Tools

This feels like a sister piece to Ed Zitron’s essay Era of the Business Idiots and Mandy Brown’s essay Toolman. Fair warning, this is a 5000 word post; I’ve been working on this for weeks, pulling together what I’ve learned about generative AI and culture over the past two years, so I hope it is worth your time 😄 Bonus: it doubles as a playlist 🎶

“‘Real power’ is achieved when a technology ‘[leaves] mythology and [enters] banality,’” Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy quote Vincent Mosco in The Ordinal Society. We’ve had the mythology stage — the world tour with grandiose prophecies of imminent AGI — but now the race to normalize generative AI* is on: tech corporations are attempting to inure people to generative AI, an expression of the Business Borg aesthetic that currently carries a negative stigma.

*(My rule of thumb: if something is described as AI, it’s probably predatory and/or bullshit; if it’s described as machine learning, it probably does something useful. Not always true but a helpful predictor.)

In general, people like what we recognize better than what we don’t — we prefer cultural works we can categorize to the unfamiliar and undefinable — and we are facing an inescapable shock-and-awe barrage of genAI graphics across the web to inundate our synapses with uncanny synthetic renderings.

Currently, generative AI is shunned by many artists and writers, the traditional arbiters of good taste and culture, because it has been developed through the theft of their labor. But tech CEOs stand to make (even bigger) fortunes if they can convince people that genAI doesn’t signify bad taste, and make it seem like an irrevocable fact of life, like spam emails and text scammers. It’s being deployed upon us with the same lockstep corporate solidarity that forced us to pay fees for checked luggage on flights (younger folks, before 2008 your bag used to be included with your ticket! Stowing your carry-on wasn’t a competitive sport back in the day.).

The aesthetics of generative AI

“I have become momentarily obsessed with scrolling down the homepage of the MetaAI tool and seeing the infinite feed of what people have been asking of The Machine. The outputs are horribly banal, but the requests are a weird window into THE (NORMIE) HUMAN SOUL AND ITS DESIRES: www.meta.ai” — Matt Muir, May 6, 2025 at 8:51 AM

(via)

By its nature, generative AI produces the most likely image that meets the brief, which devolves to insipid Pictionary-style visual communication: chonky = cat, kebab = food = French chef’s hat. These graphics are iconographic pablum, the uninspired result of gee-whiz curiosity about a new “tool” (toy)(trap) in an environment that discourages personal taste and cultural literacy.

Originally, I wrote up why I find these particular graphics tacky and visually uninteresting, but realized that ultimately, what they look like doesn’t matter — it’s the beliefs beneath the appearance that matter. As corporate models are trained further, Generative AI will probably continue to get better, rendering more attractive and/or plausible outputs, but it won’t matter to me how good it gets because I reject the values it represents.

(NB: I don’t want you to feel bad about yourself if you use generative AI, because there are myriad reasons to have experimented with it, including being forced to for your employment; I want you to recognize what it symbolizes when you enthusiastically use this technology today, and make an informed choice about whether those are values you wish to signal to others.)

“What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.” — Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Aesthetics are looks that signal values

Witching Hour by Ladytron

An aesthetic is an expression of taste for shared values, commonly communicated through a distinct style. We think of aesthetics as surface appearance only, but the formation of an aesthetic’s conventions reflects the why and the how underneath the what. Just as the medium of a thing carries a message, so does its aesthetic. Aesthetics are visually and verbally encoded value systems.

Ideology is a value system, independent of appearances. Aesthetics are the appearance of an ideology, which grow from its values. Subcultures form around ideologies, with members signaling their participation through aesthetics. “Good taste” is aesthetics that express those values.

Though it’s now often reduced to a visual style, the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s was cross-disciplinary and united instead by an ethos — namely, the nobility of craftsmanship*:

“For it is not the material, but the absence of human labor, which makes the thing worthless, and a piece of terracotta, or plaster of paris, which has been wrought by the human hand, is worth all the stone and Carrara cut by machinery. It is, indeed, possible and even usual, for men to sink into machines themselves, so that even handwork has all the character of mechanization.”

— John Ruskin, The Lamp of Truth from The Seven Lamps of Architecture

According to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, what is made should signal how it is made — the aesthetic’s value system weights how something is made to be as important, if not more, as what is made. Surface appearance is borne of the decisions this taste for craft produces.

*(People might instead think of this William Morris quote as the quintessential perspective of Arts and Crafts — “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” — and I suspect there’s a reason we’ve been taught to recall a philosophy centered on material possession instead of labor.) Kelmscott Press printing of The Story of the Glittering Plain or the Land of Living Men, from 1894

Looking at a Kelmscott Press book (William Morris’ printing company) reveals the printer’s respect for handicraft: they designed custom drop letters and frames, included original illustrations by fine artists like Edward Burne-Jones, used original type modeled after typefaces used by printers like Aldus Manutius in the early days of the printing press, printed with a richer black ink than was standard at the time, and employed a heavy hand in letterpress printing so the design and type would be impressed into the page. Thoughtful, intentional ornamentation is embraced. The artifact itself is a thing to be appreciated as much as its contents; these are books that honor the integrity of all creative workers involved in their production.

Emily Amick applies this analytical lens to reveal the tradwife aesthetic’s underlying values:

Prairie-core. Domestic bliss. Big sleeves. Bigger sourdough starters. And beneath it all, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) message: a woman’s place is in the kitchen. But not because she wants to be there, because that’s where God or her husband or some TikTok algorithm put her.

The tradwife aesthetic promises comfort, but it delivers control.

It’s softness as a strategy. It’s anti-feminism with a floral filter. It’s nostalgia for a time when women were property, romanticized by influencers who want brand deals from butter. […] The tradwife says: give up your autonomy and someone else will take care of everything.

We adopt aesthetics based on aspirational values

Jessica Cullen writes that (emphasis mine): “Aesthetics aren’t always about who we currently are but rather who we want to be.” Naomi Klein expands:

“Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community and express ourselves.”

People adopt an aesthetic to say something about themselves to others. We intentionally adopt a particular subculture’s aesthetics to convey our belonging and raise our status within the subculture. As Alec Leach puts it, “a lot of the modern taste economy is actually the status economy.”

Sometimes, we perceive only the surface level of an aesthetic, its appearance without the values — as Amick notes, the tradwife aesthetic “looks so damn pretty and nourishing. And we are tired.” — but whenever we adopt an aesthetic, we endorse (intentionally or not) the underlying values it represents. Amick continues dissecting the tradwife aesthetic and how it serves as conservative propaganda:

What looks like innocent lifestyle content is actually part of an organized political movement designed to make patriarchy look cozy and appealing. Because politics is downstream from culture. The vibes that influence how we act and live.

