What the recent AI-doomsterism is really about

What the recent AI-doomsterism is really about. By Robert Malone.

The deeper story of Netflix is not simply that another American corporation drifted left, adopted DEI, and began producing programming that many Americans find politically tiresome. It is the story of how entertainment, politics, government, technology, and the management of information have gradually converged, with Barack Obama and the political network surrounding him appearing repeatedly at the intersections. …

Culture -> politics:

Netflix formally incorporated “inclusion” into its corporate culture in 2017. … Netflix explicitly connected representation inside the corporation with representation on the screen: who gets hired, who gets to tell stories, and who tells stories with which stories audiences ultimately see.  … What critics later called “woke Netflix” was therefore not simply an accidental accumulation of unusually progressive writers and producers. Netflix itself described inclusion as part of the machinery through which content was created.

The most powerful cultural assumptions are often the ones the audience is not consciously debating at all. Ideas about race, sex, gender, marriage, government, capitalism, social democracy, American history, and social justice can be incorporated into entertainment until they simply become part of the fictional world being consumed.

The viewer never has to agree to attend the lecture because there appears to be no lecture. The action movie gets the viewer through the door. The cultural assumptions come with the subscription. …

The Obama network:

Obama’s presidency had ended years earlier, but the network had not. Political power had become institutional power, capable of surviving the individual administration that created it. …

On April 21, 2022, Obama delivered a major address [at Stanford] .. The subject was …. the architecture of information itself. Obama discussed algorithms, social media, disinformation, platform responsibility, Section 230, and the effect of digital information systems on democracy. …

“What does still nag at me, though, was my failure to fully appreciate at the time just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself. Social media companies already make choices about what is or is not allowed on their platforms and how that content appears, both explicitly through content moderation and implicitly through algorithms. The problem is we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions in some cases, industry standards may replace or substitute for regulation, but regulation has to be part of the answer.”

The new censorship:

What this all establishes is a striking convergence: Obama was publicly calling for greater intervention in the digital information environment from within an institutional ecosystem already deeply involved in building mechanisms through which government, academia, and technology companies could identify, refer, moderate, suppress, or otherwise reduce the reach of information deemed false or harmful. …

The argument was presented in the reassuring vocabulary that has become familiar throughout the Western political establishment: democracy, safety, truth, responsible platforms, healthier discourse, misinformation, and protection from manipulation.

But underneath every one of those abstractions sits a very old and very dangerous political question. Who decides what constitutes misinformation? Who decides which speech is dangerous? Who determines what gets amplified, suppressed, demonetized, labeled, or removed? And what happens when the government officials, foundations, academics, corporations, and technology companies answering those questions overwhelmingly share the same political and cultural worldview? What happens when that viewpoint is skewed by globalism, leftist propaganda, and woke ideologies? …

For Americans whose speech was restricted, labeled, suppressed, or algorithmically buried during the COVID era [or the global warming debate, before that], the issue is not theoretical. The danger exists whenever government officials, politically aligned institutions, and enormously powerful information companies begin sharing assumptions about what constitutes dangerous information. No smoky room is required. No secret memorandum has to be signed. Institutional alignment can accomplish a remarkable amount when the people staffing government, foundations, universities, media companies, and technology platforms have already reached similar conclusions about what constitutes truth, misinformation, equity, democracy, social justice, and acceptable speech.

Religion -> culture -> politics:

“Politics is downstream from culture” is the famous quote attributed to Andrew Breitbart, the American media publisher and conservative commentator who passed away in 2012.

The phrase … posits that political outcomes are a result of prevailing cultural values, beliefs, and norms. Consequently, the doctrine argues that to effect meaningful political change, one must first shift the broader culture.

An axiom of this is that scientism has replaced religion, and this is associated with a priesthood of anointed physicians and scientists. And, as any theology student will attest, religion is upstream of culture.

