defector-com-dykuft.txt (24402B)
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Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You 60 can't be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of 61 it, where "in denial" describes an irrational and unfounded rejection of 62 empirical reality. That's hardly even worth saying, but it's also not really 63 what Roose is saying. 64 65 What Roose wants is to put an entire suite of claims about the technology 66 presently doing business as "artificial intelligence"—not just that it has more 67 than zero uses (a thing nobody really denies) but that it truly is artificial 68 intelligence or anything like it; that it represents a profound leap forward 69 for technology and human endeavor; that it is the future; that, as such, 70 adopting it and integrating it into day-to-day work and life processes is the 71 smart move—beyond dispute. He wants to marginalize the many technology experts, 72 media knowers, and sharp lay readers who have for years been calling his work 73 on behalf of those claims appalling boobery. He wants his readers to view all 74 of those critics as coterminous with whatever minor body of irrelevant 75 five-follower internet loons might bother trying to argue the literal 76 uselessness of a predictive text generator or a program that collates search 77 engine results into layperson's language. He wants his readers to think of all 78 the critics as united in an essentially pathological relationship with the 79 observable world. And he wants the juice of dancing this shitty little 80 passive-aggressive jig on Bluesky, the social-media platform where many of 81 those critics will encounter his work and, while dunking on it, also share it 82 around to some number of people who will read it. 83 84 Why do this crap? I think that I would be embarrassed. I think that after I'd 85 [45]gassed up cryptocurrency and NFTs in the New York Times and told New York 86 Times readers that the Bing search engine was trying to [46]steal me away from 87 my wife, I would have asked my editor if maybe I could cover the Broadway beat 88 for a while instead of continuing to smirk at the world while pouring fire ants 89 down the front of my shorts for a living. So: Why do it? But also: How? 90 91 I think about these questions a lot, certainly more than I should. (Not just 92 about Kevin Roose! Sometimes also about Felix Salmon.) Some two decades since 93 the digital-media attention economy took shape and, sheesh, like 13 years into 94 my own career working in that economy, the list of the cold incentives that 95 might drive a journalist toward this type of routine—attention, website 96 traffic, access to industry honchos otherwise not inclined toward talking to 97 the press, the possibility of later getting a nice job from one of them—is 98 depressingly easy to conjure. But that list's plausibility as a Kevin Roose 99 Explainer is, for me, limited by my fixed standing assumption that other people 100 have and value dignity. 101 102 Something occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about this—not even 103 Tuesday! Not even prompted by this particular Kevin Roose Bluesky post!—and has 104 been sort of following me around since, making me feel squirmy and 105 uncomfortable and haunted. What occurred to me was the possibility that what 106 had seemed, to me, like it could only come from a chilling and impossible level 107 of cynicism might come instead from a perverse and even more chilling variety 108 of mostly genuine belief. Not in the transformative power of AI! I'm talking 109 about something wider and deeper and more frightening than that: a genuine and 110 horribly earnest belief in not believing in anything. 111 112 My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a 113 sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, 114 in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even 115 taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person 116 tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is 117 going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you 118 do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it. 119 120 I was thinking about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about the 121 phenomenon of small-fry sports-bettor bros with no passion for any serious 122 right-wing politics going big for Donald Trump in 2024 based on a view of their 123 vote as something like a wager, and of Trump as the bold, ambitious 124 choice—risky, but with the bigger potential payout. I was thinking about 125 sophisticated, high-achieving tech-industry types abruptly throwing off all of 126 their (thin, half-cooked, fundamentally dogshit, but still) liberal-libertarian 127 politics to get behind an explicitly authoritarian