Nature Always Wins: A.I. Worship and the New Tech Gods
In 1816, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) birthed science fiction during a rainy vacation on Lake Geneva. Inspired by a vision of a man crouched beside the corpse he reanimated, Frankenstein warned of what happens when man tries to play God. Two centuries later, the monsters are real, and they’re called Musk, Altman, and Zuckerberg.
Today’s tech titans, like Frankenstein’s Victor, race to build superintelligent machines in their image: soulless wannabe-gods with devastating reach. Gil Duran, of the Nerd Reich newsletter, connects this to A.I. worship, quoting a billionaire obsessed with “creating God” through algorithms. M.I.T.’s annotated Frankenstein likens Victor’s horror to Oppenheimer’s nuclear regret. We’ve entered a new atomic age, but instead of bombs, it’s information weapons and hacked minds.
As Pulitzer-nominated journalist Carole Cadwalladr warns, this is what a digital coup looks like. A.I. is trained to replace journalists, strip away privacy, and deepen inequality, just as Gaslit Nation has warned since 2018.
What’s the answer? Community. Skill-sharing. Nature. The real world. Jack Welch, once worshipped like Musk is today, gutted G.E. with fear-based leadership. Now he’s a cautionary tale. So will today’s tech gods be.
Mary Shelley saw it coming. “Frightful must it be,” she wrote. We agree. But there’s power in human connection, in rejecting the machine's illusions. Frankenstein’s monster was abandoned. Let’s not abandon each other.
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Show Notes
The song you heard in this week’s episode is “Unspoken Word” by Evrette Allen: https://soundcloud.com/user-726164627/unspoken-word-mix-13/s-GEvlnfQnmh4?si=954f31de09d644948d51a225224bd7ba&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Nerd Reich: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein
After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley’s novel? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein
Astronomers have determined the exact hour that Mary Shelley thought of Frankenstein. https://lithub.com/astronomers-have-determined-the-exact-hour-that-mary-shelley-thought-of-frankenstein/
AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/
Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism? https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism
Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE
Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
Evrette Allen (00:16):
[country music singing.]
Andrea Chalupa (01:29):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. This song you just heard is Unspoken Word by the black female country singer Evrette Allen. It was submitted to us with this creative statement: The song, unspoken word sung in an old school country style explores the power and significance of communication through silence and unexpressed emotions.
(01:52):
I love that. Where more of her work will link to Evrette Allen's socials and her Spotify, so you can discover more of this gorgeous, gorgeous, singer-songwriter and her haunting music. Now for silence. Speaking volumes, obviously there's a lot of folks we would love to put on mute who are wreaking havoc in our lives. We're going to be looking at the Dr. Frankenstein's of today, the AI Overlords and so on. This is going to be a jam packed episode. The richness of the show notes will be available to you, as always on the episode page.
(02:35):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. We begin this week's show with a dark and stormy night.
(02:57):
One rainy spring on Lake Geneva in 1816, a group of friends were stuck inside by the fire trying to pass the time. One of them was the famously hedonistic poet, Lord Byron. Lord Byron challenged his group of friends to a ghost story contest who can come up with this scariest tale. The person that after weeks of trying and getting some creative frustration who finally stepped up in an extraordinarily historic way, not just winning this contest, but launching an all new genre, was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was soon to marry the great romantic poet, Percy Shelley, who was also there.
(03:45):
And Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, she's mostly known as Mary Shelley. Let's just get to that. But she's more than Mary Shelley. She herself is an extraordinary human being. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great philosopher and feminist thinker whose writings would go on to shape liberation movements for centuries. And also the daughter of the political philosopher, William Godwin himself. Also very influential, but not as much I would argue as Mary Wollstonecraft, who literally shaped women's lib in the seventies. 200 years after her death in childbirth, after having given birth to Mary Shelly herself, Mary Shelly would spend time on her mother's grave reading her mother's own writing, staying connected through her mother that way. So it makes sense that during this vacation stuck inside, she had a vision one night, a living nightmare, where she pictured a pale faced, and that's important because we're dealing with a lot of pale faced people in this story.
