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[36]Capital

Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose

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By [38]Albert Burneko

11:15 AM EDT on June 18, 2025

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"You can't be a serious critic," New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose
wrote on Tuesday, [44]on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, "if you're in
denial about how useful it is." Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You
can't be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of
it, where "in denial" describes an irrational and unfounded rejection of
empirical reality. That's hardly even worth saying, but it's also not really
what Roose is saying.

What Roose wants is to put an entire suite of claims about the technology
presently doing business as "artificial intelligence"—not just that it has more
than zero uses (a thing nobody really denies) but that it truly is artificial
intelligence or anything like it; that it represents a profound leap forward
for technology and human endeavor; that it is the future; that, as such,
adopting it and integrating it into day-to-day work and life processes is the
smart move—beyond dispute. He wants to marginalize the many technology experts,
media knowers, and sharp lay readers who have for years been calling his work
on behalf of those claims appalling boobery. He wants his readers to view all
of those critics as coterminous with whatever minor body of irrelevant
five-follower internet loons might bother trying to argue the literal
uselessness of a predictive text generator or a program that collates search
engine results into layperson's language. He wants his readers to think of all
the critics as united in an essentially pathological relationship with the
observable world. And he wants the juice of dancing this shitty little
passive-aggressive jig on Bluesky, the social-media platform where many of
those critics will encounter his work and, while dunking on it, also share it
around to some number of people who will read it.

Why do this crap? I think that I would be embarrassed. I think that after I'd 
[45]gassed up cryptocurrency and NFTs in the New York Times and told New York
Times readers that the Bing search engine was trying to [46]steal me away from
my wife, I would have asked my editor if maybe I could cover the Broadway beat
for a while instead of continuing to smirk at the world while pouring fire ants
down the front of my shorts for a living. So: Why do it? But also: How?

I think about these questions a lot, certainly more than I should. (Not just
about Kevin Roose! Sometimes also about Felix Salmon.) Some two decades since
the digital-media attention economy took shape and, sheesh, like 13 years into
my own career working in that economy, the list of the cold incentives that
might drive a journalist toward this type of routine—attention, website
traffic, access to industry honchos otherwise not inclined toward talking to
the press, the possibility of later getting a nice job from one of them—is
depressingly easy to conjure. But that list's plausibility as a Kevin Roose
Explainer is, for me, limited by my fixed standing assumption that other people
have and value dignity.

Something occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about this—not even
Tuesday! Not even prompted by this particular Kevin Roose Bluesky post!—and has
been sort of following me around since, making me feel squirmy and
uncomfortable and haunted. What occurred to me was the possibility that what
had seemed, to me, like it could only come from a chilling and impossible level
of cynicism might come instead from a perverse and even more chilling variety
of mostly genuine belief. Not in the transformative power of AI! I'm talking
about something wider and deeper and more frightening than that: a genuine and
horribly earnest belief in not believing in anything.

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a
sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners,
in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even
taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person
tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is
going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you
do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

I was thinking about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about the
phenomenon of small-fry sports-bettor bros with no passion for any serious
right-wing politics going big for Donald Trump in 2024 based on a view of their
vote as something like a wager, and of Trump as the bold, ambitious
choice—risky, but with the bigger potential payout. I was thinking about
sophisticated, high-achieving tech-industry types abruptly throwing off all of
their (thin, half-cooked, fundamentally dogshit, but still) liberal-libertarian
politics to get behind an explicitly authoritarian program and help build its
surveillance state. I was thinking about bushy-tailed go-getter types in legacy
media who kept their language carefully bland around policing reform,
anti-racism, and social justice during those topics' brief heightened salience
around the George Floyd protests, and then smoothly pivoted to criticizing the
excesses of woke when the winds changed. I was thinking about randos whom Elon
Musk would not cross a sidewalk to piss on if they were on fire, who, when
Trump invited Musk to gut federal government agencies and programs that benefit
their own lives, rushed to tweet GIFs of Musk, like, dunking on somebody's head
at his critics. I was thinking about [47]bag culture. And I was thinking about
Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of
gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and
dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all
on behalf of a grift.

To these people this kind of thing is not cynicism, both because they believe
it's just what everybody is doing and because they do not regard it as ugly or
underhanded or whatever. Making the right pick is simply being smart. And not
necessarily in some kind of edgy-cool or subversive way, but smart the very
same shit-eating way that the dorkus malorkus who gets onto a friendly
first-name basis with the middle-school assistant principal is smart. They just
want to be smart.

