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domain:themotte.org

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

The thing no one seems to be talking about with respect to AI is how the underlying economics of it all are so mind-numbingly bad that a crash is inevitable. I have no idea when this crash is going to happen, but if I had to fathom a guess it will be some time within the next five years. We're talking about a technology that has already burned at least half a trillion dollars and has plans to burn another half trillion with no model for profitability in sight. There's only so long that the flow of venture capital will keep coming before the investors start expecting some kind of return. Add in the fact that Nvidia currently represents about 8% of the total value of the S&P 500 based on sales of graphics cards to a single, unprofitable company, and the economic picture looks even more dire.

I think that the underlying problem is that they're trying to run an enshittification model on an industry where the path has typically been the exact opposite. Look at computers themselves. When computers were first invented, they were limited to institutional uses by governments and large universities, and were subsidized through R&D budgets that weren't relying on profitability, i.e. as a present expense rather than a credit against future earnings. Then large corporations started using them. When personal computers were developed in the late 1970s, they were mostly used by businesses, and in the consumer market they were expensive machines for the tech-horny. As costs came down, more and more households began using them, and by the time they became ubiquitous at the end of the 20th century it had been 50 years since their invention, and they still weren't exactly cheap.

Now imagine an alternate timeline where IBM decides in the 1950s to build several large computers in cities all across the country, enough that they can let every Tom, Dick, and Harry run whatever programs they want for free, all the way down to middle schoolers doing their math homework, with minimal wait time. And of course they're offering on-site programmers so that you don't actually need to know anything about computers to be able to take advantage of them, and they're convinced that after doing this for years people will be so enamored that they'll eventually start paying for the privilege. You'd have been laughed out of the board room for making such a suggestion, yet this is roughly the state of the AI business model.

AI cheerleaders will point to other tech companies that lost tons of money in their early years, only to later become behemoths. Uber is often cited as an example, as they spent more than a decade losing money before becoming profitable. But there are two big differences with Uber. The first is that they were actually responding to a market need. Outside of a select few cities like New York and Las Vegas, taxi service in America was at best, inconvenient, and at worst, nonexistent. They successfully discovered an unmet demand and developed a service to fill that demand. No one was ever speculating on what Uber would be used for they way they are with AI, and from their launch they provided the exact service people expected that they would provide. The second, more important reason, is that Uber never gave away their service for free. Okay, maybe there were some promotions here and there, but by and large, if you wanted to get an Uber, you expected to pay for it. There was never any ecosystem where Uber was providing free transportation for everyone who wanted to get from Point A to Point B with the expectation that people would ditch their cars and get charged through the nose later.

Even companies like Spotify that started with free models and were unprofitable for a long time didn't have quite the same issues as OpenAI has. In 2016, the earliest year for which we have financials, Spotify's loss was about 20% of revenue. By 2018, the first year it was public, that had dropped to 1%, and stayed in that neighborhood until the company became profitable. OpenAI's loss last year was in excess of 100% of revenue, and is on pace to be nearly 70% this year, and that's after record revenue growth. And next year they're going to be on the hook for the first round of the 5-year, 300 billion deal with Oracle. Spotify has also had about a 25% conversion rate from free to paying customers throughout most of its history, though that's recently jumped to over 40%. ChatGTP currently has a conversion rate of around 3%. And Spotify at least ran ads on its free platform whereas free ChatGTP is pretty much all loss for OpenAI, and even the paid version lose money on every query.

So what we ultimately have then, is a company that loses a lot of money, is available for free, has a poor conversion rate for paid versions, and is selling itself as a product you didn't know you needed rather than filling an obvious demand. the leading company has already committed to spending several times more than the company has raised in its entire existence within the next five years, and they need their revenue to dectuple in the next four years to break even. They're also involved in a weird money-go-round situation with Nvidia and Oracle that's 100% reliant on them finding investors willing to lend them the GDP of Finland. And now they want to add video, a notoriously difficult thing to process even when you don't have to make the entire composition from scratch. Color me skeptical that this will be around in five years in anything approaching what it looks like today.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities,

