Baldur Bjarnason

The inevitability of anger

– Baldur Bjarnason

You can’t fully avoid anger in your life. Even if you aren’t the type to get angry, sometimes the world just steps up and puts you in a position where your coping mechanisms break down and unregulated emotion breaks to the surface, usually in the form of an unproductive outburst.

Anger has shapes and genres. It comes in types and variations. Some seethe just under the surface, only rarely breaking out in fury. A few know no other way of dealing with their emotions, their only feeling is rage. Some relish it even as it burns. Others just march through their life with a constant background radiation of annoyance and grumpiness.

One of the main skills you develop as you grow up is handling your own emotions. Maturity means emotional regulation – not absence or denial of emotion, but regulation.

This can be hard if you don’t have many examples or role models, such as when your parents are absent or suffer from their own inability to manage their emotions.

Not impossible, but can be hard.

Environmental factors have an effect. Hunger and malnutrition can compromise your ability to handle your emotions. The correlation between lead additives in fuel and global crime rates hints at the possibility that pollution might also be a factor.

Media is another.

There’s plenty to be angry about in life and being reminded of them can infuriate. Media – social, broadcast, news – can make us angry.

Media itself is never angry. Text has no emotion. It doesn’t feel. Video isn’t infused with a miasma of rage that infects those that watch it.

Those who make the media have emotions while making it. Those who experience media have emotions as a result of the experience. The medium itself is a tool shared by the two groups.

The side that creates sets in place structures, pacing, rhythms, symbols, and signals that play with conventions and precepts to convey a message to the other side. The “reader” decodes, interprets, deconstructs, and reassembles a meaning that’s built out of their experiences and expectations using their skills at understanding media.

It’s a tool on both ends and most of us on the receiving end have been doing our “decoding” for so long that we often forget that it’s a skill we’ve practiced and can improve. None of it is natural.

This is why generated media is often so vacuous, there is less intent behind it – mostly references and formulaic adherence to accepted conventions – leaving the burden of constructing meaning entirely on the consumer, and there’s a hard limit to how much meaning can be made out of what’s effectively an empty balloon: all surface filled with air.

It’s also why the entire “AI” bubble is, well, built on hot air. The intelligence people see in the chatbots is one they construct themselves. The model statistically assembles common patterns from a massive language data set and you are the only one that brings sense to the table. The other players only bring nonsense and bullshit.

This bubble didn’t happen by itself, but was made to happen by the tech industry and those who work in the industry.

Not everybody is complicit, obviously. Given the worst job environment for tech workers since the collapse of the dot-com bubble, it’s hard to fault anybody who, when ordered to use “copilots” at work or add a pointless chatbot to a website, just grin and bear it.

But the AI Bubble isn’t limited to the pointless and unproductive. It’s an outright political project.

Numerous executives in tech repeatedly talk about how they think “AI” is going to replace workers. By their own account, that seems to be the point of the technology.

So far, the impact seems limited to a few select fields. Copywriters have been hit hard. Translators and illustrators are losing gigs everywhere I look. Training, especially in software development, seems to have been hit hard. Voice actors are getting replaced with generated voices.

The goal, if we are to take tech executives at their word, is to make these trends the norm, not the exception.

That is a political project. Attacking labour, deskilling the work force, and driving down wages, is fundamentally a political project and an extremist one at that.

Centrally managing language, using pervasive chatbot adoption as a lever to change corporate writing at scale, is another explicit goal of these companies. When Musk and Altman argue about which of their respective chatbots is less “left-wing”, their intent is clearly that they want to make all writing done with their tools less left-wing.

Centralised ideological control over all corporate writing is, again, an extremist political project, historically associated with violent authoritarianism.

We could go through how these tools are being used to power a wholesale takeover of our education systems, create a tiered system of healthcare access, and automate decisions to ensure that nobody can be held accountable for atrocious decisions, but it all comes down to the same, repeated point:

The AI Bubble is a right-wing political project that goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing resurgence of fascism.

It’s also fuelling a financial bubble large enough to threaten the stability of the global economy.

