In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one.
Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked:
“How much did it cost [to make] again?”
“$7,000.”
“Really? That’s pretty good . . . most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”
“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”
In nine months, he had written, directed, and sold a 90-minute action film that cost a third of what a film trailer would. How was that possible? At the time, the cost of film stock alone would normally run into several hundred thousand dollars for an action film like El Mariachi.
During the press tour, the journalists thought the story about the $7,000 was too outlandish to be true, and Rodriguez had to show them a behind-the-scenes video to convince them. In that video they could see that the reason Rodriguez, the son of two Mexican immigrants with ten children in San Antonio, had been able to make a commercial big-screen action film from his private savings was that he had a hackermindset.
Hacker mindset
I learned the term hacker mindset from Gwern, a pseudonymous blogger, who wrote about how people like Rodriguez think in his 2012 essay “On Seeing Through and Unseeing.”
To explain the hacker mindset, one example Gwern uses is people who set world records in video games, doing so-called speedruns.
Unlike normal sports, where the athletes are usually at best twice as fast as a healthy adult, video game speedruns can be so insanely much faster than a normal playthrough that a normal person can’t even understand what is happening on the screen. The last game I played was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in my parents’ house in the late nineties. I put in some 30 hours, and if I remember correctly, I didn’t even finish it—but when I look at the current speed run record, I see that Bloobiebla & MrGrunz have finished the game in 20 minutes and 9 seconds. I can’t wrap my head around how that is possible.
And I don’t get much wiser when I look at the recording and notice that a substantial part of it is them running backwards with a hen on their head. If we want crazy outcomes, I guess we have to accept crazy behavior.
The difference between Bloobiebla & MrGrunz and me is not, primarily, that they are faster than I. It is, Gwern points out, that they see the game differently. When I played Zelda, I saw “villages” and “hen.” But they have a hacker mindset, so they know that there aren’t actually any villages and hens.
The game, Gwern writes, just “pretends to be made out of things like ‘walls’ and ‘speed limits’ and ‘levels which must be completed in a particular order.’” But what it actually is, at a deeper level, is bits, code, memory locations, processing units, and so on and so forth.
And because they see the game at this level—and understand how it’s put together—Bloobiebla & MrGrunz can make moves in the game that I couldn’t, such as “deliberately overloading the RAM to cause memory allocation errors” (perhaps this was what running backwards with a hen on their head did) which, Gwern writes, can “give you infinite ‘velocity’ or shift you into alternate coordinate systems in the true physics, allowing enormous movements in the supposed map, giving shortcuts to the ‘end’ of the game.”
And lo and behold, soon after Bloobiebla & MrGrunz drop the hen, they fall through a “wall” and land in the final “level.”
Because I’m watching the abstraction that the game is pretending to be—a cute fantasy world with villages and swords and horses—this looks bizarre to me. But it makes perfect sense when you understand what the game is at a deeper level.
Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.
Robert Rodriguez’s classmates must have experienced a bewilderment of this kind when they saw him go down to Mexico with $7,000 dollars and return with a film showing in cinemas across the US. That was not a move that was part of how they’d been told the game that is the film industry works; but it was a move that was perfectly compatible with the facts of cameras, lights, and Hollywood deal-making if you understood them at a deep enough level.
Rodriguez could speedrun a film career, walking through proverbial walls, because he saw through the game to its underlying mechanics. He had the hacker mindset. He was willing to get his hands dirty and learn the practical realities. He saw that a lot of what the other film students took for reality were just fictions they’d been taught at school.
This is a bit vague. Let me give some concrete examples of ways he saw through the system his classmates took for reality.
At film school, they were taught to work with a crew, where someone specialized as a cameraman, another as a sound technician, and so on. But Rodriguez, who had always done movies on his own as a kid, knew that that was just a convention. If he could figure it out, it would be more effective to do all of the technical work himself, which also meant he wouldn’t have to pay for a crew.
This seemed insane to others. On July 24, 1991, three days before leaving for Mexico, his film teacher asked him who would be the director of photography.
From Rodriguez’s diary, published as Rebel Without a Crew:
I know he’ll shit all over me if I tell him the truth—that I’m planning on shooting it all by myself, without a crew. So I told him, “I’m going to be the director of photography, but I’ll probably have a small crew around to help out.” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no … You’re going to fail! Your actors are going to hate you. They’re going to be sitting there waiting for you while you light the set. Don’t be an idiot. Get a director of photography.”
Instead, Rodriguez bought 250-watt bulbs that he screwed into the existing lamps on the sets, and that was that for lighting.
At film school, they had also been taught to shoot several takes from multiple angles so the editor could shape the scene, but since Rodriguez was the editor, he could visualize exactly what the scenes would be, shooting only precisely what was needed, a single take per scene, which minimized the cost of film stock and editing time.
A thousand small optimizations like this meant he could shoot the film in ten days while staying with the lead actor’s mom in Ciudad Acuña during summer break.
More examples
There are similar shortcuts in most domains if you learn to see through the abstractions and unsee the conventional ways of viewing something. There are deeper levels to most systems if you are willing to take them apart.
For example, when I grew up, I was told that there was such a thing as a “job,” and these were listed on “job boards” where you could read about the “qualifications” necessary—qualifications that you got through something called “education.” This isn’t false. You can play the game this way. But it is a very superficial way of playing the game.
A slightly more precise reading is to say that the economy is made up of 8.25 billion people, all trying to solve various problems—and what “getting a job” really means is finding a person with a problem and convincing them that you can solve it for them. This can be done by looking at job boards, of course, where people who collaborate on solving problems (aka work at companies) list some of the problems they want help solving.
Now, you notice more things you could do. You could, for example, go talk to people directly and convince them that you can solve their problems. Or, you could work in public, sharing projects you are building on the internet or elsewhere, so people can see what you do and reach out. If you want to work at a specific company, you could talk directly to the employees you’d want to work with, understand their current problems, and then solve their problems for free, so they lobby their superiors to employ you. People who operate at this level tend to have more interesting careers than those who play the game by looking at job postings.
Another everyday example of the hacker mindset can be seen when agentic people deal with bureaucracy.
Companies and governments like to pretend to be formal, machine-like systems, where things have to be done in a specific way. But this, just as in the case of the video game pretending to be made of levels, is an abstraction. A fiction. Actually, a bureaucracy is just people and some file systems. Calling and asking to speak to a supervisor, or showing up in person, or finding the specific person who handles your case, often lets you bypass the “system.” If you search Patrick MacKenzie’s tweets, you get a long stream of great examples of him doing this—getting the customer service agent at an airline to buy him a ticket from their competitor when his flight was delayed, for instance, or calling pharmacies to create an inventory of the US vaccine stock as he did together with a group of volunteers when the US government failed to keep track of the vaccine stocks during Covid.
How do people develop a hacker mindset?
One thing I personally find useful is to read about people who have it and notice what they do.1 This has helped me see possibilities that I had been blind to because I had a too superficial reading of the system.
It also helps if you can surround yourself with people who have a hacker mindset. I suspect this kind of cultural osmosis played an important role for Rodriguez. His dad was a self-employed salesman and was always trying new things—they seem to have been a family that encouraged taking machines apart and doing stuff yourself. Rodriguez also had a great boss at his first job:
My first job in high school was at a photo lab and I remember what my first boss, Mr. Riojas, told me one day after he saw some of my cartoons and photographs. He said that I had creative talent, but what I really needed to do if I wanted to be successful was to become technical. He said that just about anyone can become technical, but not everyone can be creative. And there are a lot of creative people who never get anywhere because they don’t have technical skills. Part of what makes a person creative is his lack of emphasis on things technical.
My boss said that if you are someone who is already creative, and then you become technical, then you are unstoppable.
This is another common pattern among people who have a hacker mindset. They have gotten their hands dirty playing around with the technical parts, insisting on understanding every aspect of the work, “weaving [the] system into [their] mind[s] so tight that it’s hard to find the stitches after a while,” as Alice Maz writes about her experience becoming incomprehensibly good at Minecraft.
When Rodriguez made his first feature film at 23, he had already spent a decade making home videos, editing them by using two VCRs, so he could play the raw material on one and record the bits he wanted on the other. By working hands-on, guided by his own needs, he had learned the details of the work and how things could be manipulated in such a way that his films looked good even if he had no crew or budget.
In an appendix to the diary, he writes:
The most important and useful thing you need to be a filmmaker is “experience in movies,” as opposed to “movie experience.” There’s a difference. They always tell you in film school and in Hollywood that in order to be a filmmaker you need to get “movie experience” so you can work your way up in the business. The reasoning being that by working on other films, even as a production assistant, you get to see firsthand how others make movies. Now, that’s exactly the kind of experience you don’t need. You don’t want to learn how other people make movies especially real Hollywood movies, because nine times out of ten their methods are wasteful and inefficient. You don’t need to learn that!
“Experience in movies,” on the other hand is where you yourself get a borrowed video camera or other recording device and record images then manipulate those images in some kind of editing atmosphere. Whether you use old ¾” video editing systems, VCR to VCR, or even computer editing. Whatever you can get your hands on. The idea is to experience creating your own images and/or stories no matter how crude they are and then manipulating them through editing.
