The Tech Ouroboros: About the digitised culture of consumption

Marek Tuszynski, Executive Director and co-founder of Tactical Tech. August 2024

Let's start with the strange relationship between crypto-mania and AI-mania to pick just these two because, among many differences, there is something about these two implementations of digital technologies that is closely related to the acceleration of consumption. First, and most obviously, both are resource-intensive - the use of crypto or AI requires energy and water-intensive processes that are, in most cases, hidden from the people who want to use these technologies; what is presented to these users as production, aka the generation of value (coins, content), hides the scale of consumption it directly triggers and relies on (consumption as a process of consuming resources). This consumption is out of sight of the promotion of these technologies. So that's the starting point. There is no technological acceleration without overconsumption of non-technological resources, however existentially essential.

The other kind of consumption that these two examples represent, and for which we should hold them responsible, is self-consumption, which in each cycle of consumption and production lowers the quality of the output - just as editing a digital image lowers the quality of the image in each cycle, and this is not just a technical problem (this is the case with crypto coins), but an epistemological problem with systems that extract knowledge, generalise it, and produce what looks like knowledge but isn't - a remix of meaning that looks like meaning, which should not be confused with knowledge. What we call generative AI, machine learning, is the latest form of epistemological colonisation.

One could say that the form of consumption behind these two digital revolutions – crypto and AI, as they have been stubbornly called, is hidden behind somehow liberating narratives, i.e. the creation of an alternative monetary system, the liberation of wealth from state institutions and other forms of control, or the advent of effortless content creation, being creative without skill constraints and prohibitive costs, in a way outside the existing system of information and media production - both promise to ‘stick it’ to the existing gatekeepers and give power to individuals who can master these new tools as early as possible.

Another feature of these blatantly untested technologies is that they immediately generate opinion-makers who argue for and against their adoption. Often even for good, ethical, just or trustworthy uses of these specific implementations of digital technologies. Let’s call them the advocates of patience or the acolytes of Godot - trying to actively await the arrival of something that, on the one hand, is already here and, on the other hand, will never really arrive. Why? Because someone has to, or because it seems the right thing to do, because it is perhaps too hard to imagine scalable and implementable alternatives - I am not being funny here - it is just the way it is - everything can be imagined better, the question is why are we all, in this cycle of bad technology, pretending to be good? And the accompanying panel of experts rushes in to explain how it could or should be made or used better. Maybe it is part of the same business model - you can monetise any tech as long as it creates some controversy and it is mutually beneficial – Big Tech and Small Tech give you something to talk about - which keeps the thing alive and talked about, and we can keep working on it, and the ads make money for everyone involved. Let's park it here.

The second notion of consumption I was thinking about is the business of buying products as services (think Google) or premiums (think Amazon), which has somehow accelerated post-COVID.

On the one hand, we're still living in the old days of the Microsoft business model (you don't own things, you don't have the freedom to understand how your digital tools work - but you can buy a limited licence that gives you the right to use things under certain conditions and only until the company spits out a new version that you have to get). Over time, this has translated into the "everything is a service" business model - which is similar to the "everything is an app" mantra, leading to a starved imagination where everything you can think of as a solution is a service or premium as an app - as long as you keep paying for tools that might disappear at any moment or when new version won't any more support old formats or if the cloud gets unplugged, you can continue to fulfil your desires and feel privileged and up to date about it though.

Our internet-connected devices have become permanent multi-purpose patches we wear with generic interfaces (which also hide the first type of resource consumption mentioned above - you don't feel like you are holding a piece of blood cobalt in your hand while producing your tik tok content). It really comes down to what apps you can run on these devices and what services you can subscribe to, premiums are always more advanced than "free" versions (which are never free - because, again, against the "free" narrative, you have to position the other narrative that even if you get it without making any transaction of money to the provider - you make other transactions - giving up time to watch ads, donating various personal data sets through permissions or trackers, or frankly allowing a/b testing at scale, and if you think premium frees you from the headache of giving something away - maybe think again). Let's park this one here.

The third notion of consumption is the consumption of information, entertainment, culture, and perhaps even knowledge, although this may sound a little exaggerated. I wondered where this so-called media consumption came from as an idea, apart from the obvious assumption that humans have always consumed some kind of media, however rudimentary.

It can be said that our information appetite has accelerated, strangely enough, in parallel with the human impact on the environment on which we are so dependent. I am aware of two shortcuts I am making here mentally - mixing the medium with the message (not new) - and collapsing information with knowledge (very risky). Again, I'm not an academic writer or thinker, and instead of exploring terminological differences and their semantic roots, I'm exploring the impact of specific digital business models (the data-driven attention economy) on, let's call them (myself included), "consumers" - I'd say there's an observable, growing relationship between radicalisation (and by radicalisation I don't just mean its violent manifestations, although that's included by default), polarisation, confusion and the services that promise visibility - like: I like it, or I don't like it (soon no more clicking required) and so “here I am”.

You can now be a valuable content producer by simply pointing the lens at anything - it doesn't even have to move, best thing ever, all you have to do is point it at something you always have access to - yourself - and you can do this and other things while sitting on the toilet. Better, faster and cheaper than ever before; in fact, you can manufacture facts whenever you need them - plenty of tools out there to make it a smooth and satisfying process.