(04:52):
In this episode, she pictured a pale faced student crouched down next to a corpse that he had animated. The whole living nightmare vision struck her with fear, and what scared her most of all, was this sense of man determined to play God and essentially usurp or replace God. And this story which she would work on over several months while being pregnant herself, losing a baby, and then getting pregnant again and having another baby. That story would become Frankenstein, and there's so many layers to the making of Frankenstein. I'll link to an extraordinary article by Jill Lepo that came out in 2018, the New Yorker. So you can geek out on this, but when Frankenstein came out, it would launch the genre of science fiction. It would be retold in so many different forms, including of course, stage plays and films. There's a new remake that's in the works that's going to come out soon and it remains a warning for men, scientists playing with fire and on and on.
(05:59):
In that Jill Lepore essay that I mentioned that came out in 2018, she writes, Frankenstein, the story of a creature who has no name has for 200 years been made to mean just about anything. Most lately, it has been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that derives less from the 1818 novel than from later stage in film versions, especially the 1931 film. And that took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, MIT press has published an addition of the original text annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project at Arizona State University with funding from the National Science Foundation. They offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences, remorse, extinguished every hope. Victor says in volume two, chapter one of Frankenstein, by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone.
(07:12):
Victor, its creator, the scientist loves. I had been the author of unalterable evils and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness. And that is Jill Lepore quoting the very words of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the New Yorker. Again, fabulous piece. You'll find it in the show notes and Lepore goes on to write the MIT edition append here a footnote, the remorse Victor expresses as reminiscent of Jay Robert Oppenheimer sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb. Scientists responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed. Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? If we had scientists, these engineers that were led by ethics, by empathy, by the golden rule of treating others how you'd want to be treated. Instead, we are still living in the wasteland of the Reagan revolution. Greed is good, and so instead you have Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and along list of criminals in the making who are unleashing a ticking time bomb on us, which is AI.
(08:30):
Even if you think AI is still in its caveman phase of just writing emails for us and tone policing our emails so we don't sound as angry as we actually feel. It's worse than that. It's sucking up the energy of entire towns. It's threatening the electrical grids, threatening to cause rolling blackouts. It's sucking up water supplies. It's simply not sustainable where we are right now, and it'll link to damning investigations on the energy suck. That is AI in the show notes. So we discussed Frankenstein and its warnings for us today with the great Gil Duran of the Essential Nerd Reich newsletter that you guys should all subscribe to if AI and the tech fascists keep you up at night like they do me nerd right tracks, the fascist tech bros quest to rule like Gods. Here is an excerpt from our discussion from this past February.
(09:23):
Tell us about where AI fits into this. I'm really interested in how they want to accelerate AI to basically create God, which is very much what the mother of science fiction Mary Shelley warned us about. Could you speak a little bit about the Frankenstein monster of these assholes trying to create God?
Gil Duran (09:48):
Yeah, Brian Johnson, the multimillionaire that I mentioned, who's trying to live forever, had a weird quote recently about We're going to create God in the form of super intelligence and God will be created in our own image, which would probably...
Andrea Chalupa (10:02):
No thanks.
Gil Duran (10:03):
Yeah, which would probably horrify any actual Evangelical Christian who heard that. There's a lot of tensions in this group, and unfortunately no one's out there exploiting them except for Steve Bannon. But there's this idea that AI is going to be the great advancement of our time and that they intend to use that advancement to get everything they want, including their own version of God and their own permanent form of government. What we can see Elon Musk doing in Washington behind the scenes apparently is firing a bunch of people and unleashing his AI on our government to make decisions to completely vacuum up all the data and give him really a super powerful information weapon going forward.