program and help build its 128 surveillance state. I was thinking about bushy-tailed go-getter types in legacy 129 media who kept their language carefully bland around policing reform, 130 anti-racism, and social justice during those topics' brief heightened salience 131 around the George Floyd protests, and then smoothly pivoted to criticizing the 132 excesses of woke when the winds changed. I was thinking about randos whom Elon 133 Musk would not cross a sidewalk to piss on if they were on fire, who, when 134 Trump invited Musk to gut federal government agencies and programs that benefit 135 their own lives, rushed to tweet GIFs of Musk, like, dunking on somebody's head 136 at his critics. I was thinking about [47]bag culture. And I was thinking about 137 Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of 138 gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and 139 dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all 140 on behalf of a grift. 141 142 To these people this kind of thing is not cynicism, both because they believe 143 it's just what everybody is doing and because they do not regard it as ugly or 144 underhanded or whatever. Making the right pick is simply being smart. And not 145 necessarily in some kind of edgy-cool or subversive way, but smart the very 146 same shit-eating way that the dorkus malorkus who gets onto a friendly 147 first-name basis with the middle-school assistant principal is smart. They just 148 want to be smart. 149 150 So these people look at, say, socialists, and they see fools—not because of 151 moral or ethical objections to socialism or whatever, or because of any 152 authentically held objections or analysis at all, but simply because they can 153 see that, at present, socialism is not winning. All the most powerful guys are 154 against it. Can't those fools see it? They have picked a loser. They should 155 pick the winner instead. 156 157 Likewise, when all the rich guys got behind cryptocurrency, and all the rich 158 cryptocurrency guys got behind Donald Trump, for these people the thing to do 159 was very obvious, even if they had previously regarded crypto as a scam: not 160 just to buy some cryptocurrency—the kind of move any cynic might make—but to 161 adopt the attitudes and positions of a crypto enthusiast. Neither their 162 conscience nor their concept of dignity troubles them in this switcheroo, 163 because they take for granted that this is the precise way everyone forms the 164 stuff they say and appear to think. In their view, someone like me dumps on 165 cryptocurrency not because of an analytical conclusion that it sucks and is a 166 scam, or because of a moral conclusion that as a scam it is reprehensible, but 167 because I am making a pragmatic prediction that it will fail; my arguments for 168 it being bad, in this view, are at best just the articulation of the reasons 169 why I think it will not win. 170 171 Personally, when Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and threw open 172 the regulatory gates for crypto, I saw it as a bleak and bitter vindication of 173 crypto skepticism: Critics had always been right to have identified it as a 174 tool of predators and scam artists, and now, in its embrace by the most brazen 175 undisguised crook in American society and the gleeful removal of all safeguards 176 protecting people from it, everyone could see it for what it is. For the 177 specimens we are examining here today, they saw almost the exact opposite: not 178 just a victory for crypto and its boosters, but an actual self-evident 179 refutation of crypto skeptics' arguments—for the simple reason that these 180 people understood those arguments to have always been at root a prediction that 181 crypto would lose, and crypto had won. 182 183 This has not been how I have approached my life—I think that's sort of 184 painfully obvious—and I think in general it is mostly not how people approach 185 their lives. I think in general even really flawed and derelict people like me 186 are trying to figure out what's right or what's best or what's just or what's 187 fair, or at least some workable compromise between the demands of those pesky 188 ideas and our desire for near-term comfort and stability. I think in general 189 people only form associations on the basis of what they think will win in 190 certain discrete circumstances, like betting on a horse race or making 191 stock-market trades or whatever; the rest of life is more complicated than 192 that. You vote for the candidate you think will represent your interests in 193 government and you hope they will win; you do not try to figure out who is 194 going to win and then vote for them. You praise the beauty of an artwork 195 because you think it's beautiful, not because you expect it will smash 196 auction-price records. You root for the Sacramento Kings because you are a sick 197 pervert, not because you believe they will ever win the NBA Finals. 