends of the show i'm sure you've had them on before um i you guys do work that i feel like especially from the left like a critical analysis of tech and um i think that kind of ties in a lot with like the science fiction that i post this on these lost futures right and this idea that like i don't know i guess that nugget of optimism for the future is like still there but it's just kind of being dumped upon and weighed upon with all this like i mean snake oil sale like snake oil you know what i mean and you know it's kind of about like who kind of like contesting the future you know and um who's in control of it and um i think we all agree here that it should be the working class the people you know so uh

i'm just happy to be on man and um aside from uh posting um sci-fi or um i'm actually uh trying to get my writing legs back and trying to get back into writing speculative fiction so uh um god willing i have a a piece that's going to be uh coming out in um two publications um um next year so uh people can look out for that because uh a lot of the art i post like inspires me you know and i'm like shit man like this is a story that I can like make myself or I can just find the cover art for the book, you know, actually find the book and story myself. But um, that's great to be with you guys. And thank you for having me. Absolutely. I'm so excited to hear that you have some speculative fiction stories coming out. And I can't wait to read them. I feel like, you know, people listeners will be familiar. I was speaking

to Joanne McNeil recently, and she has a new fiction book out called wrong Way. You know, when she was talking about how she was just getting started with that. And I feel like there's more and more people I talk to who are just like, I have a copy here. Yeah, there we go. Send me a copy. Yeah. You guys plan that. Oh, I just happen to have. Go buy Joanne's book. It's on my list. Yeah. It's so good.

It's great. And it's, I think, you know, it's, it's not super long. It's not like a hard read. It's a really nice story to like slip into over the holidays when you just want some downtime. Go, go pick it up, you know? Sorry. Okay. Add, add over.

Joanne was paying me for that just she's she's off screen right here she's like a long gun to my head not really we all love joanne but aaron great to have you on the show do you have a holiday sweater for us um i kind of do uh oh yeah kind of traditional my um my friend Eli is not watching at all. But if he was or listening, Eli, thanks for the sweater, man. I live in Georgia, and I get very cold. I don't know what it is. But even in Georgia, sometimes in the summer, we get a little chilly at night. And we were sitting on this porch.

And I was like, dude, I'm kind of cold. And he ran inside and got me this sweater. And it was August and I was wearing it. And it's awesome. That was my Christmas sweater. I love that. You know, I would ask you what the temperature is in Georgia,

but I don't know Fahrenheit. So I think it would be lost on me. Yeah, and I don't know Celsius either. Yeah, it's relatively cold um where's the ai tool to like you know translate the temperature to convert force yeah yeah neural link except all it does is translate celsius into fahrenheit i'm gonna get a chip put in my brain just so i can have fahrenheit and celsius translated like automatically it would be like the translator from Star Trek, but just for conversion of systems,

metric systems. I think it'd just be to force you guys to finally go metric. I know to finally let this vestige of the past go away. Men will literally use Fahrenheit before going to therapy. Someone noted it, of course, but maybe you will not know what they are all talking about.

Of course, I also have a holiday sweater for you. People who watched last year will know that it's a repeat. Apologies. But it's okay because we love it. Yes, we do love it. It's the best sweater in the world. That is so awesome. Oh, man.

That's so cool. I wish I had like a Star Trek Christmas sweater. I got to get my Christmas sweater. I saw it last year. I was like, I have to have it. You know, it's Clippy. We love Clippy. For the listeners on the stream, it's, you it's Clippy from Microsoft Office saying happy holidays,

little OK button, a bunch of little paper flying around instead of snowflakes. It's beautiful. It's pretty tight. It's pretty tight. It would be cool if the paper that's knitted on it was actual paper, but then I guess you couldn't wash it. You know what I mean? I just hope Clippy is having a nice time with his family.

Me too. He's having a nice time with his family. Me too. He's having a nice time with me. Has Clippy been retired? Is Clippy in the stationary desk that all stationary retires to with his right-handed fence and his family? I believe so. I don't think Clippy's in current Microsoft office, which is a real shame. It's a missed opportunity, especially with the new AI tool. They could have just brought him back so somebody just mentioned clippy was the original ai assistant i

think i'd have to concur with that assessment didn't work either right exactly when i ai systems were good uh you know not promising you too much anyone Anyone got a link to Joanne's book? I will get that for you. Just give me a minute and I will post it in the chat. So, you know, as we've all been talking about, it's been a bit of a wild and, you know, up and down year in the tech industry. Some obvious stories, maybe some not so obvious ones. And I wonder, you know, what are your kind of top things that stand out to you that happened in tech or, of adjacent to it, related to it this year? I wonder who wants to go first. There's the pressure. I always want to go first.

Okay. Gita, you're going first. I have a weird one, but it's something I saw. It might have been Spencer Ackerman tweeting about this morning, but somebody who also wonders this is, I am wondering if we are experiencing the fallout of long-term ketamine abuse in Silicon Valley. You know, ketamine has been the drug of the year in so many ways. Not just in that every time I go out, young people around me are doing ketamine and I'm confused, but also in that there's been like breakthroughs in like depression treatment for ketamine use. But also we are hearing things like

Elon Musk right now, I think in more than one expose, it's been revealed is self-medicating his depression and anxiety with ketamine. And the long-term effects of ketamine use do include mood disorders psychosis and delusions of grandeur so that's what if you already have those things already you go super saiyan essentially you become even more convinced of your godhood which is definitely like happening right i i don't the things that he says in public about himself and his company are concerning because and any other person they would indicate a need for a mental health uh intervention but that is not occurring here which is also something that makes me completely terrified of having money, right? Like I don't ever want to get to a level of power where I need help and

people won't help me because me being perceived as mentally healthy makes a stock price go up, right? That's scary. That's terrifying. Did you see that story the other day? I believe it's from the recent book, Breaking twitter um i can't remember the the author and they were basically saying that after elon musk appeared at that um uh who's that comedian where he was like booed off the stage oh yeah yeah or well you know he was just massively booed i don't know if he was booed off the stage exactly but anyway while that was happening you know afterward that was like a real kind of i don't know wake up call for him like he didn't expect that to happen that people actually don't fucking like him yeah exactly yeah because he's

like created this this twitter feed where it's just all praise for himself and everyone around him you know will not say no to him and just praises him all the time um and there were the story was that he went back to Twitter HQ afterwards. It was in San Francisco and locked himself in a conference room because he's been like sleeping on and off in the office. And the employees were like, so concerned that they almost called the police to come do a wellness check. He's fine. He's fine.

It's okay. Can you imagine how different the world would be now if they had done that i my hope is that it would be different you know i i'm interested in this because like i think so much about how silicon valley really is born out of like a 1960s like homesteaders movement in the 60s and 70s of like the whole earth catalog and stuff and you're seeing like so much of it is driven by hallucinations that are had from long-term drug abuse and here we're seeing it happen in real time in a way that seems very easily connectable if you like pay attention to how these people talk and behave and it makes me feel like why not burn everything down?

You know, it's like that moment in The Good Place. This is my me revealing I watch mediocre sitcoms, all of them. Oh no, no shame on that. I love slop. Oh my God, it's so easy to get stuff done while you got like a fountain of slop going on in the background. Michael Schur, for me, really has the slop touch, you know, exactly the right level of pleasant so that I'm never having a bad time.

But there's this moment where Chidi Aragone embraces nihilism and starts making a big pot of chili and adding marshmallow peeps to it. And like, that's how I feel when I learn these things. Like you have like something like when I got depression, my whole family got together and told me to stop doing all the horrible things I was doing to my body and mind. When you have depression, you make an AI that you say will be anti-woke, but still believes trans women are women. Yeah. Yeah. An AI that invents new slurs. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like this is, this is like. Just what the world needs. Exactly. Just more of it, please. Yeah. You know, I thought when I was like a really depressed guy that if I was in charge of everything,

then everything would make sense. But that wasn't true. And now we're seeing what happens when we actually try. So it's like a long tradition in Silicon Valley to let drugs make all of your decisions for you. But this is like such a sad version of this story that's happened over and over. Like at least cocaine guys were having fun. He's not having fun at all.

Yeah. Yeah. And he's also like, you know, he's also people also think that he's not having fun at all yeah yeah and he's also like you know he's also uh people also think that he's gonna be a steward stewardess into the future right like you know a lot of people are banking like their uh their hopes and optimism you know on this guy that's like just i mean locking himself in a room and doing ketamine you know brand or you know yeah man yeah it freaks me out it makes me feel cautious and nervous but also i mean this year it's nice to no longer be at a level of depression where his behaviors are relatable to me right you know yeah i i think that's a wild connection to make like i hadn't

even considered it the early kind of silicon valley folks and you know like mushrooms yeah really you know steve jobs talking about how lsd like you know made him i don't know whatever he said a visionary genius totally yeah johnny ive to do all the work imagine going on like a mushroom trip and what you see is just like an ipad like the machine elves don't want to fuck with you i think the whole point of like tripping ball is doing like hallucinogenics is that so you don't have to think about ways that you can make money and people trip on mushrooms

and then think about my job. Your psyche is so fucked at that point. Like your inner self is just more and more compressed. Like it's a fucking diamond in there, you know? So hilarious. I love that. I love that this was your story for the year because it totally came out of

left field for me, but I've been thinking about it too. Cause it's wild. And someone in the chat mentioned that he's also on Ozempic of course, which is like, yeah, well, I don't know if he's off it now, but he was on Ozempic and I don't know. I'm, I'm still very, I don't feel good about that drug. I feel like there's a whole load of side effects that are like slowly coming out. We just don't know what the body, how it's going to react to not eating nutrients it needs because you don't feel like you need them. I just, we don't know what's going to happen from that. just makes me think if elon musk had actually fully gone into the hollywood machine when marvel was putting him in movies and he was a guy that was like on hgh and was doing cameos he would be a happier person like there is a world there is a world that embraces this level of vanity and for which it is like the point of your job also yeah if he had embraced just being like a

celebrity spokesperson type he would probably be happier but he wants to be legitimate so he's trapped in a conference room doing ketamine you know yeah great it is i honestly think elon's biggest like downfall is that he just wants to be a really good poster which is like one of the hardest things to fake like you can't just be like i'm gonna learn how to be a good poster it's either like god like God given or you just have to give up. Right. Got it. Or you don't, you got it.

And I mean, what it is too, is that this is a website that like, you know, I think that he thought I like, I like Gita's a tech story of the year, a tech kind of trend of the year, because like, I think that like a lot of these people, a lot of these people look up to Elon Musk and they look, look up to figures like Jeff Bezos. And like I mentioned, right. They think that these guys are basically like Tony Stark, right.

