Artificial Intelligence

Going Meta Into Nothingness

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of my recent readings of Cory Doctorow’s valuable blog, he discussed the value of “vultures” in the economic ecosystem, and reminded us of an important idea by Douglass Rushkoff explaining the weird “abstractions” we see.. To quote Doctorow:

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don’t rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don’t start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don’t invest in the company, but options on the company’s shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk.”

Going meta is something we see everywhere, to the point we are used to it. Giant companies with packages of packages of companies. Financial jobs that are, as I heard it once put “sloshing money around and scraping up what falls out.” Hell, with Kalshi and Polymarket and the various betting markets, we’ve gone meta on reality, allowing people to bet on anything, including things that are already pretty meta.

A friend recently summed up the overwhelm of modern technology by noting how much of what we do is metadata. You can fill out a paper form and have to store it and retrieve it – but if you put it on a computer it needs a name and a location – and cloud storage involves even more metadata behind the scenes. New software that lets you “easily” track information often has “new” features that require you to enter even more data to use features. At some point paper seems easier because the metadata can take more effort than the data.

(Remember, I once interviewed at software company that did Scrum with post it notes, having given up on tools.)

The ultimate meta is AI. AI takes our data, our metadata, and approximates us. It’s a world of data centers funded by this group, run by that group, and owned by another group. The power and water consumption are abstracted away. That’s if things are even being built, which seems to be a point of confusion – but boy companies want AI in everything.

It feels like our world is more and more meta all the time. Actual, hands-on, reality has layers of layers over it and we consume the reality to power the unreality.

Everything else is pretty meta too. Ever notice how these days in 2026 that our health care decisions by the federal government seem to be driven by internet conspiracy theories not based in anything? How memes and rumors can drive actions even if they have no existence in reality? Watch the news and people are trying to talk about reality with a thick layer of marketing and political opportunism. Even the propaganda seems meta, if people even know it’s propaganda, and sometimes I’m not sure the propagandists know.

So what I wonder is how much time and energy are we wasting doing meta but you know not doing stuff? I mean here in May 2026 farmers seem to be pretty impacted by whatever the hell is up with the non-ceasefire in Iran but it’s not making the news enough. Various Influencers famous for being famous are going around being famous and Influencing, but what are they about? People are betting on various important events in the world while others short markets, making us suspicious of what’s happening why. Also software seems to get exponentially harder to use as we add more stuff because of . . . I dunno, sales or something?

I mean how much time and energy are we burning here? Well time, energy and planet. Not sure much meaningful is happening, you know.

The problem with all this “metaness” is I think we won’t notice it breaking down until a lot of other stuff does. All the meta stuff, all the abstraction, the financialization, the investment vehicles, the BS media hype, that can keep going for awhile as it has money and momentum. But there comes a day when memes don’t fill your bank account, you can’t use AI as fertilizer, and you didn’t bet on very angry people being upset about unemployment. The people who think meta miss this stuff.

It’s best we don’t.

Steven Savage

The Unaccountability Machines

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My regular readers will know that Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine was a big influence on me. If you didn’t know this, well, you’ll probably keep hearing about it every now and then. Anyway, the short summary of this must-read book is that a lot of our systems (government business, etc.) go off the rails because they focus on a few metrics, insulate themselves and their leaders from impact, and become destructive.

There, I summarized an enormously complex book that sums up decades in a paragraph. Go me. Anyway, on to the subject.

I was reading a recent article in 404 media on how people are “staffing” companies with AI, or even discussing having entire companies that are just bots/agents. Yes, it won’t surprise you that people flush with cash or wild ideas imagine a world where they just automate everything and rake in cash. Yeah, you’re not surprised.

Nowhere’s many things wrong with this idea, from data center water burn to legal complications to AI being surprisingly crappy at many jobs. But I want to address something about what it’d be like to run a company with a bunch of stochastic systems doing work for you, because this sounds like the fears of The Unaccountability Machine taken to it’s logical conclusion. Or illogical conclusion.