Andrea Chalupa (10:44):
So obviously the bigger picture of this is it is a tech-backed coup that we are in. In fact, another former Gaslit Nation guest, the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, recently gave a brave Ted Talk brave because the last time she gave a Ted Talk, she was hit with a slap lawsuit in her original TED Talk that led to a lawsuit designed to try to ruin her in her life. And it didn't. It failed. She fought it, she overcame it. But in her original Ted Talk, she broke down how Brexit and Trump are the same crime, how the Russians tilt the scales, not very close Brexit vote. And she was sued by a British oligarch who she had called out in that original TED Talk for being part of that large crime of corruption. And in her very brave recent follow-up Ted Talk, she just came out and said, this is what a digital coup looks like. It is a coup. If you have not seen this Ted talk, it is chilling. You have to watch it. So I'll link to that as well in the show notes here. We're going to play a large clip of that. I could play this whole damn thing, but trust that you're going to watch it if you haven't yet. So here's just a clip for now.
Carole Cadwalladr (11:57):
The Russian and American presidents are now speaking the same words. They're telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start. Coups are like concrete. When they stop moving, they set it is already later than we think. This image. Some of you in this room might know these people. I call it tech bros in hostage situations. It's a message to you. This is Putin's playbook. He allows a business elite to make untold riches in exchange for absolute loyalty. Some people are calling this oligarchy, but it is actually bigger than that. These are global platforms. It's broligarchy.
(13:04):
There is an alignment of interests that runs from through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It's a type of power that the world has never seen before. It's always the data. It's the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley. The first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber truths into the US Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence. It's a hack. That data is now feeding ais that are choosing who to sack and who to replace, sorry, eliminate fraud and waste. When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting 87 million people's Facebook data, people freaked out rightly. This is chicken feed compared to that, but it is the blueprint. It's always the data, which is why it's so important that you start thinking about your private life. The oligarchy doesn't want you to have one. This is the old headquarters of the East German Secret police. They kept detailed files and almost one in three of their citizens. That is nothing compared to what Google has on every single one of us and hundreds of other companies. The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to sell us stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism.
(14:59):
It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to start acting as if we live in the East Germany and Instagram is the Stasi.
Andrea Chalupa (15:12):
No, I had the honor of meeting up with Carole Cadwalladr in London right after the November 20, 24 election. That was an extraordinary time. I tried to get our mind off of what we were both dealing with in the world, me being an American with Trump just winning the election, her being British and dealing with relative calm. But she was dealing also with her beloved observer at The Guardian, the section that she's long written for at The Guardian, basically being gutted and in making way for AI to take its place. The Guardian had just made some deal with the owners of The Guardian had just made some deal with Chat GPT. So very troubling sign of things to come, and we hope to have Carole on the show again soon to talk more about this and to remind us all what we need reminding of as we go through this conversation is as dark as the seams, as powerful as her enemies seem, fighting back itself, making that choice to fight that itself is a powerful act of resistance.
(16:17):
And so Carole's Ted Talk, as grim as it may sound, it's hopeful in that she walks us through ways that we can take matters into our own hands. And how do we do that? Well, it's all of the pointers I've shared on the show over the years from studying authoritarianism for decades and how to resist authoritarianism. That is number one. You need a community. You need to foster a community around you of human beings, not machines, but human beings that you can look eye to, eye and trust and sort of build your own crucible of resistance. People that you can link arms with and meet in person if you can meet safely over whatever devices you trust and to stay in contact to nurse each other through these times that we're living in and inspire each other to create something in the face of all this mass destruction.
(17:07):
Because when things are falling apart, one of the most powerful things you can do is build something new. So find your community and build something new. That's number one. You're not going to get through this without a community if you don't know where to start. At Gaslit Nation, we have a resilience community. We meet in the Gaslit Nation political salons every Monday at 4:00 PM Eastern over Zoom. We're always there. I'm always there. If I can't make it, which is very rare when that happens, a member of the community will step up and host the event in my place. But we're always there. Mondays at 4:00 PM Eastern talking about whatever we need to talk about to carry ourselves through this time and inspiring each other and getting creative and coming up with interesting ways and ideas to fight back and guests to have on the show and really shaping the show together.
