2024 in review
Living in the future
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We’ve completed another trip around the sun and if it wasn’t clear before, the future has definitely arrived. This future is not one of flying cars nor of unlimited energy, but rather one of vacuum robots and internet celebrities like Pesto the Penguin (more on that later). It’s not certain whether this future will lead to a new Renaissance or is the prelude to societal collapse (also more on that later). Regardless, Ad Astra is here to review the events of a highly consequential 2024 and offer our readers a perspective on what mattered most.
AI
No conversation about 2024 can be had without mentioning the effect artificial intelligence (AI) had on our economy, politics, and culture. Stocks that stood to benefit from an AI boom had a spectacular year, with Nvidia, the maker of computer chips that enable AI, gaining 245% in the stock market.
AI also changed American politics. In early December, Congress seemed poised to continue its bipartisan tradition of being unable to create a budget and instead pass a stopgap spending bill that funds the government for 3 months. Despite the short duration of this bill, some would call it 25% of an annual budget, the bill was 1500 pages long and weighed 15 lbs. It was also written by lobbyists and chock full of wasteful spending. When the bill was released to the public, users on X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) analyzed it with AI and instantly shared the waste they found with a stunned public. The bill was killed and the one that ultimately passed was 10x smaller at 150 pages.
Despite these potential benefits to our republican form of government, AI was mostly used to create funny videos. Early in the year, there was widespread concern expressed about AIs ability to generate ’fake news’ that would swing elections and possibly result in the Terminator-style enslavement of humanity.
At the risk of early calling it, this did not happen. The Prophets of AI doom didn’t consider that society already didn’t trust anything on the Internet and thus largely ignored any AI-driven attempts to manipulate them. Instead, we got lots of ridiculous videos.
https://x.com/ianonpatriot/status/1857124721231540310?s=46
Big Tech
The undisputed beneficiary of the AI craze was the already monopolistic cabal of large technology companies, Big Tech. Running AI requires massive, electricity thirsty, data centers that cost tens of billions of dollars to construct. The only companies with enough money to fund these are the already entrenched players of Big Tech. Every startup, every traditional company, every political campaign, is paying the Big Tech companies to rent computation time in their data centers to run their AI models. It’s hard to see how Big Tech doesn’t become even more powerful in the future. Instead of killer robots, we really should be worried about being enslaved by Mark Zuckerberg.
Social Media and Kids
Speaking of remote enslavement, the US Congress banned the viral video app popular with Gen Z, TikTok, in April 2024. Although there are many red-blooded, American-owned ways to rot your brain, TikTok made the unfortunate error of being controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The app is set to either be sold to an American owner by January 19, 2025 or shut down, but not before an emergency hearing in the US Supreme Court on January 10, 2025, contesting the constitutionality of banning the app. TikTok’s 170 million US users are surely closely monitoring these judicial proceedings.
Of these 170 million users, many are kids. 2024 was the year when the idea that social media was harmful to adolescents’ mental health went mainstream. Social scientist Jonathan Haidt published the Anxious Generation in March 2024, comprehensively chronicling how social media rewires adolescent brains. All across the Western world, increases in mental illness among adolescents beginning around 2012 have been observed. In 2012, Instagram was launched along with the first iPhone with a front-facing “selfie” camera. This trend is consistent among a variety of countries and data sources. In the mid-twentieth century, smoking was something everyone did. Then we realized it caused cancer and today its harmful effects are well-known. A similar cultural reversal has not yet happened with social media but I would watch this space.
Ad Astra 2024 ‘Person’ of the year
Nothing sums up the internet’s ability to instantly mint new celebrities like the rise of Pesto the Penguin, born in Melbourne, Australia in January 2024. Pesto is a 10-month-old king penguin chick who weighs 50 lbs. He has received extensive online fame on X and TikTok due to his exceptional size, and has been described as an “absolute unit”. A social media video of Pesto at 7 months of age has garnered 1.9 million views.
https://x.com/bigdybbukenergy/status/1837403212485460194?s=46&t=nVb-5uC_WM3Cp0R0dGiqHQ
Ozempic
While we’re on the topic of overweight penguins, Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs continued to pick-up steam in 2024. The economic effects of the drugs are so large that the value of Novo-Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic, is roughly 94% of Denmark’s GDP, the companies home country. Additionally, stocks expected to be harmed by weight loss drugs, like junk food makers, have fallen in response. A big fight to watch in 2025 will be if federal government health insurance Medicare expands access to weight loss drugs. In addition to weight management, drugs like Ozempic reduce other health problems like diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.
Brain Rot
It’s been a big year for humanity. We certainly progressed on our ongoing march towards uploading our brains into a collective, online hive mind. Whether or not this is a good thing, I’ll let the reader decide. A fitting conclusion to 2024 was the Associated Press Word of the Year: “brain rot”[i]. According to the Oxford Dictionary, brain rot is “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
It’s certainly possible that social media is rotting our collective brains. It’s also possible that for motivated individuals, the Internet is a resource that can multiply human knowledge and productivity. For those individuals, Ad Astra has developed an app, citizen journal, which you should download (FREE!). For everyone else, here’s a video of a hilarious Siberian cat I follow on Instagram, @nimbus_siberian.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-J7-DxNlfz/?igsh=eTcwY3dyZ3Y3amox
[i] https://apnews.com/article/oxford-word-year-brain-rot-b43d864aed7f7d9d039edbd9b8a19ffb
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