Recently, I ended up re-reading James Allen-Robertson’s “Devs and the Culture of Tech”, a five-part deep dive into the sci-fi miniseries Devs, and its critiques of the tech industry on a structural level.

In lieu of anything better to do, I’ve decided to pull out a single concept James has touched on, and give my extended thoughts on it.

So, What is Technological Determinism?

In a basic sense, technological determinism (which I’m calling techno-determinism to be more concise) is a worldview that posits technological development as the primary driving force of humanity, and which treats said development as, heavily paraphrasing James, a product of “rational people pursuing the objectively best outcomes”, if not “a process of uncovering [tech] as prior technological discovery begets the next like some inevitable Civ tech-tree” .

For Silicon Valley, the techno-determinist worldview provided two main advantages.

First, it provided an easy accountability sink for when new technological developments screw over some portion of the public - it wasn’t Silicon Valley’s fault that they fucked taxi drivers over with their ride-sharing apps, it was the taxi companies’ fault for getting in the way of Progress™.

Second, it obscures SV’s role in pushing those developments, and whatever reasons they may have had for said developments - those ride-sharing apps didn’t pop up because Silicon Valley wanted to make more money, they popped up because they were The Future™.

These days, techno-determinism has lost a fair bit of its grip on the general public - and I personally believe the NFT bubble is the major cause.

NFTs Killed Techno-Determinism

If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time in the past few years, you’ve definitely heard of NFTs. They popped up in 2021, became completely fucking inescapable for roughly a year, then died an embarrassing death in 2022, prompting an outpouring of schadenfreude from the general public.

During their bubble, they were hyped to the stars by Silicon Valley, with claims that they were The Future™, that they were Inevitable™, and that you needed to Get On Board Now™ or be Left Behind™. (Sound familiar?)

As you already know, NFTs did not become The Future™. They failed, in spectacular fashion, receiving widespread mockery and rejection from the public, before getting consigned to the dustbin of history after the market imploded.

In that loud, spectacular failure, NFTs fatally undermined any notion showed the public that resistance against SIlicon Valley was anything but futile, that they didn’t need to take Silicon Valley’s attacks on them lying down, and whatever dystopian dreams the Valley had could be strangled in their crib.

On top of that, seeing SV’s rhetoric collapse so spectacularly with NFTs helped to inoculate the public against Silicon Valley’s techno-determinist rhetoric - after seeing artificially scar

On top of that, the failure of NFTs helped to inoculate the public against Silicon Valley’s techno-determinist rhetoric - after witnessing it spectacularly collapse in the face of reality, the public was well-prepared to see through SV’s attempt to recycle their rhetoric when the AI bubble reared its head.

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

It’s pretty much a given that we’re in for an AI winter once this bubble bursts - the only thing we can argue on at this point is exactly how everything will shake out. So, let’s beat this dead horse and make some random predictions before it inevitably gets sent to the glue factory. I’ve hardly got anything better to do.

The Death of “Value-Neutral” AI

Before this bubble, artificial intelligence was generally viewed as value-neutral. It was generally viewed as a tool, capable of good or evil, bringing about a futuristic utopia or a Terminator-style apocalypse.

Between the large-scale art theft/plagiarism committed to build the datasets (through coercion, deception, ignoring the victim’s refusal, spamming new scrapers, et cetera), the abused and underpaid workers who classified the datasets, the myriad harms brought by the LLMs themselves (don’t get me fucking started), and the utterly ghoulish acts of the CEOs and AI bros involved (defending open theft, mocking their victims, cultural vandalism, denigrating human work, etcetera), that “value neutral” notion is dead and fucking buried.

Going forward, I expect artificial intelligence to be viewed not as a tool or a technology, but as an enemy (of sorts), built to perpetrate evil, and capable only of evil. As for its users (assuming it still has users), I expect them to be viewed as tech assholes, class traitors, incompetent dipshits, “prompt goblins” craving approval, and generally worthy only of mockery or condemnation.

Confidence: Near-certain. Ali Alkhatib’s “Defining AI” (which called for redefining AI as an ideological project to more effectively resist it) and Matthew Hughes’ “People Are The Point” (a manifesto which opposes AI on principle, calling it “an expression of contempt towards people”) have already provided crystal-clear examples of AI being treated as an evil unto itself, and the links in the previous paragraph already show use of AI being treated as a moral failing as well.

Side-Order of Tech Crash

It’s no secret that the tech industry has put a horrific amount of cash into this AI bubble - every major AI corp burns billions in VC cash with no end in sight, Microsoft performed mass layoffs to throw money at AI (mass layoffs of people making the company money, mind you), NVidia is blowing billions on AI money-burners (to keep making a killing off of selling shovels in this AI gold rush), the fucking works. And all in pursuit of a Hail Mary pass intended to keep the tech industry’s Endless Growth™ going for just a few years more.

