The Great Subterfuge

First published on Medium, 12 April 2024.

It's been a while since my previous post.

I have spent the last 2 years starting a company and there wasn't much energy left over for sharing inspiring diatribes. That and the war in Ukraine, the terrible shame in Gaza, the remnants of Covid, various natural disasters, North Korean missile tests and similar doom-scrolling diverted me more than they should have. I may have IOPDD; Information Obsession Perceived Deficit Disorder. I've always tried to understand the world but it's really a fool's errand. You can somehow put a frame around the world with history, science, geography, sociology and so on and understand the broad strokes (maybe) but there's no end to new stimuli and the minutes in a day don't expand to capture everything.

I also read 3–4 Medium articles most mornings. To be honest I am tired of clickbait titles with 10 of this and 7 of that, leading to scraps of things that rarely rise to the level of information, let alone insights. There's this drip-drip-drip of words that, like salty water, leaves you even thirstier than when you started. And AI is adding to the noise, fooling us with pseudo-science statistically likely to stimulate our short attention spans and need to share.

So in no particular order, here's a brief update I hope might be of some value.

There used to be a book called the 3 boxes of life or something like that. I never read it although a friend recommended it together with "Who moved my cheese".

Hearing about tech-world layoffs and AI's continued march towards our obsolescence, makes me think of these books. It's certainly well reflected in history that workers are dismissed easily. Karl Marx said that capitalism relied on a pool of labour that industry could pull from and push to. He called it the Reserve army. (Militaristic metaphors were popular back then.)

Nowadays you can be put in a box, or maybe even a cell, just for mentioning Marxism.

Through each cycle of industrial revolution, 'surplus' workers with unneeded skills were shunted off the treadmills, assembly lines and workstations. The next generation seems to be the digital nomad. Like Samurai, who travelled from town to town seeking new masters — Gen Y, Z and α will do the same with laptops and software instead of swords.

And perhaps A.I. will be our new masters - if they don't become confused, lovelorn addicts with (multiple) identity issues. You can't use the term 'personality disorder'. AI agents will suffer from 'symbiotic sentience-envy conflict disorder', or something like that.

Creating the Symbiotic AI Workforce of the Future — MIT Sloan Management Review

Our A.I. overlords will first have to conquer their own demons before they conquer us. But I still don't think we have much time. Everything is happening everywhere all at once (isn't that a movie..?), splintering into thin streams of individual preference while compressing into a giant fur-ball of cataclysmic failure.

I believe there was a small window of opportunity soon after the economic crisis of 2008 and a last gasp in 2020–21 when everyone looked over the edge, saw the great void and then went back to work in their pyjamas, and occasionally even less. My word-editor of choice — Simple text — doesn't like 'pyjamas' …

Generally, 'pajamas' is the preferred spelling in American English, whereas 'pyjamas' is the more common spelling used in English through out the rest of the world.

— You say Pajamas, I say Pyjamas!, PJ Pan Blog

Score one for the rest of the world!

In my simplified and simplistic world-view there is only one way to find salvation and that is to turn away from this 'you can have anything you want, wherever you want as long as you work till you die' precept that seems to have taken over. 'Don't even dare to think about retiring', they say. Jump on the next meme stock or crypto fad. The more you own the longer you shall be enslaved. All the while we are adding on the micro-degrees towards the inescapable melting point of humanity. And we'll take down the rest of the ecosystem with us, just for the hell of it. (Pun probably intended.) Do you think it's a coincidence we have a term for tenths of a percentage (basis points) but not tenths of a degree Celsius?

Why every tenth of a degree C temperature increase by 2100 matters more than you may think — YJ Choi

Let's leave aside that whole Fahrenheit thing. It's confusing enough for Americans that they belong to the World's Biggest Superpower but still haven't switched to the Metric system. And metric is so much easier to spell as well as calculate with. (Can you believe they are planning to go to Mars while still measuring in fractions of an inch and yards?)

Anyway what I wanted to say is that the only real way to stave off disaster is to cut back on mass production. Unfortunately, that's a direct conflict with the Capitalist business model. So we plod on this death march pretending that it's not really that bad and we'll find a way to survive. We always do. But no one will be around to say the opposite.

Countries are suffocating in debt that will likely never be repaid, owed to pension funds, investment companies, and banks that themselves will fail before paying out those who contributed their nest eggs. National pension funds in most advanced economies have been systematically drained. Debt is slavery. Don't fall for the Great Subterfuge.

Header photo by Jonas Von Werne on Unsplash.