Recently, Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, was randomly bringing up white genocide a whole lot. Questions asked of Grok about things like the new HBO Max rebrand produced a paragraph about how the phrase “Kill the Boer” incites racial hatred, but one must remain skeptical of both narratives, as truth is complex and sources can be biased. Although this malfunction, where Grok would report these answers regardless of the question, was the most obvious, the chatbot has also started to do other cartoonishly bad things, like ‘both-sidesing’ the number of people killed in the holocaust.
In response to this, people have begun to correctly identify that these AI models, which are run by the tech oligarchs whose midlife crises are currently destroying the United States (and maybe the planet), could be warped to serve a particular agenda. It is clear that Musk’s obsession with white genocide, which came from his father and his father before him, was specifically and crudely shoved into his AI chatbot. Because of this whole fiasco, xAI has published Grok’s system prompt on GitHub. Although this dump doesn’t show the exact bit that tells the bot to keep telling everyone about the phrase ‘Kill the Boer,’ within this code, we can see that one of the built-in prompts is “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.” In general, Grok is being programmed to be somewhat detached from reality, and even so, conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene are getting into fights with the bot for being ‘woke.”
With the new improvements in AI video, like the recent demos from Google Veo 3, the possibilities for widespread automated propaganda have freaked me out quite a bit. This seems even more likely considering the adoration that the far-right have shown towards AI, like the insane posts coming out of the White House with Trump as the Pope or whatever. Gareth Watkins wrote an especially excellent essay about this relationship between fascists and AI a few months ago, and I want to pull more on the thread he brings up about the relationship between AI and the purposeful tearing away at reality.
trump as the ultimate postmodern force
On the day of the 2024 election, I was on the phone with some friends. As we watched the numbers come in for North Carolina, there was a clear separation between Trump and Mark Robinson, the Republican running for governor. When one of my friends asked why, the answer was pretty easy: Robinson’s comments, including one where he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” were discovered on a trans porn website shortly before the election. My friend was confused; why would someone care about that kind of thing but still vote for Trump, who has had similar types of scandals? The difference is this: Trump has completely detached from reality.
I mean this in a few ways. The man seems to genuinely believe things that are obviously not true. When explaining why the regime sent a random man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a foreign gulag, they claimed it was because he was an MS-13 gang member. The evidence of this was a very clearly photoshopped image of tattoos on his knuckles. In the age of AI, I must reiterate how obviously and poorly photoshopped this image is. This is not fooling anyone attached to reality.
Trump has also detached from reality in the minds of most Americans. North Carolinians who couldn’t overlook Robinson’s transgressions could vote for Trump because everyone has already made up their minds about Trump. There is no new scandal or piece of information that is really going to move the needle very much, since everyone has already heard Trump get accused of being everything bad under the sun, even though in many cases those accusations were correct.
This has led us to a point where people are able to project whatever they want onto Trump. Love deportations and are deeply Christian? Think that manufacturing needs to come back and that all the wars need to end? Want prices to come down and abortion to be legal? Whatever you want Trump to be, he can be in your mind. He is a blank slate since everything people say about him is true if you think it’s good and false if you think it’s bad. How he has become this kind of force is quite clear. He has purposely made it impossible to pin him down. He will confidently say something, then immediately deny it. Any time he is obviously wrong, if someone points it out, he responds only by attacking the person.
Most people in America are ‘independents.’ Many people confuse this with being ‘moderates’ or ‘centrists.’ This is an incorrect understanding. Most people in America have an amalgamation of beliefs that skew in every distance in every direction, and that contradictory worldview is why they don’t neatly fit into team red or team blue. Because Trump has framed himself as a perpetual outsider, the movement that is drawn to him thinks of itself as countercultural, even though most of these people’s views are deeply regressive. This framing is in part manufactured, with a rotating, arbitrary cast cultural enemies (‘woke,’ ‘DEI,’ etc.), but is also validated by the fact that liberals keep casting him as the main/only supervillain causing all the problems, but refuse to do what that being true would necessitate. If you keep saying the man is literally Hitler, but refuse to break any norms to stop him, it just makes you look fake and fuels his persecution complex.
The reason this makes him so powerful is that counter-cultural forces are better able to metabolize contradictory beliefs, and because of the low level of political engagement in the country, that means he is attractive to enough people to gain power. This is, of course, exacerbated by the far right's dominance in the media ecosystem. Fox News has twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. Social media and online content are overwhelmingly right-wing on nearly every platform. Elon Musk literally bought Twitter so that he could turn it into a Nazi propaganda site, in the same way a gilded-age billionaire would buy a big newspaper. These people own reality, so they can shape it in their image.
the bipartisan war on reality
But Democrats are not innocent, either. The period from 2020-2024 was probably the most “there is no war in Bae Sing Sae” period I’ve ever experienced. During the pandemic, millions of people died, and the message being blasted out was that we were ‘going back to normal.’ Then, they arbitrarily deemed the pandemic over and memory-holed that it ever happened. During this short period, billionaires gained $5.5 trillion, more than they had gained in the previous 15 years combined, while most people struggled to pay for necessities like housing and healthcare. The response from the Democrats was to say that everything was fine and people complaining were being unreasonable. And don’t even get me started on Joseph Robinette Biden and his soup brains.
