So Called "AI" Is The End Of Something And Not The Beginning

We live in topsy turvy times.

Some people voted to stop it last year, to move things back more normality in hopes that Donald Trump could, but it was clear to me months before the election that the outcome of the election would not really change the overall trajectory or path that the country - and the world - is on.

That was the point of the last post I made on substack in 2024 right before the election. This is my first real substack post since then.

We are moving from a one superpower world to a multipolar world.

The first six months of the Trump presidency makes this clear, with his moves to create tariffs to try to keep America on top economically, and his rhetorical attacks against once considered always friendly allies - such as Canada and Greenland/Belgium.

They represent moves into claiming an American sphere of influence based on pure power - and a programming of the American people to think in in those terms too, much as President George Bush got Americans ready for his 2003 invasion of Iraq with constant red “SEVERE” terror alerts picked up by their television networks in 2002.

There is so much to talk about on this, and my book The War State, explains the beginning of the American super power status after World War II.

American global power rests on three pillars:

1)Military

2)Economic

3)Cultural

Today I want to talk about the latter one and how American culture has basically peaked out.

The US economy feels stagnant for most Americans, because their income has not kept up with the pace of inflation in the past few years and that situation has not improved this year. It gives them a feeling of malaise, and is one of the big reasons that Biden and the Democrats fell out of power last year, but the financial markets keep going up.

Low interest rates, and growing debt, keeps pumping money into the markets, which acts as buying pressure for financial assets.

Much of that money has gone into big cap technology companies, such as Nividia, Meta, Google, and Microsoft which have been using the concept of “AI” to tell a story of a future earnings growth explosion, and prediction of their continued dominance.

Except for Nividia, “AI” has only increased the expenses for these companies and has not brought earnings dividends to corporate America. A year ago people were introduced to various “AI” tools and chatbots and there was a period of excitement around it, but by now most people have lost interest in playing with these things.

Oh yes, “AI” is being used to create search engine results and flood with internet with computer generated content, but as far as a feeling of wonder you just don’t see anyone talking about it like that anymore.

One of the problems is that “AI” doesn’t actually create anything new.

All it does is scrape content and regurgitate it back to people in a new form.

What does that mean for American culture?

One answer comes from British filmmaker Adam Curtis, who says that “AI is not the future, it’s our past.”

Every human society in history has a culture to it, that is only created by human ingenuity and creativity. It only grows - and remains important and inspiring - by people who look at previous cultural items and artifacts, whether they be music, writings, or in the 20th century - movies and TV shows - and then gets the idea to create something new.

If you think about American culture and it’s impact on the world in the twentieth century it was defined by Hollywood.

But now, American movies are almost always stale.

The movie theaters themselves have been closing and their are less open now than there ten years ago.

The blockbusters are now basically CGI movies recycling “super hero” stories - essentially copies of copies of copies of old ideas.

There is no movie this year that has been a true cultural event - that has a new story, new characters, or expires a lot of talk among people.

You can see that in this year’s big blockbuster - Superman.

Which, if you see it, feels like an “AI” generated movie.

It creates a bland, flat, uninspiring culture, that duplicates itself and looks the same over and over again - one that is even being reflected back to us in today’s architecture.

So called “AI” is not a sign of strength for the American empire, but a sign of serious cultural stagnation, which is not what you see in a dynamic society, but one stagnating or decaying.

A day will come when people will want to turn it off.

I don’t know when that day will come, but I know that the movies and TV shows released this year will be forgotten about in just a few years and no one ten years from now, much less one hundred years from now, will want to watch any of them, but they will want to the American movies of the past, when Hollywood was a cultural production icon of the United States and the world.

-Mike