It’s also very telling that Palantir’s marketing strategy is now leaning into a kind of patriotic workerism. Big Tech as the working man’s best friend.

They realise they need *some* sort of popular constituency, even if most people hate their guts. Trying to inherit the old hard hat conservatives.

The Forrest Gump of intellectuals.

There is, however, something more to be said about the power of capital to manifest dreams. Regardless of when the coming crash arrives, and how deep it goes, the thaumaturgic powers of capital will push this dream to its limits, whatever the cost.

So, why does capitalism always need a Next Big Thing? Ask your friendly neighbourhood Marxist about the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

It really was the exact same people, in many cases, who went from hawking crypto and/or NFTs to promising undeliverable AI products. They just rebranded their websites once OpenAI made chatbots the new hotness.

www.wheresyoured.at/rabbit-holed/

Crypto is an interesting technology without any sufficient use case. Gen AI is a useful technology without any sufficient business model.

The major technical and economic underpinnings of both are the same: mindbogglingly wasteful computation.

Sure, DM me.

We sure are.

It’s like a magic eye poster that becomes more cursed the longer you look at it.

Academic publishing timelines being what they are, this chapter is not out yet. When it is, it'll be in an edited volume available for the low, low price of £143.00 (RRP).

www.tgjonesonline.co.uk/Product/Beri...

So, if you want to read an unofficial version, let me know.

However, I can readily believe that it will henceforth need to be a rather more underground and circumspect intellectual culture, much less at home within a professional volume on "Knowledge and Expertise."

Does critique, of the kind I defend in this chapter, have a future within whatever will be left of the university sector in years to come?

In some form, probably. The empire in which we live is decentred and contradictory.

Today, I am much more inclined to draw out the commonalities between the everyday positivity of the Capitol FM radio DJ and the professionalised post-critique of Latour, Felski, and the rest.

Oh for the days when PhD programmes could quietly plug away at convincing "good American kids [...] that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth," as Latour wrote more than two decades ago...