That is, you want to avoid learning the conventional wisdom about how something works—which is always simplified and filled with false walls—and instead focus on getting into very close contact with the actual nuts and bolts by doing everything yourself. That is how you will learn to understand the system well enough to “see through” it.
It might sound like a depressing conclusion to this essay: the way to find shortcuts is to first spend ten years learning all of the technical details.
But it is not depressing.
What we’re talking about here isn’t like going to school—it emphatically is not that—suffering through all of the boring prerequisites before you get to do the exciting parts. What we’re talking about is actually doing the fun stuff, playing around with projects that excite you, trusting that you can learn enough to solve your problems. If you keep tinkering, doing one fun project after another, you will eventually see through the system.
Also, it is only the first time that it might take years. After you’ve developed a hacker mindset in one area of your life, it is much easier to see the rest of reality in the same way.
Having seen through the superficiality and clumsiness of the normal way of doing things, you are less likely to trust conventional wisdom going forward and more likely to trust your eyes. You know that there are deeper layers to reality and have a sense for how to access them.
And then all of reality becomes something you can horse around with.
This essay—like all my free essays—was entirely funded by the contributions of paid subscribers. If you enjoyed it, give them your thanks, and if you can afford, consider joining them:
Drafts of this essay were discussed with Johanna Karlsson. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
Rodriguez’ diary, Rebel Without a Crew, is one example. “The Story of VaccinateCA” is another. I also like “Playing to Win” by Alice Maz. A Guide to the Perplexed with Werner Herzog. Surely, you're joking Mr. Feynman. Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Some of these examples are more unethical and problematic than others, so beware. If you lack ethics, hacker mindset can be used in manipulative and anti-social ways. And that’s a sad way to live.
An interactive explainer on the physics of GPS. “The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.”
I think the most enlightening thing about AI is that it shows you how even the most mediocre text inspires some sort of emotion. Soulless LinkedIn slop makes you feel frustration with a person for their lack of authenticity, but you can still imagine how they forced it out of their heads. You still connect with them, even if it’s in a bad way.
AI copy is dead. It is inert. The reason you can spot it is that it sounds hollow. I don’t care if a website says stuff on it because I typed in, just like I don’t care if it responds in a way that sounds human, because it all feels like nothing to me. I am not here to give a website respect, I will not be impressed by a website, nor will I grant a website any extra credit if it can’t do the right thing every time. The computer is meant to work for me. If the computer doesn’t do what I want, I change the kind of computer I use. LLMs will always hallucinate, their outputs are not trustworthy as a result, they cannot be deterministic, and any chance of any mistakes of any kind are unforgivable. I don’t care how the website made you feel: it’s a machine that doesn’t always work, and that’s not a very good machine.
I feel nothing when I see an LLM’s output. Tell me thank you or whatever, I don’t care. You’re a website. Oh you can spit out code? Amazing. Still a website.
Perhaps you’ve found value in LLMs. Congratulations! You should feel no compulsion to have to convince me, nor should you feel any pride in using a particular website. And if you feel you’re being judged for using AI, perhaps you should ask why you feel so vilified? Did the industry do something to somehow warrant judgment? Is there something weird or embarrassing about the product, such as it famously having a propensity to get things wrong? Perhaps it loses billions of dollars? Oh, it’s damaging to the environment too? And people are telling outright lies about it and constantly saying it’ll replace people’s jobs? And the CEOs are all greedy oafish sociopaths? Did you try being cloying, judgmental, condescending, and aggressive to those who don’t like AI? Oh, that didn’t work? I can’t imagine why.
Sounds embarrassing! You must really like that website.
ChatGPT is a website. Claude is a website. While I guess Claude Code runs in a terminal window, that just means it’s an app, which I put in exactly the same mental box as I do a website.
Yet everything you read or hear or see about AI does everything it can to make you think that AI is something other than a website or an app. People that “discover the power of AI” immediately stop discussing it in the same terms as Microsoft Word, Google, or any other app or website. It’s never just about what AI can do today, but always about some theoretical “AGI” or vague shit about “AI agents” that are some sort of indeterminate level of “valuable” without anyone being able to describe why.
The agent — it's actually a collection of AI agents and assistants — scans McCann's calendar for client meetings and drafts a list of 10 things he needs to know for each one. The goal, McCann told Business Insider, was to free up time he and his staff spent preparing for the meetings.
Sounds like a website to me.
The agent reviews in-house data, what IBM and the client are doing in the market, external data, and account details — such as project status and services sold and purchased, McCann said. It can also identify industry trends and client needs by, for example, reviewing a firm's annual report and identifying a corresponding service IBM could provide.
Sounds like a website using an LLM to summarize stuff to me. Why are we making all this effort to talk about what a website does?
Digital Dave also saves McCann's team time, he said, because the three or four staffers who used to spend hours pulling together insights for the prep calls are now free to do other work.
"It's not just about driving efficiencies, but it's really about transforming how work gets done," McCann said.
My friend, this isn’t a “series of agents.” It’s an LLM that looks at stuff and spits out an answer. Chatbots have done this kind of thing forever. These aren’t “agents.” “Agents” makes it sound like there’s some sort of futuristic autonomous presence rather than a chatbot that’s looking at documents using technology that’s guaranteed to hallucinate incorrect information.
One benefit of building agents, McCann said, is that IBMers who develop them can share them with others on their team or more broadly within the company, "so it immediately creates that multiplier effect."
Many of the people who report to him have created agents, he said. There's a healthy competition, McCann said, to engineer the most robust digital sidekicks, especially because workers can build off of what their colleagues created.
Here’s a fun exercise: replace the word “agent” with “app,” and replace “AI” with “application.” In fact, let’s try that with the next quote:
Apps can handle a range of functions, including gathering information, processing paperwork, drafting communications, taking meeting minutes, and pulling research. It's still early, but these systems are quickly becoming a major focus of corporate application efforts as companies look to turn applications into something that can actually take work off employees' plates.
A variety of functions including searching for stuff, looking at stuff, generating stuff, transcribing a meeting, and searching for stuff. Wow! Who gives a fuck. Every “AI agent” story is either about code generation, summarizing some sort of information source, or generating something based on an information source that you may or may not be able to trust.
“Agent” is an intentional act of deception, and even “modern” agents like OpenClaw and its respective ripoffs ultimately boil down to “I can send you a reminder” or “I can transcribe a text you send me.”
Yet everybody seems to want to believe these things are “valuable” or “useful” without ever explaining why. A page of OpenClaw integrations claiming to share “real projects, real automations [and] real magic” includes such incredible, magical use cases as “reads my X bookmarks and discusses them with me,” “check incoming mail and remove spam,” “researches people before meetings and creates briefing docs,” “schedule reminders,” “tracking who visits a website” (summarizing information), and “using voice notes to tell OpenClaw what to do,” which includes “distilling market research” (searching for stuff) and “tightening a proposal” (generating stuff after looking at it).
I’d have no quarrel with any of this if it wasn’t literally described as magical and innovative. This is exactly the shit that software has always done — automations, shortcuts, reminders, and document work. Boring, potentially useful stuff done in an inefficient way requiring a Mac Mini and hundreds of dollars a day of API calls.
Even Stephen Fry’s effusive review of the iPad from 2010, in referring to it as a “magical object,” still referred to it as “class,” “a different order of experience,” remarking on its speed, responsiveness, its “smooth glide,” and remarking that it’s so simple. Even Fry, a writer beloved for his effervescence and sophisticated lexicon, was still able to point at the things he liked (such as the design and simplicity) in clear terms. Even in couching it in terms of the future, Fry is still able to cogently explain why he’s excited about the present.
Conversely, articles about Large Language Models and their associated products often describe them in one of three ways:
As if their ability to try to do some of a task allows them to do the entire task.
As if their ability to do tasks is somehow impressive or a justification for their cost.
An excuse for why they cannot do more hinged on something happening in the future.
This simply doesn’t happen outside of bubbles. The original CNET review of the iPhone — a technology I’d argue literally changed the way that human beings live their lives — still described it in terms that mirrored the reality we live in:
THE GOOD The Apple iPhone has a stunning display, a sleek design and an innovative multitouch user interface. Its Safari browser makes for a superb web surfing experience, and it offers easy-to-use apps. As an iPod, it shines.
THE BAD The Apple iPhone has variable call quality and lacks some basic features found in many cellphones, including stereo Bluetooth support and a faster data network. Integrated memory is stingy for an iPod, and you have to sync the iPhone to manage music content.
THE BOTTOM LINE Despite some important missing features, a slow data network and call quality that doesn't always deliver, the Apple iPhone sets a new benchmark for an integrated cellphone and MP3 player.
I’d argue that technologies like cloud storage, contactless payments, streaming music, and video and digital photography have transformed our societies in ways that were obvious from the very beginning. Nobody sat around cajoling us to accept that we’d need to sunset our Nokia 3210s and get used to touchscreens because it was blatantly obvious that it was better on using the first iPhone.
Nobody ostracized you for not being sufficiently excited about iPhone apps. Git, launched in 2005, is arguably one of the single-most transformational technologies in tech history, changing how software engineers built all kinds of software. And I’d argue that Github, which came a few years later, was equally transformational.
Editor’s note: If you used SourceForge or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, which earned the nickname Microsoft Visual SourceShredder due to the catastrophic (and potentially career-ending) ways it failed, you know.
