Reposted by Alban
RIP Chris Wickham. Unlike so many historians who emphasise particularities and contingencies, he was the master of constructing grand, coherent, beautifully rendered worlds out of his evidence. This, from his 2021 Past and Present essay, is a masterpiece of historical writing.
![bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the
operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient,
as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic con-
sequences of a logic of capital. […] The call center experi-
ence distills the political phenomenology of late capitalism:
the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped
PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to
different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the
building rage that must remain impotent because it can have
no legitimate object, since—as it is very quickly clear to the
caller—there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could
do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter
of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone
who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there
is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no
proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a
system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract
and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confront-
ing the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.6
Artificial stupidity, artificial intelligence—tomayto, tomahto. Cer-
tainly, most of what Fisher says about the call center and artificial
stupidity applies to today’s AI. The properties of the social situa-
tion that Mark Fisher described, the situation of being a consumer
in late capitalism, now are condensed into the properties of a
chatbot.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kdc4cspp6gfoxl6rwme6m2aw/bafkreiavcsxjaozop4kuvninhzpj7yv3pxas5dehz2hmsn2rk3bngvak4m)