Anyway, let’s imagine these AI companies, these automated companies, and what we know about AI. You have a lot of automated processes running things, running them with no moral agency because they’re not people. We know how sycophantic AI can be dangerous because it tells you what you need to know. All of this abstract and distant from real human experience, moreso because of the hype cycle.

What you’ve got here is, well, an Unaccountability Machine. A nearly completely automated company of AI agents spinning around one person is not going to get good, safe decisions. You may get something you can use to juice stock and sell off, but it won’t be safe.

What you have are devices that ape human awareness, using old data, telling people what they want, and when things go wrong the AI takes the blame. You have people insulated from real information, focused on limited measures, and using technology that will sound like it’s kissing up to them. All it is is amplifying what happens to various leaders anyway in our decaying government and business systems.

So, really, it’s just business as usual but faster. You can spin up bad ideas and unaccountability quicker.

Now I suspect a lot of this is just juicing stocks, posturing, and trying to ignore how AI costs are going to go up and legal issues will proliferate. So I’m more concerns what happens in the meantime and I doubt it’ll be good – and then of these “auto-companies” will need their work walked back.

Honestly, I hope most of them are scams. Maybe that’d be good.

I suspect Dan Davis is going to have to write yet another book.

Steven Savage

Dada And Empty Media

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Though i don’t discuss it as much here, I have an interest in the art movement of Surrealism and its origins. Surrealism is fascinating in its many manifestations, it intersects with politics and culture movements, and the many personalities and people are compelling. As I continue to learn about it, I keep finding new lessons, one of which I want to share here.

Surrealism’s origins are rooted in Dada, an art movement that appeared post World War I that was mistrustful of the supposed age of reason and the horrors of the time. Dada appeared to be art, in form of paintings or performances and such, but was intentionally nonsensical. Today it may seem amusing, but at the time people found it infuriating – imagine giving a speech made of nonsense words and angry folk rioting.

Dada laid the groundwork for Surrealism, something else I may discuss, but what fascinated me most about Dada beyond that was that it used the framework of existing media and filled it with nonsense. What an idea that the container of art can be abstracted from any meaningful content! Perhaps its easy to understand people angered by Dada, confronted with a play or a song or a painting that had the form of work but was filled with nothing

You can remove the art from art but still have a form we associate with art.

That idea has sat with me for some time since I had it, but I hadn’t done much with it – as my interests were in Surrealism and how the artistic framework was a vehicle for unconscious, almost spiritual expression. But lately I thought about Dada using a framework of art filled with nonsense and internet content and what we learn from it.

It’s hard to find anyone who won’t complain about nonsense, slop, propaganda, and low-effort content on the internet. I certainly do as any of my regular readers knows, and to my gratitude, tolerate. I’m sure you’re also used to encountering and complaining of such things.

We wonder how people can take such things seriously. How they can fall for propaganda or low-info listicles and the like? Well that’s because, beyond our vulnerabilities or ability to enjoy trash, it comes in the form of information. Internet dross has the shape of information or art or spiritual insight even if it’s filled with B.S.

No different than how Dada took the form of art and blew people’s minds by delivering rampant nonsense.

Think about how easily technology lets us have the form of something useful. It’s easy to spin up a website or a book or a video, pour anything into premade patterns, even go to technology or freelancers to pour something into whatever information container we chose. We have the tools to make nothing look like something, to make form so good we easily mistake it for solid value.

And, sometimes, it rubs us the wrong way. We know it looks like information but it’s not. Maybe it’s easier to understand people enraged over Dada, tricked by form. We’re in the Uncanny Valley of Communication just like they were.

This is why the history of art and media matter and why I treasure these rabbit holes I go down. The past has many lessons for the present. Come to think of it, maybe if we pay more attention to the past we’ll have a better present . . . one with not just form but form delivering real meaning and valuable information.

Steven Savage