Aesthetics matter more than ever because we act in accordance with our chosen aesthetics. As we get more and more of our “cultural” content on corporate silos, politics and purchases have subsumed a lot of cultural tastemaking. In this TikTok, Jamelle Bouie describes how politicians use aesthetic signaling to appeal to voters. Richard Sennett identifies that politicians come to embody “intentions, desires, values, beliefs, tastes – an emphasis which has again the effect of divorcing power from responsibility.”

Anu Atluru argues that “Aesthetics are the modern units of cultural currency—stores of value and instruments of power, capable of appreciating and being monetized at scale. Owning an aesthetic is owning influence.” (emphasis mine)

Interrogating the Business Borg aesthetic

Glass Lux by Glass Lux

The Arts and Craft movement’s respect for labor inspired stylistic choices that highlighted craftwork as well as the decisions in what goods to produce and how. So how does the Business Borg aesthetic reveal its values?

To define the Business Borg aesthetic, I’m looking at:

• the values I see expressed through generative media,
• the actions of the corporations behind generative AI,
• who buys into generative AI, and
• what else they like that reflects the same underlying values.

What genAI is better at than a human artist is being cheap and instant.

The Business Borg aesthetic uses technology to signal wealth and power. Generative AI is not the only visual expression of the Business Borg aesthetic, just its most recognizable. The aesthetic is also signified visually by CGI-heavy blockbuster franchises, NFT art, and the Cybertruck; and in text by LinkedIn corporate thirst traps, blue check X braggadocio, SEO word vomit, and generated “answers” to search results.

As political bedpartners, there is overlap between the Business Borg aesthetic and the MAGA aesthetic, but they’re distinct viewpoints. Both share dominance as a core value, decry empathy, center patriarchy, and admire performance — but MAGA also signals Judeo-Christian morality, traditional beauty standards / traditional gender roles, hyper masculinity / violence, and nationalism. MAGA borrows aesthetics from golden pasts, like Neo-Classical architecture, tradwives, and, as Kate Wagner brands it, Regional Car Dealership Rococo; Business Borg prefer the more modern tones of cyberpunk, solarpunk, and minimalism. Business Borg are regulatory libertarians who envision themselves as the rightful leaders of society, Kings of techno-city-states; MAGA are Christian nationalists who want to use the power of the state to impose their beliefs on others.

Elon is a Business Borg at heart but wielded a chainsaw to appeal to the more violent MAGA aesthetic. Zuckerberg is a Business Borg but got a MAGA makeover with masculine stubble and bling.

Why am I naming this after the Borg? Like Star Trek’s Borg, this is an aesthetic rooted in extractive consumption, assimilationist dominance, neo-colonial expansionism, self-righteous conviction, reductionist thinking, and proclamations of inevitability. It idolizes technology, often inspired by older science-fiction, and draws on cyberpunk aesthetics. The Silicon Valley Collective values groupthink and believes themselves superior to “the other.”

Who embraces this aesthetic

Not all users of Generative AI embrace the Business Borg aesthetic. I think a lot of people are experimenting with generative AI out of neophilic curiosity, productivity imperatives, nihilistic determinism, and corporate fiat. Aspiring billionaires adopt the Business Borg aesthetic to signal their belonging in the cohort of the techno-rich.

GenAI evangelists seem to be the same type of person who was into passive income and supplements fifteen years ago, then Soylent and SEO ten years ago, then NFTs and macro diets five years ago, now genAI and X blue checks.

The Business Borg aesthetic combines tech-centered neophilia, a hustle mindset, an obsession with optimization, evangelical fervor, and fake-it-till-you-make-it showmanship.

The Elon fanclub are Business Borg. Ed Zitron’s Business Idiot shares a lot of characteristics with Business Borg (and may even be the same group, but I think feels a little different?).

The subculture emphasizes high profile demonstrations of “winning“ — using a $10k NFT as their X profile pic, bragging about SEO heists ripping off a competitor, generosity stunts a la Mr Beast, rubbing it in Miyazaki’s face that there will be thousands of shitty knockoffs vaguely reminiscent of his work across the web.

Business Borg signal their busyness — and importance — by broadcasting how little they sleep, how much they work, and how little they read. The only fiction they like is (old) sci-fi because they read it as non-fiction, not fiction — a source of “inspiration” stripped of context and commentary. Using GenAI signals their adoption of cutting edge technology, the synthetic smoothness emphasizing its nonhuman origin. They care a lot about IQ, a supposedly impartial measure of intelligence that rewards their backgrounds and thinking styles, and idolize “genius.” They’re not actually neurodivergent, but play on stereotypes of autistic savants to cover for their pathological greed and lack of empathy.

Their visual and linguistic taste is mid because taste is not valued in the Business Borg aesthetic. In fact, there’s a certain pride in prompting things without having any skill, an almost gleeful snub to the perceived cultural gatekeepers — artists and writers and other creative workers — whose opinions the Business Borg disrespect because they believe that authority derives from money, not knowledge. They believe artists have wasted their time learning skills and developing taste. Academics have wasted their time studying things when information is just a click away. Business Borg don’t care about anything besides making money, and don’t care much how they spend it because the point is to have it, and show off that they have it.

Into The Water by Ritual Howls

GenAI True Believers often resemble the CEOs at the head of tech companies: wealthy, male, and white. These are also the people who are least at threat from the widespread use of generative AI, which reinforces racial and gender stereotypes and purports neutrality while serving up right-wing biases and corporate and foreign propaganda. Audrey Watters points out:

“Computing (in general and ed-tech specifically) has long been the bastion of white male privilege; and while there had been efforts to change that – in pipelines and on panels and whatnot – AI is clearly a re-entrenchment of that power, explicitly so with the Trump Administration’s dismantling of civil rights protections, echoed by the tech industry’s dismantling of its own DEI initiatives.”

Anil Dash describes “AI-first” as this year’s “Return to Office.” Managers didn’t care about in-office culture until it was made clear that workers could carry on just fine without them; managers care about AI only insomuch as it permits controlling — and firing — workers.

What the Business Borg aesthetic represents is more important than its appearance; it represents the dominance of ordinal thinking and the ability of moneyed power to do as it wishes without regard to law or morality — in short, the hierarchical worldview that some people are better than others and that their preferences trump their lesser’s needs.

