First, a quick service announcement. After years, I’ve finally decided to put the DataKnightmare scripts online. It took a while to find software, and a provider, that relied as little as possible on the United States. Especially if you’re like me and, even if you’re not pissed off, you lose you heart over the futility of it all. Not exactly the attitude for winning marketing.
Luckily, there’s Elena Rossini, who faced the same problem and shared her solution with me. So, starting today, if DataKnightmare finally has a home at dk.dataknightmare.eu, we owe it to Elena as well. For now, I’ve uploaded two seasons in English and the latest one in Italian. It’ll take a while, but not another ten years.
Let’s get down to business. Amid the infernal noise of useless news coming out every fifteen minutes, I thought I caught something interesting.
You’ve probably read about the so-called “Palantir manifesto,” those twenty or so points on Twitter that summarize the book by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.
And you may have heard about the so-called “interview with Claude” conducted by Walter Veltroni, an Italian politician, on a national newspaper.
Before you stop listening, let me say right away I have no intention of going into detail about either one. I barely skimmed Palantir’s tweets, and as for Veltroni’s interview (whatever it contains) I don’t deem it worth the time it would take me to read it.
And then?
And then I want to talk not about either of those things (because they’re clearly both nonsense) but about what they represent, which I actually find interesting.
Let’s start from the beginning. From a long time ago.
My generation brought information technology into the workplace. Since I didn’t fight at Waterloo, automation was already there, but my generation did see typewriters and fax machines get replaced first by WordStar, then Word, and finally the whole shebang.
These were tumultuous decades during which everything that could be digitized was digitized: sometimes well, sometimes so-so, and other times, just like shit.
It was a period when everyone dreamed their own version of the mythical “flat organization” about which all business schools wrote entire shelvefuls.
My point is that an organization is not just a technological construct. It is a complex socio-technical structure, where technology plays a part. The result is that the mere arrival of a technology does not automatically bring about changes in the processes and social structure of the organization, due to the interactions and feedback loops among all the components of the system.
To put it more bluntly: whatever technologists may think, there are no purely technological solutions to the problems of a socio-technical system.
One of the most striking examples is, for instance, “going paperless”, a topic on which I personally have spent many years and a great deal of effort. I believe we can all agree that there has never been as much paper in offices as there has been since documents went digital. No longer used for storage, maybe, but incessantly printed and reprinted every time a document is needed.
And since documents have gone digital, there are countless versions of them, all subtly incompatible with one another, all living independent lives in different parts of the organization.
To give a simple example, there used to be letterhead (spoiler alert, it still exists, but only for contracts signed by top executives); today, every single local office, and every department within that office, has its own “official” version of the letterhead, with a specific version of the logo, different from all the others.
If, on the other hand, you feel too tech-savvy for letterhead, we can talk about processes, software, APIs, and the related documentation, of which there are as many versions as there are developer teams.
Every incompatibility that arises during a project is resolved , and sometimes documented, on a case-by-case basis by the various teams that must collaborate, with the sole result that, in the end, there will be yet another version of the code, and sometimes of the documentation too. And don’t tell me your Confluence or your GitHub are in order.
What happened to documents happened to everything, of course. Processes, tasks, hierarchies.
The issue of hierarchy is an interesting one. We were saying earlier that everyone dreamed of their own version of the mythical “flat organization” that business schools assured us was the future.
For me and those like me, a flat organization meant a top leadership that would set strategic direction, and immediately below that a line of highly competent operatives with complete autonomy, eliminating any interference from top management in technical decisions and getting rid of the useless third of middle management.
For middle management, “flat organization” meant automating or outsourcing, but in any case eliminating, the useless third of the operatives, with their fixation on raising technical objections to the strategic directives from the top (and to middle management’s interpretations thereof).
For top management, too, “flat organization” meant eliminating the unnecessary third of operatives and interfacing exclusively with middle management, so as to finally overcome the need to consider so-called “technical details.”
If you look around today, it’s not hard to see who won. Top management is still all there, and middle management has more people than ever. The flattening of organizations, if it happened at all, meant mostly ousting and outsourcing technical expertise.
