Summary

Zitron uses Adam Curtis' concept of 'HyperNormalisation' to argue that the AI bubble is the latest iteration of a recurring pattern: powerful systems manufacture a simplified, reassuring version of reality to avoid confronting genuine dysfunction. Drawing parallels from the Great Financial Crisis, Enron, the Metaverse, and post-COVID austerity, he contends that the media, financial analysts, and hyperscalers collectively sustain a fabricated narrative about AI's necessity and growth — through circular financing, undefined metrics like 'annualized run rate,' and perception-management deals — because confronting the alternative (hundreds of billions in misallocated capital) is systemically unthinkable. Nobody is ever held accountable, the cycle repeats, and regular people bear the costs while the powerful are insulated.

Key Insight

The AI bubble is sustained not by economic value but by hypernormalization — a self-reinforcing loop of media credulity, circular financing, and perception management that, like every previous bubble, will leave regular people holding the consequences while the powerful walk away intact.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 8

  The entire AI bubble — every bit of hype — is an attempt to rebrand old things as new.

• 5

  nobody has a plan, and that an attachment to a simple idea — like endless growth — is what keeps these cycles repeating

• 7

  nobody is making a profit from AI other than Jensen Huang and the data center developers

• 9

  CoreWeave is a bad company that only exists because of the simple, systemic belief that If The Right Numbers Are Going Up, Everything Is Fine.

• 8

  Our reality — and the entire 'AI boom' — is largely constructed through a patchwork of deals between these companies, moving money around and signing paper as a means of stopping you thinking too hard about what's going on.

• 8

  Every single detractor must have 'sufficient AI use,' and 'concede' when AI has 'gotten better,' as if AI or the AI industry is a living organism that must be appeased, and one's 'correctness' on AI is a moral calling.

• 7

  Vigorously critiquing and pushing back on the narratives of the powerful is an actual moral cause, and I can think of little more revolting than squealing about how I'm insufficiently deferential to or unwilling to fill in the gaps in their marketing hype.

• 5

  AI data centers are nothing to do with the previous era's data centers. Nobody is mad at the data centers for streaming video.

Tone

combative, indignant, satirical, deeply critical