Housekeeping!

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There’s an old episode of The Simpsons which starts with a sighting of a single, docile bear roaming the neighbourhood. This catalyses an outsized moral panic about Springfield being completely overrun with bears. The mayor, vying for re-election, installs a Bear Patrol: armoured vans roam the streets, anti-bear fighter jets zoom over head — and not a bear in sight. Indicating to Homer that “the bear patrol must be working!” Then, he gets very upset at the resulting tax increase, and starts another moral panic. About immigrants.

If the Bear Patrol was real (and let’s face it — it is, in a lot of ways) it would be sold to Springfield by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or perhaps by a company funded by Andreessen Horowitz. These men get very rich by inventing solutions for problems that do not exist, to support other men who want to maintain political power. Understanding this dynamic is more important now than it has ever been, because the leader of the world’s superpower is gathering techno-optimists and crypto evangelists into his cabinet like he’s collecting rare Pokemon.

Something that’s become abundantly clear to me over the last few months is that narratives always win over policy positions and facts — and often, unsurprisingly, the prevailing narratives are ones that benefit individualistic men who are afraid of losing control, and even more afraid of their own mortality.

First let’s start with a small tech marketing example: people are complaining that Apple have once again put the charging port of the new generation of the Magic Mouse in the wrong place. John Gruber argues that they are missing the point: the charging port is on the underside of the mouse on purpose; so that you can never use it while it’s plugged in. Cables are messy and inelegant. The Magic Mouse is meant to be a joyful, pristine-white peripheral, unencumbered by gross USB cables. Apple will not tolerate the mere possibility of ‘wired mode’ **because it goes against all of their weird puritan design principles. The mouse is wireless always and forever. Apple only make beautiful, elegant products — end of story.

The story with AI and cloud computing is similar, but the narratives are swirling around at hyper-speed and are obfuscating a lot more than a stupid charging port. It’s scarcity and abundance all at once: AI models give you infinite answers to infinite questions — but we need to keep producing more chips to uphold this reality! ‘The cloud’ is a weightless entity that is always available to store endless amounts of data, and run endless amounts of operations — but we need to keep buying up land for data centres!

Show me a stronger narrative than ‘stick it the cloud’. I hate ‘the cloud’ — two words that imbue resource-intensive physical infrastructure with the carefree properties of vapour. The techno-optimists would have us believe that it doesn’t cost anything, financially or environmentally, to train models, store data, or conduct other high-compute activities. In reality, where facts apparently reside as scared impish weaklings, data centres take up unreasonable amounts of land, energy, and water.

Supporting the continued maintenance and expansion of this infrastructure is to deny it exists, or at least to deny how wasteful and destructive it is. When a large tech company approaches a town with a proposal to build a data centre, they use code names so that local governments have no idea who they’re dealing with. These companies promise economic prosperity via job creation, but they refuse to reveal vital information to local communities — such as water consumption data — unless they are forced to with legal action. This secrecy demonstrates just how well techno-optimists like Sam Altman understand that no one wants a data centre anywhere near them.

They also know that no one asked for most of the products that they’ve over-leveraged and spewed into cyberspace. Outside of the tech industry, no one has ever said ‘god, I cannot wait for generative AI to be pumped into every digital service I use this year!’ Generative AI is a sunk cost. They have to make it worth it by telling everyone that we need a robot to inadequately summarise a meeting or write a cringe LinkedIn post. All of the money Microsoft has siphoned into OpenAI, all of the plans to build nuclear reactors and even to open new coal and gas plants — not to mention the existing environmental degradation and reduction in quality of life for those who live near existing data centres — it all somehow has to be worth it.

On some level, these men must know it’s not worth it. That’s why they working so hard to convince the masses that generative AI products have any utility. More than that: that these products are in fact gifts and we should be thankful; that these products are powerful enough to pave the way for a glossy utopian future — if society could just hold out, jump on board, and work towards that very future. They inspire collective buy-in so they can prop up their individualistic pursuits.

If you find yourself saying ‘the very idea that I’d be remotely inspired by a billionaire!’ — I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the people who think living necromancer Bryan Johnson’s way of life is healthy and normal. In case you’re lost, Bryan Johnson was the guy who would inject himself with his son’s blood in order to reverse the aging process. He’s also the guy who wears a device on his penis to measure his night time erections, and routinely posts the results publicly, saying that his erections “are now better than the average 18 year old”. He’s spending millions on this and he looks like a body that the cryogenic lab didn’t bother to thaw out all the way. His catchphrase is “don’t die”. He has taken wellness influencing to an ugly extreme. He is a man in severe crisis.

Men like this are allergic to collective solutions. The Bryan Johnson way is to optimise himself to immortality — a solo moonshot that benefits only him, while preaching his practices to others performatively on social media with the most cringeworthy memes you’ve ever seen. He clearly values health and wellness above anything else, but not to the degree that he invests his vast wealth into vaccine development or disease prevention — rather he just makes you feel bad for not getting enough sleep. He’s taking his absolutely anxiety-inducing approach to healthcare (i.e. biohacking and transhumanism) and centring it as an inherent moral good.

The techno-optimist end-goal is pretty much the same: live forever, no matter the cost. Build data centres, infuse society with AI & automation, and spearhead The Singularity (but it’s inevitable any way right?) — all so they can make pan-generational impressions on humanity and leave behind a huge throbbing legacy and a thousand backup legacies for contingency. These are the activities of egotistical men who have never been more afraid of death, and are making their midlife polycrisis everyone else’s problem.

The Masculine Urge to Build is wasteful, dangerous, and driven by ego. You can see this in Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed up by Elon Musk and another rich business man. This is a natural step in the maturity of an authoritarian government: to platform and celebrate others who have an addiction to control and supremacy, to completely hollow-out the government — and to fill in the gaps with a hundred different Bear Patrols.