(Going by David Gerard, previous AI springs were primarily funded by the Department of Defense, with winter setting in whenever their patience for burning cash ran out.)

With all the billions upon billions thrown into AI, and revenue from said AI being somewhere between Jack and Shit (barring the profits of shovel-sellers like NVidia, as mentioned before), this AI winter will likely kick off with a very wide-ranging tech crash that takes a chunk out of the entire industry, and causes some serious economic woes for good measure.

Confidence: Very high. Ed Zitron’s gone into punishing detail about the utterly fucked economics of basically everyone involved in this bubble, and I’d be here all day if I went over everything he’s written about. Picking just a single article, here’s him talking about OpenAI being a systemic risk to tech.

Scrapers Need Not Apply

Before the AI bubble, scrapers/crawlers were a normal, accepted part of the Internet ecosystem - there was no real incentive to block crawlers by default, since the vast majority were well-behaved and followed robots.txt, and search engine crawlers specifically were something you wanted to welcome, since those earned you traffic from search results.

Come the AI bubble, this status quo would be completely undermined, for three main reasons.

First, and most obviously, there’s the theft - far from having any benevolent purposes, the crawlers employed by AI corps are created to outright steal data off your blog/website, then use it to create a slop generator that claims your work as its own and/or tries to put you out of business, making AI crawlers an long-term existential threat to whatever endeavours you go into.

Second, AI Summary™ services (like Google’s) created through the aforementioned theft have utterly cratered search engine traffic, taking the main upside to allowing crawlers to scrape your site and turning it into a severe downside.

Last, but not least, are the AI crawlers themselves - thanks to how they DDoS whatever sites or FOSS infrastructure they decide to scrape, and the dirty tricks employed in said scraping (ignoring robots.txt, lying about their user agent, spamming new scrapers, using botnets, etcetera), doing anything short of blocking scrapers on sight is not just a long-term liability to you, but an immediate liability to your website as well.

As a response to these crawlers, a cottage industry of anti-scraping solutions cropped up providing a variety of ways to fight back. Between dedicated bot-blockers like Anubis, tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade, scrapers of all stripes now face an ever-present risk of being blocked from data (especially high quality data), or force-fed misleading data intended to waste their time and poison their datasets.

As the cherry on top of this anti-scraper shit sundae, the rise of generative AI has flooded the ‘Net with AI slop, which is difficult to identify, near-impossible to avoid, and outright useless (if not dangerous) to scrape. Unless you’re limiting yourself to sources made before 2022 (commonly known as low-background media), chances are you’re gonna have to deal with your dataset getting contaminated.

Given all this, I expect scraper activity in general (malicious or otherwise) to steeply drop during the AI winter, as all scrapers get treated as guilty (of AI fuckery) until proven innocent, and non-malicious scraper activity drops off as developers deem running them to be not worth the hassle.

Confidence: Moderate. I already know of one scraper-based project (wordfreq, to be specific) which shut down as a consequence of the AI bubble - I wouldn’t be shocked to see more cases crop up down the line.

Condemnation and Mockery

For the past two years, the AI bubble has been inescapable for the public at large.

On one front, they’ve spent the past two years being utterly inundated with AI hype of every stripe - AI bros hyping up AI as The Future™, wild and spurious claims of Incoming Superintelligence™, rigged tests and cheated benchmarks made directly by the AI corps, and relentless anthropomorphisation of spicy autocompletes and signal-shaped noise generators.

Especially anthropomorphisation - whether it be painting hallucinations as lies, presenting AI as deceptive or coercive, or pretending they can feel pain, there has been a horrendous amount of time and money spent on trying to deceive the public into believing LLMs are sentient, if not humanlike in their actions.

On another front, the public has bore witness to a wide variety of harms as a direct consequence of AI’s creation.

Local environmental catastrophe, global water loss and sky high emissions, widespread job loss, academic misconduct, nonstop hallucinations and misinformation, voice-cloning scams, programming disasters, damaged productivity, psychosis, outright suicide (on multiple occasions), the list goes on and on and on and on and on.

All of this has been thoroughly burned into the public consciousness over these past two or three years, ensuring AI will retain a major (and deeply negative) presence there, and ensuring AI as a concept will face widespread mockery and condemnation from the public, until long after the bubble bursts.

Giving some more specifics:

• I expect art to be a no-go zone for AI until long after I die. To quote Baldur Bjarnason, the “E-number additive, but for creative work” connotation of “AI” is more-or-less a permanent fixture in the public’s mind, and artists in general have come to view AI as fundamentally hostile to artists. To provide some evidence, publicly rejecting AI earned Procreate and Schoolism standing ovations from their userbases, and a “Created with Human Intelligence” badge went on to go viral online.

