A dance with death, science fiction I won't describe, a weird Welsh bookseller, techo-fascism, and a lot of jazz

The Tech Bubble Consumer Dispatch #4 (03/12/25)

Mar 12, 2025

Welcome, valued Consumer, to the Tech Bubble Dispatch #4! This week’s roundup is a short one as I’m trying to focus on finishing up the second half of my Silicon Valley Consensus essay.

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Song of the week

Huge spoiler if you haven’t seen ALL THAT JAZZ considering this is the final dance number. SKIP AHEAD.

This is a top 5 movie ending for me and if I ever made a film, it would end similar to this though a little bloodier. The movie follows Joe Gideon, a choreographer, theater director, film director, and editor whose life disintegrates as he tries to balance his commitment to work, booze, sex, and family. This builds and builds until heart attacks put him in the hospital, spurring end-of-life dream sequences that culminate in this musical number featuring everyone in his life:

Book(seller) of the week

This is a two for one. Over the past two years, one of the biggest influences on the literature I've been reading has been Stephen E Andrews, a fiction writer who runs the Outlaw Bookseller Youtube channel. Andrews is a bookseller with an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime fiction, and much more. I can count on one hand how many books in the last two genres I read before finding his channel. Check him out, he’s introduced me to some of my favorite authors and books as well as given new appreciation for genres and the various schools of writers within them and historical contexts for certain stories or turns.

Here are some videos of his I recommend starting with:

The reason this is a two for one, however, is that Andrews just released a video on science fiction writer Christopher Priest, whose book “The Prestige” was adapted into a film by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Andrews introduced me to Priest two years ago after a fascinating interview with him and has a series of videos on Priest’s career and work (Priest died early last year). The most recent video is on one of Priest’s best book, “The Glamour.”

Hard to describe without ruining the magic but I’ll quote Andrews here:

The big problem with “The Glamour” is that it's almost impossible to talk about without ruining the unique pleasures that lay within this landmark work. It recalls Wittgenstein's dictum that "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent." [Early] Wittgenstein, of course, believed that all philosophical problems were merely problems of language and once we had solved the problems ("climbed the ladder") we would throw language away. But, suffice to say, that this is an utterly original and spellbinding narrative that also works as an homage to one of the great works of H.G. Wells, so it does have a science fiction precedent.
It's not a dry, dull book, it's a gripping metaphysical thriller that leaves both the most mind-bending hard SF and the twistiest Gordian knot locked room mysteries standing in the shade. If you read “The Glamour,” you will irresistibly sucked into the vortex of the book, a book whose mysteries, contradictions, and evidences push you to try and balance what Priest is giving you into something that makes sense.And it's his peerless ability to misdirect, wrong-foot, tantalize, and imply, that seduces you into solving the ambiguous core of the novel and turn it into something concrete. Opening the book awakens an obsessive hunger in the reader that leaves them unable to put it aside unless its enigmas are fully experienced.

Reading Recommendations

Last week, Ed Zitron wrote a great essay on what we know about Microsoft cutting its AI infrastructure spend and what we can piece together.

Microsoft making such a material pullback on data center expansion suggests that the growth in generative AI products, both those run on Microsoft’s servers and those sold as part of Microsoft’s products, do not have the revolutionary growth-trajectory that both CFO Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella have been claiming, and this is deeply concerning, while also calling into concern the viability of generative AI as a growth vehicle for any hyperscaler.
If I am correct, Microsoft is walking away from not just the expansion of its current data center operations, but from generative AI writ large. I actually believe it will continue selling this unprofitable, unsustainable software, because the capacity it has right now is more than sufficient to deal with the lack of demand.
It is time for investors and the general public to begin demanding tangible and direct numbers on the revenue and profits related to generative AI, as it is becoming increasingly obvious that the revenues are small and the profits are non-existent. A gigawatt of capacity is huge, and walking away from that much capacity is a direct signal that Microsoft’s long term plans do not include needing a great deal of compute.

The Financial Times has a great Big Read on British fintech vampires drooling at the chance to enter the US market.

While they have started to generate profits, they do not yet lend at scale and are rarely used as primary salary-receiving accounts. Their lower deposit bases and small-scale lending have left them over-reliant on revenue from sources such as payment fees and, in a competitive market such as the UK, limit their growth.
“For . . . banks that have a single product, the only way to really scale and bring the valuation higher is by getting a bigger population pool,” says Pierre Legrand, a fintech analyst at consultancy Alvarez & Marsal. “If you live here in the UK, you’re not going to get that very easily because of the sheer numbers and the saturation in the market.”
Another attractive feature of the US market is that interchange fees — levied by card networks such as Visa and Mastercard on behalf of banks — are higher in the US than in the EU and the UK, where they are capped. This means that for the same number of payments, a US customer is more profitable.