“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” — the Borg

Values driving the Business Borg aesthetic

Teri Kanefield breaks down Leor Zmigrod’s book on ideology, explaining that “All ideologies seek a utopia.” The Business Borg utopia puts billionaires and their ilk high atop society, in control via the technology they own.

Core values I see uniting the Business Borg aesthetic are:

1. only the output matters
2. efficiency is king
3. quantity over quality
4. appearance trumps reality
5. “progress” cannot be stopped

Value: Only the output matters

Generative AI is being marketed to businesses as a low-cost replacement for workers that cuts steps — and collaboration — out of the process. This is a box-checking culture; all that matters is that an email was sent, a presentation was created, the newspaper had a summer reading insert, no matter the books on it were imaginary.

Foundational beliefs

• process does not add value and wastes time
• the world is reducible to data, and every question has one objectively correct answer
• communication and collaboration are a waste of time (“email jobs”)
• experience is irrelevant

Outcome: Tech reduces the complex to input and output

In contrast with the Arts and Crafts movement, the Business Borg aesthetic actively conceals human labor and venerates the wisdom of the machine. Generative text and graphics simulate a performance of human-less — cost-less — automation. Generative answers encourage a reliance on the machine to synthesize on one’s behalf — and it doesn’t matter to search engines that the “answers” their AI has provided cite sources incorrectly.

Humans are perceived as sources of inefficiency under the Business Borg ideology, because they must be compensated in accordance with their skills and how much time they spend working. Generating material is rooted in devaluing both skill and process. The invented summer reading list was the result of forcing a single contractor to prepare an impossible quantity of work; generating content was the only way for the poor bloke to produce the content on budget. No one reviewed it, because Business Borg only care that the product exists.

Ed Zitron describes the evolution of the Business Idiot, personified by middle managers who are completely dissociated from the product they’re selling and explicitly do not do work (emphasis mine):

[Business Idiots] see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they’ve read rather than the content of said books, about how many hours they work (even though they never, ever work that many), about high level they are in a video game they clearly don’t play, about the money they’ve raised and the scale they’ve raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success.

These people don’t want to automate work, they want to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing — living! — is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joy are.

Value: Efficiency is king

Generative AI produces endless content for low cost. Corporations are using Generative AI as an excuse to lay off workers and intensify the jobs of those remaining.

Ready Aim Fire (Owl Vision Remix) [Single] by Blue Stahli

Foundational beliefs

• the more mechanized a process is, the more efficient it becomes because humans are naturally inefficient

Outcome: GenAI performs “efficiency”

Generative AI need not actually reduce work or cost to represent efficiency when mechanization is always favored over people. The Business Borg aesthetic perceives automation as efficient — hence situations where workers are paid to simulate chatbots simulating human agents on customer service platforms, Microsoft devs handhold Copilot, and GM’s Cruise “autonomous” taxis needed remote human intervention every 4-5 miles!!!

Efficiency is a code word for shareholders, just like “cost-cutting,” who know that these phrases mean putting the boot on workers’ necks for short-term profits. This efficiency aesthetic is used to justify outrageously profitable companies continuing to slash workers *cough Microsoft* It plays out as Hollywood demolishing the screenwriter profession to save a buck on writing rooms and self-cannibalizing the development of future acting talent by forcing extras to be body scanned so they can be reproduced by AI.

Jeremy comments on the use of genAI in coding, noting that it’s justified by claims like “working code wins” — as in, what it looks like under the hood and how it’s constructed don’t matter. I’m not a coder, but I’ve seen enough HTML produced by PageMaker and other CMSs to be skeptical of the quality of any generated code — is genAI producing the coding equivalent of tables for web layout? 🤔 The Business Borg aesthetic accepts mediocrity without understanding; easy and fast is always best. Good enough is always good enough.

Value: Quantity over quality

Generative AI is billed as a good-enough tool that will speed up production. Cory Doctorow writes of the managerial push to automate with AI:

The point of using automation to weaken labor isn’t just cheaper products – it’s cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers’ professionalism and pride in their jobs.

Enormous by LLgL TNDR

Foundational beliefs

• profit today trumps tomorrow’s concerns — someone else will have to fix ‘that problem’
• money is authority — individual rankings can be quantified by wealth
• anything that cannot be quantified is not important

Outcome: Algorithms produce culture-like media, not culture

GenAI and corporate web algorithms are intended to absorb attention like black absorbs light; they are designed to maximize engagement at minimal cost. Spotify benefits from degradation of culture. Netflix is a chum machine, built to spew content that people watch in the background. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick laments that “So much of culture is edgeless and soft, intended for us to astroglide through it without any friction or doubt as we half-watch in 1.5x speed, to consume as if we really are incapable of critical thoughts, all to appeal to everyone and no one at the same time.” Internet Age capitalism produces entertainment that is culture-like, writes Nicholas Carr:

“What’s really being tested here is human taste. Will we accept a simulacrum of a work of art or craft as a satisfactory substitute for the real thing?”

So long as people accept cheap low-quality cultural media, businesses have little incentive to pay for higher quality. Generative AI becomes an attack on culture because it drowns out human-made art and writing so it’s impossible to find amidst the Great Social Media Garbage Patch. Aidan Walker describes all this as ‘slop capitalism‘: “an economic and cultural system in which the primary product is slop and the primary activity is the destruction of value rather than its creation.”

Value: Appearances trump reality

Generative AI produces plausible graphics that we interpret as real-adjacent and plausible combinations of text that we interpret as communication.

Foundational Beliefs

• performance of dominance builds and reinforces real power

Outcome: GenAI supersedes reality with performance and symbolism

The Business Borg aesthetic celebrates audacious performances of infinite wealth and indefinite power: adopters and evangelists for genAI also embrace filling streets with “self-driving” cars over the protests of residents and first responders, raining space debris onto inhabited areas from slapdash rocket ships, paying a fortune for a banana taped to a wall as conceptual art and eating it, paying women to have their babies so they can seem fertile without fucking. While the culture at large has shifted towards inconspicuous consumption, luxury that requires knowledge to see, Business Borg signal their wealth blatantly.

A repeating theme of the Business Borg aesthetic is replacing reality with life-like hyperreality: the simulation of conversation and connection with chatbots, the renderings of war and disaster mimicking photojournalism to push political narratives, the “resurrected” extinct species, the green screen action sequences that don’t track. A photograph of reality may seem less real than a generated image if it does not abide by our expectations.

