Many years ago, in a sea far far away, there was born a little lobster named Clawd. Normally, it would have taken years for such a lobster to be born, but such are the times that this one was born in a mere few weeks, out of the mind of one creator.

And the Lord alone knows what he was good for but the whole world, human and lobster alike, decided to give the lobster godlike powers and elevate it to the level of AGI, which of course is the highest title a lobster can aspire to.

Now everyone who has actually interacted with this lobster knows that it's cool - but there's no way that it's doing all these things that everyone is claiming. And what claims they were! Audacious, fantastic, criminally fraudulent in some cases.

In this whole scheme, Clawd himself couldn't say much, being largely mute. But it was still curious to see the whole reaction - this was the most viral piece of software in the world and it was curious to see the reaction of the world.

And it wasn't until a friend on twitter said it that it struck me - this is the cryptoification of AI. The grifters are heeeeere. And now it's just going to be AI slop and AI augmented grifting from here on and whenever a child refuses to sleep, parents will say go to sleep child else you will never escape the permanent underclass - the ultimate bogeyman - not a monster but a law of nature. The ever present fear of not being able to afford to live.

This is the fear now, everywhere. The AI people are high on their own supply, everyone else is starting to feel like teetotallers at a college reunion - why is everyone starting to behave so strangely?

I thought Tenet was a terrible movie (I had to watch it thrice to convince myself of this, twice forwards and once backwards just to be sure) but there's one scene from it that stays - its the scene where the villain has the flashback to finding the entity in the radiation, remember?

The AI does. Here it is

—

In Tenet, the villain Andrei Sator discovers a dead drop in an abandoned Soviet nuclear test site (Stalsk-12) that contains:

  • Inverted gold and instructions from the future
  • Communication with a mysterious organization from the future (led by people trying to reverse entropy and destroy the past)

The radiation from the nuclear disaster makes the site inaccessible to most people, creating a perfect hidden location for these drops. Sator, having grown up near the site and survived radiation exposure, can access it where others cannot.

This is how he establishes contact with the future antagonists and begins receiving inverted materials, technology, and the Algorithm (the doomsday device). The future organization uses him as their agent in the past to assemble the Algorithm that would invert the entropy of the world.

The scene isn't shown directly in the film but is explained through dialogue as Sator's origin story - how a desperate young man cleaning up Chernobyl-like contamination became wealthy and powerful by serving the future's agenda.

—

The AI people (of which I am one) are all behaving like they've found a dead drop from the future. They think it makes them free, but it was Bob Dylan who knew when he sang -

You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
You may be working in a barbershop
You may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir

[Chorus]
But you’re going to have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re going to have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re going to have to serve somebody

We're all going to have to serve somebody - the world races races headlong. See the madness for acquiring compute. See the monies flowing into the AI data centers. This is now moving from surface structure to deep structure of the world. Intelligence everywhere. In the cameras, in the robot dogs, in the cars, in the doorbells, in the books, in the cribs. And we will see who our new masters are in time I guess. Old masters let me have a computer and live just above the permanent underclass as long as I was an obedient citizen.

One of the only substacks I read regularly is from Benn Stancil. He has a very deep post on some similar thoughts here - Gas Town. A beautiful post where he talks about the madnesses and what we as ordinary people might want to do about it.

I normally talk about careers on this newsletter, so this edition might feel a little off-topic but I like to think of it as more like poetry this time - doesn't make sense but triggers useful thoughts. You can take this post as a prompt to investigate some latent spaces in your mind about the new world we're building. This is also a form of career growth - aligning with whatever force is strongest.

In the end it turns out that we've been the agents all along.