There’s a famous Vorlon saying “The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote” and it is a fun sounding aphorism, but it is also a falsehood, both in context in its moment in Babylon 5 and in general.
Spoilers for Babylon 5: the greater context of the show is a proxy war between the “elder races” the Vorlons and the Shadows using many of the “younger races” as pawns in that game. A core moral arc of the show is about directly refuting this one statement. It’s about proving that just because “giants” like the Vorlons and Shadows see everyone else as pebbles (or more generously, ants or pawns), their opinions still matter and their capabilities together are more powerful than the “avalanche of inevitability” designed by their “superiors”.
I’ve been thinking about Cory Doctorow’s too clever terms “enshittification” and more recently “Reverse Centaur”. These are evocative terms. Like any good marketing effort they do a lot to raise awareness for the problems that they name. But the growing worry and concern, certainly from me but I’m not alone, is that these names are accidentally destructive to conversations more than they are helpful to them. More people are aware of these problems, but fewer people seem to understand that these are human-manufactured problems with potential solutions that people could build. These terms become their own accidental fuel into making these problems seem like “avalanches of inevitability” that you have to confront to even have the real conversations behind why those terms exist. I think there is also an aspect to it that in cleverly naming these things they seem like “new problems” rather than better names for old problems. (“Enshittification” is related to “good old” greed and corruption, just a specific pattern of it. “Reverse Centaur” is related to the problem that Marx awkwardly named “alienation of the worker” and Unions and others have struggled for years to find better names for, even if it is a narrower more “modern” specific variant of that problem.)
I’m mostly sure this isn’t the intent of Cory Doctorow in these naming choices. The original essay about “enshittification” made a lot of good points about the follow up questions like “why is capitalism always like this?” and “what can we do about it?” But somewhere along the (train of thought) line “enshittification” starts to sound like an inevitable “natural law” and not a problem with possible solutions. “That’s just enshittification for you” becomes a “thought terminating cliche” in a “guess we can’t do anything about it” way. Even Cory Doctorow in later essays hasn’t seemed entirely immune to some of that “inevitability” thinking despite starting the conversation with good intentions to discuss a problem with capitalism that could use better solutions and hoping to start a dialog on that. Somewhere after naming it, it seems to have stopped feeling like a solvable problem and started sounding like an avalanche and that it was too late for the pebbles to vote.
I’m afraid this same “naming the thing makes the thing sound inevitable” process is happening even faster with the way people are talking about Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaur” book. To be unfair to Cory Doctorow, I think he maybe is a bit more on the “it’s inevitable” side of the “AI” fence to begin with. Though the parts of the book that I’ve read are far more nuanced than that.
The Vorlons and Shadows that are large companies that have lost sight of humanity and see us as pawns, ants, or pebbles are telling us in this moment that “AI” is an inevitability. They want everyone to believe that “Reverse Centaurs” are the only possible future of the economy and they don’t care what the pebbles think.
Someone has already dismissed some of my concerns, and grief, in my current job search with “have you read Cory Doctorow’s new book? I’ve heard it is full of coping strategies”, presumably not having read the book themselves and certainly not interested in having in a harder conversation about what “Reverse Centaur” even means or why it is a problem or how we might solve it.
It’s not an inevitability. It is still a human-made problem with possible human-made solutions. The struggle against it is real. The struggle against it is valid.
Some semi-related tabs I want to close, so I’m mentioning them here (not as endorsement, just that I need to stop thinking about them and maybe some others could read them, too):