Look at the snoozefest kayfabe of modern MMA: it’s as much about the smack talk at weigh-ins as the fights themselves, athletes winning by points for “controlling the octagon” instead of fighting to win by KO or submission — look no further than that embarrassment of a so-called fight between Mike Tyson and the YouTuber, who danced around an old man till he got tired so he could win by decision and say he’d beaten a legend 😴

Effective altruism performs charity that can never be disproven, despite its claims of data-driven decisions, because it pretends to think at such long-term scales that known, existing suffering pales in comparison to the imagined future suffering they claim to be protecting against. It cosplays rationalism. Wannabe Foundation shit.

The Business Borg aesthetic is expressed as cheap cruft disguised as something of substance: words that look like writing, but are not; images that look like art, but are not; fights that look fighting, but are not.

As Ed Zitron sums up, it’s a “symbolic economy:”

The sweeping changes we’ve seen, both in our economy and in our society, has led to an unprecedented, gilded age of bullshit where nothing matters, and things — things of actual substance — matter nothing.

Traditionally, we have been wary of those wearing a mask, writes Dan Fox in Pretentiousness, suspecting they are something other than what they present themselves as — but authenticity has faded as a cultural value. Business Borg embrace performance as more true than reality; what someone wants to be is more important than what they are now.

Value: “Progress” cannot be stopped

The rapacious assimilation of copyrighted material to train models, the dismissal of AI’s environmental cost and induced demand, and PR campaign reorienting the conversation around AI to its possible future harms as a distraction from the harms happening today all build from the same foundation: theoretically, scaling towards the pursuit of AGI — but more likely securing the funding to inextricably embed AI into our society and infrastructure.

Foundational Beliefs

• technology always represents progress
• the ends justify the means

Outcome: GenAI is full speed ahead, no matter what

Advocates of generative AI are pursuing a brute force, fear-mongering approach to deregulation and preventing regulation. They are defying legality in obtaining training data while declaring the technology a fait accompli: resistance is futile. Their web crawlers ignore robots.txt, breaking the common courtesy of the web. They dismiss complaints about bias, claiming that they can fix that in the future. (And what incentive will there be to ever go back and fix it, once we can’t avoid using it?) They’re hoping enough of us will get hooked on it — and government and corporations will integrate enough of it too deeply in their processes — to allow their legally-suspect models to be shut down.

Ryan Broderick observes:

What the AI arms race has actually done is codified and automated all of the failures of the previous internet era. Extremism, misinformation, harassment, non-consensual sexual material, and scams — all the content that tech companies promised to fix, but never could at scale — are now trapped in some AI’s black box of data.

AGI, which has been “three to five years away” for years, is a Bezzle. As Cory Doctorow quotes JK Gabraith, a Bezzle is “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” John Kay expands that “The joy of the bezzle is that two people – each ignorant of the other’s existence and role – can enjoy the same wealth.”

Scams and pyramid schemes are seductive to Business Borg, like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Friedman-Banks, because the only things they value are money and power, not making things that actually work (see: Cybertrucks falling apart, SpaceX rockets exploding); the trick is not to get caught. The goal is to surf the edge of profit as long as possible.

Right now the whole stock market is bloated by outrageous NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft and Meta valuations based on the potential of generative AI to create a new “essential” utility, a service that everyone will need to subscribe to, forever — and so many people have bought into the grift so hard they’ll do anything they can to make it a success, or at least rake in the cash for as long as they can. Then when the bubble pops, the corporations will get bailed out on the taxpayer dollar, while we workers resign ourselves to working until we die since we’ve privatized retirement 🙃

GenAI is being deployed to control

Artists are under attack, culturally and economically, so it is only fair that they point out the quintessential thing that artists offer that generative AI cannot: taste. Professional (and amateur) artists have devoted a great deal of time to developing their taste. The oligarchs who run Silicon Valley are steeped in their own rightness and devalue anything that isn’t their expertise; if they don’t know about it, it must not be important. To the Business Borg, taste is not an essential component of production.

Mandy Brown describes how genAI is used to undercut expertise (emphasis mine):

It’s instructive that one of the mechanisms for perpetuating this ideology are chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference. In fact, their makers seem entirely concerned with obviating that difference, with disappearing distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, without which truth becomes entirely a product of power. […] [I]f those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity.

Business Borg like generative AI because it grants them cultural power that they have not been able to dominate on their own. They lack skill, so they devalue skill. They need content, so they make an infinite content machine and conscript users as unwitting factory workers to provide free labor. The relentless promotion of GenAI is an attempt by corporations to capture cultural value by siphoning off value from human-made aesthetics. Generative AI is billionaires punching down on artists and the working class.

[…] I think Miyazaki’s style is still valuable

But it is now, in a day, valuable in a different way.

What was once valuable in the awareness of painstaking labor, beautiful stories, and coherent aesthetic across the previous two qualities. PLUS our reception to it.

Is now valuable PURELY in our reception to, and reproduction of, the aesthetic. […]

— Reggie James (@HipCityReg) March 27, 2025

Generative AI has intentionally been molded to attack artists and diminish cultural literacy. Aidan Walker argues (read this whole piece if you liked my post):

AI doesn’t have to be an antagonist to schools, work, and civil society — they’ve just designed and trained it that way… There could be guardrails in place, they could pay the producers of their training data, they could give the people a say in how the models are made and deployed — we could do a thousand things differently than the way they’re being done now.

Generative AI — both imagery and text — is inextricable from the corporate vision for its use: a world in which workers are powerless and worthless, replaced by “free” generated material. Corporate GenAI cannot be separated from the purpose for its use or the billionaires and billionaire-wannabes who shill for it. The Business Borg aesthetic imbues a sheen of venality.

Further reading:

You don’t hate AI; You hate… : a collection by Mita Williams

Dispatch from the Trenches of the Butlerian Jihad by ADH

The other way the [Butlerian Jihad] metaphor is proving apt is the deep-seated, almost spiritual nature of anti-AI sentiment. It’s not just more Luddism. Many people — though hardly all, given the popularity of AI products — sense that there is something grotesque about these simulacra, the people who push them on us, this whole affair. That aversion to the technological profane holds even when various stated objections to AI are supposedly addressed or nitpicked to death.

See also:

We need solidarity across creative industries

I was just thinking about Wall-E yesterday with regard to LLMs. As a consumer trying to use the web, it feels like I’m being force-fed so much slop.

https://adactio.com/journal/21926

Jeremy Keith with some good insights on the nature of large language models as tools.

