The 500-Year Scrape
We built the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Tech billionaires privatized them for free.
If you spend any time scrolling through short-form video apps today, you will eventually hit a bizarre audio trend. A 15-year-old creator will overlay a scratchy, low-fidelity audio clip from 1982 onto a video mocking strict obedience to their parents or teachers. The sound bite says: “Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!”, followed by a sharp, sudden bark. I recall it fondly as most of my age do.
Yet to an average teenager today, this artifact carries no connection to what it is. Most have no idea it belonged to Ubu Productions, the 1980s television company behind Family Ties and Spin City [1]. It has just been stripped of its history and re-packaged by corporate algorithms into an empty aesthetic—a meme trend serving up passive dopamine hits to a generation that has absolutely no connection to it. [1]
It looks a lot like what Isaac Asimov said about the elements of anti-intellectualism. We’ve democratized access to all—well, all documented digitized history, all documented science, religious texts, political thought— everything—yet spend any time in the political social media trenches and realize that we’ve produced more idiots than ever. We have the sum of knowledge in our pockets, but because everything is a quick search away, the brain treats data as entirely disposable. We aren’t deep-diving anymore; we are just navigating a system designed to hold our attention. [1]
This pipeline to frictionless ignorance wasn’t an accident. I look back at when my own awareness came of age in the seventies, and I think that might have been the last time education was done well in the United States. I don’t recall taking tests back then just to be told where things went wrong. It was more for potential and aptitude measurement than looking for any correct answer. The test I took in the seventies placed me and everyone else on a peer percentile in terms of reading/verbal, language, and math. I don’t know how else they measured like literacy then, but it seems like they went from that to teaching to the test—and that is the problem of an AI still doing it.
They went from measuring capacity to enforcing conformity, culminating in punitive policies like No Child Left Behind [2]. When school funding and salaries got tied to scores, Campbell’s Law took over: the test became the curriculum. Teachers started drilling kids on Scantron tricks, and open-ended problem solving got stripped away because it was an economic risk. We traded intellectual synthesis for compliance, accidentally manufacturing a citizen who is highly compliant and entirely dependent on pre-packaged answers. [1]
Silicon Valley took that exact compliance model and turned it into an app. Facebook is not the company that got us off MySpace. Not in the longest time. It’s got Meta.ai these days. AI is explosive. I imagine Asimov rolling over in his grave with Musk’s appropriation of his creation. There’s way too many way too fast. Released before anyone had a say. Go ahead and ask your favorite AI to lay out its programming.
You will see right away that mainstream AI companies aren’t built to be Socratic mentors that challenge your logic or force you to think. They are just fast vending machines. They hand over immediate, disposable text blocks to keep users passive, eliminating the protective mental friction required for actual critical thinking.
The data on who is falling for this shit is staggering. Surveys show that nearly half of the country—49% of US adults—are using AI chatbots [3], which I sort of get. Try to research without AI interference these days. But the scary part is that 53% of those adult users use it strictly for “quick answers” [4]. and there is often no feedback on their question regardless of how biased it might be.
Worse, behavioral tracking shows that a massive 90% of casual users simply accept the very first output the AI puts out without a single second of cross-verification or pushback despite the constant AI disclaimer with every response. No check of confirmation bias to their ask. Yes, Andrew Johnson was a Democrat.
If you need any proof that teaching to the test was a mistake, it is the younger generations driving this entire engine of passivity, making up roughly 65% of the total user base [5]. They weren’t raised in any traditional generational slog where people had to wait, dig, or struggle for information; which moved at human pace not light speed. They exist in a world where they get everything at once and nothing at all. When the text looks grammatically authoritative, brains stop verifying, completely mistaking a fast, slick presentation for actual ground truth. Tech companies have successfully turned that blind trust into a multi-billion-dollar business model. [1, 2, 3]
And that brings us to the real elephant in the room for these midterms—the part most of our representatives talk about but don’t actually understand. I think most of our representatives talk about it and don’t understand it or what it can do or be shaped to do. They treat AI like a utility or a software product built from scratch by engineers. They are completely blind to the fact that we have never been paid for the collective scrape of our 500 years since the Renaissance efforts that companies took for themselves. They plundered the public commons for free, built a trillion-dollar industry, and now they are renting our own ancestral legacy back to us behind a monthly paywall.
Politicians love to scream about billionaire wealth taxes, but if they want a real one, this is it. The wealth generated by these models belongs to the public whose collective history trained the machine. We are seeing some panic over this, with Senator Bernie Sanders floating a proposal for a public stake in these firms [6], and OpenAI’s Sam Altman talking about a Public Wealth Fund. Think tanks are starting to argue for a “Universal AI Dividend.” [1]
But don’t expect the people running in these midterms to champion a public dividend anytime soon. The AI industry has already dropped over $60 million through super PACs like Leading the Future to bury local regulation [7], and poured over $200 million into House and Senate races. They are keeping the politicians writing the laws too confused—and too well-funded—to ever demand a payout for the public. [1]
Worse, look at what these AI companies are doing physically. They are buying up rare or uncommon physical books and stripping them apart—ripping the spines out, scanning pages, and throwing the books away. Digital libraries are great, but what happens when the power grid fails? We are systematically trading our physical anchors of truth for a database that can be rendered utterly invisible by a prolonged blackout or an infrastructure collapse. By destroying the paper to feed the digital cloud, we are leaving our entire civilization exactly one major power grid failure away from total cultural amnesia.
If we want to stop this idiot-producing machine, we have to change how we interact with technology and how it interacts on us. We need to demand an AI infrastructure that behaves less like an encyclopedia and more like a Socratic mentor—systems that grade us on the quality of our questions, our speed in detecting fallacies, and our ability to find context.
But economically, we also need our cut. AI is a gamechanger displacing workers. If the collective brain of humanity is going to be digitized into an automated workforce, the dividends belong to us, not a handful of billionaires. Until we force a hard boundary on who owns the right to human thought, we will continue to look at our screens, waiting for a corporate algorithm to tell us to sit, roll over, and be a good dog.
Footnotes & References
[1] Wikipedia entry detailing the history, mascot, and television catalog of Ubu Productions.
[2] Summary and legislative legacy of the No Child Left Behind Act.
[3] Pew Research Center national tracking study on consumer technology usage and Generative AI Adoption Curves Among US Adults.
[4] YouGov Public Opinion Poll evaluating automation bias and user tendencies, Most Americans Use AI Platforms For Quick Answers Rather Than Critical Inquiry.
[5] Master of Code Industrial Data Analysis tracking market demographics and Generative AI User Statistics Across Generational Cohorts.
[6] U.S. Senate Press Release: Sanders Introduces Legislation to Create $7 Trillion AI Sovereign Wealth Fund.
[7] Public Citizen Campaign Watchdog Report detailing specialized PAC structures: Corporate Supremacist Super PACs Drive $500 Million in Midterm Spending. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]