Even more insane, in my mind, was the insistence that the Biden regime was ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’ in Palestine. Americans watched live streams of bombs that they paid for being dropped onto tents filled with children for months, and the best the regime could come up with was that it was sad but that there was nothing that they could do, while they consistently voted to continue sending the bombs that everyone watched get dropped on the children. They insisted that the protests done by young people, which looked just like the ones against Vietnam or Iraq and were even more peaceful, were being run by a bunch of foreign terrorist organizations and not a bunch of twenty-somethings who didn’t want to contribute financially to ethnic cleansing. This obvious moral panic is more acceptable to acknowledge now that Trump is using it to disappear dissidents and crack down on institutions, but these crackdowns were being done under Biden, just with a slightly lighter hand.
Reality has been going through the shredder for years. This has always been a facet of mass media, as Herman and Chomsky explain in their propaganda model. I do, however, think that this has been wildly accelerated in the US in the last few decades. With the end of the Cold War, the ruling class needed to invent new enemies to justify militarism at home and abroad, so they were invented whole cloth. Today it’s an invasion of Central American migrants, but it used to be terrorism and WMD; the lyrics change a bit, but the song is the same. Take this passage from the New York Times in 2004 that quotes from the Bush White House:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
The problem with this whole situation (from the perspective of someone trying to maintain it) is that people’s material circumstances are starting to be impacted. The evisceration of the federal government kicked thousands of people out of good jobs. The tariffs will put companies out of business. The new budget, if passed, will kick millions of people off their healthcare and take food off the table. The US already has reached record levels of consumer debt and inequality, with over $50 trillion being redistributed to the wealthy from the working class since the beginning of the neoliberal era, and these policies will rapidly exacerbate these issues. As things go from bad to worse, it is going to take work from the ruling class to keep people from fighting back.
depoliticization
When I was younger, my godmother, who raised me, knew that I did not like being told what to do. To get around this, she always used to give me two choices: one she knew I would hate, and then one she wanted me to pick. That way, she could get me to do what she wanted while allowing me to feel like I had autonomy. This seems to be the strategy of the ruling class in the United States.
Let's compare this to the current discourse around AI. Currently, the two proposed futures that lie ahead are that (1) AI is super powerful and will kick everyone out of their jobs, or (2) AI is super powerful and will make everyone’s lives better in ways we cannot even understand. Baked into these two options are the assumptions that AI is a super powerful technology and that it will be pursued. Neither of those two statements are presented as debatable. In reality, there is pretty convincing evidence that AI is not as useful as those trying to raise billions of dollars claim that it is. A recent study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research over 7,000 workplaces that integrated AI found that AI had “no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%.”
Additionally, any conversation about AI does not allow any pushback on whether this technology should be pursued, even if it is useful in any way. Wild claims about this stuff being inevitable are being thrown around as a way of naturalizing an outcome, or a small set of outcomes, that are not predetermined, to try to ensure that they happen with less resistance. This is particularly easy to do with something like AI because it is technically complicated, so it is easier to obfuscate reality since people don’t have a strong foundation that they can use to question propaganda narratives.
This depoliticization is not only happening with AI. It is happening to nearly every substantive issue in the US. The 2024 election was pretty much entirely run on memes and vibes. The Harris team put out a few minor technocratic policies that offered no substantive change, and the Trump people just said that they would magically fix every problem with no plan. This is because both campaigns were taking money from big money groups that want to maintain the status quo, so there isn’t even an option provided for things to change in any substantive way. Ignore policies and instead take these coconut tree TikToks and manosphere podcasts. It was like jingling keys in front of a baby.
The entire media ecosystem has been taken over by Steve Bannon’s ‘flood the zone’ strategy. There is so much slop out there that it is easy to get lost, and AI is going to make this much worse. I think that this technology may be used for overt propaganda like the Grok fiasco, but it can also be used more covertly. In China, propaganda strategy has shifted from hard controls to something more like the ‘flood the zone’ strategy. When something bad occurs, like a building collapsing, the government astroturfs social media with a bunch of posts that are neutral to positive about completely unrelated topics. Since social media and AI are both owned by tech billionaires in the US, they could easily adopt this strategy using the technologies. Has Elon Musk had yet another rocket explode and fail despite getting more and more government contracts? Down rank any conversation about it in the algorithm on X the Everything App and have Grok spam a bunch of random shit so that no one can hear the quiet.
so what do we do?
Many big issues have been taken off the agenda, but the thing that keeps me going is that, at the end of the day, real life still exists, even if there is all of this effort to make that not seem true. Take healthcare as an issue, thousands of Americans die every year due to a lack of healthcare access, and the current budget in Congress, if passed, will kick about 14 million more people off their insurance. Healthcare pretty much did not come up at all during the election, even though most people in the US agree that things are bad. The only thing that has brought healthcare back into the public discussion was the assassination of a healthcare CEO, wherein more of the public sided with the assassin than the person assassinated, despite the media demonizing the act and the government treating the accused as a terrorist.
Real life eventually cuts through to most people. The measles outbreak in Texas has caused an uptick in parents vaccinating their children. People know when their life isn’t getting any better, even if the politicians, media, and capitalists are all telling them that everything is great. People can feel the inequality hitting them personally, and now only 27% of Republicans support cutting taxes for the wealthy. Considering that the traditional thing holding the Republican coalition together is tax cuts, things are mighty precarious for them right now.
This also doesn’t mean that nothing needs to be done; Democrats will take any opportunity to do absolutely nothing but block progress, so the collapse of the Republican coalition alone will not be enough to push real change. As the media ecosystem becomes increasingly flooded with slop meant to dissuade you from demanding dignity and improved material conditions, do not let those in power tell you what is possible. Things are scary and uncertain right now, but I’m trying to think of this as a jump ball situation. Defeat is not guaranteed, nor is victory, and don’t let the slop tell you otherwise.
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