Perpetuating more of this, more of that.

An endless cycle, always being added to by and of the things that sometimes espouse pausing of the cycle if only to help stand out from the very cycle we are all caught in and trying to work better with, for and against to keep livelihoods running, bills paid and some form of living achieved that can or could benefit society.

We make these systems and processes and give them, directly and indirectly, meaning, justification and reason.

Meaning to be important.

Justification to show effort.

Reason to justify meaning.

What’s it all for?

Who really benefits?

Take this course, read this opinion, view this picture that shows an injustice.

Do nothing really beyond the press of ‘Like’, maybe even comment to show some understanding.

Rise above the crowd. Stand out from it. Achieve more, succeed more, do more.

But if all of the crowd does that, is the message any clearer? Who is and what is left to justify the meaning, the reason?

Faith is therefore needed to get the machine up and running. However, once it is running then that faith can be increasingly routine. It doesn’t actually require much of a commitment – either of time or of mental energies – on the part of citizens for it to keep going. It becomes a reflex. The machinery of the state proves its credibility as an independent entity by the fact that we don’t have to think about it for it to exist. It starts to run itself.

This process helps create the conditions for economic growth by making political life reliable, while also granting individuals the time and space to develop their talents and pursue their own goals. However, that is not enough on its own. Sustained growth depends on non-state enterprises replicating some of the credibility and reliability of the state. In other words, it needs corporate entities that can act as artificial persons too, to ensure that long-term investment, economies of scale and entrepreneurial initiative can be combined in one institutional form.⁵

[...]

Corporations can and do fail as well, even the biggest ones. Corruption remains a problem. Complacency does too. Human beings can always find ways to screw things up. And if they don’t, states and corporations can always find ways to disregard the interests of the human beings that built them.

Bubbles in bubbles. Self-fulfilling algorithms, organisations, systems, prophecies running and guiding the show, following the program, just doing their job.

Achieving for their owners what their owners feel is important to success, gaining attention, showing importance for their own business, its aims, its objectives, its strategy, its monetary profit.

A loop. A feedback loop.

The very wheels of politics and industry need to change, certainly the endless taking of a steadily depleting set of planetary resources seems very much to be a foundation that binds the economy and helps support and justify short-term politics in a self-made system that needs growth to mean something, to be a reason to justify itself.

Climate change threatens untold harm – including risks of starvation, mass displacement and the many other social miseries that scarcity can bring – unless a way can be found to curb the consumption of fossil fuels. To do this we are told we must change our behaviour, yet why should we change our behaviour if the organisations that take large-scale decisions for us don't change theirs? Sometimes the politics of climate change looks like a waiting game that might eventually turn into a dance of death: we are waiting for states and corporations to signal that they take the threat seriously; meanwhile they are waiting for us – voters and consumers – to signal that we take it seriously. But why should we take it seriously if they don’t? And why should they take it seriously if we don’t? It’s a Malthusian trap – the system requires behaviour from its members to ensure their survival that the system cannot incentivise.

[…]

As they [the smart machines] provide the capacity to rescue us from the unsustainable demands of the states and corporations we have built, who will rescue us from their insatiable demands? What if AI turns out to be another form of existence that can’t stay within its reproductive limits? We might hope that Al will be smart enough to pull itself back from the brink. But our intelligence wasn't enough to teach us restraint. It took a higher power. And so the cycle goes on.

Endless growth, which eventually runs out of space, but efficiencies get made so there’s a bit more room, a bit more reason, meaning and justification for a bit more growth.

Still...

It seems entirely possible that online advertising is a giant racket. Part of the problem is that the companies that provide the services are also the source of the data about their effective-ness. It is easy to assume that all this operates at the cutting edge of Al, with the wisdom of crowds being used to micro-target individuals with all the things they didn't know they were looking for. Certainly that's the hype. But when Google both ranks searches and charges for advertising relative to those rankings, it can be hard for anyone on the outside to know what's worth paying for.

If there is a black box here, it's not just inside the algorithm that runs the online advertising bidding wars; it's the inner workings of the company too. It is striking that some of the fastest-growing companies in history, whose rhetoric portrays them as being at the frontiers of knowledge transfer and innovation, are effectively in the advertising business. Advertising is meant to be an add-on to core economic activity - it can change the biggest corporate fortunes, but it should not entirely account for them. To build a whole economy around it looks like another giant bubble waiting to burst.