"You can't be a serious critic," New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose wrote on Tuesday, on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, "if you're in denial about how useful it is." Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You can't be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of it, where "in denial" describes an irrational and unfounded rejection of empirical reality. That's hardly even worth saying, but it's also not really what Roose is saying.
What Roose wants is to put an entire suite of claims about the technology presently doing business as "artificial intelligence"—not just that it has more than zero uses (a thing nobody really denies) but that it truly is artificial intelligence or anything like it; that it represents a profound leap forward for technology and human endeavor; that it is the future; that, as such, adopting it and integrating it into day-to-day work and life processes is the smart move—beyond dispute. He wants to marginalize the many technology experts, media knowers, and sharp lay readers who have for years been calling his work on behalf of those claims appalling boobery. He wants his readers to view all of those critics as coterminous with whatever minor body of irrelevant five-follower internet loons might bother trying to argue the literal uselessness of a predictive text generator or a program that collates search engine results into layperson's language. He wants his readers to think of all the critics as united in an essentially pathological relationship with the observable world. And he wants the juice of dancing this shitty little passive-aggressive jig on Bluesky, the social-media platform where many of those critics will encounter his work and, while dunking on it, also share it around to some number of people who will read it.
Why do this crap? I think that I would be embarrassed. I think that after I'd gassed up cryptocurrency and NFTs in the New York Times and told New York Times readers that the Bing search engine was trying to steal me away from my wife, I would have asked my editor if maybe I could cover the Broadway beat for a while instead of continuing to smirk at the world while pouring fire ants down the front of my shorts for a living. So: Why do it? But also: How?
I think about these questions a lot, certainly more than I should. (Not just about Kevin Roose! Sometimes also about Felix Salmon.) Some two decades since the digital-media attention economy took shape and, sheesh, like 13 years into my own career working in that economy, the list of the cold incentives that might drive a journalist toward this type of routine—attention, website traffic, access to industry honchos otherwise not inclined toward talking to the press, the possibility of later getting a nice job from one of them—is depressingly easy to conjure. But that list's plausibility as a Kevin Roose Explainer is, for me, limited by my fixed standing assumption that other people have and value dignity.
Something occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about this—not even Tuesday! Not even prompted by this particular Kevin Roose Bluesky post!—and has been sort of following me around since, making me feel squirmy and uncomfortable and haunted. What occurred to me was the possibility that what had seemed, to me, like it could only come from a chilling and impossible level of cynicism might come instead from a perverse and even more chilling variety of mostly genuine belief. Not in the transformative power of AI! I'm talking about something wider and deeper and more frightening than that: a genuine and horribly earnest belief in not believing in anything.
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
I was thinking about a lot of different stuff. I was thinking about the phenomenon of small-fry sports-bettor bros with no passion for any serious right-wing politics going big for Donald Trump in 2024 based on a view of their vote as something like a wager, and of Trump as the bold, ambitious choice—risky, but with the bigger potential payout. I was thinking about sophisticated, high-achieving tech-industry types abruptly throwing off all of their (thin, half-cooked, fundamentally dogshit, but still) liberal-libertarian politics to get behind an explicitly authoritarian program and help build its surveillance state. I was thinking about bushy-tailed go-getter types in legacy media who kept their language carefully bland around policing reform, anti-racism, and social justice during those topics' brief heightened salience around the George Floyd protests, and then smoothly pivoted to criticizing the excesses of woke when the winds changed. I was thinking about randos whom Elon Musk would not cross a sidewalk to piss on if they were on fire, who, when Trump invited Musk to gut federal government agencies and programs that benefit their own lives, rushed to tweet GIFs of Musk, like, dunking on somebody's head at his critics. I was thinking about bag culture. And I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.
To these people this kind of thing is not cynicism, both because they believe it's just what everybody is doing and because they do not regard it as ugly or underhanded or whatever. Making the right pick is simply being smart. And not necessarily in some kind of edgy-cool or subversive way, but smart the very same shit-eating way that the dorkus malorkus who gets onto a friendly first-name basis with the middle-school assistant principal is smart. They just want to be smart.