#ai #llm #hype @adactio

ai hype llm Tools

🔗 “Large language models don’t amplify your creativity and agency. Large language models stunt your creativity and rob you of agency.”— @adactio https://adactio.com/journal/21926

Tools

Tools, by @adactio:

https://adactio.com/journal/21926

#tooling #ai

ai tooling Tools

This feels like a sister piece to Ed Zitron’s essay Era of the Business Idiots and Mandy Brown’s essay Toolmen. Fair warning, this is a 5000 word post; I’ve been working on this for weeks, pulling together what I’ve learned about generative AI and culture over the past two years, so I hope it is worth your time 😄 Bonus: it doubles as a playlist 🎶

“‘Real power’ is achieved when a technology ‘[leaves] mythology and [enters] banality,’” Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy quote Vincent Mosco in The Ordinal Society. We’ve had the mythology stage — the world tour with grandiose prophecies of imminent AGI — but now the race to normalize generative AI* is on: tech corporations are attempting to inure people to generative AI, an expression of the Business Borg aesthetic that currently carries a negative stigma outside of tech.

*(My rule of thumb: if something is described as AI, it’s probably predatory and/or bullshit; if it’s described as machine learning, it probably does something useful. Not always true but a helpful predictor.)

In general, people like what we recognize better than what we don’t — we prefer cultural works we can categorize to the unfamiliar and undefinable — and we are facing an inescapable shock-and-awe barrage of genAI graphics across the web to inundate our synapses with uncanny synthetic renderings.

Currently, generative AI is shunned by many artists and writers, the traditional arbiters of good taste and culture, because it has been developed through the theft of their labor. But tech CEOs stand to make (even bigger) fortunes if they can convince people that genAI doesn’t signify bad taste, or make it seem like an irrevocable fact of life, like spam emails and text scammers. It’s being deployed upon us with the same lockstep corporate solidarity that forced us to pay fees for checked luggage on flights (younger folks, before 2008 your bag used to be included with your ticket! Stowing your carry-on wasn’t a competitive sport back in the day.).

The aesthetics of generative AI

“I have become momentarily obsessed with scrolling down the homepage of the MetaAI tool and seeing the infinite feed of what people have been asking of The Machine. The outputs are horribly banal, but the requests are a weird window into THE (NORMIE) HUMAN SOUL AND ITS DESIRES: www.meta.ai” — Matt Muir, May 6, 2025 at 8:51 AM

(via)

By its nature, generative AI produces the most likely image that meets the brief, which devolves to insipid Pictionary-style visual communication: chonky = cat, kebab = food = French chef’s hat. These graphics are iconographic pablum, the uninspired result of gee-whiz curiosity about a new “tool” (toy)(trap) in an environment that discourages personal taste and cultural literacy.

Originally, I wrote up why I find these particular graphics tacky and visually uninteresting, but realized that ultimately, what they look like doesn’t matter — it’s the beliefs beneath the appearance that matter. As corporate models are trained further, Generative AI will probably continue to get better, rendering more attractive and/or plausible outputs, but it won’t matter to me how good it gets because I reject the values it represents.

(NB: I don’t want you to feel bad about yourself if you use generative AI, because there are myriad reasons to have experimented with it, including being forced to for your employment; I want you to recognize what it symbolizes when you enthusiastically use this technology today, and make an informed choice about whether those are values you wish to signal to others.)

“What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made.” — Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Aesthetics are looks that signal values

Witching Hour by Ladytron

An aesthetic is an expression of taste for shared values, commonly communicated through a distinct style. We think of aesthetics as surface appearance only, but the formation of an aesthetic’s conventions reflects the why and the how underneath the what. Just as the medium of a thing carries a message, so does its aesthetic. Aesthetics are visually and verbally encoded value systems.

Ideology is a value system, independent of appearances. Aesthetics are the appearance of an ideology, which grow from its values. Subcultures form around ideologies, with members signaling their participation through aesthetics. “Good taste” is aesthetics that express those values.

Though it’s now often reduced to a visual style, the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s was cross-disciplinary and united instead by an ethos — namely, the nobility of craftsmanship*:

“For it is not the material, but the absence of human labor, which makes the thing worthless, and a piece of terracotta, or plaster of paris, which has been wrought by the human hand, is worth all the stone and Carrara cut by machinery.”

— John Ruskin, The Lamp of Truth from The Seven Lamps of Architecture

According to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, what is made should signal how it is made — the aesthetic’s value system weights how something is made to be as important, if not more, as what is made. Surface appearance is borne of the decisions this taste for craft produces.

*(People might instead think of this William Morris quote as the quintessential perspective of Arts and Crafts — “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” — and I suspect there’s a reason we’ve been taught to recall a philosophy centered on material possession instead of labor.) Kelmscott Press printing of The Story of the Glittering Plain or the Land of Living Men, from 1894

Looking at a Kelmscott Press book (William Morris’ printing company) reveals the printer’s respect for handicraft: they designed custom drop letters and frames, included original illustrations by fine artists like Edward Burne-Jones, used original type modeled after typefaces used by printers like Aldus Manutius in the early days of the printing press, printed with a richer black ink than was standard at the time, and employed a heavy hand in letterpress printing so the design and type would be impressed into the page. Thoughtful, intentional ornamentation is embraced. The artifact itself is a thing to be appreciated as much as its contents; these are books that honor the integrity of all creative workers involved in their production.

Emily Amick applies this analytical lens to reveal the tradwife aesthetic’s underlying values:

Prairie-core. Domestic bliss. Big sleeves. Bigger sourdough starters. And beneath it all, the subtle (or not-so-subtle) message: a woman’s place is in the kitchen. But not because she wants to be there, because that’s where God or her husband or some TikTok algorithm put her.

The tradwife aesthetic promises comfort, but it delivers control.

It’s softness as a strategy. It’s anti-feminism with a floral filter. It’s nostalgia for a time when women were property, romanticized by influencers who want brand deals from butter. […] The tradwife says: give up your autonomy and someone else will take care of everything.

We adopt aesthetics based on aspirational values

Jessica Cullen writes that (emphasis mine): “Aesthetics aren’t always about who we currently are but rather who we want to be.” People adopt an aesthetic to say something about themselves to others. We intentionally adopt a particular subculture’s aesthetics to convey our belonging and raise our status within the subculture. As Alec Leach puts it, “a lot of the modern taste economy is actually the status economy.”

