Unreal Bird #4: Vibe Shift

Wildflowers in a winter garden.
Wildflowers in a winter garden.

Thanks for reading Unreal Birds, a newsletter about how tech, media, and capital undermine democratic accountability.

In this issue:

  • I'm continuing to report on the Trump administration's shenanigans toward Europe, and I have a few forthcoming pieces on democracy, civic engagement, and pluralism.
  • Is the left failing to meet the AI moment?
  • Field Notes: Planning for a post-Google Scholar world; Pinterest struggles to adapt to the AI era; Perplexity rejects ads.
  • Scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

What I'm up to

Last issue I shared a piece from Tech Policy Press examining how House Judiciary Republicans misread the EU enforcement decision against X under the DSA. This story sometimes gets pigeonholed as a narrow tech policy story. I think it's much bigger, as I reported in a piece about the State Department last fall. Mainstream sources are starting to catch on to the administration's plan to overthrow Europe, of which tech is just one element. As evidence, consider this perspective from the Financial Times editorial board.

I continue to work on this story and welcome thoughts, insights, leads, etc.

I have a few pieces queued for publication related to other democracy issues. One is a response to Scott Warren in Democracy Notes, where he writes that "firefighting is not a theory of change" and US democracy needs a long-term strategy for restoring pluralism.

Two other forthcoming pieces draw on polling conducted by the Kettering Foundation and Gallup on Americans' views about democracy and civic engagement. I'll share those as they come out.

Vibe Shift

I regret to inform you have I have been Vibe Coding™.

Not that this is some kind of big confession, but I've been a regular user of LLMs for a while. They've reformatted my spreadsheets and footnotes, helped me plan my vegetable garden, and given me movie and book suggestions. I've never used it to write but I sometimes use it to pre-write. Never fear: this newsletter is artisanal.

It didn't become revelatory until I asked Claude to make me a simple Chrome extension. For a guy whose coding experience pretty much stops with the HTML I used to update my Myspace page in 2005, building a web scraper in an hour is a big deal. Since then, I've come up with more ambitious projects. Many other people are having similar experiences, some of them professional coders who are no longer sure what their job is or how long they'll keep it.

It's caused a bit of a media moment; Max Read has a good rundown here. A few days after that piece was published, Dan Kagan-Kans wrote in Transformer that the left believes "AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore."

Writing for Aftermath, Gita Jackson published a rebuttal, "The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited." (Jackson and I are not related.) It's not a perfect piece; it fails to grapple with real advances in the tech. But it does provide a rationale for the left's disdain of AI:

... when companies from the tech sector monopolize an industry, like rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, instead of less work and more relaxation, what happens is that people are forced to work more to compete with robots that are specifically coming for their jobs. Regardless of political leanings, people in general don’t like AI, while businesses as entities are increasingly forcing it on their workers and clients.

Obviously "people in general" don't dislike AI; millions of people use it every day, and not all of them are tech bros. But the environmental and labor implications are real. Not all leftists critiques of AI are uninformed dismissals.

This is my newsletter and it's only fair I tell you what I think. Here are some things I believe are probably true:

  • AGI is still a marketing term and if a version of it is possible it's still very far away.
  • Warnings of an AI-driven apocalypse are dramatically overstated. (Killer robots are real, though.)
  • AI is and will remain a normal technology controlled and directed by humans.
  • Generative AI has made impressive gains and is competing with or even replacing human labor in software development. It is already coming for other domains, like journalism.
  • This doesn't mean it will be better at all of those things than humans. There are many activities and institutions for which the process is the point, e.g. writing, education, deliberation.
  • But if AI is faster or less expensive than humans at a given task, there will be pressure for managers to replace the employees who do that task. Any impact on quality will be passed on to consumers.
  • This also doesn't mean there isn't a bubble or that it won't pop, but these trendlines may persist after it bursts.
  • The political right is more enthusiastic about AI than the left. Progressives, especially, are wary of concentrated wealth and power, which AI is exacerbating.
  • The global south is also more enthusiastic about AI, perhaps because of preexisting experience in the gig economy.
  • AI is going to be a slow-moving disaster for labor markets, more akin to deindustrialization than the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Anyone in tech who tells you that the United States will address the above through some kind of public benefit is either naive or selling you a beautiful oceanfront timeshare in Kansas.

I haven't seen much to make me feel better about the economics of the coming era. Most AI policy proposals fall into the categories of "build it as fast as possible" or "solve for existing harms." It's worth juxtaposing positions like Congressional candidate Alex Bores's proposed AI Framework (comprehensive but at times vague and unambitious) with OpenAI's "Fair Chance Agenda for 2026," (alternatingly self-serving and pollyannish).

If these represent the two poles of the AI policy debate, then there is a lot of room for leftists to articulate a bold vision for preserving the power of workers and citizens without forgoing the benefits of AI tools. The need for this vision is growing more urgent. As Eryk Salvaggio writes:

"Systems that don’t work would pose no threat to labor; systems nobody uses would pose no threat to the environment, and systems propped up by a failing industry will collapse—all we have to do is wait. That’s not a principled or rigorous ground for critique; it’s passivity, and it does not correspond to growing perceptions of use in the real world."

Field notes

Snoot watch

Greyhound looking soulfully upward, hoping for a treat.
As my wife said, "those are the eyes that got him adopted."

Humble plea

This newsletter is mostly powered by caffeine. If you've made it this far, consider buying me a coffee at the link below:

Buy Me A Coffee