From one failed industrial utopia to another
...the story of my life.
The thing about the internet is that it promised utopia. If you go back three decades to when it just emerged as a commercial product, it was a lot like the AI boom today. It was supposed to deliver on everything that the Soviet Union had promised but through a capitalist information economy: true egalitarianism, an end to economic inequality, a materialist cornucopia that finally would be shared by everyone around the world. The internet promised to deliver all these things right at the moment that the United States won, as everyone believed, its ideological war against the Soviet Union. The communist dream was dead. And the internet, as promoted by its boosters in the 1990s, was supposed to be the final hammer in that fight. It was going to prove that the American Way could deliver The Promise — the promise that industrialism had offered up to the world from the beginning when weaving mill entrepreneurs in England herded orphans into factories and treated them as slaves. This was just a step to a brighter future — a future of where everyone would live like a king.
Wired magazine cover in 1997
My family left the Soviet Union in 1989, and we landed in San Francisco just in time for this new epoch to arrive. I was supposed to take an active part in it — I even studied computer science and even a bit of AI at UC Berkeley as part of my Cognitive Science degree. Well…the utopia never came. The internet didn’t make everyone equal…it didn’t bring democracy. It did the opposite: It created a massive militarized system of surveillance and social control and it underpinned the biggest economic and political centralization humanity has ever seen — an information technology that allowed one corporation, like Amazon, to dominate so many spheres of modern life: films, books, medicine, all commerce, the backbone of the internet itself…The internet, through its massive and always expanding use of energy, is helping hasten the collapse of life on Earth, too. Utopia? Nah. The growth of the internet also tracked along with America’s own internal crack-up. The collapse of liberal Enlightenment idealism is at hand.
This idea of me escaping one failed utopian society only to arrive at another just in time for its unraveling was a theme that we tried to cut into a little teaser back in 2019/2020, when I was working with a producer to turn my book Surveillance Valley into a documentary series and sell it to one of the major streaming platforms. That project failed — it was killed by the COVID lockdowns and a certain political squeamishness on the part of my partner.
Here it is, though, for you to watch.
This theme of living in two failed industrial utopias cropped up again when Rowan and I were making Pistachio Wars. Thinking about it now…this theme has dominated my thinking and intellectual interests in a way I haven’t fully realized. It is the story of my life, I guess. Straddling two failures.
As I’m getting older and a little bit wiser, I’ve come to realize that these failures are connected on a deeper level. They are not two but one failure. They are the inescapable failures that have been built into industrialism itself. It’s often said that every system contains the seeds of its own destruction. And it’s true for industrialism, too. Its quest for total power and control over all global processes — whether human, biological, chemical, geological, and even astrological. This drive to domination…to control and remake…has taken on its own internal logic. It doesn’t matter if a society is capitalist or socialist, the industrial values they embody are fundamentally the same. And so there is no place to run. Industrialism — or the Machine, as someone like Paul Kingsnorth would call it — has taken over the world. You have to make a stand wherever you are.
As many of you know (and thank you to everyone who has contributed!) I’m currently trying to raise money to make Vampire Valley, a documentary series about the internet that’s partially based on my book Surveillance Valley. The more I think about it and the more I sketch it out…the more I realize that this doc series will be on a deep level about the idea that I sketched out above. The internet and AI are just the latest and newest developments of industrialism, a process that has been going on and gaining speed for centuries and which is now running up against it limits — limits of control and extraction and modification. The system is cracking up, no matter where you are, even if most people are in denial about it.
—Yasha
PS: Come out to our INTERNET JUNKIES ANONYMOUS event in SF tonite. And watch Pistachio Wars if you haven’t already.
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“It doesn’t matter if a society is (capitalist,) socialist or communist, the industrial values they embody are fundamentally the same. And so there is no place to run. Industrialism — or the Machine, as someone like Paul Kingsnorth would call it — has taken over the world. You have to make a stand wherever you are.”
Wish more folks would realize this as they fight tribal politics of team blue versus team red versus team green and so on.
I'm probably rambled about this before, but I was curious what you thought of the documentary "Collapse" from 2009. For 20 years I've been telling anyone who will listen to me that what's happening to the US is similar to what happened to the Soviet Union, only it seems to be happening in slow motion. No one likes to hear that the future isn't bright. No one likes to hear that they are on the Titanic and it's only a matter of time before everybody is affected. Americans are blind to collapse because they didn't grow up with it and they refuse to recognize the signs. They just keep hoping that somehow everything will be okay again. You may not be rewarded for telling the truth but at least you might have some ability to try to navigate it.