[PREVIEW] Episode 556: Muskanomics

**Quinn Slobodian** (0:00)
Well, if you downgrade it slightly from robots to agents, which is of course all the discussion now, like what Liz was saying about the SpaceX prospectus is that it's this dream-weaving fantasy document. But it is interesting to ask of it, what could make this more realistic? And one of the things that Ben has been talking about, maybe he can pick up on it, which I find really interesting, is like we're kind of working with a bit of an outdated idea of what social media looks like. Like we still have this Web2 idea that social media, in other words, the inputs for that vertically integrated innovation engine that SpaceX is, will be real live humans posting their thoughts in however much of a repetitive or mimetic way. But maybe, Ben, do you want to say something about that? I thought it's been really interesting how you've been riffing on the agent as input producer.

**Ben Tarnoff** (1:00)
Yeah. I mean, I think you can see this dynamic very clearly in the case of the transformation of Twitter into X, because I think those of us who were observing that in real time, could probably have predicted that Musk would turn it into a megaphone for his own worldview. That wasn't hard to anticipate. What I think was much harder to anticipate, at least for me, was how much Twitter would become a playground for artificial intelligence. I mean, you go on it now and so many of people's interactions are with Grok, either in their own tab, talking to Grok directly or by tagging Grok into their threads. This serves Musk's ideological purposes very well, because Grok of course has been instructed, particularly through the post-training pipeline, to echo Musk's own right-wing viewpoints. So it is propagandizing people in this mechanized way, which is the equivalent of taking his ideology factory and pulling out all of the inefficient humans and putting in Grok. Like Grok will be up at 3 AM and give you an insane conspiracy theory about white genocide.
But I think more broadly, it shifts what the paradigm of social media is really about and has been about since its inception in the 2000s, in the Web 2 era, where now the direction of travel is interactions with AI, with agents.
To show that this isn't just purely about Musk, I mean, Zuckerberg has really embraced this concept. Because if you think about Facebook, it's not a hyperscaler. They're not going to make money selling compute workloads to companies. Their user base is social networks, like Facebook and Instagram. Now, I see this all the time on Instagram in particular. There are a lot of these synthetic influencers, like AI-generated pictures. Zuckerberg himself is promoting these AI companions and has talked about how Americans have fewer friends than they did in the past. So there's actually demand for more friends that's not being met through our normal social lives. Therefore, AI companions can help meet that need. I really think that's where social media will go, that it will become increasingly synthetic in the coming years.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:31)
It's interesting to think about it in those terms because, I don't know, to me, like talking to an AI, which I've done, I mean, Liz and Yung Chomsky have both been present.
I've made love to Grok on the show before, attempted to have verbal sexual relations, which in the context of AI is making love to it. It was male sexy voice, right? No, it was female and male, but also you're not thinking about it right. I'm just having sex with the computer. Male or female, it doesn't matter. It's like people have sex with animals. They don't check what fucking shit they got.