We — the general “we,” the societal “we” — are suffering from a profound, and profoundly unearned, surfeit of self-confidence. It’s everywhere.

We know what we’re doing, the thinking goes, despite all evidence and common sense and historical precedent. This is a sweaty, desperate kind of confidence, the most urgent kind of confidence — about tech, about law, about sociology, about everything — and we’re desperate to convince everyone else of our rightness, too, no matter what the reality actually is. Reality is for losers.

This is not going to end well. It has never ended well before.

The same way street lunatics and Republicans cling to whatever a random collection of neurons burped up when whey they last bothered to have a thought, an increasing percentage of our culture is soaked in the absolute, and almost always unfounded, belief that this — whatever “this” turns out to be — is the way, the right way, the only way. This one here. I found it on the ground, but it still looks good. Joe Rogan said so.

I’m speaking — of course — of AI.

Or maybe crypto. Or NFTs. Or the metaverse. Or capitalism. Or religion. Or MAGA. Or whatever other goddamned thing some goddamned group of confidence-swelled chuckleheads is trying to foist onto us today, as the One True, Unalterable, and Inevitable Path. Because they’re all the same thing. You gotta believe, because then others just might believe, too. And that’s where the profit is.

They’re called confidence men for a reason.

Doubt, in any form, is to be dismissed out of hand. Fake it ‘til you make it, baby, because of course you’re going to make it. YOLO hard enough, and it precludes wasting your single, precious life as a fraud, right? Right? Fuckin’-A. No doubt, no fear, no common sense, no obligation to reality or the truth or the rest of society.

To pick one especially sweaty example, Elon Musk is currently rampaging through the governmental infrastructure that keeps us — the general “us,” the societal “us” — alive, unplugging things, just to see what happens. You think he doubts himself, even for a second? He’ll say literally anything that makes it out of the gravity well of his k-hole. Move fast and break things, and if those things happen to be institutions or the Constitution or human beings, well… Look, dude, you can actually launch missiles with this code. Sick.

One problem — one of the many problems — one of the near-infinite number of problems — with the cryptocurrency “industry” (is there a way to put distain-quotes around distain-quotes?) was / is / will be its monumental arrogance. The hubris that flushed billions in electronic beanie babies down the cryto-toilet was born from every Ponzi scheme investor who thinks they got in early enough, or who did not know that they were involved in a Ponzi scheme, who does not know what a Ponzi scheme is but assumes it’s probably something good.  “Have fun staying poor!” they’d blithely sneer at anybody who had ethical, financial, or flat-out common-sensical doubts about their ramshackle assault on a century of hard-learned, society-wide lessons. “Look how much money I’ve ma— Oh, shit. Oh, no. No, no, no, no.”

Crypto grift — by which I mean crypto — is now playing in the biggest league possible, with someone no less powerful than the (enterally confident) President of the United States prepping a nation-state-sized bag, for countless suckers to be left holding. But that does not change its fundamental nature; it clarifies it, to its purest possible form. By bringing in the most successful con-man in history to hype their super-special hash keys, cryptobros have been granted access to the same gullible rubes that see Trump as a paragon of patriotic virtue. These suckers believe, no matter how many times they’re proven wrong, and they keep clapping hard enough for the whole Tinkerbell-contraption to stay aloft. I don’t think Trump believes (or even understands) a word he says, but I do think he thinks you’ll believe it. Which is the point.

“You just don’t understand,” the bleat inevitably goes. “De-fi! Uh, code is law. Solidity?” But I do understand, because I’m not financially incentivized not to. “I’m having fun making you poor” doesn’t have the same ring. “gm” (“God, where is my money?”) had its day. Crypto triumphalism — despite it’s Trumpy-come-lately hoopla — has aged like $MILK.

And so we’re left with the AI “industry” — we really need to come up with a shortcut to represent double-pumping two raised fingers on each hand while rolling your eyes — as the current apex example of the tech-exulation grift. Of course — [checks notes] — AI is going to make it. We are going to make it, just like last time.

Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.

Is it still early? When does it stop being early?

LLMs are not, say, an expensive way to produce marginally useful summaries of longer documents, oh no. They’re the first step towards our evil / benevolent (pick one) AI overlords. They’re the wellspring of a quasi-religious cult whose enthusiastic acolytes can clearly see the inexorable path from an unprofitable parlor trick to AGI godhood, where the technology that lies between them is inevitable, despite not actually existing, or being possible, or stuff.

It’s a thin line between confidence and delusion. Like, really thin. Like, negative thickness.

Eric Schmidt demands that 99% of the electrical output of the planet be dedicated to AI, without pausing to wonder what else it might be used for.  Sam Altman plans a seven-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure, without giving a second thought to, God, literally anything. Vibecoders come super-duper close to a working implementation of FizzBuzz, and cheer the coming replacement of everyone but themselves. People who stuff prompts into diffusion models declare themselves artists, the same way that people who yell at waiters declare themselves chefs.

Ethical concerns are dismissed as irrelevant, legal issues are declared moot. It’s a done deal. Get in, loser, we’re going AI-ing.

And doesn’t that actually make sense? If the threat - economic, national, philosophical — is existential, doesn’t the risk/reward calculation require that we throw all available resources into to the fray? Yes, of course, it makes sense.

Assuming there’s actually an existential risk. Which lots and lots of people are trying to convince you of, using lots and lots of hand waving, and press releases, and podcasts for some reason — it’s always podcasts. There is no place for thinking things through, there is no time for quiet reflection, there’s certainly not time for regulation.

The word “hype” does not do the situation justice. If it’s not now, it’s never, and if it’s never, we are dooomed. Your children will curse your name as they eat dirt to survive.

But “You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable. People who are tired of winning shouldn’t need to mock those they see as their lessers, as the losers the future is going to trample over. Inexorable triumph does not require it.

Unless, just maybe, that triumph isn’t so inexorable, and their triumphalism is a rhetorical strategy rather than an actual belief. People in a panic tend to make bad decisions — commit resources that they shouldn’t, put money into the pockets of people they shouldn’t. Perhaps all this self-confidence, this arrogance, this self-satisfaction is the gambit of a used-car salesman, promising that someone else was just here and is going to come back tomorrow and now is your only chance to pick up this beauty. [Slaps roof.] You can fit so much passionate intensity in here. Buy, buy, buy buy.   The thing is, you can just walk off the lot and leave the salesman’s shouts that you’ll be sorry fading into the distance. Here though, now, with AI, the shouts follow you, are presented to you, constantly, as deep-think and serious philosophy and stolid news. Does Schmit even understand what dedicating 99% of available energy to this nonsense means? Who cares? It sounds urgent, it sounds impressive, it sounds like a big demand for a big job and that’s what’s important. Who cares if it works, or causes harm, or any of that loser shit? Eric Schmit doesn’t care. Do you?   I should amend the first sentence of this rant. We are suffering from a profound sense of self-delusion. The confident ones are just trying to pedal their commitment to that delusion to the rest of us, to make it conventional wisdom instead of nut-baggery. If they believe it hard enough, if their can fool themselves (either truly or performatively), then maybe they can fool us, too.   And that’s, ultimately, what matters: the sale. What happens afterwards, well, at least we’ll have a nice bag.