• I expect a wave of “human-focused” marketing to crop up/continue, openly putting human labour front-and-centre to attract customers - given opposition to AI is providing some rich marketing opportunities and mentioning AI turns people off of buying, you’d be a fool to not jump on this particular bandwagon. (Arguably, this one’s already happened - recently, United advertised using humans in their customer service app and the Naked Gun made fun of AI art in a marketing poster)

Confidence: Completely certain. I’m basically “predicting” something that’s already happening right now, and has a very good chance of continuing months, if not years, down the road.

Arguably, I’m being a bit conservative with this prediction - given the cultural rehabilitation of the Luddites, and the rise of a new Luddite movement in 2024, I could easily argue that the bubble’s started a full-blown resistance movement against the tech industry as a whole.

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

A crossover between Godot and Blender was not on my bingo card for 2025, but I'm still pretty happy to see - not just because we got a cool little game out of it, but because interop between the two got a major boost.

Recently, I found myself ruminating on the general lack of AI slop over on Newgrounds (a site I use rather heavily, and have been since I joined in 2023). The only major case I've seen in recent memory was an influx of vibe-coded shovelware I saw last month.

If the title didn't tip you off, I personally believe it to be due to Newgrounds being naturally resistant to contamination with AI slop. Here's a few reasons why I think that is:

An Explicit Stance

First off, I'll get the obvious reason out the way.

Newgrounds has explicitly banned AI slop from being uploaded since September 2022,very early into the bubble. Whilst the guidelines carve out some minor exceptions for using AI to assist human work, simply generating a piece of slop and hitting “Upload” is off the table.

The only real development since then was a site update in early March 2024, which added the option to flag a submission as AI slop.

Both of these moves made the site’s stance loud and clear: AI slop of all stripes is not welcome on NG.

Beyond giving the mods explicit permission to delete slop on sight, the move likely did plenty to deter AI bros from setting up shop - if they weren't gonna get some easy clout from spewing their slop on there, why bother?

DeviantArt provides an obvious point of contrast here - far from take any concrete stance against AI slop, the site actively welcomed it, launching a slop generator of their own in November 2022 and doing nothing to rein in slop as it flooded the site.

Slop-proof Monetization

A second, and arguably less important factor, is Newgrounds’ general approach to monetisation - both in making money and paying it out.

In terms of making money, Newgrounds has pushed heavily towards running ad-free since the start of the decade - as of this writing, Newgrounds relies near-exclusively on Supporter (a subscription service which started in 2012, for context) for revenue. (Right now, adverts run exclusively on A-rated submissions (i.e. porn), which require an account to view.)

At the same time, the site wound down its previous rev-share system (which directly ran on ad revenue), leaving just the monthly cash prizes for payouts.

The overall effect of this change has been to render NG outright inhospitable to content farms (AI-based or otherwise) - being reliant on ad revenue to turn a profit off their low quality Content™, the near-total lack thereof renders running one on there impractical.

(Arguably, this reason isn't a particularly important one - being a niche animation site dwarfed by the likes of YouTube and Instagram, NG likely fell well under the radars of content farms even before its ad-free push.)

DeviantArt, once again, provides an easy point of contrast - as the site itself has proudly paraded, the site's monetisation features have enabled AI bros to make a quick buck off of flooding it with slop.

Judgment/Scouting

Wrapping this up with something that doesn't have a parallel in dA, I'm gonna look at the judgment and scouting systems used on the site. Though originally intended to maintain a minimum level of quality, these systems have helped prevent AI slop from gaining a foothold as well.

Judgment

For the main Portal (which covers animations and games), a simple voting process called judgment is used - users vote from 0 to 5 on uploaded works, with low-scoring submissions being automatically deleted (referred to as being ‘blammed’).

Whilst rather simple, the process has proven effective in keeping low-effort garbage off of Newgrounds - and with “low-effort garbage” being a perfect description of AI slop, the judgment process has enabled users to get rid of AI slop without moderator intervention, reducing the mods’ workload in the process.

Scouting

For the Audio Portal and the Art Portal, a vetting system (referred to as “scouting”) is used instead.

By default, work by unscouted artists appears in the "Undiscovered Artists" section of the Art/Audio Portals, hidden away from public view unless someone actively opts-in to view it or they find it from checking the user’s account.

If an already-scouted user or a moderator sees an unscouted user, they have the option to scout them, essentially vouching that their work follows site guidelines and is of sufficiently high quality. The effects of this are twofold:

• First, the user’s work is placed into the “Approved Artists” section of the appropriate Portal, granting a large boost to its visibility.