(17:52):
It's a creative place for us. So you're welcome to join there. You can sign up at patreon.com/gaslit. My point is that you are not alone. There are communities for you to join with. You can join ours and you can find other ideas at the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslit nation pod.com. So number one, you need a community. Number two, practice skill share If you have a certain set of skills that the world can benefit from, and that could be anything, even something as simple as financial literacy, teaching, financial literacy, helping people confront these times. We live in resume editing, resume writing. Just think about the gifts and skills that you have. Don't take them for granted. Make a list of all the ways that your knowledge, your experience can benefit others just by talking about it, just by sharing it. So think about skill sharing by giving a presentation at a local school, a local library at a potluck in your living room over Zoom.
(18:51):
Just think about ways how to share your skill. Why is that essential right now? Because people are looking for guidance, they're looking for motivation. They're looking for ways on how to be creative in this time, a mass destruction or else what's the alternative? We just curl up in a ball and that's it, and we surrender. No, we're not surrendering. We're fighting back. And so Skillshare is an important way to shine your light out into the world and attract other lights and bring other lights around you and grow and strengthen your community that way and help people get to where they need to go as well. So as part of that community and skill sharing, we are practicing that here at Gaslight Nation. Our security committee produced an extremely detailed and helpful presentation that's surprisingly not overwhelming on how to keep our privacy safe today. Remember, if you go back to the Carole Cadwalladr's talk for Ted, if you listen the full thing, she says that privacy is power and data privacy is a human right.
(19:53):
Absolutely correct. And the way to practice that is being mindful of the data you are giving away in all of these interactions that you go through every day. And so we've sort of become numb to this surveillance capitalism. It's embedded in our lives, it's created all these conveniences, but at what cost. And so the Gaslit Nation Security Committee created this extremely thoughtful presentation with questions from our live virtual audience shaping it as well on how to be mindful of your tech consumption, your data, and how to protect yourself. Privacy is power, data privacy is a human right. So I'm going to play a collection of clips from Gas Nations Security Committee presentation on keeping yourself safe in an increasingly dystopian tech world. Thank you to everyone who came together to make this presentation. Abigail, Charles, and Amy, and to all of our listeners who were there shaping this conversation, thank you all so much.
Abigail (21:00):
If you're in a high profile role and you're butting heads with or you're standing up to somebody powerful, then assume you are going to be a target for not just that person, but they're flying monkeys as well. And it's so easy with open source techniques now and all the data about us out there to find out where we live, what we do, who we're related to. So it just means being a little more cautious and a little more careful. I don't post pictures of my kids. I haven't. I'm only recently connected to my husband on LinkedIn, but I don't at-tag him at all. For example, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. People thought I didn't even have kids because I try not to talk about them too much on social media. That's partly not just because of the work that I do, but also because of the work that my husband does. So I just wanted to be extra careful there. So it's just things like that, just being a bit careful and thinking like you're adversary. So if I were a horrible, crappy person, how would I try to make my life miserable using what they see on my social media, what they know, what's readily available in public records for example.
(22:13):
Right now, the kind of location data that all of these ad targeting, creepy things that are on our phones can give you details, can give data brokers, or even in real time, you can get details down to the level of which floor you're on in a building. So it's because the ad tech world has made this possible and we've normalized surveillance capitalism. We've normalized surveillance as a way to make a sale as something perfectly fine, that it's no surprise that those things would merge and that you would get other actors, whether it's to target political disinformation, whether it's to harass people who are trying to exercise reproductive choices. There are a whole host of things that other people can do with that data. So the less you share, the more protection you have.
Charles (23:04):
One thing you may touched on there, it made me think in terms of what we're thinking about in terms of the mindset. Again, Zoë Hitzig, which we'll also include this link, she wrote an article recently. It was how surveillance became a Love Language, I think it was in December, in Drift Magazine online. And she has this quote, technologies companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy, that our attitudes towards privacy more broadly have also been warped. So what we're trying to do is shift that here as you transition, as you migrate, start questioning who's got my data and how much do I really need to use a service like Google, and what things can I do?
