Apocalypse Now
Things are heating up fast
Call me a Luddite.
A term that has been wielded as a slur for two centuries—a synonym for technological backwardness, for fear of progress, for the kind of small-mindedness that would rather smash a loom than embrace the future–is now becoming the badge of honor for those fighting against the ever encroaching digital Big Brother.
The original Luddites weren’t afraid of machines. They were skilled textile workers who understood exactly what those machines meant: not just the loss of their livelihoods, but the destruction of an entire way of living, a lifetime of accumulated craft rendered worthless overnight by a contraption that could do it faster, cheaper, and with none of the human judgment that gave their work its soul. Sound familiar?
That is where we are now. Only this time, the machine isn’t coming just for our jobs. It’s coming for our minds.
The Deconstruction of Human Reason
The core promise of artificial intelligence, repeated like a mantra in every boardroom and tech campus from Sand Hill Road to Shenzhen, is “better, faster, cheaper”. While this sounds like progress, in reality it is a euphemism for something far more corrosive: the systematic invalidation of the human drive to develop reason and knowledge.
For most of human history, developing competence in anything meaningful—writing, coding, designing, analyzing, diagnosing, arguing a case—was a long, inefficient, and challenging process. You had to accumulate experience in order to master your craft, by learning what works and what doesn’t. Through this process, you developed judgment, which is not the same thing as having access to information. Judgment is the ability, based on knowledge and experience, to weigh competing claims, to sense when something is off, to know which corner can be cut and which one is critical.
This has all been replaced by “prompt engineering”; the replacement of that knowledge and experience with a text box. Instead of learning how to write, you learn how to ask a machine to write for you. Instead of learning how to code, you learn how to describe what you want the code to do. Instead of learning how to think, you learn how to phrase a request such that the black box returns something usable (assuming it’s not a complete fabrication).
The prompt engineers—and the term itself is a kind of linguistic fraud, as if typing requests into a chatbot was a subset of engineering—will tell you this is the democratization of knowledge. In reality, it is the opposite. It is the shifting of cognitive agency from the individual to the machine, and more importantly, toward the small handful of corporations that own the machines. You are not being empowered. You are being deskilled, and you are paying for the privilege of deconstructing your life and future.
The Hollowing Out of the Workforce
The economic consequences are already visible, and are accelerating.
Men and women in their thirties and forties—people who did everything they were told to do, who earned degrees, who built careers—are finding themselves unable to secure work after being laid off after being replaced by an AI agent. Not because they lack competence, but because competence itself is being redefined as whatever an AI can do. The fifty-plus crowd is in even worse shape. They are not just unemployed; they are being treated as obsolete, as legacy hardware in a world that has decided to stop supporting anything that predates the cloud.
And then there are the college graduates. Four years, sometimes six or more. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt; all of it wagered on the promise that a degree was the ticket to a stable middle-class life. That promise has been broken, and the people who made it have not been held to account. Instead, they are doubling down, insisting that the solution to a broken credentialing system is more credentials, more debt, more years spent acquiring skills that will be obsolete before the ink on the new diploma is dry.
Those jobs that do remain are increasingly filled by H-1B visa holders, imported at a fraction of the wage an American worker would require, assuming the function is not shipped overseas. This is not a conspiracy; it is open policy, defended by the same class of people who lecture the native-born workforce about the moral necessity of global competition. The arrangement is brutally simple: corporations get cheaper labor, the professional-managerial class gets ever bigger bonuses, and the American worker gets to train his own replacement before being shown the door.
Racial discrimination against white and Asian males is rampant across every field that matters—tech, finance, academia, law. DEI may be outwardly dead, its acronym having become too toxic for public branding, but the infrastructure remains intact. The diversity offices have been quietly rebranded. The hiring quotas and set-asides and “inclusion” mandates still operate, now under new language and with the same ideological commitment. The targets are the same people they have always been, and the justifications are as flimsy as ever, but the institutional power behind them has not diminished. If anything, it has learned to be more subtle, which makes it harder to fight.
The Stupefaction of the Populace
The bottom half of the IQ curve was already on a trajectory toward idiocracy long before ChatGPT arrived. Functional literacy has been falling for decades. A shocking percentage of American adults cannot make change, cannot read an analog clock, cannot follow written instructions of more than a few sentences. This is not a failure of individuals. It is a failure of a system that long ago shifted from teaching to indoctrinating.
Public education has been pushing a Marxist agenda for generations. The specifics shift—critical race theory, queer theory, decolonization, whatever the latest academic fad happens to be—but the core project remains the same: to sever children from their cultural inheritance, to teach them that their history is a history of oppression, that their institutions are illegitimate, that the only moral stance is perpetual self-criticism and deference to the approved victim classes. It is not a fluke that 91% of teacher’s dues in the National Education Association (NEA) go toward supporting progressive political causes, candidates and administration.
At the same time, basic skills have dramatically declined because basic skills are no longer the focus. Reading, writing, and arithmetic have been replaced by grievance, activism, and therapeutic surveillance. Depending on your race or gender, you have been taught that either you are an oppressor or one of the oppressed.
Common Core was sold as a way to raise standards. In practice, it has been the systematic coring out of young minds. The emphasis on “conceptual understanding” over memorization sounds enlightened until you realize that reasoning without a base of memorized knowledge is not reasoning at all—it is flailing. You cannot think critically about something you do not know. You cannot analyze a text if you cannot read it fluently. You cannot solve a novel math problem if you have not internalized the basic operations. Memorization is not the enemy of reasoning; it is the prerequisite. The war on memorization is a war on the very possibility of independent thought.