Except they're not like Tony Stark, but they still have the addictions of alcoholism and the vanity and all the other stuff. Right. You know what I mean? So like, I don't know. I mean,

I don't know if I should jump in, but my, my, my kind of thing is related and I feel like it's super late. You guys probably are more knowledgeable and real research about all these tech stories than I am. But I think one that was really, really funny to me, because I love space, right, was the explosion, right? And the failed or not failed or purposely failed launch of Starship One, I don't know, which was also launched on Hitler's birthday, which, again, I just think there are a lot of parallels between the Nazi space program and Von Braun and someone like Elon Musk. Actually, Fred Sharman covers the history of space colonization in his book Space Forces, which we talked a little about Paris.

People should check that out. Yeah, which people can go back. I don't know the episode number, but there is an interview on Tech Won't Save Us with Fred where we go into all that history. Yes. Yeah. And we had an interview with him, too, actually, on Everybody Loves Communism. So people can check that out, too. But I just think it's it's it's it's we should point out that. And Fred points this out in his book that the creation, the building of the V2 rockets. Right. Which Von Braun designed more Jews, more people died in concentration camps or work camps, rather labor camps, building those rockets than people that were actually killed by those rockets. Right. So I don't know, the explosion or the failed launch or whatever it was of Starship one to me was just sort of maybe like a flashpoint for me personally, sort of in the private space industry.

Right. Because NASA is going back to the moon, you know, supposedly in 2025. And Elon Musk, they partnered with SpaceX, right? And it's not that the space industry hasn't been funded and researched with private industry, right? We know this, whether it's Boeing or Lockheed Martin, but I mean, it just makes me think about the way he runs Twitter. And I'm like, okay, we're never going to Mars. First of all, I love space. I love space colonization. We're never going there. But even if we were to do that, right. Collectivize these resources, right. If someone was willing to like bank bank on this awesome idea, right. I wouldn't want to be in a ship, you know, that's Elon Musk, you know, in a space section, probably going, you know what I mean? Like,

I know we're using those ships, but just the whole project of colonization, reproducing these injustices on earth. I don't think that's the guy to do it. And, ships, but just the whole project of colonization, reproducing these injustices on Earth. I don't think that's the guy to do it. And I just have to say the Starship thing kind of it was very satisfying. You know, it was very satisfying to watch it explode and sort of have these sort of ideas about the real reality. I guess the space colonization and our prospects in space kind of have them like crystall um crystallized you know in this in this mass explosion where i'm like yeah man these guys um what there are their future hustlers you know they're snake oil salesmen and their future hustlers and um i love to see them fail man i

love to see that right well you know we love to push back on the snake oil industry here on the show of course i think when you talk about spacex i i feel like there's two things that come to mind right first of all is like the move fast and break things ideology applied to space. And it's like, is that really the way that we should be approaching this when, you know, we're out in the vacuum and like, there's nothing, you know, if something goes. Yeah. If there's one thing that the incredibly accurate and, and, uh, an historically perfect show for all mankind has taught me is that you cannot be moving fast and breaking things in space you'll die you'll die right away well you do have to be moving fast but maybe not breaking things

fair fair but there's there's a story from earlier in spacex history where it must be it must have been like a one of the earlier times when they had actual humans like being launched on one of these rockets and something broke with like the toilet system or something like that. And so the astronauts had to wear diapers the whole time because like urine was like leaking everywhere because like they messed something up. And it's like that sounds really terrible we still haven't figured that out i mean like you know despite the fact of the greater uh scientific contributions right in consumer technology that the space race has given us

and the things we've been able to do in space you know when it comes to like um shitting and pissing we haven't figured that out yet you know it's still we're doing the important thing i read i wanted to ask you did you see you see NASA put up a trailer on their YouTube? Me and my husband are obsessed with NASA's YouTube channel. They recently changed the announcer for this week at NASA. We've never been more devastated. There's a trailer on there for NASA's decided to open up commercial trading to the moon. They're bringing capitalism to the moon, man.

Man, this is what Fred Sharman talks about in his book. It's like, you know, reproducing, right, these social, economic, political, economic systems in space. And I mean, like, you know, we'll get into it. I don't want to talk too much about For All Mankind. But one thing that I like that that show does is that it shows you sort of like geopolitics like translated right to space right and i mean we have had treaties right i think the first treaty was like i mean in 19 don't quote me on this is 1970 something right where it's like nobody can own the moon right and then i think that sort of got peeled back under obama and then

even more under trump with the space force so it's like and now they're talking about, well, we have to get to the moon or these mine, these asteroids before China. I mean, that's pretty much what the UFO hearings were about. Right. The UFO hearings. I wish they were actually about fucking UFOs. It'd be awesome. Right. But it was basically about how can we fortify supremacy in space? Yeah. Yeah. We we did an episode of the show on UFOs and there were certainly basically saying like, the UFOs are not real. This is about like,

you know, the U S national security industry and all this kind of stuff. And some people were like super mad. They were like, do you not see what's going on right now? Like there's hearings on UFOs. I'm like, yeah,

that's why we did this episode. I believe that the UFOs are real, but I also believe that the United States government wants any excuse they want, they possibly can, to militarize outer space. They want to do it so bad. They are salivating at the prospect. So, like, UFOs, if you

are watching us, just, like, keep it chill for a little bit longer. Be cool. Like, we know not what we do. We're babies. You gotta be annihilate some of us, but not all of us, please. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The UFOs do love the tech won't save us podcast. So that is true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Um, Molly, what's your, what's your top thing that stood out to you in 2023? So I think for me, one of the kind of wildest things that happened this year was the emergence of these sort of explicit, almost philosophical movements within the tech world into sort of the mainstream.

So, you know, it's certainly not like, you know, for for example effective altruism is new this year it's been around for a lot longer than a year but suddenly people knew about it far outside like the bay area housing co-ops and stuff like that you know in sam mcconfried's living room um and that's been really wild to watch to see like see Mark Andreessen writing manifestos that are not just about software is going to eat the world, but also about capitalism and about much more philosophical ideas and the morality of the work that he's been doing. And it's been a little bit alarming, I think, to watch some of these very powerful tech people start to embrace these very cult-like ideologies. It's like new agey almost, you know? Yeah. To sort of see them say, you know, not only is what I'm doing good because I'm making a lot of money and because I am innovating or whatever it is, but now it's also morally good and ethically right. And in fact, it is the most moral thing

that one could be doing, you know, to be developing AI or funding a crypto project or whatever it is that they're doing. That's definitely been a big one for me this year, because that feels new. You know, it's not like ideologies are new in tech, for sure. That's certainly not the case. But to see, you know, people with EAC in their Twitter bios who are just like random software engineers at some company, you know, at Meta or whatever, uh, is that's been a little weird. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, I feel like one of like the notable distinctions in this moment as well is also like, you know, we've had ideologies around tech for a long time and they've been trying to sell us a certain idea of what tech is and what Silicon Valley is and how amazing they are and how they're making the world a better place for ages. Right. It's just like in this moment,

it feels like it's not like welcome to this amazing world that tech is bringing you and all the media is going along with how incredible the future is going to be because of Elon Musk and all these tech companies and stuff. But it very much feels more like, no, you need to follow us or like we are coming for you kind of a thing. Yeah. It's very adversarial, I think is how I would put it. Yeah, right. I agree. And also, I think just the overlap between some of these ideologies and like meme culture has been really weird to watch where it seems, I mean, I don't know how planned it was, but it feels like someone sort of realized that if we can, you know, meme-ify this ideology that's actually very similar to a lot of past ideologies. We can get a whole bunch of new people on board and, you know, actually make a difference or recruit, you know, high profile people to the cause and that kind of thing. Which is very weird because it has, I think, been successful to some extent. Not that I would say EAC has really produced much

yet, but it's also pretty early um but sort of seeing it's like they sort of come you know woken up a little bit to the new age and realized that like oh if we have better memes then we'll get the youths on board with our move back to break things thing um which is very weird you know what you know what these guys remind me of um and i've mentioned this on twitter before it's probably not an original uh sentiment or theory but guys remind me of? And I've mentioned this on Twitter before. It's probably not an original sentiment or theory, but they remind me of the futurists from Italy, 1930s and dating 1930s. You know what's going on in Italy in 1930s? They were fascists, right? What?

What? What do you mean? And I think the Nazis, too, some of their aesthetics, right, were also influenced or inspired by the futurists. And basically, the futurists believed in technology as a marker of social progress. So that was by any means necessary. So that included violence, hyperviolence. That included the destruction of nature. Hypermasculinity was also involved in that. Right. All these gender norms and what they essentially believed. I mean, this is where you get these sleek curves of trains and a lot of the retrofuturism.

Actually, William Gibson has a story, a short story called the Gernsback Continuum, which basically critiques this Gernsbackian retrofuturism. He compares it to Nazi Germany. And that's what I think these guys are, right? And that's why I think what you mentioned, Paris, it's like, you know, get on board or get out of the way i mean like these are people that have no qualms at all about like stepping over you know your family member's corpse in the street you know what i mean if it means that they can make a buck and also you know sell you something that will kill you right something that's supposed to be like this jetson sort of future but it's like oh no that's just a just it's a nexus device you know it's a torment it's just like homies that spend all day long being terrified of roco's basilisk are weak

you know that's what it is to me like that's what this is to me you're making up a guy that's you to be afraid for their future the whole roguish basilisk thing makes me absolutely furious because it is so much of the thing that gets wrapped up in like i i think uh this futurist impulse this uh i was gonna say ethical non-monogamous but that's not i like that that's pretty good that's really good i just can't remember what it's called um but you mean effective altruist effective altruist i do just every time i'm trying to say effective altruist i think ethical non-monogamy i mean there's no overlap there

they did enjoy that in their it's like yeah it's a cool new name for polyamory i think yeah it's just like they invented a whole bunch of rules for just having cool casual sex basically you know again it's like a similar type of attitude right that embody encompass all of these things i think this idea of there being like it's reinventing religion in a lot of ways yes an idea being an immutable version of you that could be harmed by your actions in the present, but in the future. So they've created like a new weird version of religion

that doesn't involve God, but also involves them becoming God possibly by making good choices now and not making bad choices in the future. That's just Catholicism. I don't know why they need to do it again. Yeah. I think the wildest thing about it for me is like a lot of the really hyper rationalist types of movements, you know, including effective altruism. It's like the religion is sort of math, but also you can just like multiply anything by infinity if you want,

