Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense

Protests, incentives, and the contradiction of Gentle Singularity

Good morning from Tennessee!

The Volunteer State

I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Monday at the Litespeed bike manufacturing facility. I got to try welding - trying to lay the bead exactly right. You wear a giant helmet, which turns dark with the welding torch hits the titanium. It’s just you and this little beam of fire. It’s all you can see.

On Tuesday, I was in Nashville and the parking garage connected to my hotel caught on fire at 2 a.m. We were all shuffled outside, the air thick with burning rubber. You could hear the gas tanks explode. Some people thought they were bombs. The firefighters laddered toward black, billowing smoke, and doused the garage. We shuffled back inside an hour later. I stared at the ceiling until 5 a.m., got up, did some work, spoke on stage at 10 a.m. to a wonderful crowd about the economy for young people, and then drove home to Louisville.

I am currently trying to board a flight to get out West, and fuel is pouring of the wing of the aircraft. I will certainly miss my connecting flight. In fact, the flight is entirely cancelled as I edit this.¹ So I write to you, dear reader, from the airport yet again.

While I was moving between these different grounded, very physical realities this week, the news feed was offering something else. Inflammatory information about the protests in Los Angeles² (now spreading to more cities), removal of all CDC vaccine panel experts, the DHS memes, Apple’s big WWDC day, Zuckerberg AI army, China and the US trade (the deal is done now and the tariffs on China are monstrous) a cyberattack on United Natural Foods (which is why your local Whole Foods might be empty), Elon and Trump are friends again, plans to send people to Guantanamo et cetera. But inflation did come in cooler than expected, likely because the economy is not so healthy.

It’s overwhelming! It feels like a moment where all the contradictions are coming to roost. The structure of the world hasn’t suddenly changed, but the underlying stories feel like they are fracturing.

We are increasingly caught between a future promised and the present we're living through. We have apps that can summon autonomous vehicles in minutes while we have ICE raids escalating across the country³. AI evangelists talk about dancing in fields of daisies now that robots will do all the work while National Guard troops sleep on concrete floors without water (and their service members boo state governors).

If you wanted a perfect image of this contradictions (we are a visual first society after all), I think the burning Waymos in LA⁴ are pretty searing. People used the frictionless Waymo app and the seamless user experience that the company spent billions perfecting to summon an autonomous vehicle to their exact location, and burnt it.

It’s painfully on the nose, and I would hate to veer into detached-from-reality-metaphorical-thinkpiece but there is something relatively poignant about using the infrastructure of the promised future to reject that future and to also the refusal to keep pretending that this future arriving through our screens has anything to do with the reality people are living in.

The image of the Waymo on fire is a miniature of collapse, used to fuel calls for sending in more troops to LA than we have in Syria or Afghanistan. The contradiction becomes content, the content becomes justification for more contradiction. We scroll past the burning car to see arguments about whether the burning was justified, then scroll past those to see memes about the arguments, then scroll past those to see counter-memes. The cycle feeds itself!

And somehow, we've become remarkably adaptable to living inside all of this. We navigate between realities without stopping to notice how incompatible they are. There has always been the incredible difficulty of making real things, right, the patience and skill required to weld metal without burning through it, the complexity of keeping people safe during an actual crisis.

But now we layer endless innovation theater on top - revolutionary interfaces that solve no actual problems, liquid screens that fundamentally do not matter, promises of abundance that depend entirely on erasing the people who make abundance possible.

The contradiction isn't new. What's new is how smoothly we scroll between the real work and the performance of work, between the welder's focused attention and the algorithm's demand for distraction.

The Gentle Singularity

Which brings me to Sam Altman’s essay. I want to be very clear I wholly support AI as a complement to the human experience, but certainly not as a replacement to humans.

On Tuesday, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, published a piece called "The Gentle Singularity” (what a word combo). It opens with

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.

He goes on to describe a future where intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” where AI drives scientific breakthroughs, and we’ll swim in lakes and wealth inequality will disappear. He writes:

In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes.

But in still-very-important-ways, the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before. We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.