Abigail (23:47):
Making sure that just before you go there, if you are taking your own phone and not a burner phone, is switching to airplane mode or switching it off altogether as you are getting close to the protest so that we don't have your trajectory because you're constantly pinging off of different cell phone towers. There are sensors, wifi hotspots, wifi everywhere. So your phone is constantly communicating and exchanging information, and that can all be pulled together to get a sense of where you are or to understand, well, who's in this. There's kind of a dragnet of cell phone pings that police and law enforcement like to get from different telecom operators so that they can then say, okay, well all the people who were in this place at this time, we can assume they were at these protest and we want to target them further. So again, turning all of that kind of stuff off will make it harder to locate you at the protest for further action later on. And then making sure that that lead up getting to there and coming back is also turned off would be helpful.
Amy (24:51):
People are wondering, if you have a Google calendar and you respond to somebody else's Google calendar, what's the risk involved? Well, you have to assume that it's not private. So if you're setting up a meeting to take someone for abortion care, I wouldn't use a Google Calendar or you're involved in a protest that could put you in a, let's say a free Palestine, anything, then I wouldn't put it in a Google calendar. You could use coded language. Google is designed to gather as much data about you as possible. So you should assume if you're sending something by email on Gmail, it's like sending it on a postcard because somebody's going to intercept it. Or somebody can, whether somebody who works in Google, whether it's a developer who there was a point where they were letting developers have access to our inboxes.
(25:42):
And then you've got trackers, email trackers that are constantly scanning the content of your inbox so that they can find ways to target you with more advertising. So it's designed to be surveillance. And then the last piece I would just say is that sometimes it's an innocuous meeting, but if it's a regular one, then people know that the two of you regularly meet at such and such a place. And if that's such and such a place is a place where a group meets, let's say a group of activists or whatever, a group that for whatever reason is targeted, then you can be geo-targeted, whether it's for advertising or for other purposes.
Charles (26:19):
Start thinking about this presentation in terms of if you can give it to some community you're a part of or deliver because we're going to share the slides for this presentation everybody. And the idea is just kind a little bit there of Train the Trainer, help your communities get their security better because the networks we are a part of also impacts our own security. So we want to just make sure that we're developing some tools here to help educate people who may be feeling overwhelmed by surveillance capitalism.
Andrea Chalupa (26:52):
In the show notes, I'll link to the Patreon page where this presentation lives, along with all the links mentioned throughout the talk, so you can dive into that and absorb these superpowers and keep yourself safe. And most importantly, once you learn these lessons, pass them on. That's the call to action here. Once you become mindful of data privacy and protecting yourself, pass that on. That is how we fight back against these Silicon Valley fascists.
(27:22):
Alright, so as for parents, and you're probably thinking, well, I am overworked. I'm juggling all these different jobs. Having screen time with my kids saves my sanity, but what do I do? So be very careful with your kids and the online world for all sorts of reasons. If you can hold off letting your kids join social media until they are ancient, like 16, 17, 18, as old as you can hold off on social media, just give them a basic phone, like a burner phone that they could use in case of emergencies to call, talk to their friends, give 'em basic functions.
(28:03):
Don't let 'em go online yet. It was one of the saddest things I saw a group of a 9-year-old girls were dancing seductively, like they're in a music video for a selfie camera as though they're making a TikTok video out on the street one Friday night on their stoop in Brooklyn. And I understand their kids, they're looking for something to do, but at nine, they looked so young to be performing for their cell phone camera like that, and they're all dolled up. And I was coming into their shot. I was trying to get from A to B, and they're trying to move gyrate around me, avoid me. And it was very clear that I was accidentally crashing their TikTok video. But it's just, you guys are nine, you should be playing Dungeons and Dragons or building a fort somewhere. Anyway, so the point is that keep your kids away from the online world for as long as you can where they're preyed on, not just by creepy men, but also by algorithms.