So these people look at, say, socialists, and they see fools—not because of
moral or ethical objections to socialism or whatever, or because of any
authentically held objections or analysis at all, but simply because they can
see that, at present, socialism is not winning. All the most powerful guys are
against it. Can't those fools see it? They have picked a loser. They should
pick the winner instead.

Likewise, when all the rich guys got behind cryptocurrency, and all the rich
cryptocurrency guys got behind Donald Trump, for these people the thing to do
was very obvious, even if they had previously regarded crypto as a scam: not
just to buy some cryptocurrency—the kind of move any cynic might make—but to
adopt the attitudes and positions of a crypto enthusiast. Neither their
conscience nor their concept of dignity troubles them in this switcheroo,
because they take for granted that this is the precise way everyone forms the
stuff they say and appear to think. In their view, someone like me dumps on
cryptocurrency not because of an analytical conclusion that it sucks and is a
scam, or because of a moral conclusion that as a scam it is reprehensible, but
because I am making a pragmatic prediction that it will fail; my arguments for
it being bad, in this view, are at best just the articulation of the reasons
why I think it will not win.

Personally, when Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and threw open
the regulatory gates for crypto, I saw it as a bleak and bitter vindication of
crypto skepticism: Critics had always been right to have identified it as a
tool of predators and scam artists, and now, in its embrace by the most brazen
undisguised crook in American society and the gleeful removal of all safeguards
protecting people from it, everyone could see it for what it is. For the
specimens we are examining here today, they saw almost the exact opposite: not
just a victory for crypto and its boosters, but an actual self-evident
refutation of crypto skeptics' arguments—for the simple reason that these
people understood those arguments to have always been at root a prediction that
crypto would lose, and crypto had won.

This has not been how I have approached my life—I think that's sort of
painfully obvious—and I think in general it is mostly not how people approach
their lives. I think in general even really flawed and derelict people like me
are trying to figure out what's right or what's best or what's just or what's
fair, or at least some workable compromise between the demands of those pesky
ideas and our desire for near-term comfort and stability. I think in general
people only form associations on the basis of what they think will win in
certain discrete circumstances, like betting on a horse race or making
stock-market trades or whatever; the rest of life is more complicated than
that. You vote for the candidate you think will represent your interests in
government and you hope they will win; you do not try to figure out who is
going to win and then vote for them. You praise the beauty of an artwork
because you think it's beautiful, not because you expect it will smash
auction-price records. You root for the Sacramento Kings because you are a sick
pervert, not because you believe they will ever win the NBA Finals.

And so, for probably most people, it would be sort of uncomfortable to, for
example, shrug off the social ideas you'd vocally advocated for and throw
yourself behind a political movement in direct opposition to all of them! Not
only on principle—you'd actually believed that stuff, after all—but because of
things like dignity and even vanity: People in general do not want to look like
turncoats, scumbags, or frontrunners. Likewise, for probably most people, the
dissolution of a succession of huge tech-industry hypes having exposed you as a
[48]world-historic stooge and imbecile might temper your eagerness to deliver a
public Funkmaster Flex routine on behalf of AI companies! Not even for
particularly admirable reasons; you might just be tired of looking like a
world-historic stooge and imbecile in the New York Times.

But now imagine believing that victory, whenever it arrived and on whatever
terms it was accomplished, would automatically redeem all that debasement. If
you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was
right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich
AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that
critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not
just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity
getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of
less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity's choice to participate
in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an
authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome
of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical
and moral weight of the contestants' choices along the way. Maybe, in that
case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like
straight-up shit eating.

This, I think, is how a guy like Kevin Roose can do what he does without
apparent embarrassment, without ever seeming to have learned anything or to
have been chastened in the least by a series of cigars exploding in his face
right after he told everyone in the world that smoking these
guaranteed-not-to-explode cigars was the way of the future. He is playing the
long game. Non-fungible tokens turned out to be a musical-chairs scam, Web3
nothing more than a Sony PlayStation in helmet form, crypto at best a
speculative asset class and at worse a wilderness of Ponzi schemes. AI might
turn out to be just the ruinous money-pit Potemkin singularity that critics and
scholars and experts (and I) think it is.

My theory of Kevin Roose is this: His bet is not on any of these individually,
but on the very rich and very powerful men and institutions backing them. He
thinks they are going to win, and that when they do win, it won't matter that
the rest of us regarded his sucking up to them as a disgrace to journalism and
human dignity. He is, I suppose I must grant, being very smart.

Recommended

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Only Kevin Roose’s Editors Despise Him More Than I Do

[51]213Comments
[52]Albert Burneko
April 25, 2025
[53]A robot dances onstage
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[60]Albert Burneko
[61]@albertburneko.bsky.social

Assignment Editor

Read More:

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