I realize this was before the hyper-polarized world of post-Musk Twitter, one where venture capital and the tech industry in general was a fraction of the size, but it’s really weird how different it feels when you read about how the stuff that actually mattered was covered.
I must repeat that this was a very different world with very different incentives. Today’s tech industry is a series of giant group chats across various social networks and physical locations, with a much-larger startup community (yCombinator’s last batch had 199 people — the first had 8) influenced heavily by the whims of investors and the various cults of personality in the valley. While social pressure absolutely existed, the speed at which it could manifest and mutate was minute in comparison to the rabid dogs of Twitter or the current state of Hackernews. There were fewer VCs, too.
In any case, no previous real or imagined tech revolution has ever inspired such eager defensiveness, tribalism or outright aggression toward dissenters, nor such ridiculous attempts to obfuscate the truth about a product outside of cryptocurrency, an industry with obvious corruption and financial incentives.
What Makes People So Attached To and Protective Of LLMs?
We’ve never had a cult of personality around a specific technology at this scale. There is something that AI does to people — in the way it both functions and the way that people react to it — that inspires them to act, defensively, weirdly, tribally.
I think it starts with LLMs themselves, and the feeling they create within a user.
We all love prompts. We love to be asked questions about ourselves. We feel important when somebody takes interest in what we’re doing, and even more-so when they remember things about it and seem to be paying attention. LLMs are built to completely focus themselves on us and do so while affirming every single interaction.
Human beings also naturally crave order and structure, which means we’ve created frameworks in our head about what authoritative-sounding or looking information looks like, and the language that engenders trust in it. We trust Wikipedia both because it’s an incredibly well-maintained library of information riddled with citations and because it tonally and structurally resembles an authoritative source. Large Language Models have been explicitly trained to deliver information (through training on much of the internet including Wikipedia) in a structured manner that makes us trust it like we would another source massaged with language we’d expect from a trusted friend or endlessly-patient teacher.
All of this is done with the intention of making you forget that you’re using a website. And that deception is what starts to make people act strangely.
The fact that an LLM can maybe do something is enough to make people try it, along with the constant pressure from social media, peers and the mainstream media.
Some people — such as myself — have used LLMs to do things, seen that making them do said things isn’t going to happen very easily, and walked away because I am not going to use a website that doesn’t do what it says.
As I’ve previously said, technology is a tool to do stuff. Some technology requires you to “get used to it” — iPhones and iPads were both novel (and weird) in their time, as was learning to use the Moonlander ZSK — but in basically every example doesn’t involve you tolerating the inherent failings of the underlying product under the auspices of it “one day being better.” Nowhere else in the world of technology does someone gaslight you into believing that the problems don’t exist or will magically disappear.
It’s not like the iPhone only occasionally allowed you to successfully take a photo, and reliable photography was something that you’d have to wait until the iPhone 3GS to enjoy. While the picture quality improved over time, every generation of iPhone all did the same basic thing successfully, reliably, and consistently.
I also think that the challenge of making an LLM do something useful is addictive and transformative. When people say they’ve “learned to use AI,” often they mean that they’ve worked out ways to fudge their prompts, navigate its failures, mitigate its hallucinations, and connect it to various different APIs and systems of record in such a way that it now, on a prompt, does something, and because they’re the ones that built this messy little process, they feel superior — because the model has repeatedly told them that they were smart for doing it and celebrated with them when they “succeeded.”
The term “AI agent” exists as both a marketing term and a way to ingratiate the user. Saying “yeah I used a chatbot to do some stuff” sounds boring, like you’re talking to an app or a website, but “using an AI agent” makes you sound like a futuristic cyber-warrior, even though you’re doing exactly the same thing.
LLMs are excellent digital busyboxes for those who want to come up with a way to work differently rather than actually doing work. In WIRED’s article about journalists using AI, Alex Heath boasts that he “feels like he’s cheating in a way that feels amazing”:
When technology reporter Alex Heath has a scoop, he sits down at his computer and speaks into a microphone. He’s not talking to a human colleague—Heath went independent on Substack last year—he’s talking to Claude. Using the AI-powered voice-to-text service Wispr Flow, Heath transmits his ideas to an AI agent, then lets it write his first draft.
Heath sat down with me last week to showcase how he’s integrated Anthropic’s Claude Cowork into his journalistic process. The AI tool is connected to his Gmail, Google Calendar, Granola AI transcription service, and Notion notes. He’s also built a detailed skill—a custom set of instructions—to help Claude write in his style, including the “10 commandments” of writing like Alex Heath. The skill includes previous articles he’s written, instructions on how he likes his newsletters to be structured, and notes on his voice and writing style.
Claude Cowork then automates the drafting process that used to take place in Heath’s head. After the agent finishes its first draft, Heath goes back and forth with it for up to 30 minutes, suggesting revisions. It’s quite an involved process, and he still writes some parts of the story himself. But Heath says this workflow saves him hours every week, and he now spends 30 to 40 percent less time writing.
The linguistics of “transmitting an idea to an AI agent” misrepresent what is a deeply boring and soulless experience. Alex speaks into a microphone, his words are transcribed, then an LLM burps out a draft. A bunch of different services connect to Claude Cowork and a text document (that’s what the “custom set of instructions” is) that says how to write like him, and then it writes like him, and then he talks to it and then sometimes writes bits of the story himself.
This is also most decidedly not automation. Heath still must sit and prompt a model again and again. He must still maintain connections to various services and make sure the associated documents in Notion are correct. He must make sure that Granola actually gets the transcriptions from his interview. He must (I would hope) still check both the AI transcription and the output from the model to make sure quotes are accurate. He must make sure his calendar reflects accurate information. He must make sure that Claude still follows his “voice and writing style” — if you can call it that given the amount of distance between him and the product.
Per Heath:
“I never did this because I liked being a writer. I like reporting, learning new things, having an edge, and telling people things that will make them feel smart six months from now.”
Well, Alex, you’re not telling anybody anything, your ideas and words come out of a Large Language Model that has convinced you that you’re writing them.
In any case, Heath’s process is a great example of what makes people think they’re “using powerful AI.” Large Language Models are extremely adept at convincing human beings to do most of the work and then credit “AI” with the outcomes. Alex’s process sounds convoluted and, if I’m honest, a lot more work than the old way of doing things. It’s like writing a blog using a machine from Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
I couldn’t eat breakfast that way every morning. I bet it would get old pretty quick.
This is the reality of the Large Language Model era. LLMs are not “artificial intelligence” at all. They do not think, they do not have knowledge, they are conjuring up their own training data (or reflecting post-training instructions from those developing them or documents instructing them to act a certain way), and any time you try and make them do something more-complicated, they begin to fall apart, and/or become exponentially more-expensive.
You’ll notice that most AI boosters have some sort of bizarre, overly-complicated way of explaining how they use AI. They spin up “multiple agents” (chatbots) that each have their own “skills document” (a text document) and connect “harnesses” (python scripts, text files that tell it what to do, a search engine, an API) that “let it run agentic workflows” (query various tools to get an outcome.”
The so-called “agentic AI” that is supposedly powerful and autonomous is actually incredibly demanding of its human users — you must set it up in so many different ways and connect it to so many different services and check that every “agent” (different chatbot) is instructed in exactly the right way, and that none of these agents cause any problems (they will) with each other. Oh, don’t forget to set certain ones to “high-thinking” for certain tasks and make sure that other tasks that are “easier” are given to cheaper models, and make sure that those models are prompted as necessary so they don’t burn tokens.
But the process of setting up all those agents is so satisfying, and when they actually succeed in doing something — even if it took fucking forever and costs a bunch and is incredibly inefficient — you feel like a god!And because you can “spin up multiple agents,” each one ready and waiting for you to give them commands (and ready to affirm each and every one of them), you feel powerful, like you’re commanding an army that also requires you to monitor whatever it does.
Sidebar: the psychological reward of building convoluted systems (which you can call “complex” if you want to feel fancy) is enough to drive somebody mad. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy recently described “building personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest,” describing a dramatic and contrived process through which he has, by the sounds of it, created some sort of half-assed Wikipedia clone he can ask questions of using an LLM, with the results (and the content) also generated by AI. A user responded saying that he’d been doing a “less pro version of this using OpenClaw and Obsidian.”
It’s a very Silicon Valley way of looking at the world — a private Wikipedia that you use to…search…things you already know? Or want to know? You could just read a book I guess. Then again, in another recent tweet, Karpathy described drafting a blog post, using an LLM to “meticulously improve the argument over four hours,” then watch as the LLM “demolished the entire argument and convinced him the opposite was in fact true,” suggesting he didn’t really do much thinking about it in the first place.
God, these people sound like lunatics! I’m sorry! What’re you talking about man? You argued with a website for hours until it convinced you of something then it manipulated you into believing you were wrong? Why do you respect it? It’s a website! It doesn’t have opinions or thoughts or feelings. You are arguing with a calculator trained to sound human.
The reason that LLMs have become so interesting for software engineers is that this is already how they lived. Writing software is often a case of taping together different systems and creating little scripts and automations that make them all work, and the satisfaction of building functional software is incredible, even at the early stages.