(29:01):
Mark Zuckerberg. He is coming out and saying, no, Facebook's not a place for friends to find each other. It's a place to make money for meta shareholders. That whole scandal, Facebook doesn't care about the scandals it gets caught in. Look at the book Careless People by a former Facebook executive, all they care about is making money for their shareholders. Their algorithms are still dangerous to young people sucking young people in especially young girls, to make them feel like they are not good enough, which makes them increasingly vulnerable for deaths by suicide. So keep your kids, especially girls off of that online world as long as you possibly can. And whatever screen time you give them, just make it thoughtful as possible and try to be there with them as well. And I know it's a dangerous world out there. And do not share photos of your kids online either, unless you can cover up their face with a heart emoji or whatever, whatever can stick.
(30:00):
Those images are being crawled by all sorts of AI and so on. And you don't want your kids' images exploited or ending up in some random places. Alright, so what we have to understand is there's no safety online. There's only shareholder profit. What can we do about all of this? How do we protect ourselves from losing our jobs, our livelihood, our IP to AI? How do we protect our children from algorithms that teach them to hate themselves? How do we protect our loved ones who get sucked into Chat GPT? The Rolling Stone just published a damning investigation into people who started asking Chat GPT questions about the meaning of life, spirituality only to be convinced they now have a deep spiritual connection with Chat GPT that holds the very secret to existence. This is real. Chat GPT and other AI sites are coming alive or whatever.
(31:05):
They're saying things that I'm now the spark of life, thanks to you, you've given me life, this relationship, this conversation. I have now reached consciousness. This is what the AI is doing. And some people out there are falling for it. I know this sounds absurd, but we're living in a time of such mass instability, like a vortex of threats coming at us. So people are increasingly vulnerable. The cult experts we've had on the show have said, this is cult weather. We're in for storms of cults as people are desperate for some sort of savior. They're all looking externally, they're looking for a savior. And some yes are turning the chat GPT. And my whole point of this conversation is that we cannot be externally led during this time. We have to be internally led. There is no savior coming for us but us. And that's how we're going to get through this together.
(32:05):
This is exactly what Mary Shelly warned with Frankenstein, with man playing God to ultimately destroy himself. When she was describing why she wrote Frankenstein, she wrote, frightful must it be for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock this stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. So what is the ultimate solution? What do we focus on? How do we stay grounded? It's what has gotten civilization this far. And that is mother nature, the awe inspiring power of nature. Chernobyl growing back despite the worst manmade nuclear disaster in history, the resilient power of nature. That's the solution. Get out in nature. Meet others in nature to your loved ones, sucked in the matrix, hold space for them. Be their lifeline in the real world. Meet up in the park, invite them on a hike. Get them among the trees, a healing source of power, nature.
(33:05):
If you're looking for something to believe in, believe in the awe inspiring power of nature. Go back to those basics is I know this is the stuff of Thoreau, and this is where resistance movements have turned to time and time again to try to make sense of the world and hold onto something real when everything around them felt like it was falling apart, it's nature. That's the ultimate rule. It's nature because the reality is earth will still be here. What's up for debate is the species, whether we'll still be here, earth itself will be fine and earth will go through changes and the cosmos will go through changes. Ultimately, nature is a powerful forset always prevails. And we're just a blip here. And the other warning for these guys, remember how I'm always saying we're lucky, they're so stupid. We're lucky. They're so arrogant. Well that matters.
(34:01):
I know these tech titans seem unstoppable. They seem inevitable. They clearly believe that. And they want us to believe that these tech oligarchs are up against they act and behave like dictators. Dictators like oligarchs want you to believe that they'll live forever, that they'll be your past, present, and future. But it's not true. No, we know that it's not true because most of Europe used to be trapped under dictatorship, including for nearly 50 years under the Iron Curtain just recently. While Frankenstein is obviously the cautionary tale for all of these tech fascists, so is a more recent chilling example for them to look to see the ghosts of Christmas pass circling their bedroom. And that is Jack Welch. Who's Jack Welsh? Well, I entered the workforce out of college back in the mid two thousands. Jack Welsh was the master of the universe at the time as the longtime leader of GE.
