All posts by Kit

No Kings: Let’s start a boycott of social media!

In brief: the No Kings protests are meaningless political theater. Protests alone do nothing. They must signify more substantial action before anyone in power cares about them, and there have been no serious organizational efforts to expand the protests into coordinated action.

One of the greatest protests in US history was the Montgomery bus boycott. Everyone remembers Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus and her arrest, but the part that people then forget is that the boycott lasted a year and two weeks. Some of the additional context that gets lost is that in 1955, buses were far more important to the poor, Black community than they are today. It was a terrible burden on both the community and many individuals to refrain from using the bus for a year and two weeks. But it fucking worked. The Montgomery bus boycott was a significant factor that led the US Supreme Court to hear a case about racial segregation. In 1956, it ruled that racial segregation was illegal in the Browder v. Gayle case! It didn’t fix racism, obviously, but it created an enduring legal change. During the boycott, rallies and marches also took place.  I’m not saying they had no place, but not the place of pride.

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The Lexicon of Terms to Discuss Online Hyperreality and Hypernormalization

Less heavy but not unheavy, I’ve been trying to think of words to frame some of the issues caused by our collective obsession with social media and its consequences. (1)

The first relevant term I learned, personally, was “future shock.” Roughly, it’s the state where people suffer emotional distress because everything is changing so fast! I suspect we’ve all felt it: that moment when, at work, something changes. So, you’ve got to abandon your expertise with the previous system for something else, which is often riddled with bugs, and just when you’re getting good with the new one, bang, they change it again. It can also be felt with the rapid rise and subsequent fall of social media networks – or just their sheer proliferation – as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others compete in the same crowded space. And, lately, I’ve been seeing the final stage of future shock: the kids have it. Much of the discourse against gen AI is from young people who are seeing their futures stripped away by the rise of the AI shoggoth, its tentacles into everything.

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A Way Forward: the Significance of Authorial Intent in the 21st Century

I’m trying to figure out what I can do – concretely do – to help the world. While it comes down to “keep on writing,” I think a bit more is needed. I think that we need to talk about the problem leftists have with art and messaging.

Short form: leftist and liberal political institutions fucking hate art. Or, more exactly, they hate the idea of art and artists butting into political business.

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America, Los Angeles is what it looks like when the fascists are winning

What is happening in Los Angeles is what it looks like when the fascists are winning. This needs to be said, and everyone needs to hear it.

During Trump’s 2024 election campaign, he said that he would use the National Guard to enforce his immigration decrees. And here he is, doing exactly that. The protests in Los Angeles were relatively small, disorganized, and certainly had less violence than, say, the January 6th riots in Washington, where Trump didn’t bother to call in the military, but Trump leapt on the protests as an excuse to do what he told everyone he was going to do: use the military to occupy US cities.  This is straight from the fascism playbook, as are many of the moves he’s taken to get here.

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Humans and Social Media Are the Problem with Spreading Misinformation, not AI

I had been thinking of writing a post about how it seems obvious that many of the posts that people make about AI errors are deceptive if not outright lies. Screenshots are easily fabricated! And I am unable to recreate any of the errors, even when I know the exact prompts and chatbots – even their versions – involved. Plus, it’s reasonably easy to “gaslight” an AI into giving ridiculous output by, for instance, starting a conversation and priming it with contradictory information and then demanding it reconcile the contradictions. Absurdity often results. And, yes, AI sometimes says stupid things to well-formed, innocuous posts, but the sheer scale of articles and videos about AI “mistakes” has grown so commonplace that it seemed to me, at first blush, that deception was involved.

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Is 404 Media a serious organization? Discussion on what’s wrong with “Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions” published there

Lately, I’ve been really disappointed in 404 Media. This article by Emanuel Maiberg, “Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions” is just… bad.  The upshot is that a group of AI accelerationists have a Reddit forum, and a mod said that they had to ban up to 100 people because they suffered “religious psychosis.”  Let’s get into it!  Why is the article so rotten?

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Transitioning Away from Capitalist AIs and If God Did Not Exist

I took a pause from the If God Does Not Exist stories because I realized that the early stories needed revision. The speed of progress for AI is so fast that even things written a year or two ago now look retro! I have a footnote (1) about the literary problems I was kicking around, but the key thing is that, boy, was the break intellectually fruitful. Let’s talk about how AIs are built!

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They have Come Again and Again

First, they came for the opium dealers, the first war on drugs,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Chinese.
Then, they came for the pot dealers, reefer madness,
And we pretended it wasn’t because they were Mexicans.
They ignored the cocaine dealers in the US.
It was okay to go after Colombians but not Wall Street coke dealers, oh, no,
And we focused on crack, saying it was a hundred times worse.
We pretended it wasn’t because crack dealers were poor and black.
They came for them, though.

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Tulsi Gabbard fires spies to the joy of Russia and China

Tulsi Gabbard fired about a hundred spies because they used a secure NSA service to make explicit, sexytimes comments to each other. She offered up the predictable reasons: they weren’t professional, it’s a danger to security, unsurprising stuff. In particular, though, the chatrooms were queer-friendly and it can be contextualized as an anti-DEI move.

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Finishing that Review of Sapiens For a Friend

In a continuation of my review on Sapiens from before, I can now finish the review, since I’ve finished the book.

There was only one additional part that just stopped me completely, which was when Harari said, “Why do people worry about us running out of energy?” He was talking about the inevitable collapse of the fossil fuel industry, but no one is worried that we wouldn’t have “enough energy.” The real concern is that there will be a sharp price increase when the oil-dependent energy system we now have crosses the threshold where competition for fossil fuels rises. Less “running out of energy” and more like an “energy crisis,” the likes of which we have had before when oil has undergone price spikes. We all know that solar, wind, and nuclear power can provide the power needed, but that system doesn’t yet exist fully.

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