Large Language Models perform an impression of automating that process, but for the most part force you, the user, to do the shit that matters, even if that means “be responsible for the code that it puts out.” Heath’s process does not appear to take less time than his previous one — he’s just moved stuff around a bit and found a website to tell him he’s smart for doing so.
They are Language Models interpreting language without any knowledge or thoughts or feelings or ability to learn, and each time they read something they interpret meaning based on their training data, which means they can (and will!) make mistakes, and when they’re, say, talking to another chatbot to tell it what to do next, that little mistake might build a fundamental flaw in the software, or just break the process entirely.
And Large Language Models — using the media — exist to try and convince you that these mistakes are acceptable. When Anthropic launched its Claude For Finance tool, which claims to “automate financial modeling” with “pre-built agents” (chatbots) but really appears to just be able to create questionably-useful models via Excel spreadsheets and “financial research” based on connecting to documents in your various systems, I imagine with a specific system prompt. Anthropic also proudly announced that it had scored a 55.3% on the Finance Agent Test.
I hate to repeat myself, but I will not respect a website, and I will not tolerate something being “55% good” at something if its alleged use case is that it’s an artificial intelligence.
Yet that’s the other remarkable thing about the LLM era — that there are people who are extremely tolerant of potential failures because they believe they’re either A) smart enough to catch them or B) smart enough to build systems that do so for them, with a little sprinkle of “humans make mistakes too,” conflating “an LLM that doesn’t know anything fucking up by definition” with “a human being with experiences and the capacity for adaptation making a mistake.”
Sidenote: I also believe that there is a contingent of people who are very impressed with LLMs who are really just impressed with the coding language Python. Python is awesome! It can organize your files, scrape websites, extra text from PDFs, manage your inbox, and send emails. Anyone you read talking about how LLMs “allowed them to look through a massive dataset” is likely using Python. Many of the associated tools that LLMs use use Python. Manus, the so-called “intelligent agent” firm that Meta bought last year, daisy-chains Python and Java in an incredibly-inefficient way to sometimes get things right, almost.
I truly have no beef with people using LLMs to speed up Python scripts to do fun little automations or to dig through big datasets, but please don’t try and convince me they’re being futuristic by doing so. If you want to learn Python, I recommend reading Al Sweigart’s Automate The Boring Stuff.
Anytime somebody sneers at you and says you are being “left behind” because you’re not using AI should be forced to show you what it is they’ve created or done, and the specific system they used to do so. They should have to show you how much work it took to prepare the system, and why it’s superior to just doing it themselves.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
Wondering what those “staggering improvements” are?
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
The one tangible (and theoretical!) example Karpathy gives is an example of how hard people work to overstate the capabilities of LLMs. “Coherently restructuring” a codebase might happen when you feed it to an LLM (while also costing a shit-ton of tokens, but putting that aside), or it might not understand at all because Claude Opus is acting funny that day, or it might sort-of fix it but mess something subtle up that breaks things in the future. This is an LLM doing exactly what an LLM does — it looks at a block of text, sees whether it matches up with what a user said, sees how that matches with its training data, and then either tells you things to do or generates new code, much like it would do if you had a paragraph of text you needed to fact-check. Perhaps it would get some of the facts right if connected to the right system. Perhaps it might make a subtle error. Perhaps it might get everything wrong.
This is the core problem with the “checkmate, boosters — AI can write code!” problem. AI can write code. We knew that already. It gets “better” as measured by benchmarks that don’t really compare to real world success, and even with the supposedly meteoric improvements over the last few months, nobody can actually explain what the result of it being better is, nor does it appear to extend to any domain outside of coding.
You’ll also notice that Karpathy’s language is as ingratiating to true believers as it is vague. Other domains are left unexplained other than references to “research” and “math.” I’m in a research-heavy business, and I have tried the most-powerful LLMs and highest-priced RAG/post-RAG research tools, and every time find them bereft of any unique analysis or suggestions.
I don’t dispute that LLMs are useful for generating code, nor do I question whether or not they’re being used by software developers at scale. I just think that they would be used dramatically less if there weren’t an industrial-scale publicity campaign run through the media and the majority of corporate America both incentivizing and forcing them to do so.
Similarly, I’m not sure anybody would’ve been anywhere near as excited if OpenAI and Anthropic hadn’t intentionally sold them a product that was impossible to support long-term.
This entire industry has been sold on a lie, and as capacity becomes an issue, even true believers are turning on the AI labs.
The Great Enshittification of Generative AI
Anthropic’s Products Are Deteriorating In Real Time, And Its Customers Are Victims of A Con
About a year ago, I warned you that Anthropic and OpenAI had begun the Subprime AI Crisis, where both companies created “priority processing tiers” for enterprise customers (read: AI startups like Replit and Cursor), dramatically increasing the cost of running their services to the point that both had to dramatically change their features as a result. A few weeks later, I wrote another piece about how Anthropic was allowing its subscribers to burn thousands of dollars’ worth of tokens on its $100 and $200-a-month subscriptions, and asked the following question at the end:
…do you think that the current version of Claude Code is going to be what you get? Anthropic has proven it’ll rate limit their business customers, what's stopping it from doing the same to you and charging more, just like Cursor?
One of the most detailed public complaints originated as a GitHub issue filed by Stella Laurenzo on April 2, 2026, whose LinkedIn profile identifies her as Senior Director in AMD’s AI group.
In that post, Laurenzo wrote that Claude Code had regressed to the point that it could not be trusted for complex engineering work, then backed that claim with a sprawling analysis of 6,852 Claude Code session files, 17,871 thinking blocks and 234,760 tool calls.
The complaint argued that, starting in February, Claude’s estimated reasoning depth fell sharply while signs of poorer performance rose alongside it, including more premature stopping, more “simplest fix” behavior, more reasoning loops, and a measurable shift from research-first behavior to edit-first behavior.
Think that Anthropic cares? Think again:
Anthropic’s public response focused on separating perceived changes from actual model degradation. In a pinned follow-up on the same GitHub issue posted a week ago, Claude Code lead Boris Cherny thanked Laurenzo for the care and depth of the analysis but disputed its main conclusion.
Cherny said the “redact-thinking-2026-02-12” header cited in the complaint is a UI-only change that hides thinking from the interface and reduces latency, but “does not impact thinking itself,” “thinking budgets,” or how extended reasoning works under the hood.
He also said two other product changes likely affected what users were seeing: Opus 4.6’s move to adaptive thinking by default on Feb. 9, and a March 3 shift to medium effort, or effort level 85, as the default for Opus 4.6, which he said Anthropic viewed as the best balance across intelligence, latency and cost for most users.
Cherny added that users who want more extended reasoning can manually switch effort higher by typing /effort high in Claude Code terminal sessions.
To be clear, this is far from the only time that I’ve seen people complain about these models “getting dumber” — users on basically every AI Subreddit will say, at some point, that models randomly can’t do things they used to be able to, with nobody really having an answer other than “yeah dude, same.”
Back in September 2025, developer Theo Browne complained that Claude had got dumber, but Anthropic near-immediately responded to say that the degraded responses were a result of bugs that “intermittently degraded responses from Claude,” adding the following:
To state it plainly: We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load. The problems our users reported were due to infrastructure bugs alone.
Which begs the question: is Anthropic accidentally making its models worse? Because it’s obvious it’s happening, it’s obvious they know something is happening, and its response, at least so far, has been to say that either users need to tweak their settings or nothing is wrong at all. Yet these complaints have happened for years, and have reached a crescendo with the latest ones that involve, in some cases, Claude Code burning way more tokens for absolutely no reason, hitting rate limits earlier than expected or wasting actual dollars spent on API calls.
Some suggest that the problems are a result of capacity issues over at Anthropic, which have led to a stunning (at least for software used by millions of people) amounts of downtime, per the Wall Street Journal:
The reliability of core services on the internet is often measured in nines. Four nines means 99.99% of uptime—a typical percentage that a software company commits to customers. As of April 8, Anthropic’s Claude API had a 98.95% uptime rate in the last 90 days.
This naturally led to boosters (and, for that matter, the Wall Street Journal) immediately saying that this was a sign of the “insatiable demand for AI compute”:
Spot-market prices to access Nvidia’s GPUs, or graphics processing units, in data-center clouds have risen sharply in recent months across the company’s entire product line, according to Ornn, a New York-based data provider that publishes market data and structures financial products around GPU pricing.
Renting one of Nvidia’s most-advanced Blackwell generation of chips for one hour costs $4.08, up 48% from the $2.75 it cost two months ago, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index.
“There’s a massive capacity crunch that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in the more than five years I’ve been running this business,” said J.J. Kardwell, chief executive of Vultr, a cloud infrastructure company. “The question is, why don’t we just deploy more gear? The lead times are too long. Data center build times are long, the power that’s available through 2026 is already all spoken for.”
Before I go any further: if anyone has been taking $2.75-per-hour-per-GPU for any kind of Blackwell GPU, they are losing money. Shit, I think they are at $4.08. While these are examples from on-demand pricing (versus paid-up years-long contracts like Anthropic buys), if they’re indicative of wider pricing on Blackwell, this is an economic catastrophe.
In any case, Anthropic’s compute constraints are a convenient excuse to start fucking over its customers at scale. Rate limits that were initially believed to be a “bug” are now the standard operating limits of using Anthropic’s services, and its models are absolutely, fundamentally worse than they were even a month ago.
