All posts by Kit

Story IX: Not Suffering Children

Every religion, ideology, political party, every sexuality, gender, and identity, every philosophy and creed, downplay and minimize the foundation of civilization: children. They’re where the bullshit ends. They’re where the rubber hits the road. We all say we know this but we all fucking lie, but the obviousness of it is right in front of our eyes: who controls the children controls everything. The people who are there, who do the work, who spend the money, who put forth the effort can control everything.

In the richest countries, we sent kids off to schools for mass incarceration, more concerned with making them obedient conformists than healthy individuals nested in a decent social order. We turned a blind eye as they humiliated and assaulted each other, as they were humiliated and assaulted by teachers, coaches, and priests. Boys, we said, will be boys. We had so many platitudes to dress up systematic torment, like all schools everywhere weren’t one giant, stupid, evil Stanford prison experiment. We threw up barriers to keep children in negligent and abusive homes because stopping vicious and cruel behavior would be uncomfortable and hard. Even – perhaps even especially – with the very rich, various forms of psychological torment were commonplace, leading to affluenza, narcissism, and megalomania even when all material needs were met.

Maddeningly, this represented the best option for children! Poor kids were simply left to their own devices, running free in the world’s filth-encrusted mega-slums or toxic rural farmlands, left to youth gangs, warlords, social media influencers, and I couldn’t tell you which was the worst. It was fucking child abuse on an industrial scale. We all say that we want what’s best for the children, but not enough to pay our taxes. Not enough to spend the hours of our lives being there for them, showing them how to be good people, strong people, a credit to themselves and society. Memphis just used what we gave it.

— Professor Holly Wu

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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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