If you want a picture of the future, should you use a prompt to generate a boot stamping on a human face forever?
Generative artificial intelligence has, in many ways, become indelibly linked to the second Trump administration and the reactionary groups associated with it. Musk and his subordinates want to (and are already using) large language models (LLMs) to mess around with some of the most sensitive computer systems in the federal government. Government agencies themselves are being gutted with the aim of replacing bureaucracy with unproven AI management systems. But that is not all.
The Trump administration has invested heavily in backing US AI companies and denying access to high-end computer chips to China. Belief in the inevitable and looming rise of an artificial general intelligence is not uncommon among Trump tech backers. Trump’s AI policy centers in particular the creation of “AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” There is a widespread belief among private sector Trump backers that AI will negate the need to maintain any social or industrial infrastructure at all. What, if anything, does all of this have in common?
Perhaps the most telling AI usage, however, is seemingly less consequential. If you’re still on the network formerly known as Twitter, it’s rare to scroll that far without seeing an kitschy AI-generated image of some great triumph to come (or some great civilization lost). AI-generated memes — such as those generated to honor the martyred squirrel Peanut — immediately become cryptocurrency memecoins. While it is true that AI factors into political power struggles and more conventional ideological agendas, there is something more fundamental revealed here. Generative AI is, much more than AI of the past, a technology of the self.
Intrusive thoughts as a service
Social media is, in 2025, a mature technology. It has been — and still is — disruptive because it removes any barrier between private thoughts and the external world. Because of social media, we now have an outlet for every minor or major thought, feeling, or emotion that comes to our minds. No matter how silly, offensive, or vulgar. Social media power users are now accustomed to being involuntarily treated to the interior monologues of mentally disordered individuals broadcast for all to see. At times this spectacle feels like a violation, the electronic equivalent of a man opening his trenchcoat and flashing us on the train.
A central figure on social media — though by no means original to it — is the so-called “lolcow.” A lolcow is a bizarre and turbulent individual with “unwarranted self-importance,” “unsettling personal secrets,” “an obsessive interest,” and the inability to ignore criticism. The lolcow is “milked” for outrageous reactions, a high-tech derivative of Shakespearean bear-baiting. However, the lolcow can perversely enjoy the hazing.
A lolcow cannot take criticism lying down…lolcows are very diligent in responding to criticisms, leaving no troll unanswered. Their responses are also rarely rational or respectful, often worse than their tormentors in terms of meanness, logical fallacies, and outright insanity…lolcows frequently have persecution complexes and a love of attention that..implies they thrive on [harassment]. However, in the same way, their followers thrive on their content, creating an interdependent relationship.
The lolcow is an extreme dramatization of how social media encourages us to compulsively share our mental debris, surveil and stalk other users, and react dysfunctionally to the predictable consequences of our own chaotic thoughts going viral. But most importantly the lolcow illustrates the brutal chasm between our inner world and the way others perceive its outer expression.
I may feel inside that my posts are sober, morally serious, and compelling. But I cannot convey the inner emotions, imagery, and sensations that spawned them to anyone else. All they see is a pathetic stream of text that reminds them of the grandiose ramblings of anime villains. Most of our thoughts are private to us because we have some inkling of how unreliable we are as judges of how well they will look to less sympathetic audiences.
But what if there were a way to break down that final barrier between our inner world and the outside? And to remove the self-constraint that keeps our deepest dreams trapped in our minds? There is always an app for everything, and this is no exception.
The deepest possible spiritual dimension
In Alfred Kubin’s 1908 dystopian novel The Other Side, the narrator is invited by an old friend to emigrate to a “dream kingdom” his friend built after suddenly coming into money. This self-governing, internally sealed paradise (located somewhere in Asia) is for those who do not fit into modern society and is built around their needs. The old friend has become the dictator of the kingdom, and has need of the protagonist to work as an artist for a local publication. The novel begins with a visit from the dictator’s emissary bearing the invitation.
The dictator’s emissary states that the kingdom’s inhabitants — unhappy with modern civilization — have created a place in which life acquires “the deepest possible spiritual dimension.” They live around a slapdash hodgepodge of old buildings, classic artworks, antiques, relics, and generally anything that rusts or has cobwebs (no matter how mundane). Anything that is old is welcomed, progress is shunned. The narrator fails to realize the deeply ominous implications, in part because we have knowledge about genre conventions that 1908 readers did not.
What makes the dream kingdom so…well…spiritual is that the inhabitants live or even exist in dreams. Nothing, the emissary states, can disturb their dreaming and the world is to be raw material for the dreamers to craft to their liking. Without spoiling the novel, it is this very property of the dream kingdom that guarantees its doom. The Other Side was prescient about many unpleasant things — from the catastrophic fall of civilized Europe to postmodern cults like Aum Shinrikyo. It has, unfortunately, also proven prescient about the love affair between reactionaries and the current generation of AI.
