omcgrann

You're right. I pasted in the wrong link from my research file. That's my bad. The correct link is this: https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-creat...

I don't think the dead internet theory is something that is particularly novel at this point.

"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."

Appreciate the give and take here.

This is right, and it's more or less what I was arguing in the piece. Google built the transformer. That's not in dispute. The point is that they built it inside a research ecosystem that traces back through decades of publicly funded work--DARPA, NSF, university labs, the whole pipeline from perceptrons through backpropagation through the GPU computing that made large-scale training feasible.

Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.

Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.

Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?

A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.

This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.

Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.