Sometimes, we perceive only the surface level of an aesthetic, its appearance without the values — as Amick notes, the tradwife aesthetic “looks so damn pretty and nourishing. And we are tired.” — but whenever we adopt an aesthetic, we endorse (intentionally or not) the underlying values it represents. Amick continues dissecting the tradwife aesthetic and how it serves as conservative propaganda:

What looks like innocent lifestyle content is actually part of an organized political movement designed to make patriarchy look cozy and appealing. Because politics is downstream from culture. The vibes that influence how we act and live.

Aesthetics matter more than ever because we act in accordance with our chosen aesthetics. As we get more and more of our “cultural” content on corporate silos, politics and purchases have subsumed a lot of cultural tastemaking. In this TikTok, Jamelle Bouie describes how politicians use aesthetic signaling to appeal to voters. Richard Sennett identifies that politicians come to embody “intentions, desires, values, beliefs, tastes – an emphasis which has again the effect of divorcing power from responsibility.”

Anu Atluru argues that “Aesthetics are the modern units of cultural currency—stores of value and instruments of power, capable of appreciating and being monetized at scale. Owning an aesthetic is owning influence.” (emphasis mine)

Interrogating the Business Borg aesthetic

Glass Lux by Glass Lux

The Arts and Craft movement’s respect for labor inspired stylistic choices that highlighted craftwork as well as the decisions in what goods to produce and how. So how does the Business Borg aesthetic reveal its values?

To define the Business Borg aesthetic, I’m looking at:

• the values I see expressed through generative media,
• the actions of the corporations behind generative AI,
• who buys into generative AI, and
• what else they like that reflects the same underlying values.

What genAI is better at than a human artist is being cheap and instant.

The Business Borg aesthetic uses technology to signal wealth and power. Generative AI is not the only visual expression of the Business Borg aesthetic, just its most recognizable. The aesthetic is also signified visually by CGI-heavy blockbuster franchises, NFT art, and the Cybertruck; and in text by LinkedIn corporate thirst traps, X braggadocio, SEO word vomit, and generated “answers” to search results.

As political bedpartners, there is overlap between the Business Borg aesthetic and the MAGA aesthetic, but they’re distinct viewpoints. Both share dominance as a core value, decry empathy, center patriarchy, and admire performance — but MAGA also signals Judeo-Christian morality, traditional beauty standards / traditional gender roles, hyper masculinity / violence, and nationalism. MAGA borrows aesthetics from golden pasts, like Neo-Classical architecture, tradwives, and, as Kate Wagner brands it, Regional Car Dealership Rococo; Business Borg prefer the more modern tones of cyberpunk, solarpunk, and minimalism. Business Borg are regulatory libertarians who envision themselves as the rightful leaders of society, Kings of techno-city-states; MAGA are Christian nationalists who want to use the power of the state to impose their beliefs on others.

Elon is a Business Borg at heart but wielded a chainsaw to appeal to the more violent MAGA aesthetic. Zuckerberg is a Business Borg but got a MAGA makeover with masculine stubble and bling.

Why am I naming this after the Borg? Like Star Trek’s Borg, this is an aesthetic rooted in extractive consumption, assimilationist dominance, neo-colonial expansionism, self-righteous conviction, reductionist thinking, and proclamations of inevitability. It idolizes technology, often inspired by older science-fiction, and draws on cyberpunk aesthetics. The Silicon Valley Collective values groupthink and believes themselves superior to “the other.”

Who embraces this aesthetic

Not all users of Generative AI embrace the Business Borg aesthetic. I think a lot of people are experimenting with generative AI out of neophilic curiosity, productivity imperatives, nihilistic determinism, and corporate fiat. Aspiring billionaires adopt the Business Borg aesthetic to signal their belonging in the cohort of the techno-rich.

GenAI evangelists seem to be the same type of person who was into passive income and supplements fifteen years ago, then Soylent and SEO ten years ago, then NFTs and macro diets five years ago, now genAI and X blue checks.

The Business Borg aesthetic combines tech-centered neophilia, a hustle mindset, an obsession with optimization, evangelical fervor, and fake-it-till-you-make-it showmanship.

The Elon fanclub are Business Borg. Ed Zitron’s Business Idiot shares a lot of characteristics with Business Borg (and may even be the same group, but I think feels a little different?).

The subculture emphasizes high profile demonstrations of “winning“ — using a $10k NFT as their X profile pic, bragging about SEO heists ripping off a competitor, generosity stunts a la Mr Beast, rubbing it in Miyazaki’s face that there will be thousands of shitty knockoffs vaguely reminiscent of his work across the web.

Business Borg signal their busyness — and importance — by broadcasting how little they sleep, how much they work, and how little they read. The only fiction they like is (old) sci-fi because they read it as non-fiction, not fiction — a source of “inspiration” stripped of context and commentary. Using GenAI signals their adoption of cutting edge technology, the synthetic smoothness emphasizing its nonhuman origin. They care a lot about IQ, a supposedly impartial measure of intelligence that rewards their backgrounds and thinking styles, and idolize “genius.” They’re not actually neurodivergent, but play on stereotypes of autistic savants to cover for their pathological greed and lack of empathy.

Their visual and linguistic taste is mid because taste is not valued in the Business Borg aesthetic. In fact, there’s a certain pride in prompting things without having any skill, an almost gleeful snub to the perceived cultural gatekeepers — artists and writers and other creative workers — whose opinions the Business Borg disrespect because they believe that authority derives from money, not knowledge. They believe artists have wasted their time learning skills and developing taste. Academics have wasted their time studying things when information is just a click away. Business Borg don’t care about anything besides making money, and don’t care much how they spend it because the point is to have it, and show off that they have it.

Into The Water by Ritual Howls

GenAI True Believers often resemble the CEOs at the head of tech companies: wealthy, male, and white. These are also the people who are least at threat from the widespread use of generative AI, which reinforces racial and gender stereotypes and purports neutrality while serving up right-wing biases and corporate and foreign propaganda. Audrey Watters points out:

“Computing (in general and ed-tech specifically) has long been the bastion of white male privilege; and while there had been efforts to change that – in pipelines and on panels and whatnot – AI is clearly a re-entrenchment of that power, explicitly so with the Trump Administration’s dismantling of civil rights protections, echoed by the tech industry’s dismantling of its own DEI initiatives.”

Anil Dash describes “AI-first” as this year’s “Return to Office.” Managers didn’t care about in-office culture until it was made clear that workers could carry on just fine without them; managers care about AI only insomuch as it permits controlling — and firing — workers.

What the Business Borg aesthetic represents is more important than its appearance; it represents the dominance of ordinal thinking and the ability of moneyed power to do as it wishes without regard to law or morality — in short, the hierarchical worldview that some people are better than others and that their preferences trump their lesser’s needs.

