Surprise, Surprise! - Macho is Cool Again

Mark Zuckerberg all muscled up, fantasizing about masculine energy and doing MMA when he isn’t licking Donald Trump’s boots.  Elon Musk doing his best storm trooper impressions on stage and populating his future mars spaceship with his progeny (minus one trans member who had the temerity to not pander to the demi-God wannabe).  Jeff Bezos looking embarrassingly pathetic with his bodybuilder physique and his trophy wife.

This is Revenge of the Nerds meets Rambo.  The tech titans are shedding their dweeb skins and becoming REAL MEN!  What a metamorphosis!  But sad to say, this is actually more reminiscent of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into a huge cockroach.  Talk about deeply-rooted insecurities and damaged goods!

 

And then there’s Charlie Kirk and the whole world of so-called lost men who are feeling left out and under-appreciated.  They all want to be macho again and not feel guilty about it.  They want respect, damn it!  They want wives who will submit.  They want jobs that proclaim their manliness.  They want real lives as good as their video games.  They want to believe in absolute doctrines and dogma rather than have to ponder the mysteries of the world and attempt to understand the science that is the best bet to explain it.

 

Yes, machismo is all the rage.  And the most absurdly contradictory example of masculinity is leading the charge: Donald Trump.  But you need to get with the program, Donald.  Do some training, ditch the fast-food addiction and limit the makeup and hairspray.  You look ridiculous, bro!  

 

But then again, so do the rest of them.  Having billions of dollars apparently buys you a pass on looking like a desperate, foolish caricature of a superhero.  No, superrich doesn’t mean supercool, guys.  The retro macho thing will go through its cycle, hopefully without starting WW3 or a civil war.  You may have the money to buy a presidency or torment the world with increasingly toxic social media and cheap goods, but in the end, you can’t change the fact that you are deeply insecure little brats, and the followers you attract will find that embracing macho culture brings a very short-lived joy.

The AI Conundrum

 I am admittedly not a big AI fan.  After having spent my whole career in technology and generally embracing each new trend and capability, I am now evolving into a bit of a luddite.

Today I happened upon articles in the NYT, Nature and several other news sources that framed the myriad controversies that swirl around the AI juggernaut.  These types of articles are becoming ever more common.  Here are some of their fears:

 

• Environmental and resource concerns over the inexhaustible demands for server farms and electrical power
• The negative impact on developing countries where US tech giants have built vast server farms that compete with local needs for water and power
• The fraught decision-making in many countries as they weigh falling behind in the AI future versus meeting the basic needs of their constituencies.
• The uncertainties associated with generative AI accuracy, reliability and debugging.
• The unauthorized and uncompensated use of content 
• The effect generative AI will have on human creativity and skills
• The potential rapid loss of jobs (new jobs may eventually be created as in past technology leaps, but the initial impact might be so sudden as to cause major trauma)
• The likely rapid introduction of AI into military goals, creating a costly new arms race in addition to the costly AI race
• The existential dangers that a future AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may pose

 

It is probably naïve to believe that anything could put the brakes on the AI juggernaut.  Competition and multi-faceted FOMO, as well as basic human curiosity will drive it forward no matter what scruples may arise.  What politician or tech executive can argue caution in the face of the AI gold rush?  

 

The AI true believers probably fall into two potentially overlapping categories of allegiance.  The first is the oldest motivation in human endeavor – greed.  The money and valuations that AI companies are already achieving beggar belief (though belief has been similarly beggared in past tech hype cycles as well).  Even with a likely dot-comish bubble deflation there will be unreal amounts of money to be made.

 

The second allegiance is to the billionaire-backed, messianic, ‘this will save the world’ club.  Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Andreesen, Thiel and their brethren have jettisoned all concerns about climate change, plastic pollution, wealth and income inequality, international conflict and any other mundane earthly problems and seem to believe that AI will be the solution to all problems and will save the planet (how it will do this is still to be determined).

 

The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the increasingly narcissistic and wacked-out  billionaire club has made breakneck AI development an inevitability.  And under the current despotic Trump regime there will be nothing but encouragement as long as the Tech world licks the boots of the glorious leader.   The en masse shift of the tech bros away from Biden and the Democrats to Trump and the MAGA world can be directly traced to their outrage at the democrats’ inclinations to place some controls on AI development and potentially break up the clearly monopolistic tech giants.  And, of course, the democrats’ caution over their side hustle of cryptocurrency contributed to the breakup.

 

So, the AI conundrum is not whether it will be pursued as aggressively as possible because that is a foregone conclusion, but rather what ordinary people should do about it.  As for me, I will mostly fight it because I do not wish to be seduced into ever more soul-sucking forms of technical bondage.  Human beings of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your digital chains!

 

Trump’s Legacy: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Several recent news items caught my attention, and no, I am not referring to Trump’s triumph of vanity in Gaza or his gestapo-like dispatching of troops to democratic-run cities.  I am talking about a new report on the breaching of climate ‘tipping points’ and the failure of a global conference on limiting plastic pollution, followed by a report on industry executives who travelled to China and were blown away by its innovation and mastery in robotics, electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Trump is absolutely obsessed with opposing and destroying any of his predecessors’ accomplishments regarding climate change and renewable energy.  He has declared climate change a hoax perpetuated by ‘bad’ and ‘dumb’ people, and in his uniquely idiotic way, dismissed electric cars because they ‘don’t work in the cold’.  He has ordered an end to wind farm development, charging station rollouts and all research associated with renewable energy and global warming.  No doubt he welcomed the collapse of the plastics conference as well.