Why would someone be drawn to such a place, though? HP Lovecraft said it best:
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and rustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
Lovecraft goes on to observe that “there will always be a small percentage of persons” with a “burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and real.” That desire is the impetus for great works of art. But it is also the driver of many illiberal systems of belief.
Delusion of kings
I believe the broad panopoly of AI we have today is attractive to the illiberal community precisely because it breaks down the wall between our dreams and external reality. Some degree of assumption of the self as sealed, of the mind as separate from the world, is necessary for a democratic society. If liberalism is a way of balancing competing interests and politics as a whole a challenge of aggregating conflicting preferences, we must first believe that other people exist and are capable of thinking differently from us. The obdurate fact that getting others to do what we want is difficult is a basic democratic load-bearing assumption.
But what if we could just do away with all of that? Agent O’Brien of 1984 boasts to the supine Winston Smith that the Party controls reality itself, that the past and the future can be whatever the Party wants it to be. While totalitarian in context, it is also merely a restatement of an age-old notion of power. A privilege of being king is that you do not have to acknowledge that there is an external world that will still exist after you die. Everything is merely an extension of your self-consciousness, and what you imagine becomes the law of the land.
It is not so much “I am the state” as “I am the world.” The consequences of a king’s madness may eventually bring unpleasant reality to his doorstep — the peasants revolt, the French invade, the praetorian guard betray — but until that day dawns his mind might as well be the world. After all, who is to say that it is not? To this master of the universe, other people become merely shadows of the self. They are deprived of any autonomous motivations, thoughts, and desires. If they have any material content, it is as lifeless dolls he can dress up and play around with for his amusement. Other people are, for the most part, projections of his ever-expanding mental empire.
His world is lonely — there are no other truly real people in it — but he is nonetheless spared from the burden of having to compromise with reality. This is a supreme form of privilege, and it has motivated power-seekers for thousands of years. Generative AI grants that privilege — or at least a simulacra of it — to the commoner as well.
With prompting, what we dream takes shape in the world without much information loss. And it will only improve over time at making our dreams manifest. One does not need much skill to use it because most of our dreams are petty, banal, kitschy, vulgar, and crude. If all it must do is simply learn to play the role we desire it to, it is more than capable of satisfying the expectation. Unlike Adolf Hitler, one not even learn how to draw or paint to make embarrassing reflections of what we find beautiful. Therefore, the AI becomes the reactionary symbol not because it will do what it is told…but rather because it will give life to what we dream of.
Colonel Urchagin’s sanctuary
This is not to say that generative AI lacks instrumental uses in automating labor, consolidating power, or doing any number of other more practical things. But it is not — to the Trumper — a technology of instrumental rationality. Even if it can be used for instrumentally rational purposes. Instrumental rationality as seen by the economist or engineer is about coping with the reality of constraints. Constraints on material resources, constraints on computational processing, constraints on time, and most importantly constraints on the solver itself.
Constraints — like knowledge, goals, or admission of external reality — are barriers to action. If action is valued for its own sake regardless of its consequences, then constraints will be ignored. AI will not be used in this scheme as a method of constrained optimization, but rather as a system of fantasy generation and delusion enforcement. Inasmuch as it wields power, it does so as a cyborg commissar walking up and down the ranks ensuring that ideological diktat is followed and assumptions are not questioned. Henry Farrell doubts this will work out in the long run.
But if one dreams of conquering the stars, what does that matter? Towards the end of the late Soviet pastiche Omon Ra, the young protagonist hears a disturbing lecture from the Strangelove-like Colonel Urchagin. The USSR lost to the West in the space race, and much of what the public is told are bald lies. However, Urchagin sees the situation somewhat differently:
Know this..even though nobody really has a soul, of course, still every soul is an entire universe. This is the dialectics of being. And while there is at least one soul where our way is alive and victorious, this way will not perish. For there shall exist an entire universe, and the center of this universe shall be this…”
Like so many other monologues from the Colonel, this is profound gibberish. Omon Ra — like many Viktor Pelevin novels — is about the rise of a new form of collective unreality. Pelevin grew up as the Soviet Union fell and the gangster fantasyland of new Russia emerged to replace it. There is much cultural context American readers miss. But the notion of a soul as the entire universe symbolizes much of what AI will be to the movement loosely aligned around Trump.
The Trump presidency is a giant bubble propelled by collective fantasy. Letting 19-year olds connected to cybercrime communities — in contravention of established software engineering and safety practices — inside critical government systems is just one part of the irrationality behind the bubble. We don’t have much detailed reporting yet on how LLMs and similar tools are being used, but it is unlikely to be materially different or significantly more responsible.
We are in Colonel Urchagin’s inner sanctum now, and the unstoppable force of American technological innovation has provided him with the means to show us every last detail of the interior decoration.