“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” — the Borg

Values driving the Business Borg aesthetic

Teri Kanefield breaks down Leor Zmigrod’s book on ideology, explaining that “All ideologies seek a utopia.” The Business Borg utopia puts billionaires and their ilk high atop society, in control via the technology they own.

Core values I see uniting the Business Borg aesthetic are:

1. only the output matters
2. efficiency is king
3. quantity over quality
4. appearance trumps reality
5. “progress” cannot be stopped

Value: Only the output matters

Generative AI is being marketed to businesses as a low-cost replacement for workers that cuts steps — and collaboration — out of the process. This is a box-checking culture; all that matters is that an email was sent, a presentation was created, the newspaper had a summer reading insert, no matter the books on it were imaginary.

Foundational beliefs

• process does not add value and wastes time
• the world is reducible to data, and every question has one objectively correct answer
• communication and collaboration are a waste of time (“email jobs”)
• experience is irrelevant

Outcome: Tech reduces the complex to input and output

In contrast with the Arts and Crafts movement, the Business Borg aesthetic actively conceals human labor and venerates the wisdom of the machine. Generative text and graphics simulate a performance of human-less — cost-less — automation. Generative answers encourage a reliance on the machine to synthesize on one’s behalf — and it doesn’t matter to search engines that the “answers” their AI has provided cite sources incorrectly.

Humans are perceived as sources of inefficiency under the Business Borg ideology, because they must be compensated in accordance with their skills and how much time they spend working. Generating material is rooted in devaluing both skill and process. The invented summer reading list was the result of forcing a single contractor to prepare an impossible quantity of work; generating content was the only way for the poor bloke to produce the content on budget. No one reviewed it, because Business Borg only care that the product exists.

Ed Zitron describes the evolution of the Business Idiot, personified by middle managers who are completely dissociated from the product they’re selling and explicitly do not do work (emphasis mine):

[Business Idiots] see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they’ve read rather than the content of said books, about how many hours they work (even though they never, ever work that many), about high level they are in a video game they clearly don’t play, about the money they’ve raised and the scale they’ve raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success.

These people don’t want to automate work, they want to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening, because experiencing — living! — is beneath them, or at least your lives and your wants and your joy are.

Value: Efficiency is king

Generative AI produces endless content for low cost. Corporations are using Generative AI as an excuse to lay off workers and intensify the jobs of those remaining.

Ready Aim Fire (Owl Vision Remix) [Single] by Blue Stahli

Foundational beliefs

• the more mechanized a process is, the more efficient it becomes because humans are naturally inefficient

Outcome: GenAI performs “efficiency”

Generative AI need not actually reduce work or cost to represent efficiency when mechanization is always favored over people. The Business Borg aesthetic perceives automation as efficient — hence situations where workers are paid to simulate chatbots simulating human agents on customer service platforms, Microsoft devs handhold Copilot, and GM’s Cruise “autonomous” taxis needed remote human intervention every 4-5 miles!!!

Efficiency is a code word for shareholders, just like “cost-cutting,” who know that these phrases mean putting the boot on workers’ necks for short-term profits. This efficiency aesthetic is used to justify outrageously profitable companies continuing to slash workers *cough Microsoft* It plays out as Hollywood demolishing the screenwriter profession to save a buck on writing rooms and self-cannibalizing the development of future acting talent by forcing extras to be body scanned so they can be reproduced by AI.

Jeremy comments on the use of genAI in coding, noting that it’s justified by claims like “working code wins” — as in, what it looks like under the hood and how it’s constructed don’t matter. I’m not a coder, but I’ve seen enough HTML produced by PageMaker and other CMSs to be skeptical of the quality of any generated code — is genAI producing the coding equivalent of tables for web layout? 🤔 The Business Borg aesthetic accepts mediocrity without understanding; easy and fast is always best. Good enough is always good enough.

Value: Quantity over quality

Generative AI is billed as a good-enough tool that will speed up production. Cory Doctorow writes of the managerial push to automate with AI:

The point of using automation to weaken labor isn’t just cheaper products – it’s cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers’ professionalism and pride in their jobs.

Enormous by LLgL TNDR

Foundational beliefs

• profit today trumps tomorrow’s concerns — someone else will have to fix ‘that problem’
• money is authority — individual rankings can be quantified by wealth
• anything that cannot be quantified is not important

Outcome: Algorithms produce culture-like media, not culture

GenAI and corporate web algorithms are intended to absorb attention like black absorbs light; they are designed to maximize engagement at minimal cost. Spotify benefits from degradation of culture. Netflix is a chum machine, built to spew content that people watch in the background. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick laments that “So much of culture is edgeless and soft, intended for us to astroglide through it without any friction or doubt as we half-watch in 1.5x speed, to consume as if we really are incapable of critical thoughts, all to appeal to everyone and no one at the same time.” Internet Age capitalism produces entertainment that is culture-like, writes Nicholas Carr:

“What’s really being tested here is human taste. Will we accept a simulacrum of a work of art or craft as a satisfactory substitute for the real thing?”

So long as people accept cheap low-quality cultural media, businesses have little incentive to pay for higher quality. Generative AI becomes an attack on culture because it drowns out human-made art and writing so it’s impossible to find amidst the Great Social Media Garbage Patch. Aidan Walker describes all this as ‘slop capitalism‘: “an economic and cultural system in which the primary product is slop and the primary activity is the destruction of value rather than its creation.”

Value: Appearances trump reality

Generative AI produces plausible graphics that we interpret as real-adjacent and plausible combinations of text that we interpret as communication.

Foundational Beliefs

• performance of dominance builds and reinforces real power

Outcome: GenAI supersedes reality with performance and symbolism

The Business Borg aesthetic celebrates audacious performances of infinite wealth and indefinite power: adopters and evangelists for genAI also embrace filling streets with “self-driving” cars over the protests of residents and first responders, raining space debris onto inhabited areas from slapdash rocket ships, paying a fortune for a banana taped to a wall as conceptual art and eating it, paying women to have their IVF babies so they can seem fertile without fucking. While the culture at large has shifted towards inconspicuous consumption, luxury that requires knowledge to see, Business Borg signal their wealth blatantly.

