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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Whether or not you believe the more bombastic claims of AI CEO's, I do think it's clear that at minimum AI is going to exacerbate the trend of technology centralizing power, wealth and status, even as absolute material standards have continued to improve beyond the wildest dreams of 99.9% of humanity in the past. For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.

The root of this is not entirely unjustified, although I won't contend envy is not some part of it.

Before the industrial revolution, power and population were strongly correlated: if you want to be powerful, you need people on your side, and a lot of them. Even if "on your side" means a not-particularly-reciprocated relationship of "I sit here in my castle and you plow the fields", at least the peasant is necessary to plow the fields. You can't just kill him (or at least, not all of him), or the field goes unplowed, and you starve.

With the advent of industrial and especially computer technology, this balance is upset. You really can just kill all the peasants and have the field plow itself. Now, is this done? No, or at least, not yet. But it's partly because it's not yet entirely practical. You can buy a really nice nuclear bunker for a few billion in 2026, but nonetheless, post-kaboom, it's still just a relic of a prior era and you're on a limited, non-renewable supply of luxuries with minimal ability to bootstrap yourself and your buddies back up to industrial civilisation on timescales relevant to your personal comfort. Thus, it's more comfortable for now to not kill everybody.

But that's just a technology problem, too. In the foreseeable future, it may indeed be feasible to build a full, self-sustaining, closed loop of industrial production (ie, sufficiently advanced bots that they are capable of maintaining the infrastructure of their own production, together with being able to do agriculture for you). Once you have this, yeah, you really can just exterminate billions of plebes and suffer no long-term decline in quality of life.

So, basically, industrial production still depends on the labour of large numberse of plebeians--too many to keep alive with you in a bunker, so they must be kept alive for now.

The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.

So where does this leave us? Well, the Butlerian Jihad, obviously (fun fact: the "Butler" in "Butlerian Jihad" is this guy, who wrote this cute little letter, which you should read at your leisure).

The plebeians, daft may they be at times, are not entirely unaware of the dynamics at play here. Everybody has seen Kingsman, they know how this works. "Automate everything" is brought in under the guise of "but it will make everyone comfy and bring in an Age of Abundance!", with a Thatcher-esque dismissal of "but who controls all these bots?" as unjustified envy of the rich. But the reality is once the plebes are not necessary, the people in control of the bot swarm sooner or later will decide maybe keeping this unproductive Disney World alive isn't actually worth the trouble, and just decide to pull the plug.

I'm not saying this kind of scenario is impossible, but consider that there are large groups of people in the United States who are already candidates for the genocide you are proposing. And kind of the opposite is happening.

So I think the scenario you propose is unlikely. It's true that people want power, material abundance, etc. But people also crave social status. And you get a lot of social status out of making a show of benevolence to these unnecessary plebes as you term them.

I think it’s actually very likely. There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them, particularly people who do nothing to benefit those paying for it. Keep in mind that this scenario would entail the majority of the population, and those with the money to pay for it also have the power to murder the population in Disneyland who are a drain with no benefit. They are essentially pets. But no one will spend billions on the pets. Elon Musk isn’t the insane cat lady who’s going to keep 500 bums in his mansion.

There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them,

I strongly disagree. There is a huge system in place to distribute jobs, money, social status, and so on to so-called "historically underrepresented groups."

There aren’t any examples of people building “Disneyland” for people unrelated to them, particularly people who do nothing to benefit those paying for it.

You are aware of the sums being spent on the homeless in West Coast cities, right?

Is that why they all sleep in the overpasses?

I'm not sure what the contradiction is.

There's a political ideology that's good at rallying moralistic middle-aged women, teachers, doctors, officials, NGOdom... They do the caring for the homeless.

But is that ideology strong with tech billionaires or high-ranking military/intelligence spooks? Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.

An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists, that seems to produce leftism we recognize today, just like a system that requires a bunch of professional heavy cavalry leans towards martial valour and manly vigour...

But take away that economic system and replace it with robots, we'd see something quite different surely?

Billionaires and spooks are the ones to worry about with AI takeover, they have their hands on the buttons.

I'm informed that they already have their hands on the buttons. Certainly the middle aged women are not the ones with their fingers on the buttons.

An economic system that produces and requires a bunch of middle-aged women in office jobs, a bunch of teachers and bureaucrats and officials and journalists

In what sense are they required?

In what sense are they required?

Well the system we have has this kind of 'harmony' in that it evolves to meet the needs of the economy and the economy evolves to meet the needs of the system. Managerial state, managerial culture, niceness and rule-abiding, cancellation of dissidents because some middle-aged woman decided you shouldn't have a bank account or legal representation or whatever. And the economy gets altered by the system, so we get lots of pensions and healthcare spending and no nuclear energy. There sure are a lot of tensions and conflicts going on, 'contradictions' in Marxist terms, but the basic system remains intact.

My point is that rugpulling the economic base will rugpull the ideology too.

My point is that rugpulling the economic base will rugpull the ideology too.

Maybe to some extent. But we've had a variety of economic systems, few of which involved AWFLs cancelling people, and I'd say about (although not exactly) zero of them involved simply killing the "useless eaters". It would seem that people are generally averse to just killing large classes of people, even if they don't like them.

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