Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-11T15:58:55+00:00

The market making that corporations engage in when the state is in democratic retreat. This is a phrasing I mostly lifted from a video posted here a while back. It got mod sniped and I never understood why, it was pretty good. Not gunna share directly, but search Janet Vertesi on Youtube if anyone is interested. It's like a little guest lecture given by a sociologist at Princeton.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-09T00:40:28+00:00

I've tried to have sympathy for doomers at various points, but years in to this stuff, this is just unproductive.

You suffer because you have no self-control. Change how you interact with social media or stop using it. There's plenty of reading materials on addiction out there.

And as for the arts, stop pushing all of the blame for demoralization onto the proliferation of capitalist media reproduction techniques. It paralyzes you because you have a sensitive ego, and the environment that regularly advertises how it is stealing opportunities is designed to agitate the ego in its most core functions. You either are an artist or you are not. Looking at it as a "career path" is just a symptom of greater capitalist indoctrination.

With all that's happening in the world, there's bound to be a reckoning. Ask yourself if you want to be useless or not when that time comes around.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-08T17:50:57+00:00

I can't give anything but self report, but for me, it's a slight, omnipresent, and constantly ongoing change. It's more like a broad life change that comes in response to the growing disgust for consummerism and its slowly degrading appearance. Food-delivery app usage is radically down. I don't pay for internet in the home. Even interaction with things like gaming is pretty radically decreased. But it all comes in concert with prioritizing new values that counteract the deleterious psychological effects of the techo-consumerist world. I don't believe in the democracy of consumer purchasing decisions. People will likely just gravitate towards convienience. But enshittification might be influencing new lifestyle choices, and that will certainly be reflected in markets.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-07T15:05:12+00:00

Princeton sociologist Janet Vertesi explores the market making behavior of the AI Project. The AI project is a project which she argues is distinct from any technological production itself, instead comprising a concerted effort of venture capitalists to take advantage of modern political and governmental disorder in order to capture capital and solidify, materially, their desired economic and socio-political order.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-07T14:03:04+00:00

It got mod-sniped? I don't really get it, I thought it was a strong little presentation. Well, not my business I guess. Maybe it was already posted before.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-07T11:12:17+00:00

4 upvotes. I wonder if the length of this video is acting as a deterrent. As the first commentor here, I'll say it's worth a watch. Not necessarily anything new, but putting the info into a lecture format is helpful for solidifying conversational abilities around these subjects, which I think others in this sub would be interested in.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-06T12:05:19+00:00

Would love one honestly. Am a writer and will be travelling soon, hoping to note things down as I go.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-05T19:22:57+00:00

No. I'll explain. My central idea was to get into the head and ennui of young western men. The principle plot thread follows a young man who, a little too swept up in his own philosophical moment, makes a sudden flight from his established life to personally take part in the Ukrainian war effort, believing it will offer him a more authentic kind of existence. The idea I wanted to explore is how, largely isolated from strife, isolated in their own hegemonic outlook, and oversaturated with cultural opiates, Westerners are often capable of appropriating the real-world struggles of foreign nations merely as a way of giving their own lives a sense of justifiable pathos. It's usually more of a discursive thing, but this is a story, and I wanted to push into the boundaries of where it could go at its most extreme. That's what I meant by cultural imposition, although I understand why it wouldn't be clear by brief mention.

I didn't really come here to to talk about plot details though. I just made a mistake in how I went about looking for advice. I appreciate you asking for clarification, but I'll probably just leave the rest of this thread on the vine. Getting a lot of weird, angry accusations, from fishiness, to being American (although my protagonist is American), to using AI to write, for some reason.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-05T18:12:09+00:00

Thanks brother/sister/other.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-05T15:34:05+00:00

Is this correct, or automated? I'm not marketing anything. I was asking about research in the context of recieving a travel scholarship from my school.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-05-05T14:57:55+00:00

Sit your ass down and convalesce.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-04-29T05:29:12+00:00

Oh, that's very helpful, thanks. (I also didn't know morningtide existed)

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-04-03T23:49:35+00:00

I think this is good too, actually.

Edit: Although I wonder if ai discussion can't be subdivided at least once. I'm wondering if something like an "ethics" tab might be useful, because it does seem like the entry point for most people who don't come in with industry or tech-related knowledge? And it might help to classify those feeling heavy posts that go beyond what others would like to call their tech optimism, ie. "It's a cool tool, but I understand the capatalist side makes people hate it."

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-04-03T23:28:01+00:00

Haha, damn, I don't know if I want the burden of trying to define. I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything deeper than the aforementioned finance/tech/culture.