Over at Africa Is a Country, Jennifer D. Daniel wrote about the gig economy in Africa.

Consider the much-lauded ride-hailing sector. Championing flexible hours and easy onboarding, these platforms initially appear to liberate workers from the joblessness that afflicts so many young people across Africa. Yet listen to the drivers themselves, and you’ll hear a consistent refrain: fluctuating commissions, price surges that benefit the platform but not the worker, and no safety nets if they fall ill or their cars break down.
For many, this isn’t the independence they were promised—it’s a digital twist on indentured labor. In much the same way that colonial mining companies trapped workers in debt cycles through company-owned housing and provisions, today’s ride-hailing giants encourage drivers to take out car or motorbike loans, only for many to realize they will never break even. Platforms set the terms, dictating rates and slashing driver earnings at will. If a driver dares to protest? The algorithm can deactivate them overnight—no severance, no recourse, no explanation.

News that China announced a $1 trillion yuan national venture capital guidance fund (at $138 billion, that’s more than SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1) led me to this piece by Kyle Chan on how US-China competition is distorting how each country pursues industrial strategy and responds to the other’s.

One major difference between American and Chinese industrial policy that I would highlight is what I call the persistence gap. The Third Plenum resolution lays out the next phase of an industrial strategy that China has been pursuing for years if not decades. China’s persistence in areas like electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and even aircraft manufacturing seems to be paying off. The US, on the other hand, faces the risk of sharp pivots in its industrial policy. The sizable progress made in bringing in foreign investment and building up American manufacturing through the IRA and CHIPS Act could be in jeopardy if a new administration decides to abandon these programs. This policy uncertainty and instability creates a “policy discount factor” that undercuts the crowding-in effect of industrial policy when it comes to attracting long-term private investment.

There was also an interesting discussion about what the “guidance” actually means here.

Finally got a chance to start Liz Pelly’s “Mood Machine,” which dives into Spotify's plot against music—and brings to mind Nick Seaver’s “Automating Taste” (which me and Jathan talked about on our podcast well over two years ago). Here’s an excerpt which ran in Harper’s earlier this year:

Like many other tech companies in the twenty-first century, Spotify spent its first decade claiming to disrupt an archaic industry, scaling up as quickly as possible, and attracting venture capitalists to an unproven business model. In its search for growth and profitability, Spotify reinvented itself repeatedly: as a social-networking platform in 2010, as an app marketplace in 2011, and by the end of 2012, as a hub for what it called “music for every moment,” supplying recommendations for specific moods, activities, and times of day. Spotify made its move into curation the next year, hiring a staff of editors to compile in-house playlists. In 2014, the company was increasing its investment in algorithmic personalization technology. This innovation was intended, as Spotify put it, to “level the playing field” for artists by minimizing the power of major labels, radio stations, and other old-school gatekeepers; in their place, it claimed, would be a system that simply rewarded tracks that streamed well. By the mid-2010s, the service was actively recasting itself as a neutral platform, a data-driven meritocracy that was rewriting the rules of the music business with its playlists and algorithms.
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major labels, the rise of Spotify would soon pay off. By the mid-2010s, streaming had cemented itself as the most important source of revenue for the majors, which were raking in cash from Spotify’s millions of paying subscribers after more than a decade of declining revenue. But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers.

In The Guardian, Brett Christophers wrote about why capitalism itself can’t stop climate change:

In the half-decade after the 2015 UN climate change conference in Paris, European governments briefly talked a good game about taking actions – even up to the stranding of hydrocarbon assets – that might actually make fossil-fuel production less profitable in the medium and long term. Hence why BP, Shell and others then started making plans to transition into cleaner energy. They wanted to be ahead of the curve, or at any rate, not too far behind it.
But since 2020, governments have shown that it was in fact just talk. Most notably, they have continued to issue licences for new oil and gas production at near-record rates, despite being told by experts that such licences are fundamentally incompatible with plans for net zero emissions; Norway alone has issued more than 100 new production licences since then. It is this miserable government appeasement that has emboldened BP and the rest to abandon their transition plans. Elliott, the activist shareholder in BP’s case, merely forced the issue; putting Marx’s “coercive law” into practice.

This slots nicely into his “rigorous empirical-historical critique of contemporary capitalism” as Cedric Durand lays out in his review of Christophers’ work (Durand’s New Left Review essay is from May 2024 but pairs well).

