This Silicon Valley Stuff'll Get You Killed

some notes on ritual sacrifice in the 21st century

Thomas Cole, Desolation, 1836

Most of my thinking on Silicon Valley—on its firms, its products, its financiers, its ideologues, its boosters, and its projects—rests on a relatively simple understanding: these people will sacrifice us.

My first experience witnessing this came when helping organize ride-hail drivers working for Uber and Lyft as well as talking with taxi drivers struggling to survive the ascent of these firms. These companies, in a desperate scramble for their first profits, brazenly ignored the law, misclassified and immiserated countless workers, pushed drivers into predatory leasing agreements, paid out starvation wages while dodging taxes and ensuring drivers were blocked from dignified working conditions, and countless more abhorrent practices.

Who cared if a few taxi drivers committed suicide because UberLyft’s predations degraded pay and labor conditions across the entire ride-hail sector, or if drivers were forced to sleep in their cars to meet aggressive quotas crafted to effectively lockout and fire workers (minimizing labor costs), or if they were attacked or robbed or killed on the job. So what? Were you going to complain on behalf of people who couldn’t adapt to the future, who made a bad choice in betting their livelihood on a line of work that should be Flexible and Temporary, who are lucky enough to get in early on “the operating system for your everyday life.”

Have things improved? Uber’s global lobbying and law breaking campaign was a resounding success—they’ve successfully degraded working conditions worldwide, convinced regulators that their specific model and structure is inevitable, integrated themselves into policy planning visions and decisions, and burned enough capital to create their desired markets and consumers and behaviors where they did not exist before.

All it took along the way was the physical and mental health of countless workers, some air pollution and traffic congestion in its major markets, tens of billions of dollars of investor capital wasted on failed behavioral psychology experiments and science fiction projects, a few public transit systems, backroom deals, and an incredulous corp of commentators.

Imagine how much more could be achieved with an even greater sacrifice.

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Things have only gotten worse as Silicon Valley’s business model has metastasized, with oligarch-intellectuals poised to reorganize wider and wider swaths of our economy, culture, social relations, and politics. To maximize profits and efficiency and productivity, to purge capitalism of its last vestiges of democracy and liberalism, to transform speculative gains into real wealth then into political power that makes this alchemy easier, to discipline consumers and workers and regulators, to foster paranoia (whether by states or communities) and preserve order, to pursue geo-strategic primacy, to summon some artificial superintelligence that will either end history or realize historic profits, anything and everything will be offered up. Something has to give—the situation demands a blood sacrifice.

Some believe the sacrifices will give birth to a stillborn god that will save the world. They insist, as Google’s former chief executive Eric Schmidt does, that “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway” so now is the time to double down on overbuilding AI infrastructure. Climate change will be staved off only by accelerating the very developments bringing about the collapse of our ecological niche—so consume the water, foul the air, enrich fossil fuel firms, do whatever you must and do it with quick if there is going to be any hope of creating an “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful” entity capable of saving the world.

Some believe that humanity will be liberated by subjecting vast swaths to undignified drudgery—we need ghost workers, potemkins, and sin-eaters to power the Great Work. The global AI value chain features critical processes—data collection and annotation, analysis and model development, and data verification—performed by "invisible workers" tucked away in digital sweatshops defined by piece-rate work, low pay, and undignified working conditions. As my TMK co-host Jathan Sadowski has made clear for years now, Potemkin AI (AKA “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots—services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots”) can be best understood as a few things, such as:

• Disciplinary power, or the power of "coaxing and cajoling, of implanting beliefs and inducing action” by, for example, convincing people you've built a panopticon that is "tirelessly processing feeds from the ubiquitous cameras, rather than groups of human analysts who take time, get fatigued, and make mistakes.."

• Choosing “certain interests over others and reasserting the value of certain people over others” like prioritizing artificial intelligence infrastructure over human needs. Or, as Jathan writes, a "placeholder" for "attempts to use AI as a tool for replacing human decisions, exploiting human labor, and administering human life" so long as you don't look behind the curtain.