This is why it’s meaningless to talk about how the technology still has its uses, and that the fact that it’s mostly used in harmful ways at the moment shouldn’t be used to dismiss the tech as a whole.

The time to talk about what to salvage from the tech is after the bubble has been deflated, the political project to undermine our institutions stopped, and the machinery of political extremism has been dismantled.

It isn’t a coincidence that we’re seeing an increase in the number of people who have spent their careers in tech coming out with statements that there is a silent majority in tech that doesn’t believe in “AI” or the associated political machinery of disenfranchisement and deskilling.

The problem with these statements is twofold.

1. Tech isn’t a uniform community #

It’s possible that a majority of tech workers doesn’t believe in the bubble, very few of them work directly on “AI” in the first place and many only touch on it in ways that are truly incidental to their work. But a majority of management and the executive class absolutely do believe. Every survey to date of the management class shows that they overwhelmingly believe that “AI” is the future.

To claim that there is a silent majority of the tech management class that doesn’t believe in the over-hyped promises of the bubble is simply untenable.

2. Most influencers either stood by or outright attacked critics #

Tech is a pop culture. Very few of the decisions made in the industry are made rationally or empirically. Studies and tests are used to justify the emotional decisions of the executive or management class. Infrastructure and stack decisions are made hedonistically – “cool” tech that makes the engineers and devs feel good about themselves almost always gets a priority over “boring” tech that has no risks.

The industry, especially the software side of tech, is driven by emotion and a sense of what is fashionable. There is genuinely more grounded engineering – materials, machinery, process, supply chains, etc. – taking place in the fashion industry than there ever has been in the software industry.

That’s why it’s a pop culture, not a fashion culture.

What is “in” is defined by influencers and cultural authorities whose language is constantly grounded in emotion – “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” being a recent example – and what little argument the texts or videos contain doesn’t amount to more than a loose sequence of evocations or references that are specific to the community in question. Not even straw men. More reminder of the straw men that you saw that one time on Hacker News a few years ago. Placeholders of arguments past.

These are vocal investors, former and current executives, people who have built their careers on promoting the currently fashionable tech – all people who through their influence are the true driver of the nuts and bolts decisions in the software industry. The executives set the direction, but the implementations of most software companies are decided by whatever the current crop of dev influencers things is cool and trendy or, if your organisation is large enough, by however your internal “influencers” fixate on this quarter.

Overwhelmingly, this group of people, who hold enormous sway over how things get done in the industry, either went all-in on “AI” or, worse yet, consistently opposed those who have been trying to warn about the path that the “AI” project is taking

They actively opposed or dismissed critics while at the same time pointing out some of the implementation issues that have cropped up all in an effort to position themselves as the “reasonable” alternative.

Effectively their message was:

Pay no attention to the people warning about the political, economic, educational, and societal risks this technology presents. It’s a “normal” technology that’s fine as long as you take care about things like prompt injections.

The problem is that it isn’t a “normal technology”. It is outright a political project.

There will be a reckoning #

The average lifespan of a fascist government is around ten to twenty years. Sometimes, historically, you get lucky and they collapse in much less time.

Either way, there’s a reckoning. The long-lived fascist governments gradually tighten their grip on society and anything that threatens that grip, such as self-serving oligarchs or an unstable financial bubble, tends to get dealt with.

The shorter-lived movements leave their large-scale supporters defenseless and, in many cases, quite obviously culpable for many of the actions they supported.

Either way, a financial bubble that’s reportedly seventeen times bigger than the dot-com bubble will pop and, when that happens, nobody will want to be remembered as a supporter of “AI”. Tech industry leaders better hope that the US fascist project will have fizzled out by then because the fascists are much less likely to take kindly on them messing up the grift than a functioning democratic justice system.

No matter what happens in US politics, the days of the AI Bubble are numbered, and a number of people in tech – mostly those with enough savvy to consistently position themselves as the “moderates” of tech by pretending that technologies that predominantly have either libertarian or authoritarian politics baked right into the structure are somehow politically neutral – are realising that they need to distance themselves from the centre of the bubble.