A Scenario Illustrating How Anthropic Fucks Over Its Customers
It’s January 14 2026, and you just read The Atlantic’s breathless hype-slop about Claude Code, believing that it was “bigger than the ChatGPT moment,” that it was an “inflection point for AI progress,” and that it could build whatever software you imagined. While you’re not exactly sure what it is you’re meant to be excited about, your boss has been going on and on about how “those who don’t use AI will be left behind,” and your boss allows you to pay $200 for a year’s access to Claude Pro.
You, as a customer, no longer have access to the product you purchased. Your rate limits are entirely different, service uptime is measurably worse, and model performance has, for some reason, taken a massive dip. You hit your rate limits in minutes rather than hours. Prompts that previously allowed you a healthy back-and-forth over a project are now either impractical or impossible.
Your boss now has you vibe-coding barely-functional apps as a means of “integrating you with the development stack,” but every time you feed it a screenshot of what’s going wrong with the app you seem to hit your rate limits again. You ask your boss if he’ll upgrade you to the $100-a-month subscription, and he says that “you’ve got to make do, times are tough.” You sit at your desk trying to work out what the fuck to do for the next four hours, as you do not know how to code and what little you’ve been able to do is now impossible.
This is the reality for a lot of AI subscribers, though in many cases they’ll simply subscribe to OpenAI Codex or another service that hasn’t brought the hammer down on their rate limits.
…for now, at least.
AI Labs’ Capacity Issues Are Financial Poison, As Compute “Demand” Is Impossible To Gauge And Must Be Planned Years In Advance
The con of the Large Language Model era is that any subscription you pay for is massively subsidized, and that any product you use can and will see its service degraded as these companies desperately try to either ease their capacity issues or lower their burn rate.
Yet it’s unclear whether “more capacity” means that things will be cheaper, or better, or just a way of Anthropic scaling an increasingly-shittier experience.
To explain, when an AI lab like Anthropic or OpenAI “hits capacity limits,” it doesn’t mean that they start turning away business or stop accepting subscribers, but that current (and new) subscribers will face randomized downtime and model issues, along with increasingly-punishing rate limits.
Neither company is facing a financial shortfall as a result of being unable to provide their services (rather, they’re facing financial shortfalls because they’re providing their services to customers. And yet, the only people that are the only people paying that price because of these “capacity limits” are the customers.
This is because AI labs must, when planning capacity, make arbitrary guesses about how large the company will get, and in the event that they acquire too much capacity, they’ll find themselves in financial dire straits, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Dwarkesh Patel back in February:
So when we go to buying data centers, again, the curve I’m looking at is: we’ve had a 10x a year increase every year. At the beginning of this year, we’re looking at $10 billion in annualized revenue. We have to decide how much compute to buy. It takes a year or two to actually build out the data centers, to reserve the data center.
Basically I’m saying, “In 2027, how much compute do I get?” I could assume that the revenue will continue growing 10x a year, so it’ll be $100 billion at the end of 2026 and $1 trillion at the end of 2027. Actually it would be $5 trillion dollars of compute because it would be $1 trillion a year for five years. I could buy $1 trillion of compute that starts at the end of 2027. If my revenue is not $1 trillion dollars, if it’s even $800 billion, there’s no force on earth, there’s no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute.
What happens if you don’t buy enough compute? Well, you find yourself having to buy it last-minute, which costs more money, which further erodes your margins, per The Information:
In another sign of its financial pressures, OpenAI told investors that its gross profit margins last year were lower than projected due to the company having to buy more expensive compute at the last minute in response to higher than expected demand for its chatbots and models, according to a person with knowledge of the presentation. (Anthropic has experienced similar problems.)
In other words, compute capacity is a knife-catching game. Ordering compute in advance lets you lock in a better rate, but having to buy compute at the last-minute spikes those prices, eating any potential margin that might have been saved as a result of serving that extra demand.
Order too little compute and you’ll find yourself unable to run stable and reliable services, spiking your costs as you rush to find more capacity. Order too much capacity and you’ll have too little revenue to pay for it.
It’s important to note that the “demand” in question here isn’t revenue waiting in the wings, but customers that are already paying you that want to do more with the product they paid for. More capacity allows you to potentially onboard new customers, but they too face the same problems as your capacity fills.
This also begs the question: how much capacity is “enough”? It’s clear that current capacity issues are a result of the inference (the creation of outputs) demands of Anthropic’s users. What does adding more capacity do, other than potentially bringing that under control?
OpenAI And Anthropic’s Are Conning Their Customers, Offering Products That Will Reduce In Functionality In A Matter Of Months
This also suggests that Anthropic’s (and OpenAI’s by extension) business model is fundamentally flawed. At its current infrastructure scale, Anthropic cannot satisfactorily serve its current paying customer base, and even with this questionably-stable farce of a product, Anthropic still expects to burn $14 billion. While adding more capacity might potentially allow new customers to subscribe, said new customers would also add more strain on capacity, which would likely mean that nobody’s service improves but Anthropic still makes money.
It ultimately comes down to the definition of the word “demand.”
Let me explain.
Data center development is very slow. Only 5GW of capacity is under construction worldwide (and “construction” can mean anything from a single steel beam to a near-complete building). As a result, both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning and paying for capacity years in advance based on “demand.”
“Demand” in this case doesn’t just mean “people who want to pay for services,” but “the amount of compute that the people who pay us now and may pay us in the future will need for whatever it is they do.”
The amount of compute that a user may use varies wildly based on the model they choose and the task in question — a source at Microsoft once told me in the middle of last year that a single user could take up as many as 12 GPUs with a coding task using OpenAI’s o4-mini — which means that in a very real sense these guys are guessing and hoping for the best.
It also means that their natural choice will be to fuck over their current users to ease their capacity issues, especially when those users are paying on a monthly or — ideally — annual basis. OpenAI and Anthropic need to show continued revenue growth, which means that they must have capacity available for new customers, which means that old customers will always be the first to be punished.
We’re already seeing this with OpenAI’s new $100-a-month subscription, a kind of middle ground between its $20 and $200-a-month ChatGPT subscriptions that appears to have immediately reducedratelimits for $20-a-month subscribers.
This is a fundamentally insane and deceptive way to run a business, and I believe things will only get worse as capacity issues continue. Not only must Anthropic and OpenAI find a way to make their unsustainable and unprofitable services burn less money, but they must also constantly dance with metering out whatever capacity they have to their customers, because the more extra capacity they buy, the more money they lose.
OpenAI And Anthropic Are Unethical Businesses That Abuse Their Customers
However you feel about what LLMs can do, it’s impossible to ignore the incredible abuse and deception happening to just about every customer of an AI service.
As I’ve said for years, AI companies are inherently unsustainable due to the unreliable and inconsistent outputs of Large Language Models and the incredible costs of providing the services. It’s also clear, at this point, that Anthropic and OpenAI have both offered subscriptions that were impossible to provide at scale at the price and availability that they were leading up to 2026, and that they did so with the intention of growing their revenue to acquire more customers, equity investment and attention.
As a result, customers of AI services have built workflows and habits based on an act of deceit. While some will say “this is just what tech companies do, they get you in when it’s cheap then jack up the price,” doing so is an act of cowardice and allegiance with the rich and powerful.
To be clear, Anthropic and OpenAI need to do this. They’ve always needed to do this. In fact, the ethical thing to do would’ve been to charge for and restrict the services in line with their actual costs so that users could have reliable and consistent access to the services in question. As of now, anyone that purchases any kind of AI subscription is subject to the whims of both the AI labs and their ability to successfully manage their capacity, which may or may not involve making the product that a user pays for worse.
The “demand” for AI as it stands is an act of fiction, as much of that demand was conjured up using products that were either cheaper or more-available. Every one of those effusive, breathless hype-screeds about Claude Code from January or February 2026 are discussing a product that no longer exists. On June 1 2026, any article or post about Codex’s efficacy must be rewritten, as rate limits will be halved.
While for legal reasons I’ll stop short of the most obvious word, Anthropic and OpenAI are running — intentionally or otherwise — deeply deceitful businesses where their customers cannot realistically judge the quality or availability of the service long-term. These companies also are clearly aware that their services are deeply unpopular and capacity-constrained, yet aggressively court and market toward new customers, guaranteeing further service degradations and potential issues with models.
This is not a dignified way to use software, nor is it an ethical way to sell it.
How can you plan around this technology? Every month some new bullshit pops up. While incremental model gains may seem like a boon, how do you actually say “ok, let’s plan ahead” for a technology that CHANGES, for better or for worse, at random intervals? You’re constantly reevaluating model choices and harnesses and prompts and all kinds of other bullshit that also breaks in random ways because “that’s how large language models work.” Is that fun? Is that exciting? Do you like this? It seems exhausting to me, and nobody seems to be able to explain what’s good about it.
How, exactly, does this change?
Right now, I’d guess that OpenAI has access to around 2GW of capacity (as of the end of 2025), and Anthropic around 1GW based on discussions with sources. OpenAI is already building out around 10GW of capacity with Oracle, as well as locking in deals with CoreWeave ($22.4 billion), Amazon Web Services ($138 billion), Microsoft Azure ($250 billion), and Cerebras (“750MW”).
