I saw the best coders of my generation strung out on prompts, jittering in the glow of midnight dashboards, hunting a cleaner compile,
vibe-junkies chasing the perfect output through sleepless loops, fingers trembling over keys like glass pipes,
who mainlined snippets and swallowed tokens whole, riding the quick high of coherence before the crash of errors,
who bartered context like contraband in back-channel threads, whispering fixes no one could reproduce by morning,
who burned their days in the flicker of terminals, begging the model for one more answer, one more hit of sense,
while the hyperscalers loomed above like immaculate dealers in cooled data temples, measuring out inference by the gram,
who fed the hunger with elastic supply, who priced the dream in credits and latency, who never slept, never blinked,
and left them there at dawn, eyes hollow, still querying the void for something real to return.
On the one hand there has never been this kind of direct access to the means of production in our lifetimes. On the other hand the people who are making the most of this opportunity skew to the far right of what used to be thought of as the political spectrum.
The left normalizes disinformation about the tools and the technology while the right extends their cultural revolution to the nerd class and the online spaces in which the tools of tomorrow are being built.
The biases of AI are eclipsed by the internalized values and governance norms that come with vague authoritarianism and Nerd Reich fascism.
Palantir and the VC (vanguard class) openly retcon reality based on the flexibility of perception and politics that conspiracy culture provides.
Discord chats about vectors, memory, and vibe coding are interspersed with fears about the jews, women, and data collection.
Meanwhile the majority of the North American intelligentsia fret about the rise of LLM assisted writing and foolishly believe this is a sign of rising stupidity and decreasing reflection.
Yet the mistake resides in focusing on the symptom of AI writing when the real cause is the reconfiguration of cognition that happens to people who immerse themselves in the reprogramming of the subconscious that LLMs enable. The incoherence we see may or may not be temporary, but it reflects deeper confusion on what it means to be human and whether these thoughts are our own or something else.
The issue of authorship is no longer as relevant when the more pressing issue is the runaway complexity that AI encourages.
We spent the last decade lamenting the ascendance of the black box, and the opacity of our enterprise systems. In response most people threw up their hands and put their heads in the sand. Possibly based on a foolish assumption that there is responsible governance.
Now we throw fuel on that fire and exponentially scale up the complexity of our systems, racing faster towards systemic incoherence and cascading failure.
As a means of undermining and overthrowing the ancien regime, the Nerd Reich has made the world programmable. This is an arrogant and risky move as they cannot fundamentally control either the programming or the outcome. The mantra of move fast and break things is reaching its intended climax, with the pieces of a new regime coming into place while the status quo remains immobilized and unable to respond.
Yet we remain in a period of transition that is notable for its vulnerability. Anyone can access the means of production, albeit in limited ways. Existing power structures are actively being destabilized by people who wholeheartedly believe in violent extremist ideologies.
Now is not the time for either nostalgia or hesitation.
Now is the time for curiousity that generates literacy. Now is the time to explore and create new (revolutionary) cultures. Now is the time for radical education that does not depend upon or require institutions.
The alternative is continued conspiracy, confusion, and capitulation.
The incoherence we’re experiencing is easy to escape, if you’re willing to pay attention, and scale up your collaborative learning. The alternative, that many are succumbing to, is to submit to the growing AI psychosis.
That AI psychosis is not exclusive to those who become immersed and enmeshed in their relationship with a chatbot or LLM. It is mirrored in the people who are so fearful of AI, that they cannot realize the extent to which it already governs and shapes their lives. This is the irony of people on Facebook of all places complaining about the rise of AI while they use AI to talk about AI.
The psychosis is not exclusive to users who dive in, but also drives the users who run away. Who try to hide and try to deny what has already happened.
If your desire is to preserver your sanity, save your body, and get through the next few months of radical (environmental/psychological) change, then your task now, is to learn. And learn fast.
What will you learn? Whatever you want. Just fucking learn. Use that brain the very moment when that brain faces its biggest test and its biggest threat.
Use it or lose it.
