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Artifice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (The American Prospect)
https://prospect.org/2025/12/09/artifice-age-of-artificial-intelligence-silverman-morris-review/-snip-
Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley is a wide-ranging chronicle of how the politics of Silicon Valley curdled into reactionary Trumpism, exposing authoritarian impulses that were lurking there all along. David Z. Morris’s Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia explores the saga of the imprisoned con man and aspiring political influencer to demonstrate that the bankruptcy of his fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange is matched only by the emptiness of the philosophy that shaped him.
-snip-
A FEW DAYS BEFORE TRUMP WAS SWORN IN for a second term—assisted by an astonishing volume of crypto industry cash—The New York Times published an interview with billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He was fuming about what he called “the Deal, with a capital D,” though this deal was not the kind that Silicon Valley VCs were obsessed with. “Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood,” Andreessen said. Under the terms of this unwritten agreement, Silverman writes, “Tech guys would innovate, build cool stuff, and get rich. They’d pay some of it back via foundations and philanthropic work and, sure, the minimum legally required tax payment. The government and regulatory state would cheer from the sidelines and clear the runway for takeoff.”
-snip-
More fundamentally, though, to understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard to themselves because, quite simply, they believe that they deserve a different set of rules and expectations. Such an entitlement mentality might justify, say, stealing all of humanity’s creative endeavors to feed large language models. It would certainly justify spinning up disingenuous narratives about hypothetical threats, if such stories happened to serve their interests.
-snip-
Today’s tech billionaires do not treasure humanity but instead see human beings as treasure, as generators of data and money, as resources to be manipulated and commodified and plundered. The stories they tell may be amorphous and illusory. Their project is not. They are counting on our indifference.
-snip-
Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley is a wide-ranging chronicle of how the politics of Silicon Valley curdled into reactionary Trumpism, exposing authoritarian impulses that were lurking there all along. David Z. Morris’s Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia explores the saga of the imprisoned con man and aspiring political influencer to demonstrate that the bankruptcy of his fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange is matched only by the emptiness of the philosophy that shaped him.
-snip-
A FEW DAYS BEFORE TRUMP WAS SWORN IN for a second term—assisted by an astonishing volume of crypto industry cash—The New York Times published an interview with billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. He was fuming about what he called “the Deal, with a capital D,” though this deal was not the kind that Silicon Valley VCs were obsessed with. “Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood,” Andreessen said. Under the terms of this unwritten agreement, Silverman writes, “Tech guys would innovate, build cool stuff, and get rich. They’d pay some of it back via foundations and philanthropic work and, sure, the minimum legally required tax payment. The government and regulatory state would cheer from the sidelines and clear the runway for takeoff.”
-snip-
More fundamentally, though, to understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard to themselves because, quite simply, they believe that they deserve a different set of rules and expectations. Such an entitlement mentality might justify, say, stealing all of humanity’s creative endeavors to feed large language models. It would certainly justify spinning up disingenuous narratives about hypothetical threats, if such stories happened to serve their interests.
-snip-
Today’s tech billionaires do not treasure humanity but instead see human beings as treasure, as generators of data and money, as resources to be manipulated and commodified and plundered. The stories they tell may be amorphous and illusory. Their project is not. They are counting on our indifference.
-snip-
More at the link. No paywall.
Very strong warning to Democrats that "only total capitulation will placate" Big Tech executives.