• Second, the user is granted the ability to scout other users, vouching for their work in turn.

Said ability is something users are required to exercise with caution - if the scouted user is later caught breaking site guidelines (or if their work is deemed too poor-quality), they can be de-scouted by an Art/Audio Moderator, and those who scouted them can be stripped of their ability to scout other users.

This system creates an easy method of establishing trust among the userbase (arguably equivalent to a PGP-style web of trust) - simply by knowing someone's been scouted, you can be confident they're posting human-made work, and scouted users can in turn extend that trust by scouting other users.

Additionally, Art/Audio Moderators are equipped to handle any breaches in said trust, whether by de-scouting users for posting slop, or removing scouting abilities from users who can't be trusted with them, enabling trust to be quickly restored.

As a secondary benefit, any slop which does get submitted is effectively hidden from view by default, making it easy for human-made work to drown out the slop, rather than the other way around.

Conclusion

The large-scale proliferation of generative AI has been a disaster for the Internet at large, flooding practically every corner of it with AI slop of all stripes.

Given all that, its kinda miraculous to know that there's any corner of the ‘Net which has braved the slop-nami and come out unscathed, let alone one as large (if rather niche) as Newgrounds is.

So, if you're looking for human-made work produced after 2022…well, I don't know where to search for most things, but for art, music, games or animation, you already know where to start :P

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy 4th July in advance...I guess.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

(No clue why I didn't get around to this earlier, I've had this in drafts for too long.)

Eight months ago, as you probably know, I predicted the current AI bubble would destroy artificial intelligence as a concept, focusing on the unrelenting slop and failures of AI, and on the near-universal backlash it receives whenever it rears its ugly, slop-ridden head.

As it turns out, I had completely failed to recognise the the political elements of this entire bubble. In retrospect, I should've recognised it a lot fucking earlier.

Between Baldur Bjarnason outlining the esoteric fascist elements at the heart of the AI bubble, AI slop's enthusiastic adoption by fascists of all stripes, Damien Williams' notes on authoritarians' love for gen-AI, Ashley Lynch calling AI slop inherently fascist, Pavel calling AI a specifically right-wing phenomenon and probably some extra stuff I've missed, its become clear the outright fascist nature of AI has been staring me in the face the entire time.

With all that in mind, I'd like to expand on my previous piece with three additional predictions.

1. AI-as-Fascism

Right off the bat, I expect AI as a concept will pick up a public perception of being inherently fascist, or at least a tool of fascism. Beyond all the ink spilled about AI's fascist nature, Donald Trump going all-in on AI has done plenty to link his administration with the tech, whether through making AI slop of deportees, or letting Elon Musk's AI Powered^tm^ Department Of Government Efficiency go to town on the federal gov.

Long-term, I expect this will hamper future attempts to start new AI bubbles/AI springs, as attempts to revive the tech get treated as morally equivalent to creating the Fourth Reich.

2. The Wider Tech Industry

On a wider front, I expect the tech industry at large will pick up a similar stench of Eau de Fash as well. Whilst the tech industry has long enjoyed a perception of apoliticality (which James Allen-Robertson has talked about (spoilers for Devs BTW), their own heavy involvement with the Trump administration has done plenty to undermine that.

Between their sucking up to Trump and AI's own stench of Eau de Fash, I can see the public starting to view the tech industry at large as a Nazi bar once the bubble bursts. Silicon Valley's given 'em plenty of reason to do so.

3. A Bone for The Humanities

Ending this off on a vaguely positive note, I suspect the bubble's burst will earn the humanities some begrudging respect once the dust settles - primarily through cannibalising a fair bit of the cultural cachet that STEM has built up over the decades.

On one front, the slop-nami has given us an absolute torrent of slop flooding the Internet, notable both in its uniquely inhuman shittiness, and in AI bros' breathless adoration of it. Given that, I expect programmers/software engineers will come to be viewed as inherently incapable of making anything on par with anyone who has taken up art as a hobby/profession, and incapable of understanding art with any sort of depth to it.

Additionally, I suspect a stereotype of programmers/software engineers being hostile to art/artists may form, thanks to the rather drastic toll this bubble has had on artists, and the ongoing rhetoric of "democratising art" that the bubble's given us. (The age-old "learn to code" adage may also come back to haunt them as well, if this comes to pass.)

On a wider front, the breathless "AI doomsday" criti-hype, more general over-the-top AI hype, and nonstop hallucination-induced mishaps will likely also contribute to making STEM as a discipline look out-of-touch with reality, making the humanities look grounded and reasonable by comparison as the public looks in confusion at AI bros' inability to recognise LLMs' shittiness for what it is.

(EDIT: Slightly expanded the introduction, adding an example from Pavel.)