Monologue: Analyslop And The Death of Critical Thinking

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Speaker 1: Zoe Media. Hello one, Welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, led Zitron. Now this week's monologue is about something I also just through up in my newsletter, A new term I came up with called analoslav. Now analoslov is when somebody writes a long, specious, but authoritative sounding piece of writing with few facts are actual statements with the intention of it being read as thorough analysis, research and analysis. Indeed, now this week, alleged research group Cittrini Research, not to be confused with Andrew left Citron Research all well me put out a truly awful piece of writing called the twenty twenty eight Global Intelligence Crisis, which is this slop filled scare fiction written and framed with the authority of deeply founded analysis, so much so that it caused the global cell off and stocks. And I must be clear if you took this seriously, if you listen to this on I don't know you had it read out by LM notebook, or you read it and you kind of furwed your brow and like this, this is really provocative. You're a mark. You are being conned, You're in the process of being conned. If you haven't already been now this piece. If you haven't read it, please do go and read. It will be linked in the notes my annotated version. Those of you in YouTube won't get the link. Just go to my Blue Sky I swear to god it's there. It spends seven thousand words telling the dire tale of what would happen if AI made an indeterminately large amount of white collar workers redundant. Now you read this seven thousand boring, fucking word long piece, it isn't clear what AI exactly does, who makes the AI, how the AI works, really anything about it, just that it replaces people and then bad stuff happens. Citrini insists that this isn't bare porn or AI doomer fan fiction, but that's exactly what it is. Mediocre analyslot framed in the trappings of analysis, sold on a subset with researching the title specifically written and successfully spooking and ingratiating anyone involved in the financial markets who wants to be scared of this stuff. Its goal is to convince you that AI non specifically is scary, that your current stocks are bad, and that AI stocks unclear which ones those are, by the way, are the future also find out more for nine hundred and ninety nine dollars a year. I tried seventy bucks, and my shit's way better than this fuck when Now look, look, okay, let me give you an example. I'm going to do a voice. It should have been clearer all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to ten thousand white collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than am economic panacea. Now, he writes economic correctly, I just fucked up saying it. Now. The goal of a paragraph like this is for you to say, Wow, that's what GPUs are doing. Now, they're doing that today. It isn't. Of course, the majority of CEOs report little or no return on investment from AI, with a study of six thousand CEOs across the US, UK, Germany and Australia finding that more than eighty percent detected no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity. Nevertheless, you read GPU and North Dakota and you think, wow, that's the place I know, and I know that GPU's power AI. Now I'm a curious little critter, so I know a GPU cluster in North Dakota Corweeb's won with applied Digital that has debts so severe that loses both companies money even if they have the capacity rented out twenty four to seven. But let's not let facts get in the way of a poorly written story. Now, I don't need to go line by line on this. I'm not going to because I'll end up saying a legally actionable threat of some kind. But I need you to know that most of this piece's arguments come down to magical thinking and utterly empty pros. For example, how do you think that AI takes over the entire economy? And I quote AI capabilities improved, Companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI. AI capabilities improved. That's right, they just get better. Now, I need to discuss anything happening today. Even AI twenty twenty seven had the balls to start making stuff up about open brain or some such bullshit. This piece literally just says stuff, including this particularly egregious lin I'm about to read to you. In late twenty twenty five, agentic coding tools to cold step function jump in capability. A competent developer working with cloud code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid market SaaS product in weeks, not perfectly or with every single edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a five hundred thousand annual renewal started asking the question, what if we just built this ourselves now, quick thing? What annual contract? There are tons of SaaS contracts, though far longer than that. But this is also a complete and not a lie, a ball faced lie. This is not something that claud code can do. The fact that we have major media outlets quoting this piece suggests that those responsible for explaining how things work don't actually bother to do any of the work to find out. And it's both a disgrace and an embarrassment for the tech and business media that these lies continue to be peddled. As it went over in last week's monologue, the entire AI replacing software story is a con It's clear that the markets and an alarming amount of people in the media simply do not know what they are talking about, or are intentionally avoiding thinking about it. The AI replaces software story is literally Anthropic has released a product and now the resulting industry is selling off, such as when it launched a cybersecurity tool that could check for vulnerabilities, a product that's existed in some form for nearly a decade, and this caused to sell off in cybersecurity stocks like CrowdStrike, you know, the one that had a faulty bit of code cause a global cybersecurity incident that lost the fortune five hundred billions and resulted in Delta Airlines having to cancel over twelve hundred flights over a period of several days. There is no rational basis for anything about this selloff other than that off financial media and markets do not appear to understand the very basic things about the stuff they invest in or talk about. Software may seem complex, but especially in these cases, it's really quite simple. Investors are conflating an AI model can spit out code with an AI model can create an entire experience of what we know as software, or is close enough to that we have to start freaking out, which it isn't it obviously isn't. Anyone who build software knows this. Anyone peddling this is just wrong, and it's this replet vibe coding shit. I swear to God. People in the media use it and they just go, Wow, this is the future now or software will be built like this as they fail to build any calm down at come down the software? Why not? You know? I think we really need to think deeply about how. For the second time in a month, the markets in the media have had a miniature shit fit based on blogs that tell lies using fan fiction. As I covered in my annotations of Matt Schumer's all Something Big Is Happening piece, the people that are meant to tell the general public what's happening in the world appear to be falling for ghost stories that confirm their biases or investment strategies, even if said stories are full of half truths and outright lies. I'm despairing a little when I see Matt Schumer on CNN or hear from the head of a p firm about Citrini research. I begin to wonder whether everybody got where they were not through any actual work or knowledge, but by making the right noises. We're in a grifter economy, and the people that should be stopping the grifters are asleep at the fucking wheel.