Except it does. Look at my example. The Obama administration was able to launder federal resources into NGO's that could continue to pursue their policy goals long after a Democrat was out of the White House. That's how you do it. Instead of having the Trump administration sue Universities for being racist against white people, you fund right wing NGOs by any means nessecary, and then they can pursue your policy goals long after the government has changed hands back to the opposition. That way when Pete Buttigeig takes office in 2028, he can't just have the Attorney General drop all the cases the Trump administration had ongoing. It's no longer in his hands. It's being done by (for example) Turning Point USA with a 100B warchest funded by structured settlements Pam Bondi forced on universities.

I don't understand how you say this doesn't work. It obviously has worked in the recent past!

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

I don't see a big difference in being hostile to myself, and others being hostile to me. Self-censorship happens because the brain doesn't consider certain actions to be safe, and as long as you cannot convince it otherwise (get rid of the belief), you won't be able to do said behaviour without an altered state of mind. If you simulated a universe with just a single human being in it, I don't think concepts like shame, embarassment, judgement, "being cringe", prosecution, etc would exist.

And even if you can talk about anything, can you be yourself? Can you write emojis like "^.^" without feeling extremely uncomfortable?

I don't want to sound ungrateful that this space exists, but it has nothing on the old internet. You could probably talk about both of these subjects on the Gaia Online of 2010 and people would just think you were silly. I don't know about the old Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, but likely those too. In the past, you could only get banned by breaking the rules. If you didn't break any rules, basically anything went, even if everyone hated you. This changed around 2011 or so. This is likely why subreddits like "cute dead children" existed until around that time.

Calling out jews or wanting to be a woman is acceptable to maybe 10-20% of the population, that's a lot. That you think either of these are weird seems to prove my point. And I agree with Arjin below, who knows how many bits of identifiable information exists in the typos that I consistently make? Most freedom enjoyed in the modern society is freedom through obscurity

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Carrying a gun for snakes isn’t totally unknown.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Thank you for providing something, though that link is a trainwreck in terms of having basically no real information to go off of. Thankfully, Cato and FedSoc have significantly better articles, with at least some traceable cites to see some real info. Still not super great. Near impossible to follow the cites to actual numbers, and when you do find actual numbers, they're pretty piddly.

Nevertheless, there shouldn't have been a single dollar done that way. Trump should have supported a statutory ban, and those settlements should have been thrown out on Constitutional grounds, as well. Frankly, if Trump started doing it, I would say that they should be thrown out on Constitutional grounds, too.

In my defense, your original comment went through quite the journey, talking about fabricating criminal conspiracies and just general government spending. I see that you're now focused solely on being upset about one specific thing that was done by Obama/Biden and want to use that specific thing.

Now, some thoughts. The context for all this was (your comment and mine):

Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.

If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities, AFAICT. ISTM that the purpose of the goal is purely extractive, as you viewed prior acts as extractive. You certainly haven't given a way that it should be done that is oriented toward fixing anything instead of being primarily extractive. As I wrote, there's nothing specific about universities. No reason why they should be the target for extractive suits rather than anyone else (except, I guess, you don't like them). Not really any grounds on which to go after them that could produce settlements that could conceivably be funneled to Elon. But whatever. Finally, it does nothing to alleviate your concern that the government is sometimes held by your opponents. In fact, as I responded, I think some on the right are worried about the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic, rather than actually contributing to a solution. But fair enough on your preferences. Perhaps you have a concept of a plan, but it clashes with your originally-stated goals, and it still has significant work to get to something real.

