I remember the gatekeepers.

They were better dressed than I, wealthier obviously, and possessed of an oily smoothness which threatened that if you dared scratch through their surface, your nails would sink deeply into… more surface. And it would be moist.

I remember the gates, too. Actual steel gates, big heavy motherfuckers, keeping outsiders firmly outside. Inside was the House of Fairfax, in those days located over on Broadway. I was only allowed to meet these particular gatekeepers in a pub across the road from what was then the Fairfax citadel because my entree to the pub was guaranteed by Brian Toohey, the legendary investigative journalist and editor.

I’d spent the afternoon with Toohey, drinking beers, necking curry and interviewing him for a profile in Rolling Stone, which sounds almost cool enough to suggest insider status unless you understand the rigidly enforced hierarchies of pro-journalism in those days.

Rolling Stone’s copy was mostly hacked together on the fly each month by freelancers like me, and freelancers were neither insiders nor gatekeepers. In fact, the sort of feckless, unmanageable dipshits who ended up as freelance writers were precisely why venerable institutions like the old Fairfax, the old TV and radio networks, and the old publishing companies retained such fearsome gatekeepers.

You wouldn’t want our sort getting inside the citadel and fucking shit up.

Ultimately, writing that profile of Brian Toohey was my first step through the gates, or over the battlements, or maybe just squeezing through an unguarded break in the great stone wall. But what I remember most from that day, besides the sticky pub carpet and the carcinogenic stink of cigarette smoke everywhere, all the time, were the blank, dead looks of the profoundly disinterested when those veteran reporters and senior editors realised I was just another freelancer.

A dipshit, in other words.

Feckless and unmanageable. Possibly mutinous. And most definitely not up to the real job of punching out the big stories.

(Off-topic, but related, I spoke to some of them decades later, offering counsel and sympathy, when Google and Facebook had eaten the business model, in the process turning freelance journalism from a contemptuous clown show into the only show in town for a growing army of redundant scribblers.)

For a long time, I remained as scornful of those insiders as they had been of my kind. The columnists were the worst. A quarter million dollars a year to fart out your feelpinions once or twice a week, Paddy? Why don’t you get out of the sheltered workshop and into the actual free market, champ? See how long you last.

But slowly, I’ve come to understand that I was wr… wro…

Less right than usual.

Not about columnists. We are the worst.

But for sure, I was wrong about the value of agreed reality. We’re all so deep in our silos now that it’s hard to remember a time when we all accepted certain ground truths.

For instance, getting a needle at the doctor’s might hurt, but it could also save your life.

Or, the election results might suck, but elections themselves are A Good Thing.

I don’t need to tell you that you’ll have no trouble finding counterarguments for both those propositions now. And behind the arguments, a beast with seven heads. Here a tin weasel grifter making coin off your clicks. There a hostile foreign intelligence service flooding the socials with shit. And in between disingenuous tech wizards tweaking the algorithm to harvest hate traffic for their platforms.

Epistemic collapse is not good for you.

It can be amusing, in the particular, like that law-talking guy in the US who got pantsed with extreme prejudice after he let ChatGPT hallucinate all of his legal citations.

But the trend lines are generally bending towards a shitpocalypse. We’ve probably passed the inflection point already. Gizmodo’s embarrassment at lending its brand cred to a bullshit piece of filler that some management genius ordered up from an AI didn’t stop the same genius from enthusiastically promising more of the same.

And why wouldn’t they? Even minimum gig workers are still getting minimum wage. If you can save shareholders or company owners those coupla bucks, you might score a tasty bonus before the algo gets tweaked again to make you redundant, and robot security escorts you to the exit.

However, I don’t think that job losses will be the worst thing we have to deal with. They’ll be bad, really bad, but living in an AI-saturated world means living in a reality where nothing can be trusted.

It’s why I’ve changed my thoughts on gatekeepers. They kept me outside the citadel for a long time, and then having forced my way in, I chose to leave anyway. I had reasons to dislike them. But as petty and prejudiced and exclusionary as they were, it turns out that some things are worth excluding.

Nazis, for instance.

How the hell did they get back in? Partly because the algorithms invited them. When your business monetises strong emotions, Nazis—whether old school, neo, pseudo, or defacto—are good business. They capture eyeballs and generate clicks. More importantly, their ideas which were the purest form of culture war in Version 1.0, can be stripped of the identifying markers and repackaged for mass consumption like, say the Great Replacement Theory.

But that’s just a tiny part of the story. It feels to me like the accelerating spread of AI makes all of the worst things possible by undermining faith in everything, everywhere, all at once. I’m sorry I don’t have a simple paragraph to summarise it all for you, (I believe I may have mentioned that columnists are the Worst) but maybe Hannah Arendt does.

In explaining the origins of totalitarianism, she writes:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

I think she’d have been all over this AI shit.