The Age of Ungovernable AI Bureaucracy - attention

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The Age of Ungovernable AI Bureaucracy<br>And boy, do we humans LOVE our bureaucracy!<br>Attention<br>May 29, 2026

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I hate to be the first to break it to you, but if you haven’t noticed humanity is in the midst of spinning up the greatest and most rapid capital accumulation in human history to build the world’s largest and least accountable IT department.<br>To hear it’s proponents, AI is shockingly good and super intelligence is here. Home schooling moms benevolently neglecting kids to OpenClaw-driven lessons run by $8,000 Mac studios and Y Combinator president cum bathtub aficionado Garry Tan breathlessly replacing his entire brain with an aptly named GBrain written by AI.<br>Thanks for reading attention! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Meanwhile, big short investor Michael Burry is calling BS and some of the pioneers (Yann LeCun, Gary Marcus) suggest a ceiling for LLM technology. A writer is threatening to literally murder anyone he finds using AI writing.<br>The reality is more mundane: we’ve ushered in an era of alien bureaucracy. This era will be different than previous bureaucratic eras, but bureaucracy it will be indeed: exceptional, accelerated, and maddening. Silicon Valley has spent 6 decades being the “Bad Boy” and having a **** the rules mentality. How ironic it has produced as its fastest growing and most valuable product the ultimate, unaccountable bureaucrat.<br>AI has every single bureaucratic instinct: the love of process, repeating lines and patterns, and the lack of real understanding of goals and purpose. The model, however, unlike a human bureaucrat, cannot be promoted, shamed, or escalated. It can only be prompted again. And again. And again.<br>Life is already full of mundane bureaucracy<br>Before the AI bulls throw me out of the room, the word bureaucrat is not used as a slur. AI’s true, honest-to-goodness product market fit value is steeped in the daily mundane bureaucratic elements of life. To the chorus of people asking ‘What can OpenClaw do to me’ returned the fastest-ever-growing-repo-in-history chorus of it can READ AND SUMMARIZE MY EMAILS THANK CHRIST FINALLY.<br>This is the feature - not the bug.<br>Bureaucracy is the process of turning messy experiences into manageable lists. Bureaucracy drives the nuts and bolts of our daily-lives: receipts, inboxes, medical records, insurance claims, and to-do lists.<br>And wow, have we convened what’s effectively an extremely expensive, intergalactic alien UN to invade every part of our lives.<br>Consumers now have "an intern with the affect of a golden retriever and the speed of the Flash" to collectively return millions of tiny moments back to us. Our to-do lists and email inboxes, organized. Our expense reports, filed! Our medical records and insurance claims, researched and handled. And yes, even taxes can be optimized! Thank you, tiny digital assistant!<br>Likewise, companies have always hoarded massive cruft. Everyone knows the special soul-sucking nature of writing a weekly report no one will ever ready. These reports formed the backbone of a universally-accepted-but-never-acknowledged myth in corporate: most people zoom it in 9-5 (11-3 if you’re genz) and no one wanted to rock the boat or look to closely.<br>Junior work was transformed into middle management work, ‘presented’ in the right forum and then distilled into bullet points that would be argued for hours at the exec offsite. Over and over again. Hauling an junior employee’s work in front of the big boss was either a power play for promotion or trying to get someone fired.<br>Oops. AI has exposed that for good now. Every document of yours and your contributions and notes? Ingested and summarized. The layers and layers of policy and guidelines: AI can draft the documents to be checked and followed, reviewed and shared.<br>The Palantir’s and OpenAI’s of the world have taken a hammer to the bureaucracy. It’s no longer a barrier to port the ancient software Bill from Montana maintained (it was Windows 1998 COBOL business logic)—GPT 5.5 does it in 2 hours, tested and working.<br>Capable executives and high agency individuals are cheering—with good reason. The invisible organizational plumbing is being exposed, and they’re being enabled. “You can just do things.” The current heady incentives and staggering valuations promote this: USE MORE INTELLIGENCE. TOKENMAXX! IF YOU DON’T YOU ARE FALLING BEHIND. Fighters of bureaucracy, UNITE!<br>They are wrong to cheer too soon.<br>What works in small measure becomes untenable at scale: AI does not know what matters, and will defaults to treating everything as default process.<br>As anyone who has seen the output of Claude’s future model Mythos can contend—the relentless bureaucrat is coming for your memory leak, your unexplored unicode edge case. The ironic reality is that giving LLMs free rein against a rule set has and will expose risks that no human would ever think...