The Foomscroller (Patreon)

Hi my name is Sophie and it's time for a silly little video about a silly little man whose name is Ross Andersen but who I think of as The Foomscroller. So, I've developed a bit of a fascination with the perpetually flawed, messy and constantly ideological articles in mainstream liberal publications such as The New Statesman, The Economist and The Atlantic. Even when they aren’t defending Israel’s genocide of Palestinians or trying to take medicine away from trans children, the slop that these publications pumps out deploys a variety of approaches and technologies to reinforce a certain picture of the world that the liberal mainstream relies on, which is too complex for me to sum up in a pithy little one-liner here.

In fact I’ve been doing streams on twitch once or twice a week looking at this liberal slop and talking about its purpose, like what the article is really trying to achieve and what its effect will inevitably be on someone who reads magazines like this because they view themselves as part of the same project as the people who are discussed in the articles. These articles are frequently speaking to the reader as though they were, if not a politician, CEO or powerful investor, then at least a Westminster or Washington insider, an entrepreneur or a stock trader.

Climate change for example, isn’t a moral issue of enormous violence heaped onto the imperial periphery by the imperial core, or even a pragmatic issue of our planetary survival, but an investment opportunity, since not only will we have to expand our energy grid to transition to green energy sources, but we’ll probably need some kind of doohickey, or thingemy, that hasn’t been invented yet, and whoever does invent it is going to be rich!

The slop publications peddle a very liberal capitalist flavour of climate denial in which right wing climate denial - a flat refusal to accept it is even happening - is outrageous and dangerous, but the demonstrable truth that capitalism must be stopped in order for the world to survive must absolutely never be taken seriously, or for that matter, even given a moment of consideration, even put to print.

So what is this? A very long plug for my twitch streams? No Neo I can only show you the door you are the one who – no I want to talk to you about an article I found among the slop that just haunts me. It is such a perfect microcosm of the gap between liberal slop and actual journalism, and pleasantly enough for us, it’s also very silly.

Without further ado let’s talk about Welcome to the Age of Foomscrolling. (12ft link)

The article begins with Ross being unable to sleep and turning to late night scrolling in the hopes of drifting off:

“I reached and opened Twitter on the theory that a scroll through my feed might achieve some hypnotic effect, creating an opening for sleep to take hold. That’s when I saw the blurry video. In it, a scrap of material, small and misshapen like a pencil’s broken lead tip, hovers mystically above a thick wafer of polished metal.”

If this completely passed you by or you’ve already forgotten about it, don’t worry. He’s talking about LK-99, a material discovered  in South Korea that science and technology journalists were going absolutely barmy over for about a week because they thought it might be a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. However, it very obviously wasn’t. Not that I know so much about the science of superconductors, but rather a discovery of this kind of material would be earth-shattering and world leaders would be holding meetings about it. This was just some silly investment hype generated by science journalists who don’t understand high school science. That’s not my assessment, that’s Ross Andersen’s:

“I’d like to report that the words room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor were meaningful to me that night, but no. I puzzled over this phrase, like an ape taking stock of a monolith.”

Thus Spake Zarathustra I guess.

If the superconductor were real, it would be a momentous discovery, but if it were everything that people discussing it on social media were saying, it would be even more. Claims went quickly from levitating trains to stopping climate change with the new miracle material, because once we’re in the realm of intersubjective science fiction, why not? LK-99 makes your skin 15 years younger too, and it cures depression and it cooks you dinner and tucks you into bed and tells you everything is going to be okay.

So Ross was utterly amazed to see this new technological development that would turn out to not be what it claimed, and this is a “foom”. ChatGPT, apparently, was also a “foom”. But where does this word come from?

“In the months after ChatGPT’s release, some came to believe that a “foom” was taking place. In the AI literature, a foom occurs when an AI’s cascading self-improvements accelerate its own development until it becomes powerful beyond human comprehension.”

At some point new discoveries and developments that we can’t predict because they haven’t happened yet will go “foom” and everything will change.

I spent 2 years working on my essay against doomerism. My essay against foomerism isn’t going to need as much brainpower.