because then you can just justify anything you want, you know, like the idea that, you know, oh, well, we're going to try to maximize the amount of good that we're going to do. Well, you can just say that if this thing is going to be extended to infinity humans in the future, then we can just maximize this tiny number by multiplying it by infinity because it will, you know, it will help infinity people. And then suddenly that's the best thing you could possibly be doing, which is very convenient. But also it's like, how are you so obsessed with math and rationality? And then you're also like, we're just going to multiply these numbers by other numbers that we made up. I don't know how they square that. It seems like that's where the faith and just the justification for kind of like whatever they want to do comes in right yeah like there's the attempt to kind of

build some kind of structural justification for the world that they want to create and like everything that they want to do and not to be held to account for anything and then it's just like i don't know there there's no god anymore so let's let's worship our technologies and this will be amazing and everybody is feeling that kind of void in themselves anyway so we can fill it with kind of our techno philosophies and yeah i don't know it's getting scary it is i think that religion analogy is so apt because i guess you know i mean religion is still like used for this but you know in sort of um um creating like an overarching narrative for people you know, and giving

people like something to believe in. And I think like the tech stuff, especially because we are ever increasingly like bombarded with these new technological inventions and achievements. And I think, I think Molly, you've talked about it before, like creating a solution to a problem that doesn't sort of exist, you know? And it's like, I think at the end of the day, like, I think the religion is bought kind of based on like the some infinite growth fallacy, you know and it's like i think at the end of the day like i think the religion is bought kind of based on like this some infinite growth fallacy you know and i mean at some point like i was thinking about this the other day about data centers you know and about like i mean i don't

know if we'll run out of physical space right but there's a finite amount of space that you can have to like you know uh to to build these data centers and also the effect on you know the environment and whatnot and i'm reading like you know they're talking about like eventually putting orbital data centers in space you know and just this sort of inundation of information and the fact that we have to store it all somewhere and the fact that like well there's there's sort of the line only goes like sharply like it goes a little like little here and sharply to the to the right you know what i mean it continues to go straight up which is kind of what Gerard O'Neill, which was this futurist believed in, right?

That we could have this unlimited growth. And like, yeah, man, that's not true, man. That's far from the truth, right? Yeah, and that's like at the basis of Jeff Bezos' visions for space and all this kind of stuff, right? I think the data centers is a good bridge into the thing that I'm going to bring up, which is quite obvious if anyone's been paying any attention to the tech industry.

I would say I I love all the topics that you've all brought up and how they weren't like just the totally obvious things, which is what I'm going new agey, I miss when the trendy capitalist new aginess was like listening to Enya and shopping at natural. I will just say, you know, here in, here in India brought me back, especially to Lord of the Rings, the two towers, you know, the song that she made for the credit sequence, the Gollum song. We've talked about elves before and how how we we couldn't let go of the lord of the rings television show a little bit because the elf politics was good i love elf politics so much i i wish the show was better like i want to see more elves yeah i don't know

recommendation on twitter but i got a new keyboard and it's like lord of the rings like elvish oh nice oh my god i think i would totally i think i would totally go into a catatonic state if i had to use it like i gotta press the one ring yeah i would always press the one ring yeah um personal recommendation for me to use paris marks is the anime freron which is all about being an elf and living a really long time and realizing that you have to actually befriend your friends instead of being aloof and elf like okay yeah i love this all that the show is about it's great it's like really positive it it sounds like one piece for elves that's it's a little bit about like grief like pre-grieving knowing you're gonna live longer than all your friends but you know it is very cheerful writing

down one piece for elves in his sci-fi novel i'm creating ideas right here oh my god can you imagine elf pirates they'd be so rude i love the idea though that you know i'm imagining that right now um spell spell the name for me of the show f-r-e-i-r-e-n freron all right yeah we'll be watching that listeners do you got that um we'll have you know back on for like a premium episode to talk about it once i've watched it yeah um all right my topic big story most obvious story of them all ai hype come on yeah um you know it's the one chat gpt november 2022 really takes off early this year you know, Sam Bank or Jesus, Sam Altman. There's only one bad Sam in town. I have said they need to stop naming people Sam.

There's too many of them. Yeah, that name has been ruined. Sam, if you're with a half-baked idea, you just got to get out now. Change your name. We can't have too many. Yeah. You know, if you hear sam coming into these vc offices you know shoot shoot them away that that's yeah we get a big hammer possibly you know yeah

like a big old cane to just yank them out the door Michael says Sam Altman freed, Sam Bankman jailed. Yeah, fair enough. That's really good. That's really good. But yeah, so we have our Sam Altman. He goes on his big tour. You know, recently he's experienced some tumult at the company, you know, been ousted and then reinstated as CEO. But, you know, I think for me, watching the AI hype, it was a real kind of deja vu moment. And certainly I've talked about this on the show before, right? What really kind of woke me up to

like seeing the tech industry more critically that the thing most of all that did it was seeing in the mid 2010s when there were all these promises about automation and robots and AI taking all of our jobs, right? And we were going to need a basic income to like make everyone secure because nobody was going to have an income anymore because the robots were going to do all our jobs and it was going to eradicate like half the jobs by whenever. And then it never happened, right? And then what actually happened was Amazon used tech to like have this algorithmic management of its workers so that, you know,

it could carve them out of unions and make sure they were paid less and, you know, make really high like production targets on them that make them at much higher rates of injury. And companies like Uber using it to like carve people, carve workers out of employment protections altogether. But yeah, so, so this is my, this is my big thing, right? I saw this happen at the time. I was like a believer, right? I was like a fully automated luxury communist. I really believe that like the technologies were going to wipe out all the work and like, how are we going to possibly like live in a society without a basic income, blah, blah, blah. Right. Then it didn't happen. And I was like, okay, my understanding of this industry is like totally wrong. Like I got

something wrong and I need to like re-examine this. And that's really where like my perspective on the tech industry that I have now really came from and kind of reassessing it and looking at the political economy of this industry and like understanding what's actually happening there. And so then this year to see like all the hype around AI again and how it was gonna take our jobs

and like all these narratives like being repeated from the mid 2010s, I was was like how are we doing this again like how how is the media still reporting all this stuff and not like waking up to it so yeah it was like a deja vu moment but it was also like i don't know how i would describe it exactly but it seemed like more people this time were very much bought in from the beginning or recognizing from the beginning, maybe because of the crypto wave that happened more recently, that like this was just another hype wave to drive investment in the industry. And it was all going to fall away in like a year or two. And then we'd be on to the next thing. Well, didn't a lot of the people who were on that crypto wave, a lot of the people were also funders and pushers and advocates of AI. Yeah. I remember going to different VC blogs and reading their like AI evangelism and then like

just clicking out to the blog girl and scrolling down and seeing the same exact post for NFTs. You just kind of replaced the word NFT with AI. Basically, yeah, it's the same arguments and also the same argument that I've heard about every single piece of radical technology that ends up kind of sucking. You know, my favorite thing to do with chat GPT and it's always like just do it. If you're in chat, do it right now. Load up chat GPT and type, draw me an AC ASCII illustration of a map of the United States labeled and label all the states and describe the drawing and just see what happens.

Just every time, it'll give you a very, very interesting idea of what even the general shape of the United States is. And it's been like this throughout every single version of it. Like a 10-year-old with enough time can draw an ASCII art map of the United States. It's not that hard.

You can have like a, what is, what is the, what is the, uh, the sort of, um, the thought experiment, like a hundred thousand monkeys typing on a typewriter that we type out a novel. You don't, you don't think about the AI too. The AI hype too is that, and somebody pointed this out to me, maybe this is just a general sort of opinion or take on it, but you know, it seemed like, like Paris, I was, I was, I mean, I don't like to call myself

futurist because of those connotations but I am a futurologist I'm like to think about technology and think about especially you know as a radical and think about the ways that um technology can free us um um from um um from you know the kind of like bullshit labor that we don't need to be doing right of course people would still well that's the point right is that AI I thought was supposed to do the work that nobody wanted to do. Now it's doing things like creating art and writing news articles and it's doing all these other things that like are very human. Yeah, they're uncanny. And it's just this kind of a simulacrum of human interaction. Like, I mean, I saw there's there's this AI writing program called program called pseudo right that i've seen people pushing

and like i'm sorry it's kind of like what you said molly early about posting if you don't got it you don't got it man like the idea that a computer or will will will first of all will amalgamate right all of these different sources right so already you have their theft right intellectual theft but also how is a computer going to describe like the touch of a human face, right? Or like the smell of something. And I know this is a more general philosophical kind of debate, but I really do think about the ways in which, you know, tech, like these, these failed promises of technology sort of hollow. I mean, it's not, it kind of hollow us out. And I mean, it's not that people are making these individual decisions. It's coming on from down high by these like snake oil salesmen, you know? Yeah. I think a lot about the point of creativity, right? What is the point of

creativity? It's synthesizing something new out of lived human experiences and the other art that you've seen. That is the one thing the model, a large neural language learning network model cannot actually do. Like technologically, that is not part of what it can do. It can statistically find the combinations of words and pixels that will please the user, but it cannot make something new. It can only make something out of the bits and pieces of other things you've already seen, which makes a lot of sense that people are obsessed with it for making pornography girlfriends you know yeah yeah it's so low it appeals to almost it's like it truly is slop in the in the truest sense of the word where like it's almost like some cronenbergian like you know flesh monster that's just really grotesque and i think about this a lot too the fact that

like okay so people train ai right there have been a lot of stories written about this a lot of people in the global south right who are like being subjected to most of the most horrible shit that you've ever seen on the internet and also some of the most mundane work right but then when we have all this ai content like i forgot well i forgot who said if someone did a google search for a certain image and the first thing that i think it was the um the the the tank man right the famous picture of the guy standing in front of a tank. And I think it gave them the result back, the Google result back. The first one was like an AI reproduction of that, you know? That's been happening all over the place.

Yeah. I find it fascinating, though, like when I hear you describe that, because I feel like one of the things that stands out to me, like, you know, like the robots are not going to do the janitor's work and the robots are not going to do these like tasks that we would want to free humans from doing for the most part. Right. These these real kind of basic tasks. And, you know, maybe there's people who enjoy doing janitorial work and more power to them. You know, they should just be paid well if they want to do that. Exactly. You want to be a garbage man. You should get paid more. You know what I mean? Totally. Absolutely. There are some kinds of work as a writer.

I can understand not wanting to do people in video game development have said they've used chat GPT and similar neural, like language learning models to write character barks, which are like a character saying, oof, like it's like, you need to write a hundred of those. And I can understand not wanting to write and rewrite the same list of arcs that you've written like a dozen times before.

