As we stare down the barrel of tech’s inability to face basic reality, we are also faced with a real problem. We have no way to hold these shitbags accountable when all of this crypto-“AI”-prediction markets – fascist panopticon nonsense goes sideways, as it inevitably will. They are fighting tooth and nail to keep any transparency or guardrails off the books, in a culture that already refuses to prosecute criminal negligence by corporations with anything but laughable fines.
History time.
In 2008, massive market manipulation, preemptive regulatory capture, and endemic book cooking hid both the insane profits and teetering mountain of risk on balance sheets across the globe. While starry-eyed apostles of mortgage backed securities, securitized debt obligations, credit default swaps, etc screamed at anyone who would listen that these vehicles were “safe as houses”, the feeding frenzy of subprime loans, spiraling health care expenditures, and real estate “flipping” led to one of the largest global crashes in human history.
One guy – Kareem Serageldin, a banker from Credit Suisse – was ever jailed for a role in the crash.
Rather than going after an industry that had just ruined millions if not billions of lives, capitalists on both sides ensured that Wall Street would suffer as little as possible for their sins. Clinton signed the 2000 law, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which explicitly prohibited State regulation of these investment vehicles, and exempted them from CFTC ands SEC oversight. Along with the repeal of Glass-Steagall (also under Clinton), so-called “black box” banking, where transparency on how these securities were constructed was completely nonexistent, and the Bush-era rush for home ownership and deregulation of real estate and mortgage industries, the complicity in the 2008 crash was bipartisan and widespread.
Hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars went to investment banks that held no individual deposits. The first major bailout recipient was AIG, not because they were a load-bearing wall of the economy, but because they owed huge settlements to investment banks who had hedged their massive bets with insurance policies from the giant short-side player. Almost every dollar that went to AIG went to other investors. Emergency bailouts, suspension of regulations for mergers, federal purchases of toxic assets, the entire weight of Washington was leveraged to protect capital.
While Lloyd Blankfein and Alan Greenspan appeared before Congress, no individuals were ever really held accountable of their roles in this nigh upon extinction level catastrophe. Deals were made, companies either merged or collapsed, and the apex predators of capitalism moved on, as did their DC benefactors. Any politicians who were ousted over the next four years were most often replaced with even more rabid sycophants to the capital class.
How the fuck that turned the Right into rabid Tea Party dipshits instead of building class solidarity is its own terrifying tale of delusional avoidance and astroturfing, but it led directly to the rise in American Fascism, and MAGA.
So here we are. A set of new technologies that are fundamentally vaporware and wishcasting bullshit to create imaginary value for trading and to inflate stock prices and market cap is sweeping the world, ensnaring mind boggling amounts of value in its toxic loop, with politicians leaping to prevent any regulation or State oversight. Blockchain, crypto, and “AI” all have failed in their wild promises of great leaps forward, and have brought nothing but the immiseration of the general population. We could add “prediction markets” here, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of this piece.
Suffice to say, that the scramble to ensure that these nascent technologies are unregulated and unrestrained is indeed bipartisan and very much “inside baseball”, intentionally keeping the public stuck listening to murderous sociopaths and brain weaseled narcissists on the topic, without any real access to the true dangers and incipient risks that are once again threatening not only our financial system, but our basic freedoms.
The proliferation of crypto “pump and dump” schemes, “AI” driven scam farms, and tech involved in mass surveillance states and autonomous extrajudicial murders shows the vital need for regulation, and control of these dangerous technologies. And it shows that the greedy psychopaths who use phrases like “suicidal empathy” that don’t want regulation or oversight are toddlers trying to eat all their cookies in bed. It’s not just that they do not have our best interests at heart, it’s that our interests at all are seen as the enemy.
Elon Musk is fighting to keep Grok’s “nude-ify” feature legal, despite being expressly used for non-consensual porn and child sexual abuse images (CSAM). The only thing slowing Peter Theil down from infecting the entire country with a fascist panopticon that monitors everything from movement and purchases to associations and heart rate is that fellow crotch-frothing lunatic Trump wants control of the tech for himself.
Hunter Biden is launching a memecoin. We’re in Hell. Literally, Hell.
When – not if – this all collapses, who do we haul in front of the proverbial magistrate to pay for all this dogshit?