So “foomscrolling” is when we consume new scientific discoveries as informational content via social media, but only when the discoveries are big and mind-blowing enough to constitute a foom, but it also doesn’t matter if the foom is real because the foomscrolling is real either way.

Here’s how The foomscroller concludes his article:

“Peak superconductor foomscrolling may have already passed. But the cultural desire that fueled it—the hunger for a new tool that will lift us out of our human frailty and onto some smooth exponential trajectory to a shimmering and deathless future—that looks to be quite resilient. That collective longing may have been with us since Olduvai, in one form or another. The internet only magnifies it into a kind of searchlight. I imagine that its beam will soon find something else to lock onto, something new for the world’s insomniacs to Google in the dead of night, in the hope that maybe, this time, the foom will be real.”

Now this is quite tragic, right? The joy of the foomscroller is that for a little while he’ll get to be really excited about a new technological advancement and how it might change the world, until it turns out not to exist, and then he’ll just scroll right down to another one. He can be perpetually thrilled and never disappointed as he is fooled time and time again. Somehow too the fact that there are many like him is supposed to be a sign of something good? The article is about techno-optimism, it says as much in the byline:

“The online frenzies that followed LK-99 and ChatGPT reveal a resurgent techno-optimism—and a shared longing for a new technology that will free us from human limits.”

These liberals will never invent material analysis but god love them they won’t stop trying. Okay, so how is techno-optimism supposed to affect scientific and technological discovery? Maybe investment money will pour in due to the techno-optimism that will speed up discoveries somewhat, but investors don’t know what good investments in terms of scientific progress are, nor do they care, and any such money would take years to bear fruit so the interest now would have to be portentous of a general cultural shift to constantly hype up and support scientific research with all we’ve got for many years.

The frustrating thing here of course is that there’s a lot really worth discussing about foomscrolling, actually. The manufacturing of techno-optimism, techno-utopianism even, as a form of content to be consumed speaks to a fundamental inability to imagine the systems that govern our lives changing in any way that could solve our problems, and so a readiness to quickly believe that anything on your feed could be the salvation of mankind, since capitalist innovation can produce miraculous technology but not the different social relations needed to adjust to the climate crisis. The techno-utopianism is a fantasy, a holistic simulation, allowing capitalist realism a light hearted folly into nonsensical projections of how AI can allow us to hand over control to a supergenius computer which will steer us free of fascism, climate change, war, hunger and so on, or how a miracle metal will make our energy consumption so much more efficient that we will no longer be killing the planet, or whatever next doohickey is going to make it all go away. In identifying the tendency to foomscroll, the foomscroller has seen something worth interrogating, but he is simply enjoying the foom too much to care.

Ross has peeked behind the curtain, seen the Wizard of Oz and then turned to his fellow travellers and just said “huh, that’s neat!”

I think more leftists should read liberal slop because none of these people are materialists, so it’s actually quite amazing to see that this is the standard for discussion of culture, science, technology, the economy, geopolitics. Truly the bar is on the floor. If you think that your take is imperfect, just look what they’re publishing in The Atlantic.

The foomscroller is so fascinating to me because as I have already said I think this short piece speaks to a juggernaut of a tendency within liberal slop to see contradictions coming to bear and simply lack the material analysis to be able to draw anything useful from it. Scientific discoveries of a world-shifting nature don’t happen often enough to fill a twitter feed, so an implicit part of the foomscroller’s delight is also his disappointment, and yet it goes so powerfully unacknowledged.

There is such a palpable sense to this writing of a plea for technology to please, soon actually come up with something that will actually improve things, that it is easy to find the foomscroller tragic. It is tempting to imagine the many people who are into this tech hype now experiencing the worsening material conditions brought on by climate crisis and their interest in gadgets and gizmos waning, their imaginations expanding to allow for a real change in social relations, and learning the ways that we can make a new world in caring for each other, and the whole time he will be there, foomscrolling still.

I would rather imagine the foomscroller happy of course. I say let these people have their liberal slop, but it is becoming more and more necessary for us to recognise the huge disconnect between the things that the liberal mainstream cares about and the things that actually matter, because the gap between the liberal reality and ours is going to just keep getting bigger.