But also like, that is such a tiny use case. There's like almost no other kind of writing or creative work where that is like a, like a necessary thing for you to just make a thousands of something that's a really, really basic at once. And also like being creative means kind of being like just drowning in the process, right? Like when you make something creative, it's about doing the really tedious thing to understand the tedious task better. And to, again, synthesize something new out of something you've done hundreds of times before. Yeah. One thing that I think is really interesting about a lot of the people who make these really broad statements about like, AI is going to take everyone's job or AI is going to become, you know, equivalent to a human is a lot of the time when they do that, they only do so by like completely redefining the word job or human, you know, or like, they'll redefine job to be like what you just described with the character barks, you know, or they'll redefine human just to refer to the tasks that a human does and not, you know, touching or feeling or smelling or loving or, you know, anything like that, which is really sad. I feel like, you know, you just it feels like we're really losing a lot when you when you start talking about humans that are really just job doers you know or

task doers yeah um but i feel like that's becoming a big part of the conversation in the sort of ai hype world where it's like they're going to be just like humans if that human is just like you know on a computer all day typing letters which i mean that's me but i mean maybe this maybe this is a speculative uh speculative person in me too but um i've talked about this story so much man but um there's a story called the pretended by daryl a smith in um an anthology of black speculative fiction edited by sheree renee thomas and i love that story because when we always talk about computers and robots like um like we we we sort of humanize them or i guess like robots androids you sort of humanize them but also we understand that this

thing that we made and created is meant to do work for us it's meant to work for us i think the first sketch of an automaton in the united states um i think this was during like the antebom south i think the the model was of a black man. Right. You know, because in their minds, they saw that. Well, I mean, if this robot's going to do work, then who else does work? Who else do we relate to as farm equipment, basically? And in the short story, they pretended there is a there is a genocide of black people. And what ends up happening is that black androids are created to replace almost as minstrels, right. To replace black people. Right. Because in order to dehumanize someone, right. You have to create, it has to be an active consciousness thing that you do. Right. And this is a speculative part of me, but it kind of worries me when we talk about like AI, like robots doing work and

like, you know, all this labor, because it's like, well, I don't know. I guess Molly's kind of the point that you were making. Right. It's like, those robots are never going to be sentient and they're never going to do that work alone right they're somebody is going to have to be subservient to that they're going to have to be almost an addition right almost like a complementary piece or something that you screw in to make something work you know and i just think that like you know this talk of like valuing human life and labor while devaluing human life, you know, and the labor that people do.

I just think it's a weird trap. I don't know if any of that made sense, but it's a very sticky trap, you know, total sense. I think about this a lot in relationship to journalism, where you see some websites like my former employer, geo media has been running AI articles.

And the mission is to make journalists who have been doing all of the work of journalism for so long, and will likely continue to do all of the work of journalism when they're having to shepherd these little AI writers. It's to turn them from creative working people with ideas to technicians or minders for the robots. Yeah, minders, yeah. robot reminders yeah and it's likely again because the ai writing is like the ai fucking chachi peachy article that that gizmodo ran where it didn't even get the star wars movies in order to be fair i wouldn't either i'm a trekkie to be fair i wouldn't either so yeah fair enough the ai is a trekkie yeah god if only an ai had that level of taste, right? You know, that would be incredible. That would be worth it to have it maybe supplement some of your takes, because I know you need

a thousand of them when you work in an environment like that. But like, yeah, you know, like you, you will continue to have to be an editor, a writer, a researcher, a proofreader, you know, doing layout, all of them, all of the things that were involved in your job description before, except it's all credited to the AI. So, you know, like it is absolutely mind boggling. Like you're watching the devaluation of a complete field of work in the name of elevating it just as it's happening. Gita, that's such a good point that you bring up because I'm on the up because on the Trailbillies, which is the other podcast that I do,

we've talked about this before. We've talked about how AI, eventually the onus will be placed on the AI, right? It'll be placed on like, well, sorry that AI racially profiles people, whether it's from law enforcement to the healthcare industry. It's just, it's unbiased right it's not our

fault and it's like dude like it reminds me of like um like kodak when kodak first started making color film um the reproductions of black people right like the color in color i mean like you couldn't see them right you couldn't you couldn't and the representation was awful because they were like well we didn't know that black people bought film you know what i mean cameras and once they realized that they developed the kind of film and the solution, right. That had those colors pop in a more realistic way. I think about how some of these AI programs and some of these like sort of image sensing or image, like image recognition can't recognize different faces. I mean, my point is we play these biases already baked in to the technology, you know,

and it just worries me when eventually when law enforcement in the united states decides that they're going to like literally minority report which again is a cautionary tale though you're not supposed to want to do that shit man it's not a blueprint yeah shocking too many bad things happened to tom cruise in that movie come on guys he had to take his eyes out like come on man oh my god when you talk about the the codex stuff in the photos it brings to mind how like in new zealand as well you know the maori people had these like beautiful face tattoos right and when the they would take a photo of them however it worked like it would not pick up the fact that they had face tattoos and the way that the photo

would come out was the person's face but without the tattoo that's so scary and so it's like the representation of maori people because you know you take photos although you present these photos or whatever and always the photos are without um the moko or i believe it's called the the face tattoo right yeah it's it's wild just to see how those things can be kind of built into the systems. But I think to pick up on the broader points that you've been talking about around journalism and around kind of, you know, film, television, broader kind of creative works in these AIs, for me, it often comes back to the question around like, what can be picked up by capitalism? Like what can a price be attached to and what is kind of difficult for the capitalist system to actually kind of quantify? So like when you're thinking about, you know, work that goes into an article and what people get from that, or if you think about like a film and, you know, kind of the very unquantifiable kind of feelings that people have when they kind of experience something that really that really hits them.

Like Marx, of course, would say it's the kind of exchange value. You can kind of pick up certain things. art that is able to be quantifiable, even if it's total garbage, because then we know we can sell it for something, even if we're churning out like all these NFTs or all these AI, you know, pictures that are, you know, coming out of mid journey or stable diffusion or, you know, whatever else they're going to do in the future. In that way, it's not a surprise at all that Disney has really embraced stable diffusion in terms of creating artwork and promotional materials for their shows. That Loki season two poster that was clearly made with Staple Diffusion, it stuck out like a sore thumb. And it's also just like those movies, the Disney Marvel machine in particular, it is so clear it's about the numbers and not about the art itself.

Just every way it's produced and what it feels like to watch them. Yeah. You know what I was thinking when you said that Gator, I don't know what obscure, probably well-known French philosopher Marxist said this, or talks about this, but probably a lot of cultural theorists do, but there's almost like this de-eroticization,

right? Of art. And when I say de-eroticization, I'm not talking about sex, right? I'm talking about the idea that like art should be seductive, right? It shouldn't be something that's like kind of packaged like piecemeal and slapped on with a sticker and

handed to you with an expiration date you know what i mean it should be something that like actually kind of draws you in you know and i mean i think that marvel disney you know all these like um these um you know media conglomerates i mean of course we saw this with the writer's strike of course right even though they're saying writer's strike. Of course, right? Even though they're saying, well, we're going to wait until the technology really matures, right, to do so.

It's like, no, dude, you already have plans, like whether it's capturing the likeness of an actor to reproduce them in AI, whether it's cutting writers out. Well, you're not cutting writers out the process completely

because like you were saying, Gita, they're minders. What they'll do is they'll edit, right? And tweak the plot a little bit. And it's just like, it's, it's, I mean, I was What they'll do is they'll edit, right, and tweak the plot a little bit. And it's just like, it's, I mean, I was arguing with somebody, I think, on Twitter. And I was like, dude, you won't recognize the difference, right, when they start doing the AI. I mean, we saw this with the Secret Invasion, right, intro, right, with Samuel L. Jackson, that other Marvel special. And watching it, especially someone who posts art on my Twitter, it gives me like an uncanny visceral, like the uncanny valley

visceral reaction, like almost feel nauseous and it pisses me off so much because I see sometimes, and I block these people all the time, they'll comment like, oh, well, you posted John Berkey because John Berkey's art style already looks, it almost looks like AI before AI. It's very impressionist, right? And people were like, oh, in the style of

John Berkey, and it's uncanny how similar it is, but also how it's not, right? That gap, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. There's a balance. I kind of wonder. Oh, go ahead.

Oh, it just feels like a, you can feel the lack of a human. I've been so much more woo about creativity since I've had to force myself to really think myself, think about how I create things. And it's just like, there's just this little thing, like this feeling of humanity, and you can feel it when it's lacking. You really can. That's all. I was just gonna say, like, I feel like the folks who are working on these AI systems are like, really hoping that they can reduce art and music and whatever it is that they're trying to create with these AI systems into what can be quantified and input into this algorithm, this machine that they're creating. But I feel like, and I feel like their hope really is that they can also shift public perception to value those very same things, because then you can maximize the sort of

capitalist extraction of whatever these AIs are creating. But I feel like there is going to be this issue where people can tell, right? People can read something and say, that sounds AI written, you know? That sounds AI generated. And if you're a writer and someone asks you if something you publish is AI, that's like offensive, right?

Because then you feel like, do I sound like that? You know, that's not a good thing. Do I sound like a robot? Am I a robot? Am I that bad? Like marketing copy writing style that AI seems to have.

And I wonder to what extent there will be this like clash where people start to suddenly, you know, actually sort of push back on this AI style that is sort of coming out. Because I feel like it's already happening to some extent where people will see an image and it looks really AI generated

and they're like, eh, that doesn't do it for me. Which is obviously not what the people behind these companies want. They want to approximate things that people will buy. But I wonder if they're going to run into the fact that, well, real humans actually like real human things. And that's not something you can just change because it's better for your business. Absolutely. I think I want to step in here around real human things because I did want to pivot us to a different topic.

We mentioned earlier in the discussion For All Mankind, which is this Apple TV plus television show. And, you know, I kind of wanted to put it on the table for us to talk about not just the show itself, but this idea that like, you know, this question of like, how we think about the future and how kind of fiction and these kind of stories and media and whatnot, you know, shapes or can potentially open the way that we think about the future. Because I feel like one of the things about this show, for me, it's in, it's like third or fourth season now. I think it's the fourth season. Fourth season, yeah.

Fourth, yeah. And, you know, the general plot for people who haven't, who haven't watched it is the Soviet Union gets to the moon before the United States. And then that kind of propels this much longer space race, you know, if only seasons, yeah, yeah. We're through the seasons, like they get to Mars and all this kind of stuff. And for me, like there's this, there's this kind of divide where I see these people in space. I see like this kind of long standing cooperation between like fictional cooperation between the United States, the Soviet Union,

like North Korea, like all these other nations that are like slowly kind of getting involved in this, this kind of process. And it seems like, you know, it seems quite utopian and especially attractive in the moment, I think politically that we are right now in our real world. But then there's also the kind of question of like, I don't think we can actually live on mars in that way and like i'm skeptical of that we don't we can't have it yeah and so like there's there's this divide where i'm like i find it very hopeful but also like this is not the future i would think that we can achieve either and i don't know what to make of that kind of divide but i love the show i think i haven't watched this current season so i don't know what to make of that kind of divide, but I love the show. I think I haven't watched this current season.