Sometimes when I read pieces like this - which I take very seriously, because Sam Altman is clearly at the forefront here - I wonder what world they are writing about. Right?

What sort of world is this future landing in?

He states that “the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before” which feels like it entirely misunderstands human incentives.

A few days before Altman published his gentle singularity, the Cato Institute released an analysis showing that the current administration's deportation plans will cost nearly $1 trillion. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" allocates $168 billion to immigration enforcement, enough to make ICE's budget nearly quadruple by 2028, enough to detain over 200,000 people at a time.

The AI systems Altman describes as ushering in this gentle abundance are being used to spread disinformation about the very protests happening in response to these deportations. According to a WIRED report, people are turning to ChatGPT and Grok to fact-check information about the LA protests, and the AI chatbots are giving them completely fake information. Grok claimed photos of National Guard troops were from Afghanistan in 2021 when they were actually from Los Angeles last week. ChatGPT misidentified current protest footage as being from Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal.

The contradiction here is that Altman promises intelligence will become abundant just as truth becomes scarce, and promises gentleness just as violence escalates. And of course he does, that is his job, those are his incentives, and AI money operates in a nonreality!

As Altman notes in the piece, the main goal of AI is to get it aligned to humans - and states that “social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI”. This is accurate. The abundance of intelligence is being used to manufacture scarcity of truth. The same systems that will solve humanity's problems are being used to obscure the very real human cost of current policies.

Altman's gentle singularity depends on ignoring the violent present that makes it possible. The AI systems he's building require massive data centers, enormous energy consumption, and human labor to train and maintain them⁵. But his vision of abundance erases all of that friction, all of that cost, all of those people.

Joan Didion wrote in the beginning of the White Album “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Altman's gentle singularity is one of those stories, a narrative that helps us make sense of technological change by promising it will all work out in the end.

But what happens when the story breaks down? When sitting in that airport, watching fuel pour from an aircraft wing while scrolling through news about AI armies and deportation raids, the gap between the promised narrative and lived reality becomes impossible to ignore?

Zadie Smith, writing about Facebook over a decade ago in Generation Why?, warned that digital life was already flattening our sense of self and “shrinking the range of human expression” to fit the logic of the platform. We are flat now. Our attention is disassembled and the contradictions are monetized. The stories we have are incompatible with the lives we’re actually living.

“From a relativistic perspective,” Altman writes, “the singularity happens bit by bit, and the merge happens slowly.” But the deportations are happening fast. The disinformation is spreading now. The contradictions aren't gentle.

The Performance of the Scroll

And what happens when you can't scroll past the contradiction anymore? When the promised future and violent present become impossible to reconcile?

To repeat - Sam Altman said that "social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI.” And boy is he right. The New York Times published a profile of Dominick McGee, one of the most prominent right-wing influencers on Twitter which perfectly illustrates the misaligned AI in action. McGee has over 1 million followers and is one of the most influential users on the platform. He earns about $55,000 a year for eleven hours of daily labor designed to spread outrage and disinformation.

This is the misalignment. Dominick McGee is responding perfectly rationally to a completely irrational system. The algorithm rewards outrage, so he produces outrage. His response makes perfect economic sense.

My professor Dr. Chhacchhi said that the opposite of rationality isn't irrationality, it's being normal. And this is what normal looks like now - isolated creators optimizing for metrics they don't understand and producing content designed to make everyone more confused and angry.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about Omelas, a beautiful, prosperous city whose abundance depended on one child suffering alone in a basement. Most citizens know about the child and accept this as the price of their perfect society. They understand that their joy depends on the child's misery, and they make peace with it. She writes:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

But some people can't do that. They walk away from Omelas. They don’t know where they are going really. But they go. Many stay, justifying suffering of others as their way of life.

This bleeds into what Marx called this commodity fetishism, how we see the smooth interface, the autonomous car, the AI, but we don't see the social relations that make them possible. The data centers, the energy, the human labor all disappear behind the frictionless user experience.

