On: ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’: JD Vance dismisses calls for AI...

Seventeenth of the month, and the vice-president has found his metaphor: Frankenstein. Stop building the monster, he tells the builders, and all will be well.

Notice what the joke accomplishes. It converts a question of governance into a question of taste. The man who says “regulate” is cast as a nervous old woman frightened of a story; the man who says “build” is cast as the sensible adult. This is not an argument. It is a climate. And climates are more durable than arguments, because no one thinks to check the weather against anyone’s interest.

Who benefits from the premise that safety talk is hysteria? The firms, obviously - but also the state, which has chosen a side and dressed the choice as common sense. The vice-president does not say: we have decided that acceleration serves our power and the risks are a bill others will pay. That would be an honest sentence and would need defending. Instead he offers a monster joke, and the joke defends itself. Anyone who replies seriously sounds humorless by definition. That is the whole craft: make your opponent ridiculous before the argument begins, and you need not win the argument.

More curious is the man he addresses. Here is a builder who himself warns of catastrophe - who says, slow the pace - and is answered not with refutation but with a fairy-tale insult. The system can absorb even its own doubters, so long as the doubters remain builders. He asks for brakes from inside the engine. The engine answers: keep driving, feel guilty if you like. Guilt is cheap. Speed is the asset.

I have seen this arrangement before, in another country under another flag: the industrialists and the state speaking in one voice while pretending to argue. The quarrel was theatre. The factory ran regardless.

The monster story ends with the creature turning on its maker. The vice-president should finish the book.