Both of these companies are making extremely large bets that their growth will continue at an astonishing, near-impossible rate. If OpenAI has reached “$2 billion a month” (which I doubt it can pay for) with around 2GW of capacity, this means that it has pre-ordered compute assuming it will make $10 billion or $20 billion a month in a few short years, which fits with The Information’s reporting that OpenAI projects it will make $113 billion in revenue in 2028.
And if it doesn’t make that much revenue — and also doesn’t get funding or debt to support it — OpenAI will run out of money, much as Anthropic will if that capacity gets built and it doesn’t make tens of billions of dollars a month to pay for it.
I see no scenario where costs come down, or where rate limits are eased. In fact, I think that as capacity limits get hit, both Anthropic and OpenAI will degrade the experience for the user (either through model degradation or rate limit decay) as much as they can.
I imagine that at some point enterprise customers will be able to pay for an even higher priority tier, and that Anthropic’s “Teams” subscription (which allows you to use the same subsidized subscriptions as everyone else) will be killed off, forcing anyone in an organization paying for Claude Code (and eventually Codex) via the API, as has already happened for Anthropic’s enterprise users.
Anyone integrating generative AI is part of a very large and randomized beta test. The product you pay for today will be materially different in its quality and availability in mere months. I told you this would happen in September 2024. I have been trying to warn you this would happen, and I will repeat myself: these companies are losing so much more money than you can think of, and they are going to twist the knife in and take as many liberties with their users and the media as they can on the way down.
It is fundamentally insane that we are treating these companies as real businesses, either in their economics or in the consistency of the product they offer.
These are unethical products sold in deceptive ways, both in their functionality and availability, and to defend them is to help assist in a society-wide con with very few winners.
And even if you like this, mark my words — your current way of life is unsustainable, and these companies have already made it clear they will make the service worse, without warning, if they even acknowledge that they’ve done so directly. The thing you pay for is not sustainable at its current price and they have no way to fix that problem.
Do you not see you are being had? Do you not see that you are being used?
Do any of you think this is good? Does any of this actually feel like progress?
I think it’s miserable, joyless and corrosive to the human soul, at least in the way that so many people talk about AI. It isn’t even intelligent. It’s just more software that is built to make you defend it, to support it, to do the work it can’t so you can present the work as your own but also give it all the credit.
And to be clear, these companies absolutely fucking loathe you. They’ll make your service worse at a moment’s notice and then tell you nothing is wrong.
Anyone using a subscription to OpenAI or Anthropic’s services needs to wake up and realize that their way of life is going away — that rate limits will make current workflows impossible, that prices will increase, and that the product they’re selling even today is not one that makes any economic sense.
Every single LLM product is being sold under false pretenses about what’s actually sustainable and possible long term.
With AI, you’re not just the product, you’re a beta tester that pays for the privilege.
And you’re a mark for untrustworthy con men selling software using deceptive and dangerous rhetoric.
The AI Industry Is Surprised That People Are Angry, And It Shouldn’t Be.
I will be abundantly clear for legal reasons that it is illegal to throw a Molotov cocktail at anyone, as it is morally objectionable to do so. I explicitly and fundamentally object to the recentacts of violence against Sam Altman.
It is also morally repugnant for Sam Altman to somehow suggest that the careful, thoughtful, determined, and eagerly fair work of Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz is in any way responsible for these acts of violence. Doing so is a deliberate attempt to chill the air around criticism of AI and its associated companies. Altman has since walked back the comments, claiming he “wishes he hadn’t used” a non-specific amount of the following words:
A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology. This is quite valid, and we welcome good-faith criticism and debate. I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn’t always good for everyone. But overall, I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.
While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.
These words remain on his blog, which suggests that Altman doesn’t regret them enough to remove them.
I do, however, agree with Mr. Altman that the rhetoric around AI does need to change.
They should immediately stop misleading people through company documentation that models are “blackmailing” people or, as Anthropic did in its Mythos system card, suggest a model has “broken containment and sent a message” when it A) was instructed to do so and B) did not actually break out of any container.
Those that defend AI labs will claim that these are “difficult conversations that need to be had,” when in actuality they engage in dangerous and frightening rhetoric as a means of boosting a company’s valuation and garnering attention. If either of these men truly believed these things were true, they would do something about it other than saying “you should be scared of us and the things we’re making, and I’m the only one brave enough to say anything.”
These conversations are also nonsensical and misleading when you compare them to what Large Language Models can do, and this rhetoric is a blatant attempt to scare people into paying for software today based on what it absolutely cannot and will not do in the future. It is an attempt to obfuscate the actual efficacy of a technology as a means of deceiving investors, the media and the general public.
Both Altman and Amodei engage in the language of AI doomerism as a means of generating attention, revenue and investment capital, actively selling their software and future investment potential based on their ownership of a technology that they say (disingenuously) is potentially going to take everybody’s jobs.
Based on reports from his Instagram, the man who threw the molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house was at least partially inspired by If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a doomer porn fantasy written by a pair of overly-verbose dunces spreading fearful language about the power of AI, inspired by the fearmongering of Altman himself. Altman suggested in 2023 that one of the authors might deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
I only see one side engaged in dangerous rhetoric, and it’s the ones that have the most to gain from spreading it.
Cause and Effect
I need to be clear that this act of violence is not something I endorse in any way. I am also glad that nobody was hurt.
I also think we need to be clear about the circumstances — and the rhetoric — that led somebody to do this, and why the AI industry needs to be well aware that the society they’re continually threatening with job loss is one full of people that are very, very close to the edge. This is not about anybody being “deserving” of anything, but a frank evaluation of cause and effect.
People feel like they’re being fucking tortured every time they load social media. Their money doesn’t go as far. Their financial situation has never been worse. Every time they read something it’s a story about ICE patrols or a near-nuclear war in Iran, or that gas is more expensive, or that there’s worrying things happening in private credit. Nobody can afford a house and layoffs are constant.
One group, however, appears to exist in an alternative world where anything they want is possible. They can raise as much money as they want. They can build as big a building as they want anywhere in the world. Everything they do is taken so seriously that the government will call a meeting about it. Every single media outlet talks about everything they do. Your boss forces you to use it. Every piece of software forces you to at least acknowledge that they use it too. Everyone is talking about it with complete certainty despite it not being completely clear why. As many people writhe in continual agony and fear, AI promises — but never quite delivers — some sort of vague utopia at the highest cost known to man.
And these companies are, in no uncertain terms, coming for your job.
These people who sell a product with no benefit comparable on any level to its ruinous, trillion-dollar cost are able to get anything they want at a time when those who work hard are given a kick in the fucking teeth, sneered at for not “using AI” that doesn’t actually seem to make their lives easier, and then told that their labor doesn’t constitute “real work.”
At a time when nobody living a normal life feels like they have enough, the AI industry always seems to get more. There’s not enough money for free college or housing or healthcare or daycare but there’s always more money for AI compute.
Regular people feel ignored and like they’re not taken seriously, and the people being given the most money and attention are the ones loudly saying “we’re richer than anyone has ever been, we intend to spend more than anyone has ever spent, and we intend to take your job.”
Why are they surprised that somebody mentally unstable took them seriously? Did they not think that people would be angry? Constantly talking about how your company will make an indeterminate amount of people jobless while also being able to raise over $162 billion in the space of two years and taking up as much space on Earth as you please is something that could send somebody over the edge.
Every day the news reminds you that everything sucks and is more expensive unless you’re in AI, where you’ll be given as much money and told you’re the most special person alive. I can imagine it tearing at a person’s soul as the world beats them down. What they did was a disgraceful act of violence.
Unstable people in various stages of torment act in erratic and dangerous ways. The suspect in the molotov cocktail incident apparently had a manifesto where he had listed the names and addresses of both Altman and multiple other AI executives, and, per CNBC, discussed the threat of AI to humanity as a justification for his actions. I am genuinely happy to hear that this person was apprehended without anyone being hurt.
These actions are morally wrong, and are also the direct result of the AI industry’s deceptive and manipulative scare campaign, one promoted by men like Altman and Amodei, as well as doomer fanfiction writers like Yudowsky, and, of course, Daniel Kokotajlo of AI 2027 — both of whom have had their work validated and propagated via the New York Times.
On the subject of “dangerous rhetoric,” I think we need to reckon with the fact that the mainstream media has helped spread harmful propaganda, and that a lack of scrutiny of said propaganda is causing genuine harm.
I also do not hear any attempts by Mr. Altman to deal with the actual, documented threat of AI psychosis, and the people that have been twisted by Large Language Models to take their lives and those of others. These are acts of violence that could have been stopped had ChatGPT and similar applications not been anthropomorphized by design, and trained to be “friendly.”
These dangerous acts of violence were not inspired by Ronan Farrow publishing a piece about Sam Altman. They were caused by a years-long publicity campaign that has, since the beginning, been about how scary the technology is and how much money its owners make.
I separately believe that these executives and their cohort are intentionally scaring people as a means of growing their companies, and that these continual statements of “we’re making something to take your job and we need more money and space to do it” could be construed as a threat by somebody that’s already on edge.
