Factual Dispatch: Neo-Nero Fiddles While AI Burns

Deepseek shaved a cool $1.2T off the stock market on Monday, the final consequence of zero creativity and imagination from American tech companies for over a decade. NVIDIA lost ~$600 Billion in value, the largest loss of stock market value in the history of financial markets. To explain this lack of imagination, a story about Classic Facebook:

I had a paid writing gig as a columnist for a blog named Burners.me for a couple of years. The owner reposted an article about Nitrous Oxide and its use as recreational substance in Victorian England. This resulted in about 250 comments on his repost, as everyone even tangentially connected to Burning Man has an opinion about Laughing Gas.

He hired me to write about drug safety, the history of outlaw culture, and to interview Burners in NYC. It was good work, and I took it seriously. A few weeks after Trump was elected, my boss pinged me on FB, thanked me for my work, and said that he wouldn’t be paying for my writing in 2017.

I asked if the quality had dropped, or if our politics had made it difficult to work together. He said it was nothing like that, I just wasn’t needed anymore. He could generate much more engagement by posting one rage-bait comment or fake news link about Hilary Clinton on his brand page, than I could with my most finely crafted research. Which dripped down to more blog readers and email sign ups. It was just business, nothing personal.

Removal of fact-checking and reduction in content moderation can be viewed through the same lens. Sure it’s politically expedient because conservatives think Meta is biased against them, but it was also expensive and wasn’t trusted by anyone. Killing it is a short-term tactic designed to juice revenue. How does it work? if GOP groyper, crypto and libertarian people think Meta is biased against them, they use FB & IG less. If Zuck ruffles his hair, gets a gold chain, and announces free speech and a Musk-like feature, it’s framed as a win by the FOX-GOP-Alt Right Extended Cinematic universe. I’m expecting him to pop a Zyn and talk to Louis CK any day now. Which causes more interaction on the platform, making the ads more effective to conservative brands trying to sell, recruit, or straight up scam those same conservatives. If you don’t believe me, check out Zuck’s new profile pic on Threads:

Most importantly, it was an obvious choice for a mid-level Meta executive tasked with “growth at any cost.” Instagram now features a new video feed that shows you content people you follow liked/bookmarked. Back on Facebook Prime, your feed is mostly suggested/sponsored content, but you might have already started seeing “your friend commented on this” type posts again. Which is the same “growth hack” that happened after Trump won in 2016. The topics & phrases that are allowed now will ensure right-of-center voices can be malicious, offensive, and controversial as hell. Inviting 2,000 comments of support and anger. All of which both helps people in power and hurts people who don’t have power/aren’t lobbying targets.

Will Community Notes be present in ads? Nope, so if you want to lie, just pay to run the lie as an ad. Stealing features from Snapchat for Instagram, giving brands that spend a ton on ads wider latitude in keeping their content up, disallowing links to Pixelfed, an IG competitor, allowing ads for drugs, stolen credit cards, and counterfeit currency, all of these tactics were bog-standard “revenue at the expense of experience” playbook. But bullying your competition, copying their homework, letting the hall monitor accept bribes, and making money by having no standards isn’t business genius, it’s cafeteria-level manipulation by the likes of middle school kids.

When we remember this occasionally, Zuck has “apologized” repeatedly, for things like the pivot to video to Cambridge Analytica, to the Rohingya genocide (Editor’s Note: The recent changes to Meta’s moderation systems are reminiscent of what they did in Myanmar). But he’s unapologetic now. Is it just a mid-life crisis? Is Zuck just “vice signaling?” to draw in more conservative brands and users? He could be completely authentic in his transformation from creepy tech CEO to almost-divorced-MMA/GOP Dad. It might not matter.

Deepseek is coming not just for Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google, but NVIDIA, Apple, and every other tech company powering the last few years of gains in your 401k. Instead of posting ML educational content to FB or IG, they go to TikTok, or even posting it to PornHub, as their content isn’t throttled and the rev share worth it. If you ask questions to Deepseek about Tiananmen square, you get about as much uncensored info about it as you do if you search for it on TikTok. So it’s innovative but expected at the same time.

We could have innovated ourselves away from this trap. American tech companies could have funded basic research, truly innovative products, and prioritized user experience. Instead, they bought the competition. They could have studied TikTok and Deepseek, or even collaborated with the firms to understand their secret sauce. Instead of reflecting on mistakes made, it’s likely that complex cyberattacks were launched against Deepseek from domestic sources. How did Deepseek respond in the last 24hrs? They launched another open-source model that’s as good or better than the domestic equivalent, this time for images.

How did Democrats respond? By saying we should shovel billions more into the companies to “keep from falling behind.” Doubling down in the face of complete failure, how like Senator Schumer. Even though for all intents and purposes, the AI arms race swung wildly out of our favor because of our actions:

The most obvious worry was that the CHIPS Act would encourage China to build its own chips. People in the White House indeed foresaw that, and China has in fact already invested many billions towards that end….Nonetheless, the Biden administration, perhaps caught in the hype, seemed willing to gamble an awful lot for a short-term advantage, even if it meant straining relations with Beijing or spurring China’s own future innovation in silicon manufacturing. (Trump’s boosting of Stargate seemingly fits with the same magical thinking in LLMs, premised on the same hope of achieving a supremacy that may never come).

Instead, as we have seen in recent weeks, Silicon Valley’s initial advantage in LLMs evaporated quickly, despite export controls…But not (as some of us thought) because China ramped up H100 equivalents quickly (a big multi-year job, far from complete), but because they figured out how to work around them.

We accidentally upped their technical game. In the FT, Angela Zhang argued, "China’s achievements in efficiency are no accident. They directly respond to the escalating export restrictions imposed by the US and its allies. By limiting China’s access to advanced AI chips, the US has inadvertently spurred its innovation.”
~Gary Marcus

Maybe we should stop calling companies innovative, if they haven’t had true innovation in over a decade. Maybe we shouldn't give them hundreds of billions more to “protect” us from Chinese innovation. Maybe we should expect more than predation & enshittification from load-bearing companies in our economy. But I don’t know, and neither do most people posting think-pieces confidently asserting What Will Be. I’m not telling you to boycott Meta applications, I’m not telling you to write to your Congressperson to haul Zuck or Altman into a hearing. I think we’ve spent the last 20 years telling each other what to do on Facebook. I don’t think anyone could say that’s turned out fine and dandy.

In regards to Facebook, Tiktok, and censorship, maybe we should stop telling people we’ve never met, what they should do, about problems we don’t have, or situations we don’t face. Maybe we should stop using technology to fake expertise, and take some time getting good at things the old fashioned way, by doing them. Maybe that includes listening to human beings in analog spaces as well.

Be Excellent To Each Other,
tnh