This all establishes that corporations and their Dear Leaders are never punished for anything. Enron, one of the largest and most damaging criminal syndicates of our era, preyed illegally on energy markets for years, cooking their books and manipulating the markets with everything from rolling blackouts to offsetting repairs or addressing service outages. Every single trader was complicit, as were most of their 20 to 25 thousand person staff.
22 people faced convictions. And the company declared bankruptcy.
“AI” adds yet another layer of obfuscation to any legal remedy – how dos you punish a machine? Tesla crashes and deaths are always pinned on the drivers, thanks to aggressive deregulatory spending by Musk, and a few payoffs to avoid civil cases that may set precedent. But what about fully autonomous vehicles like Waymo, or Tesla’s own Robotaxi? Does the company just pay a fine? Can they leverage their trillions to fight poor victim’s families in court? What if an “AI” diagnostic tool misdiagnoses someone, leading to their disability or death? What if an “AI” chatbot drives a person to suicide, to murder, to other psychosis-induced crimes?
The list of potential day-to-day crimes, problems, and outright tragedies that would not occur if not for these products is a million miles long, and as of right now, there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it. Whether you are the victim of an “AI” scam farm, retaliatory non-consensual “AI” porn dissemination, or the posting to sexual images based on your child, there’s no culprit. Just as the dimwits who oppose gun control howl about “guns are an inanimate objects, they can’t kill people”, this is the argument insulating the promulgators of this garbage tech from the consequences of their products.
Elon Musk is directly responsible for the largest influx of CSAM in the internet’s history. Grok has been estimated to have been used to produce millions of illegal images, often also disseminated on his platform, X, which also hosts traders and purveyors of massive collections of content from non-consensual celeb porn to the gnarliest shit humanly (and we use that word loosely here) possible.
And there’s nothing we can do about it. “Blame the user, it’s not our fault for building the machine. “
We have a long piece about avoidance as a psychological component in the mentality of the global Right, but that avoidance is relevant here as well. “Move fast and break things” inherently assumes the right to, you know, break things. The avoidance of responsibility is right there in the tech mindset as well. Elon Musk and Peter Theil and Mark Zuckerberg howl about freedom, while completely destroying rule of law and basic privacy.
Internet platforms are protected against the things they host by laws explicitly exempting them, as “not publishers”. They are allowed to by law – and incentivized by capitalism – to promote the worst shit in existence, to amplify shocking, damaging, and hurtful content, and they are protected from any consequences from doing so.
The role social media has played in the rise of global fascism and the destruction of good faith discourse is well documented, and is now hyper boosted by “AI” in both false images and videos, and the bots that post them. Not only is this protected, it is incentivized in the attention economy.
These are not serious people, guiding these products, they’re broken, pathological weirdos who are so used to the complete lawless wasteland that is the internet that the slightest constraint to their relentless id feels like “omg guys slavery for real no one has ever felt this much tyranny ever holy shit if I can’t do everything I want to deafening cheers I will literally die you guuuuuuuys ugh”.
And this is reflected in the entire attitude towards the State, the power of real people, and the basic ethics that govern a healthy society. They are spending huge amounts of money to elect blind, greedy mole rats who will do their bidding, and financially and politically overwhelming the few communities that stand up to not getting roasted to death in cancer causing steam while cooling fans scream at them 24/7 so that the brainless, cooked pedoNazis and goonerfascists of X and 8Chan can get their fix of “first Harry Potter film Hermione” porn.
The commission of war crimes by Palantir is inevitable, if not already occuring. xAI is publishing illegal images at an insane rate. Tesla self-driving is responsible for multiple deaths, and getting data from Waymo is nigh upon impossible. They tout ridiculous rates of safety vs aggregate drivers, but overweigh outliers, and refuse to publish data on their “incidents”, nor their accountability process.
And we are not allowed to regulate any of it, and we will not be able to pursue justice when real harm is caused by these entities.
This political and economic system is unprofitable, harmful, and brutally unsustainable. The Big Blink is coming, and when it does, we are, just like in 2008, going to have zero tools to enforce justice or right any of the harm caused by these entities and products. We are once again going to be left holding the bag as the apex predators of capitalism not only get off scot free, but ride off into the Hawaiian sunset with sackfuls of cash and boundless opportunity for new bullshit.
This cannot be allowed to continue. The time for action was a decade ago, but better late than never.We must build these regulatory and oversight institutions now, with teeth and purpose, and write the laws that make sure none of these creepy psychos and ravenous grifters can hide behind “it was the machine” and “just buy a pardon from Trump”.