On the question of sin-eaters, it is increasingly clear that firms will offer various configurations of man-machine systems to obfuscate culpability. A human will serve as a legal guarantor or as "the final stop in the responsibility chain.” AI will be used externalize moral agency, rationalizing solutionist approaches that preserve the status quo while doing nothing to address root causes (e.g. robust carbon offset and credit markets that do not undermine fossil fuel extraction, content moderation that does not actually undermine hate speech, generated precision kill lists that justify genocide, predictive (over)policing that justifies ongoing overpolicing, and so on.

In its bid to become a central AI platform, Meta will spend $15 billion to acquire AI data labelling company Scale AI—an acquisition that will bring together two firms with longstanding commitments to exploiting workers across the world that are central to their respective platforms. Scale sacrifices those workers in pursuit of outsized funding and valuations, access to a pig trough of military contracts, and now an acquisition by a much larger firm. Meta has, for a long while now, sacrificed its workers in pursuit of persistent growth that sustains its core surveillance advertising revenue stream while buying time to cultivate others (e.g. the metaverse, its own financial system, and AI tools for federal agencies and military contractors).

On that note, some believe the sacrifices will ensure a renewed Pax Americana that brings together the private tech sector and the armed forces to cultivate nationalist fervor at home alongside a strategy that steers global development towards our national interest. As an added benefit, deploying the next generation of weaponry at home will surveil and denaturalize and deport dissidents, terrorize and dispossess migrants, that introduce dysfunction to the body politic.

In a desperate bid to beat back China's ascent, America is building a reactionary political coalition that links fossil capital with tech oligarchs, warmongers with China hawks. The great white hope here is that China's predominance in various tech stacks can be beaten back to secure control over the future of our global energy system, the course of technological development and deployment, and what gets produced where/how/why across our planet. Why should the United States—or more precisely, why should this reactionary coalition—control who gets access to various technologies? Because we say so.

Some believe sacrifices will restore some semblance of a natural order we’ve lost sight of. The future of human flourishing, they insist, isn’t going to be found in the past few centuries of flirtations with democracy and liberalism, but in a recommitment to Biological Hierarchies that reimpose caste, eugenics, apartheid, terror, and the like. We must administer a harsh treatment for a harsher disease that will cause a great deal of pain and misery in the short-term, but leave us better off in the long-run. That these reactionary ideologies are proving increasingly fundamental to the worldview of the most powerful people in the world and their sycophants, at the same time as this desperate search for capitalist (re)legitimacy, does not bode well for any of us.

These and more horrific exterminist forces are firmly in the driver’s seat, enjoying victory after victory, accumulating greater and greater resources to remake the world into a form more hospitable to their political project(s), and in the course of this self-annihilation they are likely closing the doors on various futures forever—though it will be a long time before we learn which options are lost to us forever.

This unholy alliance—far-right oligarch-ideologues who think democracy and capitalism are incompatible, tech firms with laboratories innovating the armament of fascism, financiers eager to transform speculation into wealth into power, and a host of other demoniacs—is relatively insulated from the public, its concerns, its pressures, its frustrations, and the few levers connected to those that could effect a change. And as a result, it enjoys relatively unimpeded power in building, expanding and legitimizing a police state in this country—a country that has, for a long time now, committed itself to surveillance, social control, force, projection, arbitrary violence, and terror.

It is increasingly unclear to me what, if anything, can be done about this. Though I suppose we’re all struggling with that problem right now. I’ll leave you with the end of Thanatos Triumphant, one of Mike Davis’ last essays and one of my favorites:

As an objection to my pessimism, one might claim that China is clear-sighted where everyone else is blind. Certainly, its vast vision of a unified Eurasia, the Belt and Road project, is a grand design for the future, unequalled since the sun of the ‘American Century’ rose over a war-shattered world. But China’s genius, 1949-59 and 1979-2013, has been its neo-mandarin practice of collective leadership, centralized but plurivocal. Xi Jinping, in his ascent to Mao’s throne, is the worm in the apple. Although he has economically and militarily enhanced China’s clout, his reckless unleashing of ultra-nationalism could yet open a nuclear Pandora’s Box.

We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’. Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.