There is no end of history
A myopic arrogance destined to age poorly
by Nathan Munn
The way AI is marketed in inevitable terms and with ludicrous hyperbole is a dark mirror of Francis Fukuyama's touting of the “end of history.” Much like his claim that the fall of Soviet communism represented the triumph of capitalism as the only viable system, our daily barrage of relentless AI boosterism is likewise infected with a myopic arrogance that is, to put it mildly, destined to age poorly. American exceptionalism is dying from a thousand cuts in Iran, AI companies are terrified of what’s around the corner, and people all over the world are in various states of fury, preparation, or mourning. It’s 2026, and we’re just getting started.
Just like the maniacal war in Iran, there's no denying that generative AI is changing our world for the worse. In my work I’m close to the swirling center of the vortex where hype meets reality, and the tech is indeed wiping out developer and marketing jobs, but the biggest change AI is fostering is the upending of the psyches of people who build and sell the technology. It’s startling to watch the raw, almost gleeful desperation of these (presumably) bright folks as they completely submit themselves to a product that demands they shut off their minds and critical faculties. One that requires them to recast their customers, clients and employees as bumbling idiots who cannot think, do meaningful work, or have original ideas. In the minds of many tech leaders all three groups now exist only to burn through Google or Anthropic tokens and that’s it. These folks keep repeating a mantra they clearly picked up somewhere else: “Look, AI isn’t going away. You have no choice but to use it.” As the polycrisis gains steam, they sound like they’re trying to convince themselves more than anything.
Someone recently remarked that using generative AI is functionally similar to gambling: you spend a token, pull the lever, hope you get the desired result, then do it again. This sick process is a microexpression of the AI economy writ large. It’s also analogous to the American/Israeli non-strategic brutality in Iran and, at the highest level, represents the gaping void at the heart of our late-stage militarized gamified capitalist reality, where AI and war, enthusiastic oppression, out-of-control gambling, and the death of thinking all overlap and blur into a hellscape of pain and confusion. Observers have pointed out that there are so many ways for it all to go wrong that it eventually will have to go wrong.
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of 90s hip hop. Wu Tang, OGC, early Jay-Z. The sonic dissonance of these songs, mixed with reinterpreted samples and melodies from another era, and interwoven with vicious, brilliant observational wordplay, is something beautiful and awesome to behold. A spiritual expression of humanity and resistance from inside a system designed to destroy its inhabitants. The spectral minor-chord shivers and distant beacon of GZA/Genius’ 4th Chamber not only conjure the dark streets of urban life in the late 20th century, they evoke today’s landscape of surveillance, threat, fear and bravery; of strangers in masks and cameras that scan for identity; of weapons and escape routes and chemicals and ancient languages and natural ecosystems, rivers and roots that persist somewhere below our feet, moving under the asphalt.
The systems of oppression that have colonized people and places over centuries have been expanded to all of us. It’s the imperial boomerang predicted by poets and Pulitzer winners alike. Hearing GZA, RZA, Ghostface and the rest talk about secret documents, the Ebola virus, the rape of the continents, man's weakness, and New York City newsstand men trained as bombmakers in Iran is unnervingly, exhiliratingly tied to our present moment. The system that created the man from Iran is the same system that welcomed him to America is the same system that, today, has declared war on everyone, even those slavish and stupid enough to try to appease the lunatics. We all have targets on our backs now; it’s just a question of the shooter’s priority.
I’ve also been spending time with Jay-Z’s 2010 book Decoded, a dense tome of his lyrics and their meanings, autobiographical stories, and reflections on a lifetime of influences from the Sugar Hill Gang to Basquiat to Che Guevara. It’s a hustler’s bible and I treat it as such, flipping it open to a random page in moments when I’m seeking some guidance.
For the past couple weeks I’ve been in acute physical pain, the type that comes with age. At one point a bottle full of codeine-laced painkillers in my cabinet was beckoning me in a worrying way. I’m sober and like it that way, but it wasn’t always so, and the agony was pushing me to that bottle even though alternatives were available. Rationally I felt justified but sensed I was being pulled toward something dark.
So when I flipped open Decoded I was amazed but not surprised that the first line I saw was about being wired like codeine, with notes on the opposite page opining about the need to analyze our own thoughts, to recognize destructive musings and discard them before they take a toll. I haven’t touched that bottle since.
All to say, in strange and uncertain times it’s a good move to seek out our oracles, trust our better instincts, and gravitate to the art that speaks to our hearts. Some like to lump Jay-Z in with the coterie of billionaire psychopaths destroying democracy, but to me he’s something entirely different: a gifted kid born into a cauldron of poverty and danger, who used his smarts and heart to become not only a brilliant artist, but a shockingly successful businessman to boot.
Someone leaked Claude's source code recently, which is funny because it's a refreshing reminder of the power a single person wields. There's no way to stop humans from doing human stuff short of transforming tech campuses into hardened military installations, which is where things are headed anyway. When Amazon server farms are absorbing missile barrages and dozens of tech companies are on a state-sanctioned kill list, how far are we from Oracle or Meta-branded mercenaries standing guard in Bahrain, Dubai, or Menlo Park? There is likely a wager being arranged on Polymarket around this eventuality.
The merger of state and corporate power was scary enough when it was playing out at normal speed, but amid the fog and mess and misery of war it is sure to accelerate and mutate in ways that are at once grotesquely surreal and entirely predictable.
The AI sickness and the expanding wars do not represent, as their overlapping marketers promise, the end of history. These stunningly idiotic, VC-funded nightmares represent the arrival of a new era in which the only sure bet is unpredictability. In this new world the most important skills to retain are the ability to love, to care, and to never stop moving – even when all you can see is smoke, and when all you can hear is a faint but persistent pulse.
Nathan Munn is a regular contributor to Flaming Hydra. He previously wrote for Hell World from Canada about how it feels right now to live upstairs from the world's shittiest loudest neighbor.
Luke O’Neil