Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Is Amelia the Poster Girl for Internet Media?
A while back I developed my Three Ages of Communication:
Age of Parchment
Age of Printing Press
Age of Free For All
But then I read Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, first published in 2014 and updated in 2018. He hass five waves of communication:
Invention of Writing
Invention of Alphabet
Invention of Printing Press
Invention of Mass Media
Invention of Internet
The point about Mass Media is that is it a one-way communications medium. But the Internet is two-way. That is big. Very big.
And if you didn’t understand what that meant, now you do with the creation of the Brit Amelia, who’s an AI goth girl with blue hair that carries a Union Jack wherever she goes. The joke is that Amelia was created in a gubmint attempt to suppress WrongThink. And then a guy creataed Amelia on AI to make the opposite point, the populist nationalist notion of Good Old Britain for the Britons.
The point is that Amelia could never have appeared in the Mass Media Age, because the whole point of Mass Media is that only the ruling class and its bribed apologists — or just obedient servants — in the media get to tell the story.
Scott McKay at The American Spectator is musing about all this today. And he makes a useful point. You don’t need a big media infrastructure to produce Amelia, like we saw in the Age of Hollywood and the Age of Network TV.
You don’t need to cast anyone to play Amelia. She’s going to look fairly consistent in iteration after iteration, because AI can do that and because the people participating in moving that meme will prompt it to do that. She is, in part, an AI viral-media answer for what oral tales did for Robin Hood — a powerful folklore meme personifying an idea that resonates with large swaths of people.
YES! And when you think about this, our new media age is the first time since women passed down fairy tales from mother to daughter that ordinary people have had a chance to participate in media. Because with AI anyone can do it.
Yep, right now everyone who is anyone is wringing their hands about how nobody will have a job in five years, because AI. Maybe so.
But meanwhile ordinary people can create their own stories on the Internet and spread them around on social media. And this is the first time since whenever when this has been possible.
Of course, it all may go wrong. And maybe everyone will still have a job in the AI age.
Because, as of right now, nobody has a clue what will happen.
| perm | 02/14/26 4:06 am ET | comments |
What's Next?
Here’s an AI guy that says your job is gone already, because AI has already made lawyers and programmers obsolete.
Here’s Veronique de Rugy that thinks that Congress may actually do something about entitlements when they run out of money in 2030. Not.
Here’s Edward Ring wondering whether the Dems will choose Newsom the moderate or Mamdani the extremist in 2028.
I think that the real “tell” is that Democrats all over the US are going all the way for tax increases, whether it’s California and its wealth tax on billionaires, or Gov. Spanberger in Virginia, or the Democratic establishment in Washington trying to push through an unconstitutional income tax.
This is not that hard. The only thing that matters to politicians is to pass new laws to gift their supporters. And these days that means government employees and NGO operators. Not to mention Somali pirates.
You could say that the Republican party doesn’t care about government employees. But it does care about not messing with Social Security and the Healthcare Industrial Complex.
You can see Trump tweaking this or that. There’s a “tell” there too. He daren’t go for the gold. And I’ll bet that when Democrats get together for a brewski they dream together about Republicans making the fatal error to, e.g., transform Social Security into a real savings program, and how grandpas and grandmoms would be out in the cold. I can’t imagine the Narrative that they would all be reciting in unison. It would make Schumer’s Jim Crow 2.0 seem like chit-chat.
The AI guy, software guy Matt Shumer, is the scariest. He says the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic are mindblowing.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing.
Yeah. Read the whole thing.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
Imagine a lawyer not needing any lawyer assistants. Or an executive not needing creative advice.
A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe. That AI can handle the grunt work but can’t replace human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I’m not sure I believe it anymore.
The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one.
Hey, I know! “AI: design me a nuclear plant that can power the biggest server farm in the world.”
But here’s what I want to know. Before the Industrial Revolution government was not all that powerful. Then, not later than the 20th century with oil and autos and mass production and mass media it learned to control everything (and made a complete hash of it). Is AI going to make government even more powerful, or will it create ways for humans to dodge and weave around the politicians and the administrators and the activists and the intelligence community?
The simple answer is that we don’t know.
But the guy says that the corporate Thing right now is to say that all layoffs are due to AI.
Politicians and activists: what do you think about that?
| perm | 02/13/26 3:37 am ET | comments |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Critical Race Theory creates more racial tensions, not less.
Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
An Analysis of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning
