There’s an interesting parallel between the rise of guys like Elon Musk, the Trump presidency, and the simultaneous adoption of and enthusiasm behind AI—it’s the dawn of a new era of the con.

Whether it was Lee or Bernays who created modern day public relations doesn’t matter so much as the effect they’ve had on the world because of it. Advertising is one thing, but the idea of PR and manipulating social dialogues around everything—as opposed to just products or investments—has brought us all to this era of un-reality in the west.

Taking a look at Musk, for all who laud him, he has not actually built anything. He doesn’t know anything about cars or rockets, he purchased the assets that have built his wealth (or built them on government subsidies while being ‘anti-socialism’). He’s no inventor, shows no capacity for innovation or vision for the future. He’s just a shrewd capitalist (and a pretty big fucking idiot). Trump may have made some real estate dealings in the past but is notorious for fucking over workers (as well as lying about, well, more than I can link to). These are men who keep their heads above water because of how American culture has adopted public relations on the thoroughfare of public debate.

Yet these men are lauded by many for their ‘leadership.’ Wealth supersedes any questions in relation to morality, justice, equality, or even legality. It’s repugnant.

Drawing Lines

Somewhere along the line, the idea of what you make of yourself became less important than how what you make of yourself represents the capitalist ideal. Social intangibles like respect and dignity and honor have long evaporated from the air we now collectively breathe, and everything is about money and power. Being a shitty person has a proportional relationship to how much money you have at your disposal to ride out any negative news cycle that might carry your name with it. Do we really think Mark Zuckerberg will be affected by the fact his superyacht didn’t help a boat in need?

And so a new age of deceit is upon us. It’s no wonder that the people largely associated with these ideas also adopt AI so completely—to them, cutting corners for financial reasons is more important than any natural, human process. Art does not matter to these people—creation is an inconvenient step in the process of financial viability. Existence, and its potential, are secondary concerns to capital gains.

The MBA idea that everything is business has overwhelmed our relationship with inspiration. Labor is no longer about meaning something, it’s about cost-effectiveness. These people have adopted the idea that financial equations are more important than human endeavors, and so aesthetic (or any constructed) results that suit any need of production are more important than creative processes.

Losing It

This is a cancer upon humanity. I’m not saying that every use of AI is bad, or that every statement to the media is a lie, or that every businessman is a crook. But we have entered an era where the potential truth of the internet has been consumed by the dishonest nature of advertising—and along with it, those who profit are becoming shells of human beings who are only icons of wealth, shedding all other traits in regards to empathy, kindness, dignity, respect, or honor. They are the scum of the earth infecting growing swaths of the population with this grotesque self-centered outlook that defeats the purpose of our collective existence.

Capitalism is beyond an economic crime, it is the death knell of what makes people a part of the natural world. With the technological advancements we’re developing now, if it remains as influential as it has been over the past couple centuries, we are certainly doomed to lose a majority of our civilization to completely inhuman ways of being.

Oil companies pocketed $93 billion while the government is repaying hundreds of billions in tariffs deemed to be illegal by the Supreme Court—mostly to corporations, even though it was consumers who paid the bill.

The United States is a business, it’s completely profit-driven, and until the people are willing to utilize economic strikes to keep from being completely swindled by literally anyone in power—be it the state or private corporation—we’re just totally fucked, transferring money from employers to landlords and businesses.

Chris Hedges said it best:

The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments that are intimately familiar. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system will begin to consume the structures that sustain it. It will prey upon, in the name of austerity and government efficiency, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

As time marches forward, we’ll see less and less of a government and more and more subscription-based business models with tech companies intervening into increasingly necessary, and formerly public, services. Just a couple years ago here in LA during the wildfires, billionaire developer Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to protect his home and his mall. Meanwhile, the entire Pacific Palisades burned around these structures. This is the future we can expect, especially with the climate crisis fast approaching.

The new Polaroid anti-AI, pro-real-life-interactions ad campaign is pretty great. While advertising in general is a menace of a media system, any dialogue we’re having in public about AI—or digital addictions in general—is important to keep front-and-center, as we seem too eager to stray from the idea of our basic humanity being at stake. (It is interesting how some responses to the campaign discuss the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of data centers and how any corporate dialogue against AI is hypocritical, which is understandable but I feel on the wrong side of the subject.)

The AI debate as a whole kind of annoys me, but I do find value in dialogues centered around our collective humanity and what that means, because I think it should be the central focus of all this. The potential impact of AI (or advanced LLMs, whatever you want to call them) could touch on just about every aspect of modern civilization—but there’s no way I’m gonna trust those who could profit from this saying it’ll all be, ‘for the better.’

On the industrial side, it’s not that automation is usually a bad thing in regards to pushing civilization forward, but when it comes to economics, it can create turmoil if the system society exists within doesn’t look out for its people. If computers run the show and we still live under a capitalist system, how do the economics work out as jobs could disappear from media to healthcare to shipping? Silicon Valley openly jokes about a permanent underclass, but that’s a very real possibility if the current economic model remains as all resources are funneled into technological development as opposed to human services.

Creatively speaking the whole thing is a fucking joke. The outright theft of the collective cultural history of humanity in order to create heartless visuals and sounds is criminal—both in the law of the land and the law of nature. Anthropic destroying rare books because it’s the easiest way to scan them to train AI models is so on-the-nose evil it wouldn’t make the script of a blockbuster movie. The things that make us human—the tangled relationships between ideas, labor, production, and objects—are being completely disregarded for this idea of creating a future that embraces a new era of subjugation and control instead of growing into a state of egalitarianism.

I think that’s the most enraging part of all of this. Regardless of what part of the AI debate is being scrutinized, the human benefits are largely abstracted and obfuscated—there are quips about the end of money or a complete reformation on how we work, but no dialogue about how those processes might actually work to benefit people. No one can convince me that those who are fully invested in AI as the future aren’t some of the most evil people to have ever lived, looking out only for their own stake in a hyper-violent, automated future and willing to dispose of not only everything we’ve collectively created since the dawn of time but also a majority of the lives on earth for the sake of a few dollars.

Why even try to write about any of this now? There is so much happening on a daily basis that it’s difficult to keep track of, much less maintain a discourse on. The climate crisis? War? Artificial intelligence? Wealth disparity? Global fascism? Genocide? Wage stagnation? What’s the point?

I think right now that question—Why bother?—is more interesting to me than the sum total of all the issues being faced, because it points directly to the crux of the problem. There is a bottleneck between the outcry for necessary change and administrative action to set it in motion, and that stagnation leads to division, rage, and despair among the people. This does not feel unintentional.

In a 2017 town hall debate on CNN, Nancy Pelosi replied to a question regarding the popularity of a more socialist economic agenda with, “We’re capitalists.” When I watched that live, it felt like a real mask-off, with-us-or-against-us moment for the Democratic party. Regardless of who is in power, there will never be a political agenda that prioritizes the well-being of the people over that of economic growth (and, when it comes down to it, individual profits). Nearly ten years later and it feels like liberals still won’t acknowledge that when you play the tape of capitalism to the end of the line, you end up with a guy like Donald Trump in power every time.

But the fact is the Democrats have no interest in what their constituents want, regardless of what it costs them. Kamala Harris lost in 2024 due to her pro-Israel stance during a genocide. Instead of even acknowledging that, the DNC buried the campaign autopsy because it said just as much. The Democrats won’t admit why they lost, and by doing so, won’t have to change any policy that might prevent donations coming in from AIPAC. If they won’t change their tune on supporting a genocidal apartheid state, I can’t imagine they’ll turn against Wall Street.

And this is what we’re stuck with—a hyperactive social media machine, a lazy and dying fourth estate protecting corporate interests, and a government that could give a fuck about any of it. We’re just in a cycle of talking amongst ourselves ad nauseam while nothing changes—constantly gaslit into an echo of reacting to one crisis after another, being exhausted by the lack of response by anyone in power. This repetition can only go on so long before it breaks into fits of action, at which point I think we’ll see the iron fist of the state really begin to squeeze.

At the very best, it’s demoralizing and leaves a feeling of futility to any creative endeavor. If nothing else, all I can do is imagine that when the dust settles and whatever comes next finally arrives, there will be some kind of record on how it all went down. Sometimes bearing witness is all you can do.