So I don't know what's happening in the two thousands, what needle drops they're going to have at the end of the season to indicate this. 9-11 happened. Like, yeah, I know. I think it's in 2003 and I don't remember seeing 9-11.

No, not, it's not. Basically it's like the, whatever space, whatever the, it was, I guess it was the Johnson space center.

That bombing in the third season was kind of the oklahoma city bombing and i think it was supposed to kind of be like anyway you go ahead yeah yeah it's fascinating how they reinvented don't ask don't tell also in the third season it's just on some other shit sometimes um but i i i am actually up to date on the other futurist science fiction show on Apple TV+, which is Foundation. And that is like a much more long view on what the future and the possibilities of the future could be. And the long view in that show is that we will keep recreating empire as we continue moving out into space. And there is nothing that will be able to stop us. We'll recreate empire in such a way that we have an eternal emperor

just one white cis man that is born and born yeah no he's basically lee pace is playing sexy joe biden in this show i'm not afraid to say that man if that's what joe biden looked like i'd be enjoying it i'm gonna have a cheeks out knife fight anytime soon. But yeah, that feels so much more likely to me than this utopian vision of the future. It is so much in the Star Trek mode of utopian optimism, which appeals to me a lot, right? Like I am a star.

David and I watched Star Trek basically every single day. Oh, David and I have talked about it in the DMV. We lost track. So much Trek. start david and i watched star trek basically every single day david and i have talked about it in the d.a we why we actually we lost so much track i've he's genuinely changed my life for the better although my dad was always the next generation fan whatever anyway ds9 just gotta say ds9 is the best star trek give a black captain on the space station oh it's so good the ending is really good also i mean like the final season right now. So no spoilers. No spoilers. No spoilers. I wanted to say real quick,

I think what you're, that kind of tension that you're experiencing in Paris is something that I've experienced with the show. It's the perfect hauntological show.

And if anyone knows hauntology, it's sort of the haunting of lost futures or what may have been or what can still be, right? And I mean, it's the same way

that the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment is haunted by the New Deal or haunted by the civil rights movement or haunted by not the specter of communism, but by the disappearance of the specter of communism. I don't know if that makes any sense. People should read Mark Fisher, Ghost of My Life. He talks about hauntology in this, but I love For All Mankind because it's a hauntological show, right? It presents this lost future to you, right could have been but i think like you were talking about it still replicates and reproduces right the same sort of mechanisms right that happen on earth i mean in the second season right no spoilers but well this is probably a spoiler you should watch the show if you if you if you want to listen to this but

now if you haven't if you haven't stop this and go watch all four seasons get caught up and then come back but like yeah you know we were talking about molly drops out right now but like you know i mean we re we recreate territorialism in space right and i mean we split up the moon you know and the one caveat i was telling you this paris the one caveat that i do like about the show because ronald d moore is a showrunner, creator, and he also did TNG, thinks he did some DS9. The liberal caveat is that the world might have been a better place in a lot of ways, and sure, more complicated if the Soviet Union still, all right, even if the Soviet Union sends a woman to Mars, right, not because they actually believe in any of the sort of tenets of like Marxist feminism, right, or any of that, but even if they sent a woman to the Mars the same way that they would push propaganda, right, to the United States, right, to Americans about our racial conflict, right, in the United States,

even if they did it to antagonize America, it still in the show pushes the United States, not only to send a a black woman right to the moon but also the era right the equal rights amendment right it gets pushed through and all these progressive things get pushed through i mean but yeah again though as you said paris i guess the the the tension there is that like i mean and you were saying gita that like you know all these problems that we deal with on earth will just'll just reproduce them in space, you know, unless, you know, we develop a radically different society where, you know, the, the basis of, you know, life and social progress, isn't like, you know,

to crush people into money, throw them into malls, gaping mall for a buck, you know? Yeah. We need to all become Gundam new types. That's clearly. But I do think like, for me, you know, some of the science fiction that has always kind of stood out to me is that kind of science fiction that i feel opened my mind to different possibilities that maybe i hadn't considered right and that's one of the reasons that like i absolutely adore ursula k lguin and yes you know always sam yard delaney as well totally yeah yeah and you know i i feel like again like everything in those stories are not perfect or anything like that but it's like i don't know i

hadn't considered that society could be this way or yeah it just i i think it it just helps you see things in a different light and i feel like even though for all mankind again like has its flaws and its faults like i feel like it's for all mankind again like has its flaws and its faults like i feel like it's another one of those kinds kind of science fictional stories that allows you to say wow what you know what if something else had happened and you know things things could be better than they are today and it's not because like the soviet union had to go to the moon first or whatever but like there are many other paths that history can take and it's like i don't know maybe it makes you or makes me feel that it's not it's not certain that like we're locked into this path that agreed seems to be so

dark right now agreed agreed i think that's really i think that's the point of science fiction right i mean like i mean science fiction does a lot of different things. I'm not claiming that it does this one thing, but I saw this tweet that really pissed me off. And the guy was like, what's an academic opinion that would have people just like, what are you talking about? And he said they think science fiction, actually, this is coming from someone who studies science fiction, apparently, and teaches it, or the history of science fiction, the historiography, I guess. I think I saw this tweet the other day. Yeah i got so fucking mad man like i got really bad like so mad that i was like okay let me not get banned again for like telling someone anyway right it's like you've been banned a lot of times yeah eight

times but it was like dude like science fiction is like has been a net negative right um for humanity because in paris you were talking about this earlier because it is inspired right all these the people that we were talking about and we're going to talk about it a little bit right but there's jeff bezos erin musk or all these ghouls it inspires them as we but the thing is is that one as we know they don't read this shit elon musk a couple weeks ago thought that blade runner was the name of the character right yeah i mean he thought it was rick decker's name was played under so we know that he doesn't read this shit and secondly science fiction especially like if we're talking about like new wave science fiction right and science fiction um that was created in science science fiction media that was created after the atomic age right and after we created

the means to destroy ourselves science fiction has always been a critique right a bad kind of science fiction has been a critique not just of new wave but of society you know we could even talk about could even talk about HG Wells, you know, and war of the worlds. That's a common used example. The fact that it was a criticism and exploration of the British empire. Right. I mean, as you said, Paris, I think that like shows like this in science fiction in general, I mean, it does, it's not necessarily about a future. It's about a visionary present as JG Ballard said, or, I mean, you know, if you want to look at William Gibson, right? This is a sentiment that he didn't exactly say, but it's attributed to him. The future is already here.

It's just unevenly distributed, you know? Absolutely. I think that's really well put. Someone in the chat, well, Michael says Silicon Valley based on the back cover of the classics of science fiction. That would be a really good Twitter account, yo. That's a really good Twitter account. I mean, every time I think about how Palantir is something Peter Thiel thought would be a great name for a company, right? Let's think about everything that Palantir represents. They read these stories and don't understand them.

And they see situations in which one person has a lot and they think, I'd like to be in that situation. Please let me recreate it. One of the crowning moments for me on Twitter was when William Gibson responded to a tweet from Web3's Going Just Great about a company named Wintermute.

There's a crypto company called Wintermute and he's like, they were completely missing the point of my story here. That's the torment nexus, you know. Even though I will say Willem Gibson, I love him, but he's a pretty big lib on Twitter, but that's fine, whatever.

It's like, he crazy, I mean, his whole cyberpunk is all about, you know, like, gotta fight the system, man, and be a hacker, man. And then, you know, I'm just like, oh, dude, like, this is some milquetoast shit, but I still love him, yo. It's very Gen X brained, right? love you it's very gen x brained right you know it's like someone anyone that has strong opinions about the star wars prequels and can nate tell you how betrayed they feel i i like i'm suspicious of your political acumen at that point i'm suspicious if you like starting i'm kidding i'm a trekking i know i get it like i i was originally a trekking and then there is something about the mythological fantasy arc of star wars that does inspire hope and like the idea that it's all like all of the good characters are a part of a

political rebellion i can see how you can get there right what do you mean hope you mean the fact that it's two different empires essentially essentially, that are constantly tuggling war and people. OK, so I'm also one of those people that are like, OK, Star Wars is great, but the Jedi did everything wrong and they deserved everything that happened to them. They should have just let Anakin take his mom. First of all, the cops. And also, don't they have that thing in them, Mitochlorian, that basically like it's race science.

It's what they do. They are practicing race science and they are slavers also and they are conscripting child soldiers they are teaching all those younglings we're learning how to fight that's what's fucked up come on somebody somebody said in the comments that andor is the only star wars uh property that they respect and i would agree that because of the class themes and andor again well they're class're class themes, but more like themes of fighting back and fascism and whatnot. You know, I did enjoy I did enjoy Andorra. They took the idea of an empire and a rebellion from that empire very seriously in that show, which is all that I want from Star Wars. Right. In Star Trek, a lot of these things have been resolved already.

So we have to go back to like the 27th century or whatever to see any kind of human strife and see any kind of struggle which i know makes early episodes of next generation like sometimes very confusing where they have to create conflict in a world where conflict no longer exists you mean like the episode where they went to the planet full of black people where they were basically like literally the fourth episode with the most racist thing i've ever seen. And I almost stopped watching after that. I was like, okay, I'm going to power through because I trust like Sir Patrick Stewart.

And I was, you know, I was, I was, when you get to season three, every single episode is a banger. Next generation. Like it really,

there's a Ronald D Moore came and he was like, I'm fucking all your shit up. The measure of a man is the measure of a man. So good. I mean, I don't want to get into Star Trek now, but everyone should check out Deep Space Nine and check out Far Beyond the Stars. If you want an amazing piece of Afrofuturist media, that episode is one of the finest 45 minutes of TV that I've ever seen.

It's so good. That one has moved me. It moved me very deeply. I love that. It's a beautiful episode and a fantastic series. I feel like we've just been a part of a social experiment about how long can you put four nerds in a room before they start arguing about Star Wars. To be fair, it only took like an hour and change

just because we had other topics. But if we did, we probably would have done it. We had to be pedantic about other things before we could be pedantic about Star Wars and Star Trek. You're forgetting that lightsabers are cool. They are cool. Yeah, that's the thing. It's a valid counter.

When I saw John Boyega light up that lightsaber, they hooked me in one last time. And I got got just like John Boyega did. So bad, yeah. That's serious. Oh, my God. I would say I was in Santiago just recently. And I was like walking around, you know, just on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday or whatever it was. And I walked by the park, and there were a bunch of dudes in the park having lightsaber battles.