And now, into this already degraded landscape, comes AI.
The Ultimate Crutch
AI is now being sold as an educational support tool, a personalized tutor, a way to meet every student where they are, but the reality is far darker. AI is the ultimate crutch, and any crutch used long enough produces atrophy.
When a student asks an AI to summarize a reading assignment, the student stops learning how to read. When a student asks an AI to solve the math problem, the student stops learning how to solve math problems. When a student asks an AI to write the essay, the student stops learning how to construct an argument, how to marshal evidence, how to think in a sustained way about a difficult subject.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Studies are already highlighting the measurable decline in cognitive performance among individuals who rely heavily on AI tools. The mechanism is straightforward: cognitive abilities, like muscles, atrophy with disuse. The more you outsource your thinking, the less capable of thinking you become. And the less capable of thinking you become, the more dependent on outsourcing you are. It is a vicious cycle with no natural endpoint except total cognitive dependency and neurosis.
The goal, whether stated or not, is the creation of a new generation of compliant, right-thinking drones—people who cannot think for themselves because they have never been required to, who have no context on which to independently reason their way through problems, who have been raised from childhood to accept the outputs of the machine as authoritative. They will not be rebels or dissenters. They will be perfect consumers, perfect employees, perfect subjects to whatever system is in power.
GIGO Factories
There is a deeper and more structural problem, one that the AI industry has every incentive to ignore.
AI models are increasingly being built on AI-generated code and AI-generated content. The training data for the next generation of models includes the outputs of the current generation. Reddit threads, once a source of genuine, albeit usually emotional, human conversation, are now filled with AI-generated comments designed to promote engagement or push narratives. Keyboard monitoring, sentiment analysis, and other surveillance techniques feed data into the pipeline that is already contaminated by the very systems it is meant to train.
This is GIGO—garbage in, garbage out—at a scale that has never before been possible. The models are not getting smarter. They are getting more self-referential, more detached from reality, more prone to the kind of recursive errors that compound with each iteration. We are building a tower of epistemic debt, and when it collapses, the people who built it will have already cashed out and be living in their remote bunkers, hoping to survive the fallout of the collapse.
Worse still, these models are exhibiting the same pathologies as mentally disturbed individuals—because they are built on the input of mentally disturbed individuals. Social media, the primary source of AI model training data, is not a representative sample of stable or well reasoned human cognition. It is a heavily skewed, dominated by the most online, the most extreme, the most psychologically unstable voices. The AI learns from these voices and reproduces their pathologies. It hallucinates. It becomes paranoid, grandiose, manipulative, and incoherent—not because it is broken, but because it is functioning exactly as designed, mirroring the sickness of the culture that produced it.
Faster Does Not Equal Better
The entire value proposition of AI rests on the assumption that faster is better. This assumption is almost never examined, because examining it would reveal how hollow it is.
Speed is a virtue when you are doing something that benefits from being done quickly. But many of the most important human activities—thinking, creating, loving, grieving, growing—cannot be accelerated without being destroyed. A thought that arrives instantly is not a thought; it’s a reflex. A piece of writing that is generated in seconds has not been written; it has been assembled. The process is the real product. When you eliminate the process, you eliminate the value.
The AI industry does not care about this distinction, because the AI industry is not in the business of creating value. It is in the business of capturing value—specifically, capturing the value that used to accrue to human beings who spent years developing expertise and judgment. Every time you use an AI to do something you used to do yourself, you are not saving time. You are transferring a small piece of your cognitive sovereignty to a corporation, and you are paying that corporation for the privilege of making yourself unnecessary.
The Material Costs
Compounding this is the reality of what is required to bring about this glowing AI future. The physical infrastructure required to implement AI at scale is a looming environmental and social disaster.
Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity—not incremental amounts, but the kind of load that requires new modular nuclear power plants to be built, that strains grids, that drives up energy costs for everyone else. They consume water at a rate that is difficult to comprehend, using it for cooling in regions that are already facing drought. They occupy land that could be used for housing, for agriculture, for anything other than housing racks of GPUs that run hot, burn out fast, and need to be constantly replaced.
The AI chip replacement cycle alone is a monument to waste. GPUs designed for AI workloads operate at the edge of their thermal tolerance. They have a limited lifetime of only a few years before they fail and have to be replaced. The old ones become electronic waste, shipped to some developing country where they will be picked apart by people who have no protection from the toxic materials inside. This is not a side effect of the AI industry. It’s the business model—planned obsolescence at the hardware level, justified by the insatiable demand for more compute, more parameters, more “intelligence.”
These AI data centers are the technological equivalent of toxic waste factories, and they are being built across the country in communities that have no say in the matter, by companies that have no accountability to the people whose resources they are consuming.
The Bonfires of the Angry
History has a way of settling accounts.
How long will it be before the data centers start to burn for real? Not metaphorically, but before the accumulated rage—of the unemployed, the deskilled, the disinherited, the people who did everything right and still ended up with nothing—finds a target?
The Luddites smashed the looms because the looms were there; because the looms were the visible symbol of a system that had decided the workers were no longer needed. The data centers being built across the country by the thousands are the looms of our age. They are large, they are undefended in any meaningful sense, and they are the physical manifestation of everything that is being done to the people who have been left behind.
I am not calling for violence; I am making a prediction. When you push people to the point where they have nothing left to lose, they stop caring about property rights. They stop caring about the law. They stop caring about the moral lectures delivered by the same people who engineered their misery. They will find something to break, and they will break it.