Pluralistic: On the sincerity of AI bosses (17 Sep 2026)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: On the sincerity of AI bosses (17 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


A robotic claw grips a bundle of arrows; in the background are the pink folds of a human brain.

On the sincerity of AI bosses (permalink)

The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

In this regard, fascism is simply one end of the continuum of conservative movements, which are always about finding a way to "get turkeys to vote for Christmas." That's because, at root, conservativism is the belief that some minority (rich people, white people, bosses, men, etc) were born to rule and everyone else was born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

By definition, "a minority that was born to rule" can't win an election, because they are a minority. Conservatives win electoral races by convincing people they intend to oppress, cheat and maim to vote for them through appeals to fear and hatred (racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Conservative political victories are always followed by economic misery for the conservative base, because the senior partners in the conservative coalition are the bosses who get richer by making workers poorer. Conservative rulers try to offset this with spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities, but this tactic only carries so far. Eventually, the electorate notices that despite terrorizing migrants and trans people, diesel is now $10/gallon and the guy responsible is now $1.4b richer than he was before the election:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo

Workers and bosses aren't the only fracture line in the conservative coalition. Within conservativism, there are leaders who want mutually incompatible things and abhor one another: the white nationalists hate the Zionists; the misogynists hate the TERFs; the imperialists hate the isolationists:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

These fracture lines can be papered over while things are good, but they crack when things go wrong, and this is even more true of fascist movements than it is of other conservative coalitions.

This is true of all fascists, so it's true of technofascists, too. The best-ever reference work on technofascism was just published: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End-Times Fascism, which unpacks the apocalyptic ideology that dominates Silicon Valley, especially the AI cultists:

https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/

In a recent interview about the book with the QAA podcast, Astra Taylor explained how the contradictions of the technofascist movement are to be expected, because fascism is always an "incoherent bundle":

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/end-times-fascism-feat-naomi

Understanding technofascism's inherent incoherence is vital to making sense of the chaos roiling the AI cult at this moment, wherein you have AI people insisting that there must be a moratorium on AI development lest the word-guessing program awaken and devour the human race. This week on the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron discussed the outlandish, science-fiction inspired cult beliefs that dominate AI boardrooms with Adam Becker and Cal Newport:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

Becker is well-placed to discuss this. Like the hosts of the QAA podcast, he started paying close attention to the bizarre beliefs of conspiratorialists long before the rest of us realized that no matter how preposterous their certainty about the imminent machine intelligence Singularity was, these beliefs are sincerely held by some very wealthy and driven people. Becker's 2025 book More Everything Forever is a tremendous field guide to these delusions and their profound philosophical and technical deficits:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

In the interview, Newport dismisses the theory that the warnings about imminent AI apocalypse are self-serving criti-hype intended to serve as both marketing pitch and regulatory capture gambit, through which the hyperscalers get the government to step in to interrupt the beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/#red-queens-race

Rather, Newport says that these people sincerely believe that they are about to immanentize the eschaton and are pants-wettingly terrified about the AI god they will conjure forth any day now. He makes a good case for this, pointing to the long history of words and deeds on the part of various AI bosses that suggest that they are true believers who are genuinely high on their own supply.

I don't doubt that there are sincere believers in the AI technofascist coalition, but that does not preclude the possibility that they share their boardrooms and executive rows with cynics for whom this is all a shuck, a scare-story to convince the rubes that their modestly useful utility software is really a nascent "superintelligence" and thus capable of replacing all their workers, which means they should fire all those workers and start sending their salaries to AI companies.

This is an example of one of those "incoherent fascist bundles." Just as Mike Pence (a misogynist Christofascist) was happy to share the White House with Trump (a godless pedophile rapist), AI companies can and do thrive by filling their executive ranks with Singularity-crazed maniacs and sharp operators who are happy to spread this superstitious nonsense if it helps them pump up their stock swindle.

Each group thinks they're using the other one, and they are…up to a point. When it comes to the current AI nonsense, that point came when Nvidia's best customers started to demand that everyone stop buying Nvidia's products, whereupon Nvidia's CEO suddenly remembered that his chips weren't being used to make god, but rather, to power regular-degular "cloud software":

https://cxotoday.com/governance/nvidias-jensen-huang-crosses-swords-with-ai-labs-over-regulation/

When it comes to technofascists (and all fascists) this kind of division isn't an exception, it's the rule. The billionaires behind AI are split between solipsists who don't believe other people are any more real than bots; and cynics who think that bosses will be easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing mouthy workers with pliable chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either

To be a senior member of the fascist coalition, you must be capable of both sincere belief while not openly dismissing your fellow senior members' contradictory sincere beliefs. Behind closed doors, they may make fun of each other (or fantasize about murdering one another), and they may periodically erupt into plots to oust one another from the coalition. But every one of them must be able to go along to get along…

Most of the time.

Until they don't.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago 9/11 v spam https://memex.craphound.com/2001/09/17/through-most-of-last-week/

#25yrsago PalmOS picture of the WTC collapse https://web.archive.org/web/20010920145653/https://ne.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/2001/09/0914pda_watch.html

#25yrsago Wifi emanating from the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20010916231834/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010916/tc/attack_wert_dc_2.html

#15yrsago Silvio Berlusconi prostitution-ring wiretaps: sex with eight women in one night, “I’m only prime minister in my spare time” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/18/silvio-berlusconi-wiretaps-sex-parties

#15yrsago Tesco threatens journalist with arrest for writing down prices https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2011/sep/16/tesco-shopping-supermarket-prices-check-writing

#1yrago AI psychosis and the warped mirror https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

#1yrago Conspiratorialism's causal chain https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/cause-and-effect/#things-have-causes

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 501 (15980 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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