Ep 241 - The Disempowering Politics of 'Inevitability' Part 1: Data Centers and LLM as 'The Future'

**Adam Johnson** (0:03)
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit. I'm Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:15)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:16)
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**Adam Johnson** (0:52)
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**Nima Shirazi** (1:04)
The age of automation is now. Here's how to future proof yourself. Advised NPR in 2021
Technologists say smarter than humans AI will likely be here by 2030 Announced the New York Times in 2024 AI Godfather predicts another revolution in the tech in the next five years. Trumpeted The Guardian in 2025

**Adam Johnson** (1:29)
In recent years, we've been inundated with reports insisting that so-called AI and related technologies will upend or already are upending every element of society from labor to education to health care.
As a result, we've been told we need to adapt to this changing world. This might mean job retraining, higher utility bills, different school curricula or data centers in our neighborhoods. Sure, there might be some growing pain, some disruption or job displacement, the logic goes, but it's all in the name of modernization and progress and is above all inevitable.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:01)
But whose vision of progress is this?
Why are we all expected to adjust our lives around it? Why does our media routinely present these multi-trillion dollar investments as inevitable rather than the collective sum of human choices, namely choices made by elites behind closed doors? And why must we accept that this extraordinarily wasteful, profoundly inequitable, and already unpopular version of the future is inevitable? Just because consulting firms like McKinsey, AI CEOs like Sam Altman, and the media channels in lockstep with them say so.

**Adam Johnson** (2:40)
On today's episode, part one of a two-part series on manufactured inevitability, we'll examine the tactic of convincing the public that some capital-friendly shifts, whether a new trade agreement, massive suppression of wages, new surveillance architecture, or plagiarism-fueled carbon-intensive new technology, is simply going to happen whether we like it or not. And it's our job not to challenge or question the moral or social utility of this change, but to simply accept it as inevitable, like one would an asteroid careening towards Earth. We'll dissect how this inevitability narrative gets seeded, promoted, asserted and reinforced, examine what ideological work is done by it, and discuss how activists and water and land protectors refuse to submit to a future for which they had no democratic say in shaping.

**Nima Shirazi** (3:24)
Later on the show, we'll be joined by Amy Woodson Bolton, professor of British and Irish history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.

**Amy Woodson Bolton** (3:33)
When we think about what industrial capitalism means as it emerged, and we could debate when it started, but in many ways it built on the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, and that then gave the capital and the labor and the raw materials into the industrial revolution. And then in the 19th century, you see the whole fields, and I'm really thinking here of economics and anthropology, but this became pervasive across many different fields that really understood progress as a law of, I was going to say nature, but it's this really interesting law of sociocultural evolution, very much based on Darwin's concept of evolution, but understood as teleological, right? Like understood as evolution that leads somewhere.

**Adam Johnson** (4:24)
This episode is a, we'll say it's a spiritual successor to episode 92, The Responsibility Erasing Catchall of Automation, which also dealt with this teleology narrative that there's some future that's inevitable, and we're all kind of racing towards it because of some kind of technium, providentialism we'll call it. We'll call it right-wing providentialism, that there's this future we're all kind of careening to, and it's our job to either get out of the way of this progress and this future.

**Nima Shirazi** (4:50)
Or ride it.

**Adam Johnson** (4:51)
Or ride it and get on board, or even better, get profit off of it, right? Get in on the action. It's a PR trope that one sees commonly in very aggressive marketing tactics. Specifically, infomercials use this tactic a lot.