The Venn Diagram of Ai and Crypto boosters is damn near a perfect circle
This is something I've held in the back of my head but didn't seriously give it a whole lot of thought until a close friend of mine brought it up, causing this to pop to the forefront of my brain. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to nod along in unison.
As the title says: It really does feel like the very same people who are pushing AI down our throats now and telling us we're gonna like it, are the very same people trying to shame us/invoke FOMO when crypto was huge some years ago.
The mannerisms feel the same, even more so today than ever. Back when crypto was taking off, those of us critical of it or who didn't want anything to do with it got tarred and feathered and told we're Not Gonna Make It (or, as they liked to say, NGMI), seemingly to invoke the feeling of FOMO so we'd give in to our impulses and buy into crypto so they could get that much richer (like the big MLM-shaped bullshit industry that it is).
With AI boosters, you've got them singing a similar song, except this ridiculous thinking has penetrated even deeper and is pervasive in all sorts of tech businesses, even ones that don't benefit from AI: If you even so much as peacefully decline to use AI, the AI boosters act like you've committed a grave offense, like they baked you a cake and you had the audacity to tell them it's a shitty cake and fuck you for making it.
You see the very same people who just yesteryear were going all-in on crypto now going all-in on AI. It also kind of tracks because generative AI is a huge middle finger toward artists, almost like another technology that these asshats were pushing: NFTs.
Another parallel: Buying up everything in pursuit of more money. Back during the crypto craze, you had crypto-heads going and buying up all the graphics cards and leaving damn near none for people like you or me. They'd post on twitter, bragging about having bought out the entire stock of cards at their local Micro Center. Prices skyrocketed, retailers fattened their wallets, and people who just wanted to game got left in the cold.
But hey! At least that was only graphics cards. We're in the midst of these asshats buying up everything again, except now they're running big companies, and they're sucking down EVERYTHING. RAM? Yep. GPUs? Yep. SSDs. Sure. Fucking spinning hard drives?! Yeah, nothing is sacred right now. They're showing up to the proverbial thanksgiving dinner and leaving nothing for anyone else. All because they need to feed their ever-hungry slop-o-tron more power in hopes that it'll give them infinite money.
Once again, people like you or me? Yeah, fuck you, got mine. Better hope your computing devices don't die.
Except this time, it's much, much worse. When graphics cards were unobtainium, at least we could fall back on game consoles if we wanted to game. That isn't even an option anymore. You know how much a base PS5 costs right now? $650. Without a disc drive. That console used to cost $400. Sigh.
Even still, if you have the audacity to take issue with any of this? "If you don't get with it, you're gonna get left behind, bro."
I'm so tired, boss.