last updated 3 days, 12 hours ago
i finally made it! the final post in alphabet superset! i'd like to thank myself, struthless (the originator of the challenge) and of course every wonderful one of you reading and commenting on these posts!
i thought i'd run out of stuff to say (okay maybe i did at times!) but overall, if anything my feelings about technology and life and their interactions have only been expanding and shifting, like tectonic plates. the mind and writing are funny things.
i worry a lot about the ai bubble and how we can't continue at this pace of investment and hypergrowth forever, how the reckoning is coming and none of us are really sure how things will look when the dust settles, if indeed it does. i don't believe or worry AGI is coming but i do think less smart, less good than AGI technology can wreck the world just as much.
i don't think i really believe in "peaking" for individuals, that you can look back across a period of life and be like "that was the best i had and everything after that was a slow but steady decline", i think life is too complicated and that way of looking at things too constrained. eras and corporate life seem different. i hope open AI has peaked. i hope we've seen peak microsoft and peak apple and peak countless other big tech companies.
this era of the anthropocene has had countless horrors, wonders and mindfully sought drudgery the likes of which the world has not seen before. i'm sure the old luddites thought the same of their own automation apocalypse, thought the same of their uncaring masters. they must have looked at the world with a sense of rage and misery on one hand and stuffed down hope and the cautious yearning in it screwed up in the other.
i have a heavy sense of dread about change at the best of times. moving cities, moving house, leaving behind a decade of ties and familiarity has been a lot, and i'm also currently off social media for a month so have to soothe my brain the old-fashioned way. the "old" ways are chat, podcasts and books and being recommended things to watch specifically chosen for me. all of this has been a shock to the system, but maybe not in a bad way. a hard refresh.
i don't think consumer habits without other levers can ever enact real change, whether that's the support of unions, governmental pressure, protests... there has to be a honing, something to turn the blunt edge of "less money" into the surgical scalpel of a clear demand. whilst AWS exists, supporting a large part of the web and leading the industry, amazon will not topple, no matter how little we may or may not buy from their webstores. while i disdain apple i use their stupid sexy hardware. hypocrisy is the stuff of our enemies favourite dreams but also something to seriously grapple with. never a hypocrite, never a comrade.
i mentioned protests and unions and boycotts and so on and so forth feel that none of them alone achieves the goal, but always shy away from confronting the idea that maybe even together we are small in the face of the money of machinery and ever present war machine. maybe we will lose. maybe we've lost!
i think even if big tech starts to eat itself, if the circular financing situation that certainly doesn't sound good (e.g. open AI financing nvidia which finances open AI?) crumples under its own immense, inflated valuations, if the AGI never emerges into its godhood, if it all turns out to be for nothing but money and ego, then what? we win, but at what cost?
changing the world is hard, and i sometimes doubt that anything makes any difference. it all feels like an exercise in soothing souls, in making the bitterness of the world at large meld into the sweetness of my life, but i still see there is value in that. no more bread without roses.
i'm starting to be more comfortable with not knowing, with waiting and seeing, with hoping and praying, with discussing and worrying and weeping, together. we will face the world together, whoever remains and whatever happens.
once again, thank you for reading.
this piece is part of my (successful!) attempt at alphabet superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (it took me 2 years and 3 months — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge finished on 11th August 2025, closer to two years i think). other posts: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge, leaving, monotony, no, permanent, questions, relationships, sensual, technopaganism, upload, video, waste, xenial and yep.
if you liked this post, please:
Previous | {{next_post}}