A repeating theme of the Business Borg aesthetic is replacing reality with life-like hyperreality: the simulation of conversation and connection with chatbots, the renderings of war and disaster mimicking photojournalism to push political narratives, the “resurrected” extinct species, the green screen action sequences that don’t track. A photograph of reality may seem less real than a generated image if it does not abide by our expectations. (See also: reading “human vibes” into LLM responses)

Look at the snoozefest kayfabe of modern MMA: it’s as much about the smack talk at weigh-ins as the fights themselves, athletes winning by points for “controlling the octagon” instead of fighting to win by KO or submission — look no further than that embarrassment of a so-called fight between Mike Tyson and the YouTuber, who danced around an old man till he got tired so he could win by decision and say he’d beaten a legend 😴

Effective altruism performs charity that can never be disproven, despite its claims of data-driven decisions, because it pretends to think at such long-term scales that known, existing suffering pales in comparison to the imagined future suffering they claim to be protecting against. It cosplays rationalism. Wannabe Foundation shit.

The Business Borg aesthetic is expressed as cheap cruft disguised as something of substance: words that look like writing, but are not; images that look like art, but are not; fights that look fighting, but are not.

As Ed Zitron sums up, it’s a “symbolic economy:”

The sweeping changes we’ve seen, both in our economy and in our society, has led to an unprecedented, gilded age of bullshit where nothing matters, and things — things of actual substance — matter nothing.

Traditionally, we have been wary of those wearing a mask, explains Dan Fox in Pretentiousness, suspecting they are something other than what they present themselves as — but authenticity has faded as a cultural value. Business Borg embrace performance as more true than reality; what someone wants to be is more important than what they are now. What a technology could be is more important than what it currently is.

Value: “Progress” cannot be stopped

The rapacious assimilation of copyrighted material to train models, the dismissal of AI’s environmental cost and induced demand, and PR campaign reorienting the conversation around AI to its possible future harms as a distraction from the harms happening today all build from the same foundation: theoretically, scaling towards the pursuit of AGI — but more likely securing the funding to inextricably embed AI into our society and infrastructure.

Foundational Beliefs

• technology always represents progress
• the ends justify the means

Outcome: GenAI is full speed ahead, no matter what

Advocates of generative AI are pursuing a brute force, fear-mongering approach to deregulation and preventing regulation. They are defying legality in obtaining training data while declaring the technology a fait accompli: resistance is futile. Their web crawlers ignore robots.txt, breaking the common courtesy of the web. They dismiss complaints about bias, claiming that they can fix that in the future. (And what incentive will there be to ever go back and fix it, once we can’t avoid using it?) They’re hoping enough of us will get hooked on it — and government and corporations will integrate enough of it too deeply in their processes — to allow their legally-suspect models to be shut down.

Ryan Broderick observes:

What the AI arms race has actually done is codified and automated all of the failures of the previous internet era. Extremism, misinformation, harassment, non-consensual sexual material, and scams — all the content that tech companies promised to fix, but never could at scale — are now trapped in some AI’s black box of data.

AGI, which has been “three to five years away” for years, is a Bezzle. As Cory Doctorow quotes JK Gabraith, a Bezzle is “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” John Kay expands that “The joy of the bezzle is that two people – each ignorant of the other’s existence and role – can enjoy the same wealth.”

Scams and pyramid schemes are seductive to Business Borg, like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, because the only things they value are money and power, not making things that actually work (see: Cybertrucks falling apart, SpaceX rockets exploding); the trick is not to get caught. The goal is to surf the edge of profit as long as possible.

Right now the whole stock market is bloated by outrageous NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft and Meta valuations based on the potential of generative AI to create a new “essential” utility, a service that everyone will need to subscribe to, forever — and so many people have bought into the grift so hard they’ll do anything they can to make it a success, or at least rake in the cash for as long as they can. Then when the bubble pops, the corporations will get bailed out on the taxpayer dollar, while we workers resign ourselves to working until we die since we’ve privatized retirement 🙃

GenAI is being deployed to control

Artists are under attack, culturally and economically, so it is only fair that they point out the quintessential thing that artists offer that generative AI cannot: taste. Professional (and amateur) artists have devoted a great deal of time to developing their taste. The oligarchs who run Silicon Valley are steeped in their own rightness and devalue anything that isn’t their expertise; if they don’t know about it, it must not be important. To the Business Borg, taste is not an essential component of production.

Mandy Brown describes how genAI is used to undercut expertise (emphasis mine):

It’s instructive that one of the mechanisms for perpetuating this ideology are chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference. In fact, their makers seem entirely concerned with obviating that difference, with disappearing distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, without which truth becomes entirely a product of power. […] [I]f those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity.

Business Borg like generative AI because it grants them cultural power that they have not been able to dominate on their own. They lack skill, so they devalue skill. They need content, so they make an infinite content machine and conscript users as unwitting factory workers to provide free labor. The relentless promotion of GenAI is an attempt by corporations to capture cultural value by siphoning off value from human-made aesthetics. Generative AI is billionaires punching down on artists and the working class.

[…] I think Miyazaki’s style is still valuable

But it is now, in a day, valuable in a different way.

What was once valuable in the awareness of painstaking labor, beautiful stories, and coherent aesthetic across the previous two qualities. PLUS our reception to it.

Is now valuable PURELY in our reception to, and reproduction of, the aesthetic. […]

— Reggie James (@HipCityReg) March 27, 2025

Generative AI has intentionally been molded to attack artists and diminish cultural literacy. Aidan Walker argues (read this whole piece if you liked my post):

AI doesn’t have to be an antagonist to schools, work, and civil society — they’ve just designed and trained it that way… There could be guardrails in place, they could pay the producers of their training data, they could give the people a say in how the models are made and deployed — we could do a thousand things differently than the way they’re being done now.

Generative AI — both imagery and text — is inextricable from the corporate vision for its use: a world in which workers are powerless and worthless, replaced by “free” generated material. Corporate GenAI cannot be separated from the purpose for its use or the billionaires and billionaire-wannabes who shill for it. The Business Borg aesthetic imbues a sheen of venality.

Further reading:

GenAI is Our Polyester by W. David Marx

Economics & labor rights in AI skepticism by Henry from online

You don’t hate AI; You hate… : a collection by Mita Williams

Dispatch from the Trenches of the Butlerian Jihad by ADH

The other way the [Butlerian Jihad] metaphor is proving apt is the deep-seated, almost spiritual nature of anti-AI sentiment. It’s not just more Luddism. Many people — though hardly all, given the popularity of AI products — sense that there is something grotesque about these simulacra, the people who push them on us, this whole affair. That aversion to the technological profane holds even when various stated objections to AI are supposedly addressed or nitpicked to death.

See also:

We need solidarity across creative industries