The News: Table Stakes

Since the 1500s, the historical consciousness of literate Westerners has been built around the naming of dramatic ruptures: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, globalization, modernization. Ages of Sail, of Rail, of Automobiles, of Flight, of Space. Of science, revolution, nationalism, capitalism, socialism.

What we forget is that many of these namings happened after what they’d named, not before. Always as the fruit of a transformation was ripened on the vine, almost as it was ready to rot away.

In the process of such naming, history writers and history teachers have habitually reached back to encompass within the rupture events, institutions and people who did not understand themselves to be heralding a fundamentally new era, who had no intention to change everything, who were not looking down on mortals from on high. They rewrote the inchoate in those moments, throwing out all the people, ideas and events that were notable to the people in that time but which could not be rewritten as forceful steps into the rupture.

Some of this ordering of the past has just been the quotidian way that modern publics learn their history as memorable, digestible shorthand narratives. But some of this labelling and structuring work is about capture. It has been a branding exercise by individuals, by institutions, by corporations, by governments who are trying not only to claim themselves the rightful heirs of the rupture they name but to draw capital, power and reputation to themselves as the avatars of the change they are labelling. They put themselves into it as its alpha and omega, as belonging to and representative of its beginnings but also as anointed to carry it forward to its glorious and inevitable ends. They do not interpret history at such a moment, but claim to be history. They are no longer cause but providence.

So it is with the people who are telling the story of generative AI who mean to proclaim it a rupture that is already over, already caused, already the irresistable legacy that they made and that made them. The rest of us can only do whatever a rupture makes in us and of us. Eat the sugar made by slaves, wear the clothes made in dark satanic mills and sweatshops, go into plastics. Go west to dig gold and build the railroads, go to the cities to escape a dying countryside, run in the rat race and move to the suburbs, get a credential to move up a rung.

What is different about Silicon Valley and its turn to generative AI is the scale and speed of the coupling of disparate and contingent beginnings to the proclamation of inevitable ascension. The amount of capital, the global extent of its concentration, the mere decades from the historical beginnings they now acclaim as their monopoly property.

What gets erased in that hurried revision? Not only the multiplicity of ideas, technologies and possibilities in the early shaping of computation and the Internet, but also the real economic underpinnings at play in this moment. Big Tech got big first because of accidents of timing and appropriations of technologies and practices that were not for them. Mosaic only turned into money for Marc Andreessen because somebody else built the architecture of the World Wide Web for free and because people made content for the Web that others wanted to see and read, whether or not they were paid to do it. Facebook only turned into money for Mark Zuckerberg for very similar reasons.

And the money they made and then invested was as much as it was and compounded as fast as it did because of a long period in which capital was very nearly free due to extremely low interest rates. If you didn’t have much capital to begin with, then going underwater on a mortgage or carrying a year’s salary as high-interest credit card debt was a catastrophe for you, and created structural ripples through the entire wage-based economy. If you had a fair amount, by luck or otherwise (usually the former), then low interest rates were a stairway to financial heaven.

Silicon Valley in its Big Tech form solidified around the ideological figuration of the unicorn: a company that vaulted to a billion-dollar valuation without having to make a profit or provide a plausible vision of a long-term future. From very early on, investment money piled in to possible unicorns, some of them almost laughably obvious frauds, because the investors made money on the perception of that magical possibility.

Nobody ever made money betting on a revolution they saw coming from centuries or decades ahead. The money gets made when people who have it invest in the accumulating momentum of what tens of thousands of people did in more discordant, divergent, unplanned ways. The money gets made when all that history is given a name, its brand is trademarked, and it shows up on the shelves in school lessons, political speeches and newspaper stories.

And the thing to remember now is that this process is not inevitable. Not only do people realize as the branding is going on what is being done to them and through them and fight back, sometimes effectively, but sometimes the branding goes pffft because the money is flooding into something that isn’t going to work out. The mercantile company is in the wrong place, chasing the wrong thing, losing control of what it thinks it owns. The monopolist has just gained control of an industry that’s about to die, or is going to use their unconstrained authority to unintentionally drive the whole thing into a ditch. The whale oil is going to be obsolete, the tulipmania’s going to end, the race to the Moon is the end of space and not its beginning.

These moments need to be seen for what they are: people on the make who have money on the table and are selling the suckers hard into making the table stakes even bigger. Sometimes they’ll win because the dice hit the odds, and sometimes they win because the dice are already loaded. The one thing they are not in that moment when the rattling of dice in the dealer’s hand can be heard the loudest are prophets.

They don’t own the future. They’re just storytellers who are trying to make history align in their direction. Historians who live under the sign of truth rather than of personal profit often know that their story is wrong, and that the ending has yet to be written.

Image credit: By Antoine Taveneaux - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15889804