At the same time, there has been a significant evolution in top-level roles. With the advent of venture capital from the 2000s onward, top executives have shifted from being managerial figures to being increasingly performative ones. In no role is this more evident than in the role of the CEO. Today, the CEO is above all someone capable of weaving a compelling narrative of their "vision" for the future, in order to raise, on the market or from private investors, the funding necessary to build it.
Whether that future makes technical or economic sense, whether it is even possible, or whether it bears any relation to the future described in the last financial report, is unimportant.
What matters is that the CEO, and the narrative they present for this quarter, continue to inspire investor confidence. Nothing else matters.
Today’s CEO doesn’t need to be capable of “doing,” nor even of "leading" anymore. He just needs to know how to persuade. Relentlessly, changing the story whenever necessary without batting an eye. His defining qualities are stubbornness and an inflated sense of self-worth, which, unfortunately, are also hallmarks of the pathological narcissist.
Think of Zuckerberg, who started with the brilliant idea of creating a social network where his classmates could rate female students’ bangability; luckily, Sheryl Sandberg came along to help him actually make money; then he tried to reinvent money (remember Libra?), then he peddled the metaverse, and now he’s trailing the AI bandwagon after the disastrous launch of Galactica, which shut down in 72 hours.
Think of Musk, who has the imagination of a mediocre teenager in 1975, and his endless bullshit about self-driving cars, colonizing Mars, and mega-constellations of satellites.
Think of the best of them all, Sam Altman: a guy who writes a blog and the world goes crazy as if John the Evangelist had just published a revised version. Altman has bamboozled the entire venture capital world with the sole promise of burning through all the investors’ money only to raise even more.
From one boast to the next, they all think their success isn’t the result of luck, connections, government contracts, and monopoly, but of their being special, and especially visionary. While Taleb teaches us that moderate success can be explained by skill and effort, but overwhelming success is explained by variance.
Let’s not digress. Today, a digital CEO must be able to declare:
“We are driving the synergistic evolution of our value ecosystem through a holistic and data-driven approach, enabling scalable paradigms of sustainable innovation centered on change.”
and do so with an air of deep conviction. It’s obviously just hot air, but anyone who laughs or thinks the phrase makes no sense will never be a C-level and will never get an interview.
In tandem with the performative shift of CEOs and founders, the media system has also adapted. With bankruptcies, restructurings, and acquisitions, today the media are, with few exceptions, outsourced marketing in the hands of the very industrialists the media should be investigating. Let’s be clear: every powerful figure has always had sycophants and hagiographers in every publication, but today the media is required to stick to amplifying the corporate narrative. Washington Post, anyone?
A certain mythical, very American interpretation of the digital sector and its players has also contributed to this, and not insignificantly. From William Gibson’s “keyboard cowboys” to Steven Levy’s “heroes of the digital frontier,” every effort has been made to revive the foundational myth of the Frontier, with all its toxic baggage, for the digital age.
The result is that today, the protagonists themselves view themselves in mythical terms. Sure, it couldn’t be any other way; no one wants to think of themselves as merely a lucky teller of six-monthly fairy tales, no matter how skilled.
No, instead they are all “visionaries,” “builders of the future,” if not outright “revolutionaries”, obviously in the capitalist sense of the term, that is, destroyers of industries and communities for their own exclusive benefit and that of their investors.
This finally brings us to Palantir and Alex Karp. He is not content with merely having founded a company that got fat on military contracts (capitalists want the state reduced to a bare minimum except when it's a client a client) but he channels his own mythical image as the defender of a West conveniently besieged only by those problems his products claim to address.
And not, for instance, by unprecedented economic and social inequality, by global social and climate changes, or by a caste of tax-exempt billionaires with a penchant for oligarchy. Once again, we are witnessing the bluster of someone who has not a single original idea in his head and has made his fortune precisely because of that.
That Karp, like all his other billionaire buddies, believes he has a “vision” to communicate to the public (beyond the quarterly earnings report) is no surprise. Nor is it surprising that he reiterates the book’s themes in a series of tweets, perhaps to compensate for less-than-overwhelming sales: everyone, after all, wants to be seen.
But if you scratch just beneath the surface of these CEOs’ narratives, you realize that Silicon Valley produces nothing but variations on the theme of those who have always created and financed it: the Cold War Pentagon.