So these people look at, say, socialists, and they see fools—not because of moral or ethical objections to socialism or whatever, or because of any authentically held objections or analysis at all, but simply because they can see that, at present, socialism is not winning. All the most powerful guys are against it. Can't those fools see it? They have picked a loser. They should pick the winner instead.
Likewise, when all the rich guys got behind cryptocurrency, and all the rich cryptocurrency guys got behind Donald Trump, for these people the thing to do was very obvious, even if they had previously regarded crypto as a scam: not just to buy some cryptocurrency—the kind of move any cynic might make—but to adopt the attitudes and positions of a crypto enthusiast. Neither their conscience nor their concept of dignity troubles them in this switcheroo, because they take for granted that this is the precise way everyone forms the stuff they say and appear to think. In their view, someone like me dumps on cryptocurrency not because of an analytical conclusion that it sucks and is a scam, or because of a moral conclusion that as a scam it is reprehensible, but because I am making a pragmatic prediction that it will fail; my arguments for it being bad, in this view, are at best just the articulation of the reasons why I think it will not win.
Personally, when Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and threw open the regulatory gates for crypto, I saw it as a bleak and bitter vindication of crypto skepticism: Critics had always been right to have identified it as a tool of predators and scam artists, and now, in its embrace by the most brazen undisguised crook in American society and the gleeful removal of all safeguards protecting people from it, everyone could see it for what it is. For the specimens we are examining here today, they saw almost the exact opposite: not just a victory for crypto and its boosters, but an actual self-evident refutation of crypto skeptics' arguments—for the simple reason that these people understood those arguments to have always been at root a prediction that crypto would lose, and crypto had won.
This has not been how I have approached my life—I think that's sort of painfully obvious—and I think in general it is mostly not how people approach their lives. I think in general even really flawed and derelict people like me are trying to figure out what's right or what's best or what's just or what's fair, or at least some workable compromise between the demands of those pesky ideas and our desire for near-term comfort and stability. I think in general people only form associations on the basis of what they think will win in certain discrete circumstances, like betting on a horse race or making stock-market trades or whatever; the rest of life is more complicated than that. You vote for the candidate you think will represent your interests in government and you hope they will win; you do not try to figure out who is going to win and then vote for them. You praise the beauty of an artwork because you think it's beautiful, not because you expect it will smash auction-price records. You root for the Sacramento Kings because you are a sick pervert, not because you believe they will ever win the NBA Finals.
And so, for probably most people, it would be sort of uncomfortable to, for example, shrug off the social ideas you'd vocally advocated for and throw yourself behind a political movement in direct opposition to all of them! Not only on principle—you'd actually believed that stuff, after all—but because of things like dignity and even vanity: People in general do not want to look like turncoats, scumbags, or frontrunners. Likewise, for probably most people, the dissolution of a succession of huge tech-industry hypes having exposed you as a world-historic stooge and imbecile might temper your eagerness to deliver a public Funkmaster Flex routine on behalf of AI companies! Not even for particularly admirable reasons; you might just be tired of looking like a world-historic stooge and imbecile in the New York Times.
But now imagine believing that victory, whenever it arrived and on whatever terms it was accomplished, would automatically redeem all that debasement. If you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity's choice to participate in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical and moral weight of the contestants' choices along the way. Maybe, in that case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like straight-up shit eating.
This, I think, is how a guy like Kevin Roose can do what he does without apparent embarrassment, without ever seeming to have learned anything or to have been chastened in the least by a series of cigars exploding in his face right after he told everyone in the world that smoking these guaranteed-not-to-explode cigars was the way of the future. He is playing the long game. Non-fungible tokens turned out to be a musical-chairs scam, Web3 nothing more than a Sony PlayStation in helmet form, crypto at best a speculative asset class and at worse a wilderness of Ponzi schemes. AI might turn out to be just the ruinous money-pit Potemkin singularity that critics and scholars and experts (and I) think it is.
My theory of Kevin Roose is this: His bet is not on any of these individually, but on the very rich and very powerful men and institutions backing them. He thinks they are going to win, and that when they do win, it won't matter that the rest of us regarded his sucking up to them as a disgrace to journalism and human dignity. He is, I suppose I must grant, being very smart.
