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The AI Rupture Moment
Recently, an enlightening article by Khadeeja Bassier caught my eye, talking about the AI “rupture moment,” a concept borrowed from a Mark Carney speech at Davos. The idea, powerful and terribly current, deserves reflection.
Carney, quoting Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” uses the greengrocer parable. Imagine a shopkeeper who displays a party slogan in his window. He doesn’t do it because he believes in it, but for a quiet life, to conform. The system is built on this collective fiction, on this performance of consensus. But what happens when the greengrocer, one day, decides to take down that sign? The facade collapses. The authentic act of an individual exposes the lie on which power is based.
This is the “rupture moment.”
The parallelism with the AI world is brilliant. For years, the big companies in the sector have put their slogan in the window: “We develop AI for the good of humanity.” And we all—developers, users, investors—have accepted this narrative. It was a useful fiction that attracted capital, talent, and allowed explosive growth.
But now we are witnessing the rupture. The fiction is no longer just imperfect, but is being actively used against us. The article calls it “enshittification”: the downward spiral of every digital platform that, once it reaches critical mass, shifts from being at the service of users to exploiting them to serve advertisers and, finally, shareholders.
OpenAI, which in 2024 defined advertising in chatbots as “creepy,” is now introducing it. Anthropic presents itself as the ethical alternative, but as the article points out, who writes their “constitution”?
The point is this: we are moving from the “good of humanity” phase to the monetization phase. Whether it’s our attention (via advertising) or our trust (via a self-proclaimed moral authority), the business model is coming to the surface. The greengrocer is taking down the sign.
The question the article leaves us with is powerful: is the scene of the chatbot recommending a dating site to reconnect with one’s mother a parody or a preview?
Perhaps both. It is the crack that announces the rupture moment.
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