 

Future psychologists will be challenged to catalog the full list of Trump’s pathological traits, but the toxic mix of envy, narcissism, resentment and vengeance that drives his decision-making will be at the top of the list.  So deeply embedded is this psychosis that he has embraced every right-wing conspiracy theory and anti-science quackery that comes his way.  He has appointed charlatans and idiots to cabinet positions, with their only qualification being total obeisance to his will.

 

What does this mean for the future of our country?  We will soon be years behind in the development of renewable energy and electric vehicles.  We will have abandoned our leadership in international efforts to address climate change and other planet-threatening trends such as ocean acidification, plastic pollution, landscape and forest damage, and the loss of lifeforms and biodiversity.  We will have crippled our scientific research community and hamstrung our universities.  We will have irrevocably destroyed the trust of our most loyal allies.  We will also have seriously delayed efforts to transition away from fossil fuels and obtain a more sustainable balance of energy.

 

No empire lasts forever, and we have had the extraordinarily good fortune to be in a dominant economic and military position for over a hundred years.  But pride goeth before a fall, and there is no more extreme case of pride than the current president and his administration.  Trump will go down in history as the president who paved the way for the great period of decline of the United States, and the ascendance of China.

 

 

The Pendulum or the Spiral?

As an avid reader of history, I look for clues in the past to understand what is going on today.  George Santayana said that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.  But the past has many different outcomes for seemingly similar trends, so how can one attempt to predict the future and respond appropriately?

The aggressive authoritarianism of Donald Trump and his administration appears to be unique in the history of the United States.  There have been other periods where presidents have acted forcefully and tested the limits of presidential power.  Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR are examples.  However, the vengeful nature of Trump’s authoritarianism, his pathological narcissism and his attempts to vilify all opponents and create a climate of fear are substantially different from these other presidential terms.

 

Are we on a path to repeat the fascist nightmares of the 1930’s?  Will Trump use his absurd depiction of the internal dangers of the radical left and crime-ridden cities to declare martial law and push us toward a true police state?

 

The periods of 1919-1921 and the Depression saw the country lurch toward dangerous and unstable economic, political and social circumstances.  But in both cases, the crises passed and the country returned to a state of equilibrium.  In both politics and economics, which find themselves inextricably linked, there is a dynamic that is similar to the motion of a pendulum.  There is movement from the moderate center to a more extreme position, followed by a return to the center and a move toward the other extreme.  

 

The pendulum swing is a cycle of politics, just as the economic patterns of inflation, unemployment, and job and GDP growth go through their various stages.  You have a Reagan/Bush cycle followed by a Clinton cycle, followed by Bush and then Obama.  This has been a healthy if imperfect way for US politics to find compromise and make slow but steady progress toward its lofty goals as a society.

As the pendulum swings in one direction, the opposing side depicts the motion as dangerous and extreme.  Politics is a game of hyperbole and drama.

 

But history is also full of times when the pendulum swing becomes too violent and there is no return to equilibrium; where the cycle morphs into a spiral of ever-increasing radicalism, hostility and, ultimately, violence.

 

What causes this departure from the normal cycle?  Are there specific events, crises or conditions that predispose a nation to begin falling into this deadly spiral?  In the 1930’s there was a poisonous mix of desperate economic times, a general sense of alienation among large portions of the population, strongly nurtured grievances from the first world war and demonic, yet charismatic strongmen.  There was also a cynical acquiescence by key business, political and military leaders who saw the short-term upside for themselves and ignored or rationalized the clear dangers.

 

In Germany, a single event – the Reichstag fire – gave the new chancellor Hitler the opportunity to suspend most civil liberties, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, habeas corpus, and to authorize monitoring of the post and telephone.  By claiming the act was evidence of a widespread communist plot to overthrow the government he convinced the German president, von Hindenburg, to issue the decree.  This dramatically propelled the German state away from any semblance of democracy and into a police state and dictatorship.  

 

We do not have a desperate economic situation, though there is a huge disparity in wealth and income that is becoming ever more toxic in our society.  And it is not out of the realm of possibility that a major recession and economic shock will come in the next few years.  

 

Trump has already fabricated the myth of a widespread conspiracy of the radical left and of crime-ridden cities, and has taken first steps toward a police state by use of military forces in democrat-governed cities and by transforming ICE into a huge paramilitary force.  He has attempted to rally the military around the concept of using domestic conflict as a training ground. And he has instructed the justice department to target so-called radical left groups and their supporters.  It is not difficult to imagine a single dramatic event similar to the Charlie Kirk assassination serving as a Trumpian Reichstag fire.

 

It is also very possible that we are truly in the steepest part of the Trump pendulum swing, and that the reaction of the nation will be to reject his extremist agenda and bring us back toward the center, presumably by significant shifts in the midterm elections. 

 

The difference between a pendulum swing and a death spiral may be a set of random events or an insidious, orchestrated coup that creeps up on us and catches us off guard.  But at least half the country is on alert now and profoundly opposed to the Trump administration, so if the spiral is to occur it will be ushered in with the kind of sad, feeble reluctance to make a strong, timely stand that is the Achilles heel of comfortable human beings.