When it's time for the machines to replace the people, or to acknowledge the invisible humans behind the systems that keep us fed and connected, we don't, because we've trained ourselves not to see what it actually looks like. We ignore what we don’t want to see.

Brian Merchant writes in 'Blood in the Machine' how the original Luddites weren't the anti-technology primitives of popular myth. They were skilled textile workers who understood exactly what the new machines meant. It wasn’t just “oh let’s automate stuff” it really was the destruction of their expertise and communities in service of capital accumulation. Luddites feared a particular kind of progress - the kind that annihilated skill, community, and voice in the name of efficiency.

Studs Terkel spent his career during a time of immense change (not too different from now) documenting in Working what happens to the people who do the work that makes everything else possible. He wrote:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

He interviewed hundreds of people whose labor gets erased from our stories about progress: steelworkers, waitresses, cleaning ladies, farmers, firefighters. He talks with Roberto Acuna, a farm laborer and organizer. Roberto says:

When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.

There's a violence in making people invisible, in treating their work as just an input rather than recognizing their humanity. There is violence in ignoring the humans behind the story, ignoring the child fraught with misery in the name of progress.

Steve Bannon described the Trump strategy as "flooding the zone” where you overwhelm people with so much stimulation that they can't focus on any one thing long enough to understand it. The stories like Studs told get lost. It's the same principle that drives social media algorithms: flood your vision with everything at once so you keep scrolling instead of stopping to think.

McGee is both the child in the basement and the citizen who's made peace with it (again with these contradictions). He earns money to poison public discourse while the platform extracts billions in value from the outrage he generates.

The immigration raids happening right now follow this playbook. As the WSJ reported, Miller tells ICE agents to hit arrest quotas, target Home Depots and 7-Elevens, create maximum visual impact. Deploy the National Guard, send in Marines, generate footage of militarized enforcement that floods our feeds and keeps us scrolling between outrage and justification. There are more troops than there are protestors and it’s costing $134 million. Optics are policy!

The system rewards the performance of enforcement over the reality of it.

If they really wanted to solve immigration, they would read papers like Exceptional by Design from the EIG team on improving high-skilled, legal immigration. They would offer fair hearings, deport actual criminals, arrest people who are violent during protests, and help people who have been trying to get citizenship for years who pay taxes (almost $100 billion in 2022) and work hard.

We are in a system that is designed to blind, distract, and blur - the infinite scroll. Nothing is too urgent and everything is equally urgent at the same time. Nothing lands. Welding is the opposite. It’s about focusing all your vision into a single point of contact, that small bead of fire between metal and hand.

The bike factory offered a different model too. Individual skill contributing to collective knowledge, the painter who understood which coatings would last, the assembler who could feel when the derailleur was properly aligned. Each person's expertise was visible, valued, and connected to everyone else's work.

There's something important in the difference between systems where you can see how your work connects to others versus systems designed to keep those connections invisible.

Most dystopian narratives focused on authoritarian control like Big Brother watching, governments suppressing information, which we are increasingly experiencing. But one could argue that the systems that profit by drowning us in information and platforms that make money by making everyone confused and angry are even scarier. The panopticon perhaps is less frightening than the slot machine.

It's extraordinarily reassuring that Altman says that social media feeds are misaligned. Perhaps that's a move in the right direction, that the endless scroll is not inevitable technological progress but a specific choice about how to organize human attention. And then there is this:

Even the AI systems themselves are resisting this! The scroll is rejecting itself.

Thanks for reading.

1. If I take a long time to reply to your email, this is usually why

2. There are always very bad people who show up to protests to make it extraordinarily violent and force a lost message, as the LA Times reports

3. They are going after elementary schoolers now it seems

4. There was a really interesting thread about the economic crisis in LA which is very visceral if you ever visit it. Between the fires, the traffic (which causes wild commutes), the exorbitant rent, and the high homeless population, the city truly is a powder keg

5. One thing that drives me crazy is people being like “this video in the exact style of Pixar only took me 30 minutes to make - yes! because it was trained on Pixar’s years and years of work!