Among the questions posed by Christophers’s work, then, is whether rentierism should be seen as the default state of capitalism or a transitional one, a sign of business-as-usual or one of looming breakdown. His first two books present rentierism as an essential feature of the system which may well last indefinitely. Yet there is evidence to suggest that it is, in fact, a morbid pathology which is already destabilizing accumulation and threatening capital’s self-reproduction. Over the coming years, the intensification of these systemic convulsions may amount to what the French Regulationists call a grande crise, which will demand a major institutional reshuffling. At stake here is the hegemony of finance itself, which looks increasingly vulnerable despite the impressive portfolios of asset managers. Assuming that an eco-socialist alternative remains out of reach, there are at least two possible outcomes to consider.

MJ Crockett is also in The Guardian writing about an under-appreciated element of AI hype: it is impressive when diminishing human activity to machine roteness.

All that these examples of so-called “AI victories” show us is that machines are better than humans at performing empathy, creativity and conflict resolution in machine-like ways. Considering why these tests are unfair helps us better appreciate our distinctively human talents. We build relationships thick with meaning and forge new knowledge out of trusting social bonds. We find common ground reflected in our faces, voices and postures, perhaps because embodied communication helps us recognize our shared mortality. No chatbot can achieve these feats, because chatbots don’t have bodies, and aren’t embedded in our social worlds the way our loved ones are.

In The Guardian again, we have Becca Lewis on Silicon Valley’s crooked timber and the origins of our techno-fascist moment.

An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”.
No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for liberalism, its reactionary foundations were baked in almost from the beginning. As Silicon Valley enters a second Trump administration, the gendered roots of its original reactionary movement offer insight into today’s rightward turn.

Kyle Chaka in The New Yorker is searching for historical parallels that make sense of the unholly techno-fascist alliance plaguing us.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”
Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of the Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the MAGA right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In the Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.

And to sum it all up: John Ganz on the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil and a straightforward articulation of the fire this time.

What’s doubly disturbing about Khalil’s arrest is that it appears to have been made in a climate of mob activity and at the incitement of demagogues. Known agitator Shai Davidai has attacked Khalil repeatedly on social media media and called for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport him. And Khalil was targeted by the group Betar on one of their deportation hit lists. Betar is a fascist organization founded in the 1920s by Revisionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and at one time received support and training from Mussolini’s Italy. They are labeled as an extremist organization by the Anti-Defamation League, which has shamefully endorsed Khalil’s abduction. If organs of state security and petty demagogues and mob leaders are acting in concert to crack down on dissent it is clearly and unequivocally fascist. I don’t mean this to be a polemic: it is just the only appropriate term from political science and theory for this type of practice.
The politics of the situation are murky and perhaps deliberately provocative. The White House made a crude and inflammatory post that included a photo of Khalil and the words “Shalom Mahmoud.” Rather than fight antisemitism, this seems almost calculated to promote theories that the U.S. government works on behalf of Zionists. Perhaps the regime took this moment to take a hard line because it was announced that they had engaged in direct talks with Hamas and this is a sop to convince ideologues that Trump isn’t soft on Palestinians. And perhaps the regime hopes to provoke disruptive protests to further justify and deepen its project of squeezing and trying to break universities, part of its broader assault on the independence of American civil society.

Listening Recommendations

Quinn Slobodian talked about his upcoming book “Hayek’s Bastards” on the Trashfuture Podcast. Associated Press reporters Garance Burke and Michael Biesecker went on the Angry Planet podcast to talk about the role AI products have played in bolstering Israel's genocide of Palestinians. I’m going to plug two of my recent podcast appearances: on System Crash where I talk about my Silicon Valley Consensus idea & on Question Everything where I talk about Silicon Valley’s reactionary politics.

Some songs I’ve been replaying constantly as of late, bundle them into a playlist:

“Keep Your Faith in the Sky” by Willie Scott & The Birmingham Spirituals (again)
“The Thief That Stole My Sad Days [Ya Blessin Me]” by Moodyman
“My Queen Is Harriet Tubman” by Sons of Kemet
“Truth” by Kamasi Washington (I love this music video)
“Song to the Pharoah Kings” by Return to Forever
“Domino Line” (Feb. 1982 Live Performance at Chuo Kaikan Hall in Toyko) by Casiopea
“Portrait of Lucy” by Jaco Pastorius
“Springtime Again by Sun Ra” & His Arkestra
“The Creator Has A Master Plan” by Pharoah Sanders

And that's it for this week's roundup! Part 2 of Silicon Valley Consensus will be out this week, focusing on the finance and geopolitics spurring the overinvestment and overvaluing that drives the overbuild of AI infrastructure.

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