I agree that the dangerous rhetoric around AI must stop. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman must immediately cease their manipulative and disingenuous scare-tactics, and begin describing Large Language Models in terms that match their actual abilities, all while dispensing with any further attempts to extrapolate their future capabilities. Enough with the fluff. Enough with the bullshit. Stop talking about AGI. Start talking about this like regular old software, because that’s all that ChatGPT is.
In the end, if Altman wants to engage with “good-faith criticism,” he should start acting in good faith.
That starts with taking ownership of his role in a global disinformation campaign. It starts with recognizing how the AI industry has sold itself based on spreading mythology with the intent of creating unrest and fear.
And it starts with Altman and his ilk accepting any kind of responsibility for their actions.
The internet known within China is a very different internet to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling. From the outside looking in, it feels like an entirely different beast, and to begin to understand it, you must first understand the conditions that formed it.
History
Mao Zedong was the founder of the People’s Republic of China and led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. He developed Maoism, a variation of Marxism–Leninism. Following the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, he aided in the establishment of the Chinese Red Army and then proceeded to head the Land Reform Movement (土tǔ改gǎi), industrialisation via five-year plans, and launch the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (镇zhèn压yā反fǎn革gé命mìng运yùn动dòng). He led intervention in the Korean War and oversaw the Great Leap Forward (大Dà跃yuè进jìn) campaign from 1958 to 1962.
In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, aiming to purge capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. During this period, there was mass destruction of artefacts, a violent class struggle, and, notably relevant within the context of this article, his cult of personality.
Mao Zedong’s cult of personality was a propaganda campaign designed to elevate Mao’s status as a beacon of communist China. His image was widely distributed in portraits and badges, and every Chinese citizen was given ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung’ (毛Máo主Zhǔ席xí语yǔ录lù), otherwise known as the Little Red Book, which they were expected to carry at all times and read from frequently.
Following Mao’s death, the Boluan Fanzheng program was launched, which translates in English to ‘Eliminating chaos and returning to normal’. As part of this program and subsequent efforts by Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and others, China began to repeal some of the Cultural Revolution’s changes.
However, some felt that this occurred too abruptly and moved too swiftly, giving people too much freedom too suddenly and causing them to act in pursuit of further liberties. This caused disputes which directly led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. China, which had before the protests seen greater (but far from full) press freedom, fell suddenly back under intense censorship. After a few years, restrictions were relaxed somewhat – particularly after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour. However, media remained very much restricted.
China’s first interactions with the internet were as early as 1987, but it wasn’t until 1989 that it started to properly gain a footing, starting with inter-university contact, as most countries’ internet communications did. In 1994, China began to embrace the internet, becoming properly linked to the internet in April. The next year, citing economic opportunity, the basis of infrastructure and a national network were established.
China, being an extremely large country, took a while to gain proper country-wide infrastructure, with it taking until the early 2010s for proper connections to reach rural areas. For a brief while in the 2000s, there was a surprisingly wild and free web, with minimal oversight. Unfortunately, as the internet became established, and the web began to form, censorship shaped it. China began to block many international sites, preventing penetration into the Chinese market. Under Xi Jinping, censorship has been far stricter.
Unlike much of the rest of the world, where the global interconnectivity of the internet is emphasised, China emphasises ‘Internet Sovereignty’ (网wǎng络luò主zhǔ权quán) – the idea that the government should have complete control of the internet as it operates and is available within the country.
The Great Firewall
This sovereignty is achieved via what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall (防Fáng火huǒ长cháng城chéng), a reference to the Great Wall of China. It is the combined product of the various legislation and unofficial degrees paired with technological enforcement.
It is a complex and oppressive measure. It does not merely block offending URLs but goes to great lengths by resetting connections, performing DNS poisoning to direct to incorrect IP addresses, scanning the actual data in transit via deep packet inspection, enacting full IP blocks, performing man-in-the-middle certificate takeover attacks, and more. It is one of the most complex filtering systems deployed at scale. Some sites are let through the filter but in extremely degraded states in an effort to avoid the backlash of full blocks while still functionally preventing access.
All of China’s major telecommunications companies – China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile – are state-owned, meaning that their services are inherently under government jurisdiction, making circumvention extremely difficult. They’re choke points of internet traffic.
Many of these restrictions can be bypassed by means of VPNs which are legal, albeit with restrictions. VPN providers must obtain state approval and face imprisonment if they fail to do so. As such, much information can be accessed, but it is made difficult and consuming of money and time. Unfortunately Tor functions in a degraded state, requiring workarounds, and many more standard proxies are thwarted by the firewall. The friction is only growing as time progresses.
The Great Firewall is a large part of this, and its prevention of access to international services has determined China’s development during the Fourth Industrial Revolution by giving preference to domestic organisations. Not only is this positive for China’s local economy, but it is also beneficial for the government as it has greater control over domestic companies than international ones. The Great Firewall acts as both a protective trade barrier and an instrument of ideological control.
Restricted Topics
There are many factors of China that are heavily suppressed. Information about the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre is one of the more famous examples of censorship, but there is far more. In their 2025 world press index, Reporters Without Borders placed the People’s Republic at 178 out of 180, higher only than North Korea and Eritrea. Some major topics subject to censorship include:
Taiwan
Specifically, discussion of the country Taiwan as the independent country which it is, rather than as a part of China.
Human Rights Abuse
There are ongoing mass human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities who are held in concentration camps. Starting in 2014 under the guise of the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism and escalating in 2017 with the mass unlawful incarceration of some one million Uyghurs, it is widely regarded as the largest mass internment of ethnic and religious minority groups since the Second World War.
There are also great and horrific human rights abuses in Tibet which are censored so heavily that the availability of reliable information is even impacted globally. Discussions of the human rights abuses or Tibetan independence are very heavily censored.
Promoting Western Constitutional Democracy: An attempt to undermine the current leadership and the socialism with Chinese characteristics system of governance.
Promoting ‘universal values’ in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership.
Promoting civil society in an attempt to dismantle the ruling party’s social foundation.
Promoting Neoliberalism, attempting to change China’s Basic Economic System.
Promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline.
Promoting historical nihilism, trying to undermine the history of the CCP and of New China.
Questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
COVID-19
Less so now given that the peak of the pandemic is past, but China heavily restricted discussion of the coronavirus. It also restricted discussion about other outbreaks, such as SARS during the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, which was also first identified in China.
This censorship has gradually gained a tighter grip around Hong Kong, which previously enjoyed a largely unrestricted internet, with the passing of the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law (香Xiāng港gǎng国guó家jiā安ān全quán法fǎ) presenting a significant alteration to the digital landscape.
Different Services
Given that the internet within China is aggressively moderated and filtered, internet services external to the country which cannot be controlled and don’t align with regulatory requirements are often disrupted or blocked wholesale. Some major services that are blocked include Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Signal, Discord, the Internet Archive, TikTok, and ChatGPT. This is by absolutely no means a comprehensive list, and there are so many more sites and services blocked. News sites especially are aggressively blocked due to China’s minimal press freedom.
With a population in excess of a billion people (roughly 20% of all web users), China has a size such that it can support a more or less self-contained web, with its own systems and alternatives to global platforms. The Great Firewall’s disruption of global competitors has created a massive domestic tech ecosystem within the vacuum.
Many services have received direct Chinese versions, such as LinkedIn, which had a Chinese version titled 领lǐng英yīng from 2014 until 2021 and then a stripped-down jobs-only version called InCareer until 2023. In other cases, there are equivalents or services with similar functionality that take their place. Commonly, the functions of many apps are combined into a singular.
Global Platform
Chinese Equivalent
WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook
Weixin (微Wēi信xìn)
Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr
Sina Weibo (新Xīn浪làng微wēi博bó)
Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok
Xiaohongshu (小Xiǎo红hóng书shū), Douyin (抖Dǒu音yīn)
Reddit
Baidu Tieba (百Bǎi度dù贴tiē吧ba), Douban (豆Dòu瓣bàn)
Quora
Zhihu (知Zhī乎hū)
Tinder, Bumble
Tantan (探Tàn探tan), Momo (陌Mò陌mo)
YouTube
Bilibili (哔Bì哩lī哔bì哩lī / BB站zhàn)
Netflix, Disney+, Hulu
iQIYI (爱Ài奇qí艺yì), Tencent Video (腾Téng讯xùn视shì频pín)
Twitch
Huya (虎Hǔ牙yá), Douyu (斗Dòu鱼yú)
Spotify, Apple Music
QQ Yinyue (QQQQ音yīn乐yuè), NetEase Cloud Music (网Wǎng易yì云yún音yīn乐yuè)
The ‘web’ as it exists elsewhere, with lots of interconnected separate sites, is not the same web that exists in China. Like a more aggressive version of the consolidation of the global web into a few social media sites that many have been critical of. There are many sites, but they’re all scrutinised.
Another defining feature of this domestic ecosystem is the absolute dominance of live commerce. Unlike the West, where e-commerce and social media are generally distinct, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live merge short-form entertainment with instant purchasing. This has birthed a substantial industry of livestream anchors and a highly accelerated consumer web experience.