This gives us - the super-users, we all aspire to be one - a decent sense of agency, especially in determining what counts (think influencers). What really matters is who wins, who comes out on top (gamification), who endures or survives (this is the end time, man - prepare for the worst - it's coming; isn't it always the end time for mortal beings? - because this is the only time to get excited about anything), you just have to pay attention and manifest it aggressively (enshitification of the internet - tx Doctorow) - just express what you really feel right now and immediately tell others how irrelevant they are.

These types of enshitification constitute some extreme manifestations of what is being sold as different freedoms rather than enriching and diversifying our experiences and chances of actually being in it together. No individual can escape the global consequences of polycrisis, and regrouping into small and determined mini camps craving to have it in their own hands might work in the Mad Max universe - while here and now, it might force us into one.

The way we are being conditioned by the immediate technologies we will rely on so much, in the long run, is frankly killing any possibility of the planetary action that is so needed - and yes, Meta will never fix it, nor any other big tech coming out of the US, China or Europe. This is why I listed above knowledge among the things we consume and how sad this consumption has become - there is an accelerating blurring between these categories; entertainment is considered knowledge, knowledge became just a story, and a story is all about belief.

Frankly, we are in the business of developing tools that allow us to eat our own tail, and AI is the new big mouth that we have just invented to help us with this self-consuming task incredibly effectively. In this spiral of self-consumption, everything tastes the same - it is impossible to verify sources and provenance and impossible to separate disgusting opinions from facts. It seems that fiction is much more popular than non-fiction in this reading club of self-consumers. And let us park here once again.

How does all this add up to anything useful or meaningful? Even if you eat your own tail, I would assume that at some point, your mouth will hit the back of your head; obviously, in the abstract, there would be something that would happen much earlier, something not very nice indeed, something that has nothing to do with life extension. OK, one thing is for sure: I think in triangles whenever I free myself from thinking in circles. Here is a little undercooked triangle theory I have been practising lately.

Just to unpark some of the thoughts from above and mix them up with a bit of framing, focusing in particular on generative AI as an example of where consumption is going and what this kind of culture of digital consumption reveals. If we think about this triangle of (sad) consumption, the softly justified story of improvement and perfection with a hint of disruption and risk (Generative AI is both - the danger and the magic) hides the true cost of this generative solution, and in particular hides the turk in the generative machine.

Designing tools that generate profit by masking consumption as production leads to a clear outcome: consumers are stripped of both individual and collective agency, while the creators of increasingly sophisticated new forms of consumption tools amass power—the kind of power that allows them to buy their way out of problems that everyone else must face. What is in the middle of the consumption chain is closer to power; those at the ends of it - where extraction and expulsion determine where the local is - are left out without any chance of mobilisation, organisation or representation. The majority, which in this context we can call the periphery at the ends of the culture of digital consumption, is the resource. It doesn't get much better further up the chain unless you position yourself alongside people like Peter Thiel.

Let's go back to the fantastic pattern machines called generative AI (they are fantastic at pattern recognition and pattern creation – that are capable of tuning complex patterns into deceiving shapes of meaning - just to be clear, I'm not saying AI is terrible at everything, feed it specific data, narrow the scope of its learning and it can produce usable output much faster and with much better quality than anything before - but that's it, patterns in patterns out.

Some say we may be on the verge of creating a new way of being into something very special and arrogant, a new form of hyper-human intelligence - where we extend ourselves through technological infrastructure - say the internet is our planetary nervous system - all we need to do is connect it to zillions of sensors attached to everything imaginable at all micro and macro scales, and we will be able to understand and control all the complexities of this and other worlds. Others say we are on the verge of creating new intelligence smarter than us or anything we have known before, yes current AI is just the beginning of something much more profound; we just need to maintain our status as a god of this power, or it could end badly.

Both of these positions represent an interesting collision of two fantasies we have pursued along with our fascination with computing. One is an old dream of us humans becoming true creators of living sentient intelligence. The other is to become omniscient - we are the creatures of the now who don't know the future, all we can imagine is managing some sort of total information system that we could control that would allow us to predict at least the near future with some accuracy - creatures who can't predict the weather more than two weeks in advance - we are, that's how superintelligences from other universes talk about us: rather violent, depressing and bad at weather forecasting.

Unfortunately, both of these fantasies are being successfully exploited by late-stage capitalism, aka market forces, led by Big Tech companies and other industries that are catching up with digitalisation and 'smartification'. Communism collapsed because it imprisoned the imagination and exhausted its extractivist practices; capitalism has lasted a little longer because it controls both the imagination and much larger territories of extraction - but both control of the imagination and control of resources are reaching their limits.

Paradoxically, it is easy to imagine how tools such as LLMs could be used to manage the scarcity of the resources we have in a more responsible, strategic and equitable way. The same could be said about how these tools can be used to create opportunities. But this will not come from within these tools and the will of their masters. To use these tools in such a way requires new political thinking and structures - new and different from capitalism and communism, so to speak, political frameworks - and it does not necessarily mean something unimaginable - learning from mistakes is a kind of old good school way of going about fixing broken things, and trying to stop playing the consumer game might even be a place to start.

We deserve better imaginations and economies not based on extraction. Our current digital tools are made by a very small group of super-rich snake oil salesmen - we really do deserve better, better than Elon telling us what's right and what's wrong, ugh.

All the images by Marek, from the series "James Joyce - Dublin 2024"