And I was like, this is so beautiful. This is awesome. I don't even like Star Wars, but I'd be like, yo, can I get one, please? Yeah. Can I please participate? Drop everything to go join that. No, this is like straight up, though. This is another technological issue I do think about a lot.

When something about AI, you know, Ari mentioned this earlier, where AI is doing all the fun stuff that humans want to do and not all the unfun stuff that humans don't want to do, like our menial tasks for our boss. Well, I think about that too a lot in terms of we are constantly finding ways to turn our work activities into games instead of playing games, which is something I've become increasingly convinced is something human beings actually do need once in a while. You need to a game play is very fun imagination is very fun and i think it's mentally healthy to use your imagination and will make you more excited about the world it was absolutely yeah we should be going out into the park and having a lightsaber battle or pretending to be an elf like you should be playing dungeon dragons all these things make your life better yeah i want to be an elf with a lightsaber so yeah i want to be a space dog man yeah instead of erin's got his sci-fi novelist i have lightsaber we're all taking

notes right here can i tell you i need people to peer pressure me into actually doing this idea but i had an idea for a science fiction novel that i may write may not uh original idea don't steal the idea is that you read it and it reads like a hard fantasy like george rr martin type novel but it's actually about like uh silicon valley has broken itself off from california and turned into like a libertarian reddit island and they just reverted back to feudalism essentially essentially and i want to read it but do it in a way where it's like you don't like contextualize it in like a setting yet so like people find out wait this is like not like in the dark ages like this yeah yeah yeah i would like i feel like the reveal happens like three chapters before the end of the story and it comes and it's like somebody's last name is teal and like that's it and you're like wait a second wait a minute

i can't wait to have you back on the show to talk about this book once you get it out okay please like every day pre-pressure me about this i have how's the book going yeah yeah exactly yeah fantastic discussion. I will note voting on worst person in tech just closed. We are going to talk briefly about that. I'm going to see, I prepared some slides. Oh, look, it works. Okay. So, you know, let me see. So here it was our bracket. It'll be hard to see, I think, on the screen. Maybe it's easier if you make it a bigger, I don't know. Anyway, so it's been going on for a few days. We've narrowed it down from 32 ghouls to the final two, who are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Plenty of great contenders in here. It's very sad that many of them can't make it to the final two or just be winners, right? This is very clear i i was you know there were some really close battles like daniel ek and mark benioff really kind of neck and neck uh there's some tough matchups in there yeah totally i'm seeing how many of these names i recognize i'm like okay you know i'm impressed zazlav made it as far as he did but obviously he's going to lose to jeff bezos but he is like running the wb discovery like it is a tech company which means poorly and destroying it he's probably the figure

in there who's like most far away from being like a tech person you know much more in like the media industry than we consider tech but i was like people hate this dude from the strike and people know who he is so i know he's gonna do well and i was i was surprised he did as well as he did but i was also happy to see it you know well i'll say this is an epic matchup because here we have two gentlemen who want to enslave your children or grandchildren on mars you know i think this is you know i mean i think this is a pretty pretty fair. Well, one on Mars and the other one in floating space colonies. Yes. And he wants to turn Earth into basically a zoo, essentially.

An arcology from The Sims? I'm so angry about it. It's a SimCity idea. Come on! So before we go through the final and, and reveal the winner, I'm wondering from all of you, do you have a person, you know, we don't need to make it too long. Do you have a person who stands out as the worst person in tech this year for you? matchup because he personally said he was so happy when waypoint was shut down and he's still a fucking loser so yeah that's to you you suck yeah i only wish his uh impact wasn't so incredibly evil you know you talk about palantir and peter teal his company you know his current company andrew will which is you know the store, the flame of the West.

And he just sold, it was revealed, I think 404 revealed it actually, that the kind of plane drone to shoot down planes that he made was sold to the U.S. government. Sick. Great. Love it. I'll see you in hell. Molly, what about you? I personally was disappointed to see Mark Andresen

knocked out so early on. Tough matchup in the second round against Elon Musk, so I get it. But Mark Andresen, boy, I have a special place in my heart for that man, especially after the techno-optimist manifesto. That was truly something. I definitely want Humpty Dumpty to have a great fall.

Yeah. manifesto. That was truly something. I definitely want Humpty Dumpty to have a great fall. And no one put Humpty Dumpty back together again. That's a good one. I'm also hating on Marc Andreessen a lot this year. Aaron, do you have anyone who you want to call out? Not anyone on this list or anyone specifically, but we were talking about AI. We're talking about sort of replicating all of these social ills and all these, you know, injustices. And I've been seeing this ad on X. I hate that I'd like, I was going to call it Twitter. And then I don't know why I called it X fucking Twitter. But I've been seeing these ads.

I do it every now and then too. It's just like a slip up, right? It's like a frigging slip. But like, I've been seeing these ads, I don't know if you guys have seen them, about using AI to undress people. And whoever made that shit, I think we should put that guys have seen them, about using AI to undress people. And whoever made that shit, I think we should put that person in a medieval torture.

Oh, to undress. Yeah, to undress people. I misread you. I was like, to undress people? What does that mean? To do something that's a little modest. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

But yeah. To ruin a concert. Whoever's using AI to perpetuate shit like that, like a really creepy, disgusting, just to mean a complete sort of removal of any privacy or respect for anybody that person as i said needs to be put in a medieval torture device and probably sent to the mariana trench anyone doing any shit like that with ai it's already bad enough don't make it worse you know what i mean don't make it any fucking worse just be cool guys yeah just be cool man cool, man. Why can't we all just embrace that as sort of a motto?

Just be cool. Just be cool. I could not agree more. And I'm sure everyone listening agrees as well. So let's get into this. We have our final two. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk came down to the Rocketman. They're both trying to blast off their penis rockets to try to show off to the world.

Everyone hates them both, or most people do. You know, on the one hand, you have a cult that's still behind Elon Musk that really loves everything he's at. On the other hand, you have these effective accelerationists who they are kind of, you know, profit. You know, use the pseudonym Beth Jezos because, you know, they, they just love this guy so much. You know, I would say going back to what we were saying earlier about the ketamine and Elon Musk, you know,

looking like shit. And I got to say one kudos to Jeff Bezos is like, dude is ripped and seems to be having like a great time. You know, I will give him props for loving life, but I understand, like, I just don't understand what kind of swag he has that he's scoring so much. Yeah, I don't get it either.

Also, too, I just like, you know, I mean, no shame to anyone who's, you know, I've been losing my hair, actually. It just started growing back this year. But, you know, you think he had all that money, man, and he can't, like, not even get a toupee or put something on he looks relatively better than elon mux elon mux looks like a beached uh a beached uh cetacean you know so yeah i think elon's you know two hair hair transplants are even kind of showing at this point like he needs a third i think you know i have to say though i am skeptical of the idea that any of these people are actually loving life and having a good time i feel like most of these people are actually deeply deeply miserable elon in particular but i i sort of wonder how how happy any of them really are no i feel like they hate everyone

i feel like jeff is living life and to show that we need to go through you know i figured you know as a final right like these beauty pageants where people need to go through a series of like contests and stuff i feel i felt we need to put our finalists through some contests to see who was going to win right and so we started with um swimsuit jump scare man no jeff is so built what the hell he looks the hell? He looks like barrel chest Superman the way they used to draw him. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. I don't exactly like him. He's a triangle. Yeah, yeah. Acting comics number one. Yeah. But, you know, I think it shows

Jeff is doing well in comparison to Elon. Elon's struggling here. it was these photos that got him to try ozempic right he looks like like like oh you bought chicken in the package it is raw fucking cutlet like yeah he looks like a chicken raw chicken cutlet and all these are some shit are whole foods man come on just to me like being unless you're charlize theron literally being a white south afric African is just the most ridiculous. It's the bottom of the.

Especially like a beach whale, man. Yeah. Yeah. Now we move from the swimsuit competition to the costume contest. So I think that this is I think Jeff Bezos is is a grape uh in this in this photo what is he supposed to be is that a plum or maybe it's a plum it's apple it seems like a fruit of some kind but i'm not sure which one it really looks like a struggle costume but you know what that's's what Halloween's for. It's Bob's ride. Yet again, Elon Musk loses for going on SNL

to perform as a meme that is my friend making fun of him. Wait, is that what he's doing? Yeah, he's doing the Arbo Italian Elon Musk. That's exactly what the mustache that he had. Anyway. It's horrible. It's horrible. i would say bezos wins this one

oh yeah bezos racking him up for the novelty of the costume yeah of course yeah it's like you know it's original i would wear his costume for sure i feel like i've seen like a williamsburg hipster wear that costume on halloween i've seen like feel like i've seen somebody wear that in starbucks you know yeah yeah just styling like that yeah exactly now we move from back into style yeah i have actually those look like the glasses i have so that's why i'm partial now we move from the costume contest through to the eating contest of course oh my god what is that he looks like he's about to swallow a sword or like maybe like or maybe like a shish kebab with potato chips like i can't tell just viscerally upset by it can he do anything like a normal man

or it might be a freeze frame of him vomiting i'm not sure it's either going in or it's coming out. We don't know which. It's really linear, yes. Jeff Bezos, I can say again, man, this man is eating a fucking iguana, man, and a spider. That's pretty adventurous, brother. He's eating all of these things so sensually also. Like, look at the lust in his eyes.

That's true. What's happening in that bottom one on the left? Oh my God. He's just kissing it a little bit. Yeah, he looks like he's rubbing it on his lips while he listens to someone talk to him this is his game that's how he gets those women so i'm going to see one of my distant relatives yeah yeah it's it's uh bezos eating an iguana a cockro, and a tarantula. And Elon Musk is sticking a potato spiral, I believe that's called, into his mouth in a very, very awkward way.