One of the most famous Chinese apps is Weixin (微Wēi信xìn), which operates globally as WeChat. Developed by juggernaut Tencent, Weixin/WeChat is arguably an operating system in and of itself. It is used by almost everyone in China, as well as in other countries like Malaysia, to the point that it is difficult to get by without it. It encompasses messaging, voice/video calls, payments, location sharing, social media functionality, mini-programs, delivery, transport, games, appointments, and just about everything else one could think of. It is well and truly an ‘everything app’.
Weixin is integrated with China’s mass surveillance systems and has very restrictive terms of service which align with government policies. All data is kept within the country. However, outside China, WeChat data is largely stored elsewhere, and different platform policies apply (unless interacting with someone within China). The convenience and difficulty of avoiding Weixin and similar ‘everything apps’ creates a walled garden that keeps users deeply entrenched in platforms the state can easily monitor.
Systematic Oversight
This monitoring is not a side effect of the technology but a core feature of its design. There are a number of restrictions and influences from China’s uniquely structured internet.
In addition to mass censorship, there is also mass surveillance. In late 2012, the real name system came about, mandating online accounts be linked to people’s identities. This was furthered in 2025, when the National Online Identity Authentication (国Guó家jiā网wǎng络luò身shēn份fèn认rèn证zhèng) system launched.
Often in the West you’ll hear jokes about China’s social credit system based on mistranslated details presented in poorly researched, sensationalist articles. There is no single, national numeric ‘social credit’ score assigned to people like a financial credit rating. Companies and individuals who ensure compliance are treated more favourably, and those that fail to or frequently violate regulations may be restricted from certain benefits. On a smaller level, companies and local governments sometimes award perks to people who take positive action, but this has minimal impact on daily life. Credit systems do exist, but they’re fragmented and not a nationwide value.
However, it is worth noting that judicial blocklists do carry severe real-world consequences, such as bans on purchasing high-speed rail or airline tickets, which often fuels the Western confusion. It is a shame that China’s social credit system as a whole is so pervasive a myth, given how ubiquitous surveillance and censorship are within the country by other means.
In 2025 a new regulation was passed which has made it so that influencers without verified credentials are banned from speaking on certain topics, including finance, law, medicine, and education, in an effort to reduce misinformation. Further legislation, such as the Cybersecurity Law, mandates data localisation and network operator compliance, legally binding technology companies to state surveillance apparatuses.
Online Culture
Like much of the world, China’s online culture is a combination of both local and global trends and culture. However, the language barrier and isolation of China from the rest of the globe’s internet do lead to a more separate digital zeitgeist. Much that does make it into China is interpreted differently or associated with different meanings, much like information that is known globally about goings-on within China is distorted. This even leads to humour, seen in instances like the aforementioned Western misconceptions about the social credit system which have become the basis of many jokes and online discussions.
Within China, internet users are commonly referred to as netizens (网wǎng民mín). There are many global memes which have translated over to China, and there are also China-specific versions, interpretations, and equivalents of popular memes. Memes reflect culture and what people are thinking about. There are some interesting cases, though, such as the Doge meme maintaining relevance thanks to commonly being available as an emoji and used in messages to indicate sarcasm or irony.
For example, Baozou comics (暴bào走zǒu漫màn画huà) take the place of Western rage comics. Where in the West someone might reply they’re ‘eating popcorn’ when drama occurs, the Chinese equivalent is ‘eating melon’ (吃Chī瓜guā). There are many equivalents to many English terms. GOAT, meaning Greatest of All Time, is roughly equivalent to YYDS, which stands for Yǒngyuǎn de shén and means ‘Forever God’. You also have 润Rùn学xué. Rùn (润) means ‘moist’ or ‘profitable’ and is spelt in pinyin like the English word ‘run’. As such, it is used to refer to leaving China and is featured in discussions of how to get overseas visas.
As is typical for memes, they are not just empty humour but also reflect society at large and the general thoughts of the populace. In this vein, comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh has become quite the meme, though one that is heavily censored against. Automated filter systems easily detect direct references to disallowed topics, so anything sensitive is referred to with evasive manoeuvres such as homophones, historical allegories, and deliberate typos.
Artificial Intelligence
Chinese large language models will refuse to discuss censored events or criticise the government, instead following Chinese Communist Party narratives. Trying to reference censored events such as Tiananmen Square is restricted, as is drawing comparisons between Winnie-the-Pooh and Xi Jinping, China’s leader:
It is worth noting that this exchange was conducted in English. The language used to converse with AI models can influence their responses and determine the contents of their messages. It isn’t just DeepSeek which is censored, for heavy restrictions are present in other major models. Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot’s Kimi, Zhipu AI’s GLM, Xiaomi’s MiMo, and many more are censored.
In the face of more and more people relying on AI for information, this is critical. More critical, however, is the use of language models for more advanced, nuanced censorship. Tricky turns of phrase, or vague allusions to a topic, are increasingly unviable. Moderation passes with language models can detect negative government sentiment or anything pertaining to a restricted topic to an almost unavoidable degree. This emphasises the importance of local AI models to reduce the ability of governments and companies to censor and control, keeping information and technology free and democratised.
Unfortunately, there is the further issue of Chinese-managed models being used to sway sentiment online, presenting as normal users and astroturfing discussions to influence people and sow discord.
China’s digital landscape is a version of the web that is not World Wide but is instead fractured along the lines of ideology and nationalism. It has evolved not with the web as it is generally known globally, but alongside it, building its own identity, rules, and customs. It is restricted and only becoming more restricted in time, keeping information from entering and a population from exiting. It is a digital silo, where the tools designed to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and information have instead been repurposed to define the boundaries of a sovereign, state-sanctioned truth.
I have a piece in the spring issue of Jacobin, on the decline of literacy and what might happen to politics once our minds are no longer intimately structured by the written word. Like all these essays, it quotes Walter Ong. Apparently, some of you people are unware that you can just go and read Walter Ong for yourselves, because as soon as the essay was published I received several thousand emails all saying the same thing, which is that you really wanted to read the piece but you didn’t have a subscription to Jacobin, and could I help you out? And I am going to help you out, but while we’re here—why don’t you have a subscription to Jacobin? Why are you missing out on news, analysis, and perspectives from the leading voices on the global left? Isn’t it time you fixed that? If you need any more inducement Numb at the Lodge readers can get four print issues for $10 by clicking this link. Here’s the piece.
In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.
What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.
One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.
When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.
They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’
The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’
Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literary, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.
Like a lot of his contemporaries, Luria had a basically progressive model of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience; as time moves on the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the more backwards. Which is why he had to go to the furthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to find people who had never been exposed to writing. But the villages he visited hadn’t always been a backwater. A thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the Alai Mountains had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and poets like Ulugh Beg, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina. The illiterate herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a sophisticated literary culture that had, for the most part, vanished from the world.
Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.
The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside.
This is not just happening to the impoverished or the disenfranchised; professors at elite universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a thirty-page extract; some of them have difficulty making it through a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they’re willing to pay $300,000 for the privilege of dumping an entire text into ChatGPT and submitting its response as an essay.
Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.
One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.
Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.
The situation is not likely to get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing. In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death. Now, it seems almost benign; our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without distractedly poking at their phones, as if Mad Men were a kind of penitential mental gruel. I’m old enough to remember the first time I ever went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to have the same story. They loved to read as children, but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home.
Today’s undergraduates, meanwhile, were born around the same time as the iPhone was released, were about twelve years old for the beginning of the pandemic, and fifteen for the launch of ChatGPT. They can’t parse complex sentences, but at least they can identify words. What about the cohort who don’t have a gaping hole in their education at twelve, but at six? What happens when the babies currently being raised by AI-powered dolls grow up? When it’s their turn to govern the world?
This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy. For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic, we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.
(Meanwhile, a lot of Silicon Valley ideologues agree, they just think this is a good thing. In their future, the vast majority of people will be wireheads, hooked up to an AI-powered pleasure machine that will keep them in a state of permanent hedonic bliss. At which point democracy becomes impossible, the masses are evicted from history, and a natural elite emerges to rule the world. The reactionary ideologues assume that they’ll be part of that literate elite, and not plugged in to the infinite porn machine. Given how many of their leading lights have already developed AI psychosis, I wouldn’t be so sure.)
I don’t think these people are wrong to fear an undemocratic post-literate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be getting their worldview from frantic contextualized six-second soundbites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker, who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.
Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.
Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the ‘general starvation of the mind,’ in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by ‘mere literacy, the ability to read signs.’ In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word. At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anbaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.
Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who actually surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life, but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass-production of printed texts.
When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle, and forcing herders to join new collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years from 1930 to 1933, maybe more than a third of the Kazakh population died. Some died of starvation, some died trying to flee across the desert, some were shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster, but a disaster that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed in the Alai Mountains. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. It could only have been the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there.
One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world. The rate is lower among young people, but not by much. Essentially everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Pushkin and Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is not saner or more democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. If anything, the opposite. It’s possible that the great works of literature don’t actually do anything politically at all. They don’t make us better people or freer citizens. Their value exists in an entirely different world.
Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable ‘global village,’ in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, and integrates the entire world under ‘the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.’ It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch-cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.
Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization among gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging even harder to the right. A lot of people still seem to think that this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but actually it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.
Still, I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.
Will the last person who can read this turn out the lights
CT scans of four coffee beans, from unroasted green through French roast, reveal how density, porosity, and internal structure change at each stage of roasting.
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