One final note is that connection to being able to continue suing is weak. Yes, money is fungible, but it was particularly ill-motivated in the original comment. Like, the thing that Elon lacks for being able to sue a future government is money? Lol wut? It sure sounded like there was something legal going on, rather than just money. Honestly, left wing NGOs probably get significantly more money through regular appropriations (and bullshit appropriations when they were, indeed, shoveling money out the front door during COVID/IRA/whatever). It took me a bit to realize that you were mostly just pissed about one terrible thing they did, didn't really have any specifics of how it could work the other way, didn't really have any sense of how it could actually fix the problems identified, didn't really have the qualities that one would naturally expect from a reading of your comment, and also worked against your originally-stated goal. Yeah, I was kinda dumb for not figuring it out for a while.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

The U.S. didn’t technically lose Vietnam, it also didn’t technically give up. The U.S. withdrew in exchange for a promise that north Vietnam wouldn’t invade the south. It broke that promise, obviously, but the first time it did so- south Vietnam actually won. The second post US-withdrawal invasion thé south Vietnamese defenses fell apart due to political factors leading to a change in leadership.

Vietnam was a failure of intelligence, not a failure of tactics.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

I think that would be a fair assessment. There is certainly a wide gap between being a fairly local politician and trying to run a campaign on a bigger stage, and then actually delivering once you've won the race. In many ways, the skills don't translate, and cabinet secretaries are one of the posts where it can be most obvious (not guaranteed though- regardless of how you feel about the moral and philosophical implications of her actions, it's hard to deny the Clinton got shit done as Sec State, Cruz seems to be doing similarly).

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

As an alternative, how about we simply stop funding universities that have been spending public money on things as ridiculous as creation science? They can even keep the tenure, so long as they fund it themselves.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

It won’t be Q people. There’s a reservoir of right wingers trying to do science already- creationism(and climate change skeptics). You would have to make universities hire people like Ken ham and give them tenure.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Ok, but getting right wing faculty is… difficult, and in practice would look like making universities hire creation scientists and give them tenure.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Oh, I know, that's the joke/point : This is specifically eastern orthodox, not christianity in general. Neither the catholics nor mainline protestant churches I'm aware of would sign off that statement. If anything, they'd consider it a dramatic misunderstanding, not just a minor point of contention.

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

I agree.

But I also am aware that we SEE the group that is addicted to social media, they're the ones you encounter on the social media sites. People who avoid it are, almost by definition, less legible to us here online. I could be underestimating how many people are able to switch off.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

Bad phrasing. Basically:

  1. Old Twitter was almost always additive and became almost indispensable over many years.
  2. New X (and lots of the other platforms have gone the same way) has followed the style of building the most addicting experience fuelled by extreme emotional response. Fairly sure TikTok started this c. 2019/20 and it was so successful all the others thought they had to follow.
Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Looking at social media, I predict the "AI-vulnerable" will be the massively larger group. Maybe the inability to even pretend there's a human connection will put people off, but I'm not counting on it.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm not looking to date right now because I still have not moved out yet. I got a job and paid off all my debts, but I have not moved out yet. That said, more practice making friends quickly will be helpful, so I will be re-joining the gym soon, both for that and also to lift weights diligently because I gave up learning languages and find that I have a ton of extra time. Also I'm going to be trying both the social connection strategy and the dating app strategy at the same time, because they complement each other.

I don't know if I like the advice to start martial arts. I took Tae Kwon Do from 10 years old to 16 years old. When I was a kid, Tae Kwon Do was simple fun, and you got McDonald's afterwards. But starting at about 15, my brother and I were the only adult males in the class; all the other postpubescent males had quit in the years previous. Whenever we sparred, it was him and me; I discovered the first incidence of male rage in these sparring matches. If I took a direct blow to my (padded) head, or experienced some other minor ass-kicking, I found that I was so angry afterwards that I could not speak, otherwise I would reveal the tears that had involuntarily welled up in my throat. This was how it was in most tournaments. I do not like this feeling. I felt the same feeling playing baseball in my senior year, when I was 18; I never even played catch with anyone before, so it was a sharp learning curve, and I don't think I did poorly in those circumstances, but I failed a lot and continued to misplay for the admittedly pretty bad baseball team, and every time I was the source of a bad inning, I would get very mad. I remember more than one game, we would all get in a circle and take a knee, and my face was involuntarily contorting itself in sheer rage. No tears that time, though.