198 199 And so, for probably most people, it would be sort of uncomfortable to, for 200 example, shrug off the social ideas you'd vocally advocated for and throw 201 yourself behind a political movement in direct opposition to all of them! Not 202 only on principle—you'd actually believed that stuff, after all—but because of 203 things like dignity and even vanity: People in general do not want to look like 204 turncoats, scumbags, or frontrunners. Likewise, for probably most people, the 205 dissolution of a succession of huge tech-industry hypes having exposed you as a 206 [48]world-historic stooge and imbecile might temper your eagerness to deliver a 207 public Funkmaster Flex routine on behalf of AI companies! Not even for 208 particularly admirable reasons; you might just be tired of looking like a 209 world-historic stooge and imbecile in the New York Times. 210 211 But now imagine believing that victory, whenever it arrived and on whatever 212 terms it was accomplished, would automatically redeem all that debasement. If 213 you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was 214 right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich 215 AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that 216 critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not 217 just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity 218 getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of 219 less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity's choice to participate 220 in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an 221 authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome 222 of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical 223 and moral weight of the contestants' choices along the way. Maybe, in that 224 case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like 225 straight-up shit eating. 226 227 This, I think, is how a guy like Kevin Roose can do what he does without 228 apparent embarrassment, without ever seeming to have learned anything or to 229 have been chastened in the least by a series of cigars exploding in his face 230 right after he told everyone in the world that smoking these 231 guaranteed-not-to-explode cigars was the way of the future. He is playing the 232 long game. Non-fungible tokens turned out to be a musical-chairs scam, Web3 233 nothing more than a Sony PlayStation in helmet form, crypto at best a 234 speculative asset class and at worse a wilderness of Ponzi schemes. AI might 235 turn out to be just the ruinous money-pit Potemkin singularity that critics and 236 scholars and experts (and I) think it is. 237 238 My theory of Kevin Roose is this: His bet is not on any of these individually, 239 but on the very rich and very powerful men and institutions backing them. He 240 thinks they are going to win, and that when they do win, it won't matter that 241 the rest of us regarded his sucking up to them as a disgrace to journalism and 242 human dignity. He is, I suppose I must grant, being very smart. 243 244 Recommended 245 246 [49]The Machines 247 [50] 248 249 Only Kevin Roose’s Editors Despise Him More Than I Do 250 251 [51]213Comments 252 [52]Albert Burneko 253 April 25, 2025 254 [53]A robot dances onstage 255 [54]Subscribe to skip adsAdvertisement 256 257 If you liked this blog, please share it! Your referrals help Defector reach new 258 readers, and those new readers always get a few free blogs before encountering 259 our paywall. 260 261 • [55]Share on Bluesky 262 • [56]Share on Reddit 263 • [57]Share on WhatsApp 264 • [58]Share on Email 265 266 [59][IMG] 267 [60]Albert Burneko 268 [61]@albertburneko.bsky.social 269 270 Assignment Editor 271 272 Read More: 273 274 • [62]ai, 275 • [63]artificial intelligence, 276 • [64]bag culture, 277 • [65]blogs of note, 278 • [66]crypto, 279 • [67]kevin roose, 280 • [68]new york times, 281 • [69]stooges 282 283 Stay in touch 284 285 Sign up for our free newsletter 286 287 [70][ ]Email 288 Sign up 289 More from Defector 290 291 [72]Interviews 292 [73] 293 294 A Lot Can Go Wrong While Attempting A Speed Record On Mount Everest 295 296 [74][bab] 297 [75]Owen Lewis 298 July 1, 2025 299 [76]Tyler Andrews runs up the Lhotse south face 300 [77]MLB 301 [78] 302 303 It Feels So Good To Be A Robber 304 305 [79]21Comments 306 [80][AJS] 307 [81]Kelsey McKinney 308 July 1, 2025 309 [82][GettyImages-2222989821_ee0a99] 310 [83] 311 312 NYC: Come To Our WNBA Comedy Show On July 15 313 314 As we approach the WNBA All-Star break, join Defector for a night of stand up, 315 games, and giveaways. 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