Read Amodei, Altman, Karp, Zuckerberg, and Thiel all you want. You’ll always find U.S. supremacy through ICT technology, the export of American capitalist values, social control, and the containment by any means necessary of any competing power on the Eurasian plate.
Stuff that hasn’t changed one iota since 1946, written and systematized by top-tier minds like Bush (Vannevar, scientific advisor to Roosevelt and Truman, namesake but not related to the subsequent presidents George Bush and George Bush the Lesser), Kissinger, Brzezinski, Cheney: people who have steered U.S. policy for decades while the presidents in office played the cool guys on TV, parroting the season's buzzwords.
This does not mean that the oligarchic delusions of Karp and company are harmless, far from it. But they are not evil geniuses. They are merely actors who, offstage, still believe they are Julius Caesar.
These fake champions of free enterprise with public money, these self-appointed “inventors of the future,” are merely parroting the catchphrases of those who created, and sustain, them.
Now, power attracts servants and sycophants, as I said. But it isn’t satisfied with them, whom it ultimately despises. Every powerful person, and all the more so every nouveau riche braggart, needs to feel validated by someone whose social or cultural stature they secretly envy.
And here comes the bard. Somebody who in the 20th century would have been called an “organic intellectual,” whose task is to use their own art and culture to make the powerful shine. The bard is subtler than the sycophant, and can even afford a superficially critical attitude, because his role is not to confirm the narrative of the powerful point by point (there's already servants and sycophants for that), but to validate it by taking it completely for granted, and to distract attention from the problems, with a highly erudite discussion of some insignificant detail.
So, while the AI guys are wooing investors with fairy tales of sentient machines and the elimination of workers, sorry, the transcending of work, the bard doesn’t get into the substance of the matter, but instead interviews artificial intelligence. This is what Walter Veltroni, a seasoned Italian politician, did just last week. From someone like him I would have expected, if not more dignity, at least better timing. Interviewing an Artificial Intelligence is so fall-winter 2023.
The bard is more insidious than the sycophant, because he doesn’t take a stand for or against. He merely includes the narrative of power in the “cultured” debate.
If power speaks of next-generation nuclear power, the servant will shout from the rooftops that solar and wind power are outdated; the sycophant will point out that the green area around the plant is ideal for a family picnic.
The bard, on the other hand, will wax emphatically about how the cooling towers might inspire a XXI-century Wordsworth to compose a modern version of Tintern Abbey
The digital bard, with all his erudition, has nothing specific to say, but he says it with refined words and high-sounding quotes. His task is not to discuss or refute, but to undermine any serious debate by taking the narrative of power for granted and constructing a seemingly scholarly discussion on completely marginal details.
And in this, Veltroni has done his job. The very act of “interviewing” an automatic text generator, and choosing to do so on issues that would be profound if he were talking to a human being and not to a rhetorical mirror, is the most devastating weapon one could bring to bear in support of the millenarian delusions of the digital braggarts.
If the role of public intellectual still has any meaning, Veltroni’s puff piece is a complete betrayal of that role, it is the subjugation of culture to the interests of those who have no culture whatsoever, but are awash in money.
While actual experts have pointed out since forever how harmful it is (and whose interests it really serves) to anthropomorphize a technology like so-called "Artificial Intelligence", Veltroni just waltzes in and interviews "AI" on the meaning of life. It doesn’t matter that the obviously "AI" has nothing to say on the matter. What matters is that a text generator suddenly comes across as something you can actually “talk” to about such a topic.
Veltroni could have truly played the intellectual and discussed the point of a European Union willing to chase after the United States in a speculative bubble. He could have talked about the problems of using Artificial Intelligence in the professions, in the media, and in education.
He could even have played the left-wing intellectual and spoken of oligopolies and rent-seeking, of techno-feudalism, of the political role of Artificial Intelligence in dismantling the bargaining power of labor.
He could have talked about all of this and much more.
Instead, he chose to play the cheerleader for the nouveau riche braggarts, and in doing so, I believe he has established his place in the hierarchy where Leonardo Sciascia listed men, half-men, little men, ass-kissers, and windbags.
I have an idea.
Junes
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