I dunno. Maybe I'm mature enough to handle it now. I don't get mad at Tarkov or DayZ like I might have, and those fill me with adrenaline. But I do get mad and start shaking due to nerves if I break up my dogs fighting and one of them bites my arm in the chaos, though it doesn't help that I consider their continued fighting to be an unresolved serious issue creating tension in my life.

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

It was actually "Substack" all along, but I was acting like it's a slur.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

It's unclear why you think they wouldn't be able to use a slogan. I feel like rebranding to "Open Ideas" will take significantly more effort than for an empty dismissal slogan countering it to spread. "Open Ideas doesn't mean Hate Speech" or whatever sticks.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

Yup, that or nationalize them outright, or provide a public platform.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

And I say this as someone who thought Jack’s original app, from ~2010 and right up to the way it introduced dissenting voices during COVID-19, provided an indispensable service to humanity.

I'm not seeing how this particular belief would increase your credibility on the issue.

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

With a nod to the disappointment of @TwiceHuman (and others) I am enjoying immensely the ones of these I've read so far, and actually many I somehow missed the first go-around. The AAQC thread is one of the goodest features here.

(I intentionally didn't write best to spite my phone keyboard, which kept giving me shit as I tried to type. Take that, Xperia.)

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

I deactivated twitter/x a few months ago. Got tempted back in last week and went through the ordeal of solving 10 visual puzzles (weirdly cryptic and very difficult) to prove I was human. Within three minutes, and WITHOUT A SINGLE POINT OF PREFERENCE FROM ME (no likes, no comments, no follows…) I was being shown loathsome racist material. Somebody somewhere wants this to happen, and set it up precisely this way. The base algorithm of X is racist, bigoted, hateful, angry and divisive, and it’s radicalizing people’s opinions every second of every day. And I say this as someone who thought Jack’s original app, from ~2010 and right up to the way it introduced dissenting voices during COVID-19, provided an indispensable service to humanity. There was obvious censorship and bias that Elon set out to fix. But he’s made it 100 times worse in the opposite direction.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

So those who are against free speech on the basis of conflict theory are openly admitting that they don't believe that they have an advantage in the realm of ideas.

Not so simple. It's pretty trivial to come up with justifications why my ideas are good but not immediately obvious. For example, I believe my ideas tend to be good in the lonf term, but inferior ideas are more appealing in the short term, and that there's a lot of people with high time preference. A progressive, on the other hand, might believe that someone's bigotry might prevent them from trying something, but once they do, it turns out to be not so bad (see for example "but have you considered the Irish" arguments when immigration is brought up).

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

Fine, I'll show you where the bodies are buried.

The Obama administration was shaking down companies, and structuring the settlements to fund left wing NGOs So for example, Eric Holder as Attorney General sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and others, and funneled the settlements through a structure that allowed these companies to pay less if instead of paying the government, they paid leftwing NGOs like ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, etc.

Picking on the National Urban League, they took this money (or some of this money, money is fungible) and used it to fight Trump in court repeatedly. Here they are in 2020 suing Trump, again in 2025. Oh, and here they were in 2020 suing the administration over how the census was being conducted, resulting in immigration status being excluded from the census. That was pretty significant. Really changes the electoral map.

So you see, by shaking down big banks during the Obama administration, through a structured settlement program, Democrats were able to use federal resources to launder their policy goals beyond the mere 8 years of their administration. I want Republicans to do exactly this. Only instead of big banks, I want them to sue Universities, force them to settle exactly the same way Eric Holder did with malicious prosecution, and then structure those settlements such that they are forced to fund right wing NGOs that will continue to fight for those policy goals after Trump is out of office. Just the same way the National Urban League did for Obama even after he was out of office.

And if you still think this is all too vague, too wishy washy, not even the concepts of a plan, with all these specific, cited, historical examples, I don't know what to tell you.

Quality Contributions Report for September 2025

I thought he was writing Shittack.

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

I agree. And surely it can’t be far away from legislation that forces tech platforms to give users control over (or at least MUCH more transparency about) the algorithm used.

It’s impossible to consider that the tech cos will do this themselves. They would be slaughtering the greatest golden goose that ever was. Their hand must be forced.