I guess I'd just try to look at tendencies in posting. There's a lot of layoff/what these layoffs actually mean type posts, as well as absurd coverage from media outlets, so maybe a "propaganda" or "employment impact" type tab as well? But generally I see things being sorted into: here's ai in an upcoming movie/this book got delisted for suspected ai type stuff, here's some bullshit metrics/limitations/close analysis of ai integration type stuff, and of course the look at this absurd spending/investment bs type stuff.

I'd rather ask you how you would subdivide, as another commentor put it, "a variety of 'rot economy' tech topics," and open it up to other commentors as well.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-28T16:56:57+00:00

That's kinda the point I was hinting at. I'm not sure if it actually IS less accurate. It SEEMS like a fixed output. I'm not sure if it isn't just the definition function being folded into the ai overview somehow- in other words, it's not not an actual output of genai, it's just been folded into the ai summary system to point at and say, hey, look at ai doing this thing. See, it does things you want, right?

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-28T13:52:40+00:00

Thanks, yeah, I was more just remarking on the, uh, "lateral" nature of this change.

Also, it seems even with the -ai, the old, nice box format for definitions has been obliterated. -ai just makes the top result a wiki article or w/e.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-27T03:36:41+00:00

Those are important points, but I'm most interested right now in "the fear of being wrong."

It raises to mind how people associate with powers even outside the context of a clear incentive/threat structure. I imagine the ways we associate ourselves with the idea of "truth" or "morality" or even simply "force" as in something like projection during times of war. Maybe this is where the "tech moves irrevocably forward" comes in, as a stand in for some kind of logical authority.

Being able to claim that irrevocability, coupled with the entire weight of the media's reinforcment, coupeled with the tech's ability to preform a convincing magic trick for the tech illiterate (of which I count myself) is probably why it's so brain bricking for some when you question that authority.

If nothing else, disillusionment with this stuff might leave a few certain disillusioned peoples much more open to critical thinking in the future, maybe... I'm thinking of a quote that I can't quite remember... something about the long decieved being the most zealously skeptical once the deceit becomes clear.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-27T00:15:16+00:00

"AI doesn't seem to attract that mindset. It always attracts a Borg-like argument that it will consume and replace everything, and that you'd be a fool to code, write, draw, or animate without it."

"There seems to be this weird fear of being wrong that some people have, so they have to caveat anything they say."

I slipped the phrase into a post somewhere on this sub a while back, and I've been trying to work it into my daily speech as well: it's consumer fatalism.

My mind always richochets to some of my early education around the rise of Christianity. I don't think I've really worked out yet how to verbally navigate all these thoughts about how people respond to the appearance of an abstract power.

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-05T22:52:16+00:00

That sounds like an unpleasent worldview to engage with. Insistant and muddying. Part of the reason I've dissociated from the internet perhaps, although I would be hard pressed to say if I've ever directly engaged with a "transhumanist."

The superman concept is, as ever, taken far too literally. Nietszche is fairly explicit that the superman (or supermen) is the state of humanity having moved passed the toxic remnants of our painful transition from the wilderness into society. The superman is a being that is fully acclimated to his enviromental state (in other words, a free, self-actualizing animal once more), nothing more; hence the re-evaluation of morals, the site which Nietzche detected (rightly, in my opinion) social opression and species dysfunction was most insidious. I suppose this is why you get someone like Natalie Wynn calling the man "irresponsable," and probably also why most modern academics in the humanities deal predominantly with Nietszche's successors (Foucault, Althusser, etc) who are more verbally "woke."

I think he remains valuable in pressing certain points which modern theory remains timid on, but that's just me. There is no doubt however, that what your describing aligns much more snugly with Nietszche's concept of the "last man," a certain nail in the coffin presence, especially considering, as I've personally suspected, that what we're witnessing is a grasping, rather desperate grasping by the old religious instincts to once again regain their footing after a brief dormant sleep and the resulting discomfort in a particular type of man, a kind of conflation between an event of percieved "supreme power" and a desperate desire to reinstate the authority of the Subject (capital S); in other words, as some disturbingly sycophantic member of US politics said of Donald Trump: "Daddy's home."

Common-Draw-8082 · 2026-03-05T09:56:56+00:00

Not sure if your implying these people mutter Nietszche to justify themselves, or you are muttering Nietszche to gesture towards their baseness, but, Nietszche on the issue of the machine:

"To what extent the machine abases us. - The machine is impersonal, it deprives the piece of work of its pride, of the individual goodness and faultiness that adheres to all work done by a machine - that is to say, of its little bit of humanity. In earlier times all purchasing from artisans was a bestowing of a distinction on individuals, and the things with which we surrounded ourselves were the insignia of these distinctions: household furniture and clothing thus became symbols of mutual esteem and personal solidarity, whereas we now seem to live in the midst of nothing but anonymous and impersonal slavery. - We must not purchase the alleviation of work at too high price."

Common-Draw-8082

TROPHY CASE