A white South African having to interact with the American Midwest. This is what happens. It's like when those politicians go do the Iowa caucus and stuff and just make a total fool out of themselves they're like i'm also human you know yeah and romney in a grocery store absolutely yeah i think he ran to santas just like yeah he's not an alien in a human suit he tries so hard and he just fails constantly smile yeah now we move from the um eating contest through to the space battle uh you know where we have jeff bezos who has you know grazed the edge i guess he's he's kind of gone up there and come down it's not a suborbital flight not technically yeah you know wearing his cowboy hat uh popping a champagne bottle elon musk sitting like an excited little little little kid has he will not go up no he won't okay

so again basil has to win this like dude you create listen at least like people love to compare him again to tony stark or all these like the comic book industrialists but like tony stark is iron man he puts on the suit and goes around and saves the world and he flies around yeah like can't even i mean it's like i wonder how much he'd be like he says that he's um going to uh be a human trial of his a neural link you know but i don't fucking god i hope so i hope so i mean you know what man you should go ahead like let me see um you know how quickly that kills you i think basis loses points for the cowboy hat that was a pretty awkward moment but i do think you should have had a cowboy hat versus cowboy hat matchup because that one of elon wearing that huge cowboy hat when he went

to like the mexican border or something like that and wearing it backwards and wearing it when he went to go play i didn't wear like i don't even know you can wear cowboy hats backwards bro maybe like well if you wear a baseball cap backwards, it's cooler. So if I wear a cowboy hat. That feels like an Elon Musk thought pattern, you know. It really does. So these are our two finalists, you know, some of the richest men, some of the most powerful men in the world came down to these two. I'll remember people last

year came down to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And Thiel took it by a very, very slim margin of, I think it was like a few votes at the end. Now I will say, I've seen the results. I'm about to tell you what they are. You will not be surprised to hear, I think, that the results are much more definitive this time around, given the contenders and given the past year. So our winner of Worst Person in Tech 2023 is none other than Elon Musk. Yep. There he is. Got it. He had 84.1% of the votes compared to 15.9% for Jeff Bezos. So it really kind of blew him out of the water. We only wish that we could give Elon Musk a one-way ticket to the sun so we could never hear from him again. Once again, he can be the test subject for his ventures.

Yeah. As he should be. He should be the monkey getting the Neuralink. Optimistic science fiction. Neil Stevenson writes him dying in space in the 70s. And I just wish that would come true. Nice. Yeah.

He's like a much more empathetic, thinking, feeling human being in Neil Stevenson's novel. And I wish that he would die for the rest of us. That would be I don't like cheering on death, but I will celebrate his. What I'll say is that, look, I'll put it this way, is that I think it's perfect 31 for this year because it's not just, you know, Twitter and takeover of X, which I think for a lot of people, you know, that definitely pissed them off. But I think that his increasingly I don't even say incendiary. He's a fascist. Right. He's increasingly fascistic, transphobic, racist. I mean, straight up great replacement theory shit. We're talking about like, you know what I mean? We're talking about like Turner Diaries type of shit, you know, like, I mean, I think that he is emblematic of the dark, and I don't want to be pessimistic,

but this really dark tech dystopia that's also kind of mingled in with nationalism and racism and xenophobia that is barreling towards it. So I don't, again, I think that, I think Paris that you're saying that, you know, we're talking about mankind and talking about alternatives, you know? And I think that's important to remember that. But I can totally understand why Elon Musk wants as a barrier to that alternative world that we would hope for.

Totally. And I think, you know, to pick up on what you're saying there, I think it does show us the past year in particular, why all of the praise that was heaped on him for so long was such a mistake, right? And has really put us in this position where now we are having to try to reckon with the beast, the monster that we have created, right? We not only have this man who, you know, was positioned as the future and whatever he said was the future was supposed to be our collective future and governments and, and you know investors and all that stuff rallied around it and tried to make it happen but now we have this guy who really controls key infrastructures in our lives that have been privatized that have been given over by governments to him you know rocket launches a lot of governments now and a lot of companies are just stuck with SpaceX because there's really no reasonable alternative to what they can do.

And that gives him immense power, right? Even the EU, which is trying to develop their own alternative, it just had to push it back even further. Starlink, of course, this internet satellite communications system that now not only allows Elon Musk to choose where it's going to be rolled out, where it's going to be used. We saw that most notably in Ukraine, where he turned it off near Crimea and in eastern Ukraine after speaking to Russian officials. And more recently, when he suggested that maybe humanitarian organizations in Gaza could get access and then immediately had that shut down by the Israeli government after,

you know, he was accused of antisemitism, right? Rightfully so, let's be clear. But again, you know, this is a Zionist government deciding whether the people they are oppressing should have access to internet services and Elon Musk allowing that to happen. And then of course, what we see closer to home, where there's this attempt to make this transition toward electric vehicles. We can debate whether that's the total right policy, but Elon Musk does control the dominant electric vehicle charging infrastructure. And now you have all of these other automakers that are announcing they are going to adopt Elon Musk's standard, which is going to give him even more power over all of this. And so I think it sets us up. Like, I think it shows us

that this man, even as he's being radicalized, even as he's going further to the far right, even as he's embracing transphobia, racism, antisemitism, all these sorts of things, he has an immense amount of power and will not be dislodged easily. And our governments have set us up in this way where there's this immense risk that they've now created for us. And I think we are going to have to figure out how we address that problem, not just with all these other tech billionaires, which is even more, but even just with Elon Musk specifically. And I think that that's a real threat and something to really be concerned about. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I just, I just want to add to that. I mean, like everything Manuel said, and I just want to add, it's like, you know, I was thinking of like figures like, um, like a Henry Ford or Howard Hughes, you know, and I mean, I'm not saying that these industrialists were, I'm not, you know, I'm not subscribing to great man theory, right. But like, you know, I feel like Elon Musk, like very much looks at himself in that vein. I don't know if that was those specific figures. Right? But this idea that, as you said, Paris, like, you know,

there are governments that are colluding with him, right? And that are letting him, that are using his technology and sort of, he has this pivotal role, not just in technology, but politics, you know, in shaping political discourse. I mean, there's just like, that's way too much power in the hands of one sociopath, right? A hundred percent.

Yeah, for me it's enough if he is like completely taken over and especially like essentially de facto privatized america's like outer space industry like a rocket building etc etc that's really disturbing that's and that's one industry that he's been incredibly destructive to but to think about all the innovation going on in electric cars, which is just something that's really necessary, like 100% necessary for us to continue to use cars, which debatable for necessary for our future.

But, you know, I'm not a big car fan, but like, that's obviously the move, the wave that's going on. You know, he's in charge of that also. And then he took control of what is genuinely a major information and communications hub, which is Twitter. It's not like, not everyone is on Twitter,

but a lot of very specific groupings of people are on Twitter. People that control the flow of news and information. And that's why he wanted it because he wanted to be in control of that. And he is like one ketamine addicted loser. And that's so terrifying. Like the ketamine stuff is funny, but it is also terrifying, right? He is so similar in mood and attitude and temperament to kanye west and we are not letting kanye be in be in charge

of anything right exactly exactly exactly we shouldn't let this guy you know it's it's so right and you know i was thinking too um i mean this is probably the the least i mean i wouldn't say this is the least detrimental thing not to astronomers right but like even the fact that like his technology is having like a visible impact right like with these three the starlink satellites there have been um complaints right by astronomers because like he's like blocking out like the night sky right these satellites are actually like yeah somebody yeah we're polluting the night sky like we we're seeing these trails and stuff. And I mean, I know that's like, you know, there's there's examples of the slave labor, right, being used to for batteries, for electric car batteries. Extreme racism in every Tesla factory. especially where I live, right? Because I live where I live in Atlanta, like there's less light pollution. I don't want to have to look up at that or anyone to have to look up at that

and have like this blemish, right? Like this man who is a true blight, right? On humanity to also have that in space, right? In like the natural world and environment. I mean, it's just, I don't know. It just feels indicative, right? Of like, wow, this man is like blotting out the stars, you know?

That seems like metaphorical, right? If that was in a science fiction story, I'd'd be like that's a bit too on the nose part of me part of me does want kessler syndrome to happen where you know the satellites collide and then creates all this space junk so that gravity situation go up yeah yeah exactly just to like kill spacex and his like plan so we can focus on Earth and not have to really talk about space so much. Well, I mean, like, you know, I think that in order for them to keep up making these satellites, like they're going to have to keep making more of them. And I mean, at one point, at some point, it's not it's just not due to Elon Musk. Right. There are a lot of telecommunications. I mean, this is how we use this is how we're doing this right now.

But we might get to a point where we might not even be able to like safely leave orbit. You know what I mean? Because there's so much shit up there and um yeah this is a guy facilitating that you know and adding to that problem among the other um dystopian fascist things that he's doing any thoughts molly yeah i was just thinking like i i really wonder how things are going to end when it comes to elon musk like there is some end to the Elon Musk story. And I'm curious if it will be, you know, people realizing that this one man is in charge of far too many things and forcing some sort of, you know, breakdown or breakup of his power system. That seems very optimistic on my part that that would actually come to pass. The other alternative is like, we keep seeing these like mini spirals where Elon is just like spiraling out of control. And every time I'm like,

is this the one, you know, is this the one where he finally completely disintegrates and, you know, everything falls apart and it never is, but they're getting weirder and weirder and worse and worse. And so I'm just really curious, like what the final Elon spiral is going to be. And also what the out, you know, what the sort of external effects of that will be because they're, they're very weird, but so far they've been like relatively harmless.

It's just like watching him have these little breakdowns. And I'm sort of curious, you know, ultimately what will be the end of Elon Musk? Yeah. With yay. The antisemitism was enough, right? Where that's the only model of like kanye i think about david and i talk about this way too much but we were big music fans in a certain era where kanye west was extremely popular

so many of these songs soundtrack many of my memories and yay was like inescapable in the world of entertainment in a very similar way, but it was divorcing Kim. And then the anti-Semitism stuff. And that was enough for people to drop him. But I guess you can see the gulf in power between the world of celebrity and the world of tech here. Right. Yeah. Where it's just,

it seems like every time Elon does something that's like totally, completely beyond the pale,'m like yes this is going to be it and then it's like oh no that wasn't that people didn't even blink when he did that yeah i feel like i feel like the big difference is that with yay there were not as many people who were like financially dependent on this continuation whereas with elon musk there's so many people invested in Tesla, which is highly overvalued right now. SpaceX, these other companies that if Elon Musk goes down, all of their investments are going with it. And that's why even though they can see the problems,

they're trying to keep him propped up as long as they can. Adidas and Balenciaga are already luxury brands. that have a long history and they just don't need kanye but all these companies are built around the idea that elon musk is a genius and he's the only person who can run them well i mean it's like it's okay if like henry ford is a little bit anti-semitic right like we don't really care about that right we care about like his money and his infrastructure what he's able to do for the american i mean all of this bullshit so i mean like yeah he's just too tied in to like the tech world and also politics right yeah it's like the too big to fail of the human world you know he's he's too scary we gotta be like uh the little davids with our with our slingshots you know and you know take down this goliath you know what i mean that's what we gotta do i love it i love it um know, we're going to start wrapping up.

I'm wondering, you know, we talked about what was the biggest thing that, you know, really stood out to you in 2023. I wonder quickly, you know, we're heading into 2024. Obviously, these people are not going anywhere, nor is this industry. What are you looking for? What are you kind of watching into the next year into the next year as we uh head into it i'll go first because mine is just like you know just not uh it's not anything much but um as i said mentioned before we're supposed to go back to the moon in 2025

so um you know this year i'm just sort of excited to see what sort of um space programs whether it's the chinese space program with this india space program whether it's the Chinese space program, whether it's India space program, whether it's NASA, right? What they're going to do. And I mean, you know, the anti-capitalist in me, you know, is obviously very wary of the private space industry.