That’s why we’re seeing a number of blog posts, videos, and social media posts saying that most people in tech were only pretending to support the bubble, that their enthusiastic blog posts, exuberant social media posts, and angry dismissals of critics were all insincere and born out of a fear for their careers.

They claim to be a part of a responsible majority that, very responsibly, helped implement the bubble to preserve their career and now, very responsibly, are saying that they didn’t mean it.

Even as they, at the same time, claim that the technology itself is neutral and “normal” and that once the bubble passes we can continue right where we left off and find “reasonable” uses for a tech purpose-designed to deskill, destroy the labour force, and drive creative industries into extinction.

It comes across as insincere, is all I’m saying.

This is only happening because that destruction is already making people angry, the bubble popping will only make more people angry, and pretending that nothing’s happening will only serve to pour fuel onto the fire.

So, they’d like us to just focus our anger on the TESCREAL cultists, please and thank you. They were just doing their job.

But they genuinely didn’t have to do their jobs this way.

Unlike the ground infantry of the industry – coders, designers, support staff – the influencers, who have a platform and a voice, and the management, who made the decisions, are absolutely to blame for all of the useless chatbots that were pushed into unrelated apps, the wholesale takeover over education, the deliberate positioning of diffusion models as an alternative to photography and illustrations, and a long long list of intentional destruction of people’s livelihoods, environment, education, and community.

They are to blame and, because we have no other tool at hand and no mature outlet for justice, people will inevitably be angry.

This obviously helps nobody because anger, motivating as it is, is a loss of reason that makes us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.

The inevitability of anger #

Almost all of our experiences of politics and how society is governed are mediated through either TV or social media. News is delivered simultaneously as a twenty-four hour broadcast cycle and a constant bombardment of hearsay and paraphrases on social media.

These media have a shape and a set of affordances that mould whatever message they convey. Once you boil down what you want to say to fit in a video or a social media site’s character count, you peel away all nuance and moderation.

What you’re left with is text that enrages, even if that wasn’t what you were feeling at the time.

This essay is almost 2500 words. The Bluesky equivalent I posted yesterday while I was working on a draft of this piece, with all of the argument and context stripped out, was little over a hundred words:

In the late stages of the bubble we’re starting to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to”, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do.

In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did.

An argument for moderation and consequence becomes a provocation – an incitement of the crowd – and the easiest emotion for the reader to construct from their end of the tool that is text, is “justifiable” anger. Mixed but reasoned emotions are boiled down to rage.

We live in a world where our most accessible forms of expression – the ones that we all marinate in day in, day out – have been confined, dismantled, sanded off, and stripped down until its mechanisms are too limited, too simple, to easily convey anything other than the simplest of emotions: anger or mockery.

There are people who manage to push the boundaries of the form and, within specific contexts, deliver more, whether it’s poetic, artistic, or simple clarity.

But they aren’t the norm and the work they do is harder than it should be.

We need to click past the “AI” summaries, rage-baiting social media posts, and read the text itself.

Anger is inevitable. You can and should minimise your exposure to triggers, but even with the greatest care it will sneaks up on you and, at least temporarily, some of your reason will leave you. The trick isn’t to prevent anger, to never become angry about anything in your life, but to recognise it when it arrives – the warning signs of when it takes hold of you – and defuse it before it does you harm. Walk away from the trigger. Talk about your feelings instead of what’s triggering your feelings. Focus on the facts, in context, instead of just the parts that enrage.

All of which requires space and nuance.

The only way we can counter the inevitability of anger is by fostering and participating in a wider selection of media than just social media and TV-like video platforms. We need movies. We need books. We need the support and structure of longer articles. When we are faced with the anger triggers that are baked into social media, we need other media to serve as a distraction from the triggers, a space for us to explore facts in a more nuanced and holistic way, and – which is a key part of our long, long history of art and media – give us an avenue to explore our emotions and feelings in healthy ways that don’t involve shouting at people.

Social media is confined.

We need space to spread our wings.