These channels do not have to be centrally coordinated to reinforce one another. Politics determines rules. Information systems determine which arguments people encounter. Culture shapes many of the assumptions through which people interpret those arguments. One operates through elections and government. Another operates through algorithms, search, moderation, and information distribution. The third operates through stories, heroes, villains, historical narratives, children’s programming, documentaries, and entertainment. Taken together, they represent a far more sophisticated mechanism of cultural influence than anything Edward Bernays could have imagined when he wrote Propaganda nearly a century ago.

AI:

And now the same argument has arrived at artificial intelligence. In September 2026, …. Obama urged Democrats to make artificial intelligence a central part of their agenda and argued that, if Democrats regain control of the House after the midterm elections, they should establish a framework for a major public conversation about AI….

And a week later we got the current outbreak of AI doomerism, which is obviously a psyop:

Obama’s history makes a different question unavoidable: what exactly will be regulated?

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the machinery through which Americans search for information, summarize history, compare arguments, evaluate evidence, write, create media, and increasingly understand the world.

Regulation of AI therefore has implications extending far beyond whether a chatbot produces a dangerous recipe or a convincing deepfake. The rules governing AI can potentially influence the boundaries within which machines are permitted to answer questions at all. It will be and already is the next frontier in government censorship. …

Who benefits from regulation of AI?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the other industry giants can afford armies of lawyers, compliance officers, safety researchers and government-relations specialists. A startup, university laboratory or independent developer cannot. Regulations requiring expensive testing, licensing and government approval can therefore protect the companies already dominating AI while making it far harder for new competitors to challenge them.

Government gains something too. An Obama political circle that has spent years arguing that the “information environment” must be managed and regulated now has an opportunity to help write the rules governing the technology that may soon become the world’s primary gateway to information. The extraordinary concentration of corporate and government power produced by their proposed solutions should scare us all.

Going global:

Nor is this confined to the United States. Europe has already moved much further toward regulating online speech and artificial intelligence through the Digital Services Act and AI Act. But the internet does not respect national borders. Global technology companies that want access to Europe’s 450 million consumers must comply with European rules, and it can be easier to build those restrictions into their global platforms than maintain entirely separate systems. The result is the so-called “Brussels Effect”: European regulators can influence what Americans see, what platforms permit, and how AI behaves without Americans ever voting for a single one of them.

Conclusion:

The Western world is deciding who will govern the information systems of the twenty-first century. Netflix initially looked like a story about an entertainment company that became political. It turns out to be a window into something much larger. Barack Obama’s post-presidential career has repeatedly converged on institutions that shape political leadership, popular culture, and the flow of information.

A government does not have to burn books to acquire enormous influence over political discourse. It can pressure platforms, define misinformation, regulate algorithms, establish rules for artificial intelligence, and encourage private institutions to police information according to standards government itself helped establish. At the same time, cultural institutions can normalize a political worldview through entertainment until ideas that were once controversial simply become the background assumptions of everyday life.

 

A 1930s book burning by national socialists

 

Each piece can be defended individually as reasonable. Netflix is only telling stories. … Stanford is only studying disinformation. The Obama Foundation is only training leaders. Government officials are only protecting people from misinformation. Regulators are only making AI safe. The political network is only helping Democratic candidates win elections. Perhaps every individual involved sincerely believes exactly that. The problem appears when all of these pieces are placed beside one another and the direction of travel becomes visible. The danger is not necessarily a conspiracy. The danger is a system in which the same political assumptions increasingly dominate the institutions that produce culture, define misinformation, regulate information technology, train political leadership, and determine the permissible boundaries of digital speech.

That is why the question of whether Netflix has become “woke” now seems almost quaint. Netflix is only one piece of a much larger struggle over who gets to shape the stories Americans hear, which information Americans find, and increasingly which answers their machines are permitted to give them.

Ronald Reagan famously warned that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. The modern threat to that freedom may not arrive wearing jackboots or carrying a list of banned books. It may arrive promising safety, inclusion, equity, responsible information, and the protection of democracy itself. Edward Bernays understood a century ago that the most effective propaganda does not feel like propaganda.

Completely unrelated:

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, Stephen Neil