But I mean, there are some pretty cool things going on in the private space industry, right? So I'm just kind of excited for, I guess to be pessimistic, but I'm excited for all of my dreams about space colonization, all these dreams that I know aren't going to be true to be shattered.

No, I'm kidding. To just see what what little steps we're going to take. You know what I mean? I'm kind of excited about that for space news. Molly? Yeah, I'll go. I'm really interested to everything sort of getting worse on Facebook and all that. You know, there are all these new social media places, some of which are federated, some of which are really experimental. And everyone's in like a different place or several places and i'm curious whether 2024 will be more of like a re-congealing of social media or if something new will come out onto the field or if people will decide that maybe social media doesn't matter that much and they'll go do something else i don't know what's gonna happen finally yeah right yeah i think no one's touching grass and everyone's just watching

molly white on tiktok well that's acceptable that's more than me yeah you can go watch me touch grass on tiktok yeah touch grass while watching molly on tiktok touch grass with your dog and we'll all be into that there you go that's true atlas is really the star of the show yeah um but yeah i'm really curious where that's gonna go because i feel like social media we all like to dunk on it we all like to rag it. We all like to talk about how social media is like the worst thing that's ever happened. But I also think there's a lot of good that comes out of social media and a lot of value in social media. And so watching how that develops and, you know, seeing the unseating of one of the more powerful social media brands in Twitter and what has

been happening to it under Musk's control, I think sort of has created a gap in the space. And I would love to see something good fill that gap and not something that's sort of corrosive in the way that Twitter sort of became and certainly has become these days. So I think that'll be really interesting. And then, you know, from my own perspective and what I like to focus on, i'm also watching the crypto world really closely obviously uh people are already celebrating the next bull run because bitcoin prices are up a little bit and it's weird to watch i don't know sorry i just feel like they have just memories of goldfish you know what i mean like i don't understand like well it's been really weird to watch people go from like full-on crypto winter sort of despondence to the, it's like,

they've just gone from like zero to 60 on now. It's like the euphoria that we were seeing at the like highs of 2021. And I got told to have fun staying poor. And I was like, Oh my God, it's back. I got a tweet the other day that there's been a big ape heist. And I was like, Oh my God, 2021. All our top tier apes are gone. What's going on about apes jesus christ yeah yeah the apes are still around so yeah i'm really curious to watch what's going to happen in the crypto world because people are

forecasting this huge bull run and if it does happen that's going to be fascinating if it doesn't happen that is also going to be fascinating so like i'm here for the ride either way yeah me i'm gita i'm always thinking about things but uh for me i'm you're always gita and we can rely on that yeah man um i'm thinking about the fallout of the two strikes the entertainment industry and the upcoming renegotiation contract negotiation for animation workers and for casting and for crew workers that are coming up in the next couple of years it's a union yeah yeah animation i think is upcoming very soon so animation the workers i've spoken to in animation have all told me that a lot of the horrible things that have happened in writing and acting in Hollywood happened to them first. And their protections are a lot weaker in their contract.

So this might actually be a pretty rough struggle, especially considering, you know, there's only a few studios that in America where that really employ animation workers and give them careers. And we're talking about like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. And one of those two studios is a WB Discovery property. And it's, I'm very, very curious about what is going to happen and what that means to the American animation industry, especially in a time where a Miyazaki movie can beat a new Disney film in the box office. We have entered the global village in a way where it just happened where I wasn't even paying attention. But now people just have no qualms about Godzilla minus one. They were going to have a one week runtime in America and now it's

out indefinitely in theaters, which is absolutely wild. People are more into it than the previous Marvel movie. So what is going to happen in the entertainment industry? How is it going to be revolutionized by people like David Zaslav running these companies, not like they are like shepherds of art, but ruthless CEOs of a tech company that has a tech product? And I think it will be as big of a change in how we consume entertainment and how it's made as streaming was in terms of how every episode the new girl all the seasons have 24 episodes can you remember the last time you watched a 24 episode television show star trek star trek was it like half of the season would be would be garbage and the other half would be some of the most

amazing shit i've ever seen and now it's like somebody had mentioned discovery which i have to say discovery um did a little bit hagiography of musk and that aged very very poorly but i mean they're like 10 episodes a season i mean it's like you know i it's it's instantly forgettable so yeah i'm interested in in that sort of um and that as well dita yeah you know it's the strike really made clear how poor the labor protections are for writers. And why that like many shows that you say everyone says like are bad, like why they are so bad, because they don't have real writers rooms anymore, because you can't make a career in this industry anymore. And even if you do, you're no longer writing until something gets into put into syndication and you can't get residuals from being played on television because of the streaming model. It was so fascinating to see Netflix actually release numbers with a whole bunch of caveats, right? Like we still can't trust them because we don't have the raw data. But it's fascinating to see that actually begin to happen as viewers realize also that they're being cheated in some way. You know, I think the stuff with people being really, really mad

that Looney Tunes episodes are leaving WB Discovery, it helps people understand exactly how much control that they have over what we consume and what we use in our entertainment, in our leisure time, and how little control we have. One thing I have to say about that also is my colleague Luke Plunkett over at Astromath

wrote a great blog called There Is No Piracy Without Ownership. So just think about that. Definitely. About what ownership means and what it means to steal. Yeah. Yeah. And also to, you know, like physical media, man.

I've been more of a kind of proponent of acquiring physical media. Like I was talking about Serial Experiments Lane. I want to get the D of the blu-ray i mean just because like at the end of the day you know these uh these media conglomerates they unfortunately they own right this media and they can decide if they want to just take it off their streaming platform or whether they want to like you know yeah so i mean i would tell people like or there's someone you know someone had the pirate flag in there you know and we have the skull and bones you know if you're uh feeling adventurous too you know that's another route get a vpn it's easy uh you know these days you know it it happens in so-called low culture before it happens anywhere else i think that's

why you see uh animation workers so nervous about what's going to happen in the next contract negotiation they're a lot of them are kind of ready to strike already they don't feel like negotiations are going to go well based on previous years. But also, you know, the idea that entertainment is leased to you until it is removed from your device. PT for Sony and Konami, right? That was a game made by an author, like game director, Hideo Kojima, a demo for a game.

And when Kojima got fired, they physically, like they removed the program that was downloaded off of people's devices. That's something that can happen to any digital piece of media that you have at any point in time. You don't own those things. You're leasing them, even if you paid for them in some cases. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I feel like we've seen so many of those types of stories over the years of people thinking that they own something because they bought something digital and then it gets pulled back. I bought the 4k Lord of the Rings blu-rays recently because I was like, I want to see them

in the best quality. Right. I would say my two things that I'll be watching into next year, one of them kind of, actually, I think they both kind of relate to what we've been talking about. And the first is Starlink. There has been talk that Starlink might be going public in 2024, being carved off from SpaceX and being floated on public markets. I think that could be quite significant. And I think the other thing with Starlink is that we're seeing that the company has plans to start offering mobile phone service, not just satellite internet service. And I think that could be incredibly disruptive and concerning when you have them competing against national telecom companies, but are operating on a global level. And so I'm quite concerned about what that is going to mean.

And there was just a story the other day that they had approval to move forward with tests on it. So I think that is something that should be stopped in its tracks before it goes anywhere. The other thing I'll be watching is data centers. I feel like one thing that the AI hype boom has brought into people's attention is that all of this computing, everything that we do online, all these AI tools require power, right? The computers are somewhere. It's not just in some magical cloud. They're in these data centers that get built around the world. And as we move toward these AI tools becoming more and more common, it requires more and more computing power in order to operate these things. And that means more data centers need to be built in more places. And that means more resources, more energy,

more computing parts that need to go into it, places. And that means more resources, more energy, more computing parts that need to go into it, more mining to fuel all those things. And I think that we're slowly seeing greater opposition to these data centers. Some of it's been happening for a while, but it's growing. And I think it does offer us, on the one hand, I'm interested in where that opposition is happening and why. But on the other, I think it does give us the opportunity to have a kind of conversation around how much computing power we actually need. You know, what actually makes sense?

Should we be allowing these companies that are incentivized to get us to use greater computing power because it works for their business models to really be driving the direction of computation and of technology, really. So those are things that I'm going to be quite interested in watching and paying attention to going forward. That's a really good point about the data centers, man, because I know I'd mentioned

it briefly before, but I guess it's a speculative element. But, you know, I was like, we don't have any more room on Earth, right? We need space on Earth to build these data centers. Like, where next are they going to go, right? And there's already enough junk up there so it's just like again i mean if we're talking about like uh you know things are finite right and you know we i mean this is why you know i think this is why we're all here and why you do the show as well and while we all do what we do um these resources need to be managed in a collective more equitable way you know and i think like you can even say

that about data, which we see as like limitless, right? We see something with no end, right? So yeah. Yeah. Now I thank all of you for coming on our end of your show, for talking about the big things of the year, for talking about the sci-fi futures, for telling us what you'll be watching in the next year. And of course, for going through the worst person in tech with us all. Now, I would say I have one more thing to let the listeners know about before we close. And it's kind of funny that we ended up talking a lot about Joanne's book at the beginning of the show, because we're doing a year end giveaway where, you know, those of you who are already Patreon supporters, you can get in on this year-end giveaway. No problem. I'll be

putting information on how to do that on Patreon probably tonight or tomorrow. I'd say more likely tomorrow. But if you are not currently a Patreon supporter, and I guess this is more for the people who'd be listening on the audio feed, if you join up to support the show by December 31st, then you'll be entered for a chance to win one of five copies of Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way or five copies of my book, Road to Nowhere. And they will, of course, be signed by the authors. So just a fun little perk for the end of the year, fun little contest for you to get in on where maybe you can get a copy of one of these books just for supporting the show and the work that goes into making it happen. So thanks to, you know, everyone watching.

Thanks to all the listeners on the main feed for supporting the show, for listening, for making it possible to do all this. And of course, thank you so much to Aaron. Thanks to Molly and to Gita. Thanks to all three of you for coming on our end of year live stream to discuss all of this with us. It's been a blast. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It was really fun. It was nice talking to you guys. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you so much for having me. I love being on. Absolutely. All right. See you, everybody.

Bye, y'all. Bye. Gita Jackson is a co-founder of Aftermath. Molly White is the creator of Web3 is Going Just Great. And Aaron Thorpe is a co-host of Everybody Loves Communism. Tech Won't Save Us is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.