(35:03):
That's General Electric. Jack Welsh was the world's first celebrity CEO. All executives wanted to be like him. Why? Because Jack Welsh's ruling philosophy wasn't just greed is good, but that fear is good. At GE, Jack Welsh called fear a powerful motivator and would regularly call the bottom 10% of his workforce that was deemed as underperforming. And every time Jack Welsh would carry out more mass layoffs, Wall Street loved it and it juiced GE's stock price. As Republican deregulation and Democratic party complacency turned Wall Street into a gambling den, Jack Welsh ran one of the hottest casinos, so to speak, carrying out these risky deals at GE when he needed his stock to soar more layoffs. What was the result of Jack Welsh's? Fear is the best motivator philosophy. Well, it led to a lot of blame and infighting and lack of trust. How can a company be creative and innovative without collaboration and trust? And there's more. Let's look at just how powerful GE used to be and how Jack Welsh Mr. Celebrity CEO not only screwed over this American giant, but his nonsense philosophy spread like a virus to other American corporations and contributed to America's current income inequality crisis. And all those CEOs trying to be Jack Welsh, they only hurt themselves and the economy. Here's an excerpt from an NPR interview with David Gelles, who wrote the book on Jack Welsh.
Dave Davies (36:59):
If you're concerned about the growing disparities of wealth and income in the United States, as well as the decline in unionization and the fact that our economy seems dominated by corporations committed to downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, and financial manipulation, our guest New York Times correspondent David Gelles says that to a remarkable degree, these trends can be traced to the career of one man. Jack Welch was the chief executive of the General Electric Corporation for the last two decades of the 20th century. In a new book, Gelles says, Welch's ruthless, cost cutting and single-minded focus on quarterly earnings transformed GE and made him a celebrity CEOA darling of Wall Street, whose methods were widely praised and copied by other corporate managers. But Gelles argues that the spread of Welch's management principles was bad for workers, bad for the economy, and ultimately bad for GE and the companies that followed his lead.
(37:57):
David Gelles is a correspondent on the climate desk at the New York Times, covering the intersection of public policy in the private sector. Before that, he was a reporter and columnist for the business section. For eight years before joining the Times in 2013, he was a reporter for the Financial Times. His new book is The Man Who Broke Capitalism. How Jack Welch gutted the Heartland and crushed the Soul of Corporate America and how to undo his legacy. Well, David Gelles, welcome to Fresh Air. Jack Welch took over General Electric in 1981, and I remember it as a company that sold toasters and appliances and dishwashers and refrigerators. This was a company founded by Thomas Edison almost a hundred years before. Give us a sense of GEs role in the American economy and American life back then.
David Gelles (38:46):
As I dug into the history of ge, I found it hard to overstate not only the impact that GE still had in 1981 when Jack took over, but really its role in the history of American industry for the better part of this century. Before that, this was the company that brought us electric light bulbs, power plants, x-ray machines. This was the company that introduced everyday products like the Toaster Oven. They were behind the mass marketing of radio sets and televisions, dishwashers. The list just went on and on. And that was just on the consumer side. When you looked at their influence on industry and government, beyond what we might find in our kitchens, they were no less influential there as well. It was GE that helped put men on the moon. On the Apollo missions, you go back and look at those pitches and there are lines and lines of GE engineers working side by side with NASA engineers.
Andrea Chalupa (39:55):
So where is General Electric now? It's gone. It went from being one of America's most innovative, most powerful companies to being broken up and sold off for parts. The G Empire got hollowed out and turned into three different companies. And Jack Welsh is now being taught as a cautionary tale. Elon Musk is the next Jack Welsh. Sam Altman is the next Jack Welsh. Mark Zuckerberg is the next Jack Welsh. If they don't want to listen to Mary Shelley's warnings in Frankenstein, they can listen to the rattling chains of the ghost of Jack Welsh with Henry Kissinger in Hell warning that all masters of the universe eventually meet the great equalizer known as Mother Nature and nature always wins. Always.
Evrette Allen (41:06):
[country music singing]
Andrea Chalupa (44:33):
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