I’m a bit late to this New York Times Magazine article by Yiren Lu, but it is such a perfect model for how not to write about tech. It is a masterpiece of the form. It is bewildering reminder that tech and Silicon Valley boosterism is alive and well, even after the supposed techlash, and it all gets wrapped up within the boundless hype for generative artificial intelligence. I thought it could be a useful exercise, then, to go through the article step-by-step to take note of the tropes for this kind of “reporting,” and to help us better understand how the AI boom, as they call it, is a way for tech and Silicon Valley to right the ship, so to speak, after the shocks of higher interest rates, greater legislative scrutiny, and other roadblocks. [
Without further ado, then, let’s get started.
This early paragraph does a great job of laying out the emptiness of Silicon Valley’s hype cycles, but fails to critically engage with it — crypto collapsed and investors were adrift, so the minimal gains in AI felt like the natural next choice to pump money into. Should we question the way this hype cycle works? Nah. Then, we have our first indication that no one really knows what they’re talking about when it comes to generative AI, or else they are keen to inflate what it can do. I am by no means a technical expert, but even I can tell that ChatGPT does not represent the threshold of this tech becoming “dramatically more useful.” The advancement of models like ChatGPT, as Lu writes, is that it can “respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency.” Let’s be clear about what this insane development actually is: you know how your phone autocorrects based on what it thinks you’re about to say? Well, ChatGPT is better at making those predictions, and much better at making it sound like a person wrote it. That’s it — impressive, yes, but hardly revolutionary in the way these boosters talk about it.
Here is where things start to get juicy. As Malcolm Harris charts in his new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Silicon Valley has long been able to find a way in the popular imagination to conflate capital opportunism with pathbreaking innovation. As Lu repeats the myth here, the region is eager to embrace new technology and lead the way, by which she means, make money. The flimsiness of this conflation goes unremarked upon, and the myth endures.
What does this paragraph mean? Seriously, please tell me. Venture capitalists love to boast about how they have an intrinsic intuition for what the next big thing is, this is how they build their reputation even when they choose wrong. This goes back to the dual founding myths of Silicon Valley and of venture capital, as explored in Sebastian Mallaby’s book The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. Mallaby fundamentally believes in both, so he’s a good barometer of their rhetoric and influence as it persists today. The power law, as he describes it, describes how within this world, “winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate,” and most investments will fail but the very few that succeed tend to skyrocket. VC’s willingness to go all in on that extreme ratio, he argues, is what power’s tech innovation and keeps the magic alive. The discerning eye of the venture capitalist, then, becomes incredibly powerful.
What again goes unsaid here is that, especially in recent years, this discernment seems completely out of whack. Fontenot, the VC, can tell what the “thing of the moment” is, and he’s also agnostic about what it is, and this, the article seems to suggest, shows some kind of cultivated insight. To me, it signals that they don’t have any clue, and merely have enough capital to pump into whatever seems to be attracting investment. As I’ve highlighted before in the newsletter, in only the last 2 or 3 years, this cycle has gone from NFTs to web3 to the metaverse to cryptocurrency, with a couple others in between, and all of these have either tanked or vastly constricted, and at every stage venture capitalists poured their money in and claimed each one was the future. If VC did once have this unerring nose, it seems to have lost its sense of smell.
As for “his expertise, he believes, is people” — lmao okay.
totally dude
“Any one of these projects might have seemed remarkable” — OK, now I am just being petty, but any writer that thinks a chatbot impersonating Mark Cuban to give you business advice is “remarkable” has no business writing about technology. It also makes no sense, because the technology for chatbots of this type has existed for a while, and it certainly has nothing to do with AGI (artificial general intelligence), which this section of the article is about. Put simply, AGI is the dream for many of these futurists, “a machine intelligence with the flexibility to handle any intellectual task that humans can,” as Lu puts it. It is decades away, if we ever get there. And it doesn’t look anything like a Mark Cuban chatbot!
From here, Lu correctly points out the generative AI boom seems to be unlike previous tech booms in the Valley, as it greatly favours existing gigantic companies that have already hoarded reams of data and users, like Google and Microsoft, over the supposedly punchy start-ups. Moreover, she writes, “That the era of V.C.-backed, outsize returns might be coming to an end is, of course, a source of anxiety,” and so who wouldn’t want to get theirs while they still can, especially when “it feels as if the deterioration of the physical world is happening roughly at a pace with the flourishing of the virtual one, and the only way to insulate yourself is by achieving vast financial success.” And so, perhaps Silicon Valley has finally disrupted itself, adopting and heralding a technological change that even puts itself at risk.
But wait.
This is a fascinating way to end this article ostensibly about the “wild children of the AI boom.” Here, Lu highlights a friend of hers and how he, too, has been just as susceptible to shifting his focus completely based on what is hot at a given moment, agnostic, we can assume, to what it actually is. First, Lu reframes this opportunism to be about a passion for open-source community tools, regardless of what use it is for. This is subtly significant — it is a way of disguising craven trend-following as a progressive pursuit, indeed as a reflection of a hacker ethos that is said to be Silicon Valley’s bleeding heart. This is another Valley staple: the use of the tool is irrelevant, as long as it represents a technical “development” that can make someone money.
And, in the end, “in that adaptability, that ability to reinvent himself while coming out on top, he resembles Silicon Valley itself.” Woof. After rather cogently wondering whether this mythos was reaching its zenith, we culminate with a reaffirmation of the legend, suggesting that this fundamental modus operandi of reinvention promises the continued supremacy of the Valley and its VC wunderkinds. I’m not so sure, and I certainly wouldn’t take them at their word.
Max Read continues the discussion about how TikTok transcends bits, which I talked about a couple newsletters ago, and he makes the astute observation that even when these users call what they do “satire,” what they really mean is that they’re “saying stuff you don’t really believe to provoke negative reactions on social media to expand your audience,” which Read says is more like bait. Moreover (and now he’s really talking my language), as he writes in his essay on MrBeast for The New York Times Magazine, MrBeast “essentially asks his audience to see themselves as a commodity, and to therefore see their views and likes and shares as a force for good.” I think this is true—MrBeast and other major creators are more open about how cynical the whole thing is, inviting viewers into that cynicism, but seeking to turn it into a “force for good” (he does, indeed, give lots of money to charity, to random people, to folks needing surgery). I, of course, have to wonder how this impacts questions of platform power, because in this scenario both creator and user are willingly entering into what I call the total monetization of the self, and while they may benefit in certain ways, the platform is the big winner because everything returns to them.
“The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product” by Amanda Mull for The Atlantic: “From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.”
Song Recommendation: “SkeeYee” by Sexyy Red
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